The decline of Aleppo started in the late 19th century. A trading post on the western end of the Silk Road, its market shriveled as De Lesseps’s marvel, the Suez Canal, captured an ever-larger share of Eurasian commerce. The peace settlement after World War I hurt the city even more. It cut Aleppo off from its natural economic outlets not once but twice: first in 1920, when the Western powers carved away the Arab hinterlands from the Turkish core of the Ottoman Empire, and second in 1939, when the maritime province of Hatay, just west of Aleppo, was alienated from Syria to the Republic of Turkey. Aleppo was thus sealed into Syria, economically unplugged, directionless, irrelevant.
After Syrian independence from France in 1946, Syria fell into a spiral of military coups, settling in the 1970s into the Ba‘athi Dark Ages under the Alawi Assad dynasty allied with Russia. Political power clotted in Damascus, augmented by the Latakian carpetbaggers, who soon pushed the city’s population above Aleppo’s. Tourists ignored Aleppo’s Roman roads, medieval monasteries, and Suleimanesque citadels. The effervescent Armenian quarter, born from the World War I mass murder, became a dusty, derelict artifact of the past. The covered souks, listed by UNESCO as a world heritage site, now sold cheap junk against grimy walls. An industrial park was built, winking at economic development, but the city had few jobs for the mass of rural migrants who flocked to it.
So at empire’s lingering end, it has been the fate of many great Ottoman cities to become the toys of petty, brutish mediocrities, tyrannical men who paid lip service to reform and modernization but accomplished nothing beyond the imposition of order and stasis onto fearful societies: János Kádár in Budapest, Josip Tito in Sarajevo, Gamal Abdel Nasser in Cairo, Saddam Hussein in Mosul, Hafiz al-Assad in Aleppo. As the decades meandered, lost in a mélange of timid hedonism and mass despair, the cities rotted.
Aleppo groaned against the Assad regime in the late 1970s and was brutally chastised for it, but it was a smaller city further south that bore the brunt of the regime’s reprisals. Hama was bombed and razed for a month in February 1982. This time around, the so-called Arab Spring, born in Dera’a in the Syrian south, perished in Aleppo, in the north. The city where humans have settled themselves for several thousand years is now a field of ruins, the flesh of its inhabitants fare for the ubiquitous Aleppine crows that, for authors of times past, symbolized the ancient city. In its destruction, it joins other grand cities abandoned to Russian arms: Budapest in 1956; Prague in 1968; and before that Warsaw, left cynically by the Red Army to the Nazis in the summer of 1944.
The French language gave the world “raison d’État”: the imperative of the state that trumps other considerations, including conventional personal morality and the notion that at least some inalienable rights adorn what we like to call humanity. It is a pity that Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize for an idealistic whiff of Nobility (Nobel the name comes from noble the adjective) wishfully detected early on by a committee in Oslo. The Prize taints Obama’s tenure as an arch-realist, if only that were how he had acted. A true realist may sacrifice principles and hundreds of thousand human lives, but only in return for something tangible. Obama’s Middle East policy has seemed devoid of any strategic thinking, grand or small. It has instead been driven by indifference, pet peeves, the inertia of personal choices, and a single-minded obsession with avoiding another major politically corrosive terrorist attack—or any possible pretext for one—on American soil. Obama’s sacrifice of principle has gained in return only temporary respite from a rising whirlwind.
In his first speech delineating a Middle East policy, delivered with great fanfare in Cairo in early June 2009, Obama extended a hand to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The answer came only a few days later, with the brutal repression of the Green movement. Yet the policy still stood throughout his two mandates. Ultimately, Tehran, choked by sanctions, was given a new lease on life with the so-called nuclear deal. The reason for this deal is no less capricious, no less based on half-baked illusions, than the reason that drove George W. Bush to change the Iraqi regime. In foreign policy, the effort to control the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction is a virtue that covers all sorts of sins committed.
Counterterrorism is another such virtue. Obama has populated the skies of the Muslim world with drones, delivering death into some of its poorest neighborhoods. And Daesh, that assemblage of ex-Ba‘athi thugs and Islamicized revolutionaries who were conveniently allowed to occupy Raqqa and Mosul, has become a house of sin that enables the unreasonable and unprincipled copulation of Russians and Americans, Iranians and Saudis, Turks and Egyptians. As the dust settles, it seems that Moscow and Tehran have been the most skilled players in that slimy game. The highly publicized battle to reclaim Mosul from Daesh, which began in October 2016, ended up functioning as a smokescreen for the Battle for Aleppo. While the world was invited to cheer Iraqi forces entering the city they had so suspiciously evacuated two years before, Russia was turning the defiant Syrian metropolis into rubble.
In the 1990s, Pax Americana was unchallenged in the Middle East. The elder Bush had liberated Kuwait, and Clinton had brought Arafat and Rabin to the White House to ratify the Oslo Accords. But the 21st century has been rough for the United States; the second Intifada, the Iraq War, and the Arab Spring exposed Washington’s inability to impose outcomes in the region. By 2011, signs of a strategic American disengagement there had converged into a policy.
It soon became vividly clear, as well, that the European Union was no substitute for American power. The 2011 Libyan war exposed the stark limits of European militaries. And a combination of systemic economic recession and sequential political catastrophes—Grexit, Brexit, and the refugee crisis—scuttled lingering dreams of a meaningful EU Mediterranean policy. That gave Russia the opportunity to make a conflagrant comeback in the Syrian quagmire.
For old allies in the region, the American withdrawal was simultaneously acrimonious and liberating. It is worth remembering that Israel did not become a U.S. ally on ideological or moral grounds, but only on geopolitical grounds in the context of an anti-Soviet alliance. The young State of Israel sided with the West at the onset of the Cold War after a brief and bitter dalliance with Stalin, and when Washington finally took note in the late 1960s, an exceptional relationship developed. But the romance soured with Obama, whose testy relationship with Netanyahu stands out for its ultimate futility. The American Treasury still supports the Israeli military, yet American diplomacy has never been further from being able to impose any outcome on Israel. Meanwhile, the Likud government has reached out selectively to Moscow and Beijing and, in the present circumstances, has done so at no cost to itself.
Turkey, a NATO member, embraced the Arab Spring as a staunch adversary of the Assad regime, its policy aligned with Europe and the United States. But as the balance of power shifted on the ground, Ankara had to make peace with the order that Moscow and Tehran were imposing in Syria. Under Obama’s watch, Turkey drifted into unapologetic autocracy and reoriented its strategy to prioritize the repression of Kurdish groups, not only in Turkey proper, but also in Iraq and Syria, where its troops fight the Islamist State for an array of self-interested reasons. It does not matter that the Kurds are the only group in the region somewhat sympathetic to Washington. The diplomatic dance that followed the assassination of a Russian Ambassador in Ankara has illustrated anew how much Washington has lost its grip on Turkey.
The country most orphaned by the passing of Pax Americana is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The destruction of Aleppo constitutes a rattling defeat of Riyadh’s policy in Syria, adding injury to the insults the Saudi Kingdom has absorbed from America lately. Obama signed the deal with Iran against Saudi outcry. He then first acquiesced in, yet also chastised Riyadh for, Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen, having been lured in by the bait of Tehran’s support of the Houthis.
This was personal: A couple of articles published in the summer of 2016 revealed how little the American President thought of the Saudis. No wonder, then, that the presidential veto against the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, allowing victims of 9/11 to sue Saudi Arabia for the 2001 attacks, was overridden with an abundance of Democratic votes.
It was not the first time the Obama Executive had surrendered a foreign policy prerogative to the Legislature. In August 2013, regime forces released sarin gas on rebel-held suburbs of Damascus, a war crime that, Obama had warned, would provoke American intervention. The French started the engines of war, but at the last minute Obama pointed at a reluctant Congress as an excuse to sign a Russia-backed deal whose political boost for the Assad regime far outweighed any military benefit. The Syrian regime had to surrender most (not all) of its chemical arsenal, an achievement exaggerated and used to further political goals in Washington. And that, in part, is why hardly anyone complained when chlorine gas was used months later to kill Aleppine children.
In hindsight, the “red line” moment marked the passing of the Levantine baton from Washington to Moscow, and with that act, the destruction of Aleppo was fated. And the denouement? The Likud Prime Minister of Israel has expressed a willingness to treat wounded Aleppine children, woman, and men of non-combat status in Israeli hospitals, if only others will help transport the needy to the border. The silence coming out of Washington and the great cities of Europe in response to this offer has been deafening. Listen, then, to the crows of Aleppo.