ABSTRACT
Introduction In a transitional context as steeped in global power differentials as the Arab Middle East, who coerces, who persuades, where, and how? This is a book about the limits of an American “smart power” challenged by the emergence of an indigenous “soft power” at a pivotal moment in Arab history. It narrates contests between attraction and intimidation, public diplomacy and military occupation, elites and publics, seduction and resistance. Demonstrating the intractable entanglement between American soft power conceived in the shadow of its “hard” US military counterpart, this book traces the conceptual and policy trajectory of the US’s “power of persuasion” from the War on Terror and into the Arab Spring. Challenging the theoretical conception of soft power as the exclusive domain of (Western) elites, it explores the indigenous, popular soft power of Syria’s thuwwar (revolutionaries) as they struggle to attain freedom and dignity domestically while asserting their “voice” in international politics. Recent academic work on Syria has focused on examining the domestic causes and consequences of the uprising (Bishara 2013; Hinnebusch 2012; Ismail 2011; Leenders 2013; Lefevre 2013; Pierret 2013; Wedeen 2013); accounting for Assad’s resilience (Heydemann 2013; Stacher 2012); emphasizing regional influence and fallout (Hokayem 2013; Majed 2013); investigating the conflict’s militarization and protracted war (Abboud 2015); and deciphering the trajectories and travails of ISIS’s ascent (Filiu 2015; Lister 2015; Moubayed 2015). Some scholars have interpreted US policy on Syria relative to a general pattern of American responses to the Arab Spring (Brownlee 2012; Challand 2014; Gerges 2013; Heydemann 2014). Exploring new empirical terrain within a novel theoretical framework, this book probes interlocking circles of state structure and popular agency and the
resulting chains of action-reaction-action they spur. The analysis here decisively considers “the people” in an exploration of the intersections of American foreign policy and Arab politics. Publics and states encounter and contest one another domestically, regionally, and internationally in assorted combinations and through various iterations of power. This book thus offers a narrative of continuity, disruption, and resumption in US foreign policy as it is engaged, challenged, and resisted by a Syrian sha’b (people) often omitted in academic and policy discourse. Power-soft, hard, and smart-is monopolized by no single actor, its dissemination and effects constrained to no single level of analysis. An Assad-repressed, US-overlooked, Arab-inspired sha’b resists the Baath, engages and challenges Uncle Sam, receives and responds to Obama’s “smart” treatment, all in cyclical fashion. Syria’s thawrah thus becomes a site of challenge and contestation, interaction and engagement among and between agential publics and national and transnational state structures. On Friday, September 26, 2014, residents of a smattering of towns across Syria-in ISIS-controlled Raqqa but also “liberated” suburbs of Aleppo-went out in protest, as many had done for years since the thawrah (revolution) began in early 2011. This time, however, their ire was directed not (just) at Bashar alAssad’s mukhabarat (security) regime and its violently suffocating repression. Al sha’b yureed isqat al nizam (the people want to topple the regime) had become a “given,” familiar demand. New here was the denunciation of violence perpetrated by an “international community” headed by the United States, selfstyled global watchdog and dispenser of democracy. This Friday was named “Civilians don’t need more international killers,” as protestors objected to the anti-ISIS coalition’s airstrikes in Syria seen to hinder, not help, the cause of the revolution (Al Jazeera 2014). By July 2015, the Syrian Human Rights Network had documented 173 civilian deaths at the hands of the anti-ISIS coalition (Al-Arabi Al-Jadid 2015). It seemed the US had more than avenged the death of journalist James Foley, dramatically beheaded on camera in a highly stylized video released by ISIS immediately preceding President Obama’s announcement of Operation Inherent Resolve’s first airstrikes in Syria. Such a “moment” in which US bombs kill civilians alongside Coalition “targets,” marking America’s contribution to the consistently mounting (and overwhelmingly civilian) death toll in the country, is significant in the trajectory of the Syrian revolution. This occasion joins other consequential turning-points such as Bashar al-Assad’s public invitation to continued violations of Syrian sovereignty in July 20151 and the military “coordination” agreement between Israel and Syrian international patron and weapons provider Russia (Oliphant 2015), or the first Russian airstrike on Syrian soil under the pretenses of fighting ISIS (Enab Baladi 2015). Such critical junctures have upset longstanding narratives concerning Syria’s relations with international actors. How did Syrians and the US government, two sets of players in the many-sided bloodbath of the now barely recognizable thawrah silmiyyah (peaceful revolution), arrive at this moment? Why had US soft power failed to win the hearts and minds of Syrians? The US, the potential munasir (defender) and da’im (supporter) of al sha’b al
soori, the Syrian people, was being denounced for its direct killing of Syrian civilians. Its pounding airstrikes appeared to indicate among Syrians more shared US ground with the barrel bomb-dropping (but still “rogue”) regime of Bashar al-Assad, the Hezbollah and Iranian militias, and the foreign-staffed ranks of ISIS than Obama’s democracy-promoting, people power-celebrating discourse of 2011. The War on Terror was back, it seemed, with democratization relegated outside the realm of priority and barely registering in the statements of US officials now preoccupied with ISIS, terrorism, extremist ideology, and a “refugee crisis” threatening Europe, Australia, and America. This book is an attempt to untangle the dynamics between US foreign policy towards the Arab world, from a War on Terror-darkened context into the Arab Spring, with a specific focus on the Syrian uprising that catapults “the people” into the domain of international relations and foreign policy. American soft and smart power are singled out for an analysis that probes their intractable interdependency and its effects on the popular reception of American development assistance, civil society “empowerment,” and democracy promotion in the Arab Middle East. This contextualization opens the theoretical space to unsnarl the roles of soft and hard power in American War on Terror policy and to examine alternative forms of indigenous soft power. Only thus can the US campaign against ISIS but not Assad, and flagrant popular resistance to Operation Inherent Resolve, be understood. Key to interpreting the course of US-Syrian Arab Spring interactions is an examination of the power-knowledge dynamics that underpin them. Perhaps nowhere is the power-knowledge nexus as materially consequential as in the realm of Western foreign policy-making, from the Orientalism that justified and sustained European colonialism to the post-WWII “modernization” agenda of the United States. More recently, the War on Terror has been self-consciously informed by-if often violating-tenets of diplomat and political scientist Joseph Nye’s concepts of soft and smart power. Yet power’s actors are multiple, its pathways numerous, and resistance to it legion. Critical analyses can no longer afford to “except” Arab publics. Exploring the interplay between the two forms of power at the site of great power elite-Arab indigenous popular interactions, this book critically interrogates the theoretical framework of Nye’s soft power and its relationship to hard power in US War on Terror policy. Here I argue that a blurring of the two forms of power and their respective targets “by design” has tarnished the credibility of US policies geared to win hearts and minds in the Arab world. The book then assesses the extent to which US foreign policy towards a region now simmering with popular uprisings, most volatile in Syria, exhibits continuity or disruption from a security-oriented War on Terror grand strategy. Turning to a critical case of an Arab “public,” this book goes on to examine Syrian popular interactions with the US, arguing that investigating the dialectic between two levels of analysis often studied separately, domestic (nowrevolutionary) politics and US foreign policy, is integral to unpacking developments in both Syria and Washington. Thus Syrian popular engagement with a US wielding a self-narrated smart power strategy that disseminates various
combinations of hard and soft power towards the people, Assad’s regime, and ISIS, is crucial. The analysis of the dialectic between Syria’s revolutionaries (thuwwar) and the US serves as an initial exploration of how US smart power plays out on the “receiving end,” and how popular uprisings can resist hard power. This interaction is proposed as a form of indigenous soft power challenging not only domestic authoritarian regimes, but also resisting Arab-US power dynamics as it transforms the people (al sha’b) into a nascent and important, if multifarious and disjointed, foreign policy actor.
