The US's latest move to oust Assad from Syria may only help him dig in further

• The US has leveled a new round of sanctions against Syrian President Bashar Assad, which the US says will finally undercut the dictator and his foreign backers.
• But extensive research shows the effect of such sanctions is limited, and this round is likely to only limit Syria's ability to recover from a ruinous civil war, perpetuating instability, writes Gil Barndollar, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities.

As the old cliché goes: This time will be different. A bevy of recent reporting and op-eds in Western media have predicted, for the umpteenth time in a decade, that Syrian president Bashar Assad is about to fall.

Syria, already wracked by unprecedented economic turmoil, faces even harsher US sanctions with the imposition of the far-reaching Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act last week. Assad, the latest narrative goes, has finally met a force that neither his brutality nor his foreign backers can defeat.

Assad's regime, and the 13 million people it governs, are already experiencing Weimar-level inflation: In some areas, prices are higher in the evening than they were in the morning. The UN's World Food Program says that the price of a basket of food in Syria has gone up 111% year-on-year, matching the highest level since the civil war began. The Syrian pound has lost half its value in just the past month. On Twitter, Syrians have posted images of banknotes used to roll cigarettes.

Even before the coronavirus hit, 40% of Syrians were unemployed, while 80% lived in poverty. Food insecurity is a reality for the vast majority of Syrians.

May brought an even clearer sign of Syria's economic distress. Billionaire Rami Makhlouf, Assad's first cousin and the richest man in Syria, took to Facebook to complain of harassment by the security services and to appeal to Assad for justice. Makhlouf's crown jewel, the mobile phone network Syriatel, was seized, ostensibly for unpaid taxes, and he has been banned from leaving the country. His entreaties appear to have fallen on deaf ears.

Recent protests have also encouraged Assad's premature obituary writers. Earlier this month, demonstrators in the southern province of Suwayda cursed Assad and expressed support for the remaining rebel enclave in Idlib. That the protests arose among the Druze community, largely neutral or loyal to Assad throughout the civil war, is worthy of note.

So the usual suspects at the usual Washington think tanks are celebrating the recent imposition of the Caesar Act as a potential nail in Assad's coffin. Yet Assad's brutality and corruption doesn't change two basic realities. The first is that sanctions, even by the United States, are seldom effective in forcing regime change. The second is that crippling Syria's recovery is not in the interests of either the US or the region.

As a supposedly more humane alternative to war, the United States has increasingly turned to punishing sanctions on recalcitrant individuals and nations. The Trump administration's sanctions on Iran, for example, have dealt the Islamic Republic a body blow. The economy contracted by nearly 10% last year, while oil exports dropped by nearly 90%. Inflation skyrocketed, while in September 2018 the Iranian rial hit a record low against the dollar.

Iran also demonstrates the clear limits of even the most far-reaching US sanctions. Like Syria, Iran's deepest problems are attributable to the incompetence and corruption of its own authoritarian leaders.

Yet despite intermittent protests and being hit hard by COVID-19, Iran's theocracy and its security services appear to be firmly in control. Iran's regional adventurism has not ceased. If anything, Iran's proxies and allies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen are more powerful than they were before the imposition of sanctions.

By crushing the broader economy, sanctions often serve to tighten a ruling regime's grip on its economy. Academic studies have shown sanctions further entrench authoritarian regimes, by enabling them to further control the economy and distribute scarce foreign goods to their supporters. The "oil for food" sanctions on Saddam Hussein's Iraq led to ration books for all adult males — "a secret policeman's dream," in the words of journalist David Rieff.

By destroying legitimate commerce and immiserating the middle class, sanctions destroy the constituency usually seen as the sine qua non of representative government and the rule of law. Iraq and Libya show the consequences of a hollowed-out society.

Sanctions are unlikely to result in Assad's ejection. But they will undoubtedly hamstring Syrian reconstruction, a process that will cost at least $250 billion. Syria can't afford that bill, and now neither its backers nor its neighbors will participate in reconstruction efforts.

The result, especially when combined with US troops still holding 25% of Syria's oil reserves, can be predicted: a broken state, an ongoing humanitarian disaster, and a perpetual tinderbox waiting for another spark.

Though unpalatable, the continued rule of Assad is far better than the return of either ISIS or the assorted jihadis of Idlib. Perhaps a more-or-less liberal Syrian revolution could have succeeded in its first year or two. But the past is the past. Further chaos and civil war in Syria should be avoided at all costs.

The rule of the Assads was not a significant concern of the United States for four decades. Even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceded the same thing, telling reporters in 2018: "We haven't had a problem with the Assad regime, for 40 years not a single bullet was fired on the Golan Heights."

For a post-pandemic America confronting both China and its own myriad problems, the fate of the Syrian regime is ultimately a trivial concern.

In its irrational zeal to punish — if not overthrow — Assad, the US is willing to accept ample collateral damage. As one Lebanese minister told the Guardian, "In their rush to get Bashar and Khamenei, the US are forgetting who their friends are."

Lebanon's economy is in freefall, both a cause and a consequence of its Syrian neighbor's distress. Across the Middle East, states that worked to isolate and defeat Assad have accepted his victory in the civil war. From stagnant, resource-poor Jordan to the rich UAE, former Assad antagonists had at least hoped to make money on Syrian reconstruction. With US sanctions hanging over their head, that hope is gone.

The broader global impact of the Caesar Act will be even worse. To China, Russia, and many neutral countries, US sanctions leveled on third parties look like the worst kind of hubris. Continued economic coercion and bullying of rivals, non-aligned states, and even allies threatens to crack the dollar's status as the global reserve currency.

In 2016, then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew stated: "It is a mistake to think that [sanctions] are low-cost. And if they make the business environment too complicated, or unpredictable, or if they excessively interfere with the flow of funds worldwide, financial transactions may begin to move outside of the United States entirely—which could threaten the central role of the US financial system globally."

Cryptocurrencies, barter mechanisms, or currency baskets are not displacing the dollar tomorrow. But every Caesar Act adds another crack to the foundation of one of America's greatest asymmetric advantages, the US-driven global financial system.

The Caesar Act may be the straw that breaks Assad's back, but there is ample reason to doubt this. Far-reaching sanctions on Syria will probably have the same yield they usually do: A middle class immiserated, an odious regime further entrenched, and neutral observers further convinced of both US fecklessness and hypocrisy. This time probably won't be different.

Gil Barndollar is a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and at the Catholic University of America's Center for the Study of Statesmanship.