The Obama administration and civil war in Syria, 2011–2016: US presidential foreign policy making as political risk management

Abstract

From 2011 to 2016, the Obama administration’s Syria policy appeared to be in constant flux. Prominent accounts portray this as the result of foreign policy making in an arena with no good options, or the use of programs as smokescreens to conceal underlying goals. Both portrayals fit the foreign policy making literature, which views policy as crafted by a president who acts either as guardian of the national interest or as a consummate politician. But the record on Syria does not square with these accounts. The Obama administration neither tried to find solutions to the strategic problems that Syria posed in and of itself, in order to advance the national interest, nor exploited Syria as a political opportunity, to enhance domestic political power. I show, instead, that the trajectory of US Syria policy was consistent with efforts to minimize the risk that the crisis posed to President Obama’s central foreign policy objectives and his domestic political capital and legacy. The Obama administration’s Syria policy resulted from a distinct logic of political risk management.