by John Kerry
I was intrigued by the prospect and knew that the Obama administration was interested in exploring the possibilities, so I thought the committee could dip a toe into those waters. The president encouraged me to reach out to the regime. I did so without knowing Bashar al-Assad well. I’d met his father, who was brutal and devious, but I didn’t have much of a relationship or history with Assad the younger beyond a short stop I had made in Damascus in 2005. Nobody in the White House, and certainly not I, placed any trust in him, but I believed that if he had his own self-interest at heart, then he would be interested in a frank conversation.
In 2009, I had my first long meetings with Assad, which left me with two important takeaways: the strange predicament he faced in managing his country and that I couldn’t take anything he said at face value: it all had to be tested.
In our first meeting, I confronted him about a Syrian nuclear power plant that Israel had famously bombed and that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) now wanted to inspect. The fact that this was a nuclear facility had been well established publicly. It was beyond dispute. “If you want to show the world that you’re prepared to move in a new direction, let the IAEA in,” I argued to him. Assad looked me in the eye and told me it wasn’t a nuclear facility, with exactly the same affect and intonation with which he said everything else. It was a stupid lie, utterly disprovable, but he lied without any hesitation. The next time we met, I had been briefed by the White House on the smuggling of weapons across the border to arm Hezbollah. Again, the evidence was incontrovertible. Again, when confronted, Assad denied it. I asked for everyone to leave the room besides the two of us. “Mr. President, this isn’t a debate. I’ve seen the evidence. It is happening and we know it’s happening,” I said, and let the words hang in the air to gauge his reaction. “Everything is to be negotiated,” he replied, and stared ahead. It was a purposeful non sequitur from an immature autocrat caught in a bald-faced lie. It was a revealing moment that would come in handy years later when I was secretary of state and had to face the Syria conundrum from a different perch. A man who can lie to your face four feet away from you can just as easily lie to the world after he has gassed his own people to death.
Assad’s interest in a three-way peace negotiation with Israel and the United States was an area where he leaned forward. Israel and Syria had had several negotiations over the years, dating back to the Clinton era. Most recently, the Turks, under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had engaged with Assad and then prime minister Ehud Olmert of Israel to see if they could agree on the baseline for resuming negotiations. That effort was interrupted by the Gaza War in 2009, which was the beginning of the deterioration of Israel’s relationship with Turkey. The Obama administration was interested in renewing the Israel-Syria negotiations.
Assad asked me what it would take to enter into serious peace negotiations, in the hope of securing return of the Golan Heights, which Syria had lost to Israel in 1967. I told him that if he were serious, he should make a private proposal. He asked what it would look like. I shared my thoughts. He instructed his top aide to draft a letter from Assad to President Obama asking for American support of peace talks with Israel, stating Syria’s willingness to take a number of steps in exchange for the return of the Golan from Israel. His father had tried and failed to get the Golan back, so he was willing to do a lot in return. The next day, I flew to Israel, where I sat down with Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and showed him Assad’s letter. He was surprised that Assad was willing to go that far, significantly further than he’d been willing to go with the Turks. I took the letter back to Washington. I gave it to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and also to Dennis Ross at the National Security Council. Subsequently it became part of the State Department’s effort on the Israel-Syria negotiations.
I continued to work with Assad to test him on what would have been small confidence-building measures—areas where he could demonstrate some good faith—and made clear that anything the United States could ever consider doing for him would be contingent on verification that he had followed through on his end. In coordination with the White House, I made several requests, ranging from easy ones, such as working on the transfer of land for the American embassy in Damascus and the opening of an American cultural center, to difficult and trickier issues, like border assistance with respect to Iraq and a visit to Iraq by the foreign minister, reconciliation with Bahrain, and dispatching an ambassador to Lebanon to send a message before the elections that Syria would stay out of Lebanon’s election process. All of these were largely done and delivered.
Everything Assad did always had to be verified. He would tighten up on some misdeeds for a couple weeks or so by limiting the transit of weapons or saying the right things about engaging with Israel, but words were easy, while sustained actions told a different story. A few weeks later, I remember hearing that Assad was continuing with exactly the kind of behavior on Hezbollah that we told him needed to stop. It was disappointing but unsurprising. I once asked a leader of one of our close allies in the Middle East why Assad chose Iran over a different kind of future for his country. He told me, “When Assad goes to Iran, they offer him a sumptuous feast with a buffet stretching as far as the eye can see. When you guys see him, you offer him some raisins and dates.” I answered bluntly, “Well, we aren’t going to offer him anything if he continues to behave like this.”
For all his lies, there were times when Assad could seemingly acknowledge his predicament and lay out a candid rationale for moving in a different direction. He made clear that he was most concerned about providing jobs for a young population beginning to enter the workforce. He told me he had hundreds of thousands of people joining the workforce every year, and that he needed to loosen the economic restrictions and spur private sector investment. I made very clear that if there was any chance that that was going to happen, we had a long list of things he would have to do, none of which was going to be easy. Assad said he was interested in having that conversation because the pressure grew every year: the promise of a secular state, even the authoritarian police state his father had built, demanded a population believing that their quality of life was better than it would be with the alternative.
The alternative he feared was the Islamist movements his father had crushed decades ago. As the oil dried up and Syria became a net oil importer and as the youth population boomed, it was more apparent than ever that in an overwhelmingly Sunni country, Assad was a leader from an Alawite sect, in effect a minority within a minority. He talked with nostalgia about a different, more secular time in Syria and once showed me a picture of his mother going to the Umayyad Mosque in a midlength skirt, her head uncovered. At one point, his foreign minister said, “If we don’t find a way to get more jobs for our people, you’ll come back in ten years and he’ll be Mullah Assad!” Assad laughed. “I will be Bashar with a beard.” His message was unmistakable: one way or another, he was bent on regime survival, even if it meant posing as a theocrat, but the easiest path was by moving his country in a new direction.
Assad wasn’t alone in that challenge. King Abdullah had faced similar demographic challenges in Jordan, but Abdullah was strong and smart, the son of a brilliant, revered military icon turned peacemaker. By contrast, Assad had always been underestimated. His ruthless father had never envisioned him leading the country, so he’d been buried in the line of succession behind his uncle and brother, but fate and a funeral had placed him at the front of the line. He was long and lanky with a head that sat atop a very long neck out of proportion to his body. He had a quality that sometimes made you wonder if he wished he’d still been an ophthalmologist living out of the political limelight in London, enjoying the regime’s ill-gotten wealth and chasing his glamorous, cosmopolitan wife all over Europe. I wondered how he would react if he faced a real crisis at home. Would this young, unlikely head of state cut an independent, modern path, or would he try to one-up his father and turn even more brutal to try to hold on to power?
We
were at a standstill when the Arab Spring came to Syria in the form of protests in Deir al-Zour and then spread around the country. I made very clear to the Syrian ambassador that if Assad killed innocent civilians, it would be the end of direct engagement with me. Period. He told me that Assad intended to address the country soon and engage in a reconciliation process for a reform agenda. I told him the United States would be listening very carefully. The next Friday, after prayers, more protesters were killed. I never spoke to the ambassador or Assad again.
Not long after, Assad delivered the first of what would become a running series of increasingly surreal addresses on Syrian state-run television. He announced that the opposition were terrorists trying to destroy the state and stop his experiment in reform to benefit the Syrian people. Some speculated that Assad had ceded control to his mother’s family, while others suggested that he had simply fallen back on his father’s old playbook. What became increasingly clear as he twisted the screws tighter and tighter was that he was transforming himself into the very magnet for religious extremism and jihadi intervention he had professed to fear the most. His actions were making Syria a beacon for regional conflagration. I soon argued that he would never be able to lead a united Syria and, like many other autocrats of the Arab Awakening, he should go. Not long afterward, in August 2011, President Obama also said he should give up power. After that, the president drew a famous red line about the potential use of chemical weapons.
About two years later, all these issues would find me again at the State Department, and they haunt all of us to this day. We’ll never know what would have happened if the Arab Spring hadn’t intervened and if we could have fully put to the test what Assad said he was willing to do to change his economy. It’s impossible to go back and replay the many directions history might have taken. In the end, all you can do is make your best judgment at the time. Assad’s horrific, sadistic series of judgments have brought ruin to his country and infamy to his reputation.
If diplomatic overtures overseas were an interesting study in mercurial personalities, broken and byzantine politics, and dysfunctional democracy punctuated by occasional breakthroughs, it turned out I didn’t have to travel far to find similar challenges. All I needed was to get on the US Air shuttle from Boston to Washington.
Foreign policy in the Senate could be riveting and at times deeply frustrating. When I talk about it, I hope I don’t sound as if I’m channeling Everett Dirksen or Mike Mansfield, guardians of a bygone era. The Senate I knew was never perfectly functional or efficient. It rarely behaved as imagined in the Federalist Papers. In 1985, I had arrived in a Washington on the cusp of sweeping, disruptive change. I witnessed a big shift in the first ten years that I was in national office, and then my presidential campaign unfolded at the dawn of an even bigger change in how America communicates. It’s gotten only more complicated since then.
I point this out because when I became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, I wasn’t an idealist nostalgic for a time long gone. I never expected everyone to sing “Kumbaya,” nor did I expect the seas to part in Congress allowing the entire Obama foreign policy to advance unimpeded, but I couldn’t have predicted just how corrosive the atmosphere would be and how broken the Senate would become, all of it standing in the way of doing things that in previous Congresses would have been automatic. Inside the Senate during the first four years of the Obama administration, even on foreign policy issues which not long ago had been the least partisan, the level of dysfunction, terror about primaries, raw politics, rancor and excuses for inaction became a way of life.
The fate of three treaties are as good an illustration as any of the way the Senate, sadly, became compromised. By 2009, I’d debated enough treaties to know both the Senate’s traditions and its travails. Even across the five terms I’d been there, for the most part the Senate had largely kept intact a bipartisan tradition when it came to nuclear nonproliferation treaties. From John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush, nuclear treaties worked their way through the Senate typically with eye-popping margins that affirmed the national security community’s commitment to reduce the nuclear threat. Votes that tallied 99–0 or 93–1 were more common than not.
Still, I knew that “treaty” had become a dirty word that the conservative think tanks criticized in every voting scorecard and endorsement questionnaire. There were Republican colleagues who handed me examples of the direct-mail letters that were sent to their constituents soliciting ten-, fifteen- and twenty-dollar contributions to stop a “one world government,” inveighing against treaties that were supposedly designed to strip America of its sovereignty and put average citizens in jeopardy of being told what they could and couldn’t do by the United Nations. These were fact-free scare tactics, but they worked.
One Republican brought me an example of the way the language of these appeals would permeate the letters his office received from his constituents, parroting the conspiracy theories word for word. Facts didn’t matter. The pressure on my Republican colleagues was real, although that didn’t excuse them from doing the right thing, but it put an onus on me as chairman to try to be mindful of their politics at home. It was important to run a process that would, I hoped, help them disprove the false statements point by point so that they could go back home and credibly demonstrate that they’d taken their base’s concerns seriously and voted yes only after getting the needed answers. One of my early lessons learned in the Senate is never tell other senators that you know their politics better than they do. Instead, where possible, just help them see how they can overcome those challenges.
I thought that getting over that hurdle would be most surmountable on a modest nuclear nonproliferation treaty. I wish I could say I’d been right. Our nuclear treaty with Russia expired in December 2009. That meant the United States was losing its day-to-day visibility into the Russian nuclear arsenal. Under ordinary circumstances, this would have created a sense of urgency to quickly put in place a new accord. The administration sent one to the Hill—the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, called New START, which cut by nearly a third the maximum number of deployed strategic warheads, instituted a verification regime and kept us on the path toward reducing our reliance on nuclear weapons. At the time, a number of former secretaries of defense and state had made a splash arguing that the United States should be moving toward an aggressive goal of zero nuclear weapons. By that measure this modest Obama approach seemed almost incremental.
Enter Sarah Palin.
The half-term governor whose expertise on Russia seemed to begin and end with its proximity to Alaska had become a Tea Party heroine before many even knew what the Tea Party was. She appeared on Facebook and Fox News to attack the treaty in a fact-free frenzy. I knew the committee would hear differences of opinion on treaty specifics, from missile defense to telemetry, but I didn’t think anyone would have predicted we’d be sitting in the ornate committee meeting room in the Senate parsing Palin’s open letter to Republican freshmen on FoxNews.com.
It was never too early for presidential politics, so former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney joined her in a footrace to the right, attacking the treaty as possibly “Obama’s worst foreign policy mistake.” The early 2012 presidential field joined in, from Gingrich down the line.
On the Foreign Relations Committee, we had our own version of the Tea Party on the committee’s roster, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina—the “Palmetto Palin,” as David McKean called him. Jim was a freshman senator of outsized influence. He had won my friend Fritz Hollings’s seat in 2004, an example of the transition happening to the Senate in many ways and coming from the South in particular. Fritz had been a groundbreaking governor before he came to the Senate, a liberal who prided himself on working across the aisle and partnering with his senior senator, Strom Thurmond, on issues affecting South Carolina. By contrast, DeMint was an ideologue, a proponent of term limits who had been elected president of his freshman class in the House before he moved to the Senate a
few years later.
Jim set out to break a lot of china—and he did. While other freshman senators were dutifully learning the institution, he penned a book titled Saving Freedom: We Can Stop America’s Slide into Socialism. Most unusual was Jim’s approach to his Republican colleagues. He took the extraordinary step of founding a political action committee of his own dedicated to electing Tea Party–style candidates, including those running against his Republican Senate colleagues. For example, he backed Lisa Murkowski’s primary opponent, helped a self-described former witch win the Republican nod for the Senate seat previously held by Joe Biden, and defied his own leader, Mitch McConnell, by endorsing Rand Paul in the Kentucky primary for Senate after Mitch had convinced the popular Republican secretary of state Trey Grayson to get into the race. (Grayson lost in the primary.)
Jim was hard to get to know because he didn’t have a lot of interest in getting to know anyone on the other side of the aisle. He’d slip into a hearing, ask a question that was a polemic thinly disguised as an inquiry, and then he’d leave. His arrival on our committee was punctuated by his vote—one of just two in the entire Senate—against Hillary Clinton’s nomination for secretary of state.
