CONSTRAINED BY THE PAST: HOW THE EXPERIENCE OF AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, AND LIBYA LIMIT U.S. POLICY OPTIONS IN SYRIA

The U.S. is involved in multiple interventions in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen with no end in sight for any of these interventions. The Presidency of Donald J. Trump was interpreted as an isolationist turn in U.S. foreign policy. However, this is the wrong conclusion to draw. U.S. policy elites are willing to engage in military interventions, but they place severe constraints on what the U.S. military can and cannot do. These constraints result in incoherent and contradictory military interventions which ultimately fall short of achieving their objectives.  The origin of these constraints lie in the experiences of U.S. policy makers during the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. This paper analyses how these constraints came into being and argues that because of these constraints and the interventions they influenced; the U.S. has a dead-end Syria policy with no effective way to influence the conflict’s trajectory. 

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