To open or not: the embassy question

With the Assad regime gone and rebel rule slowly consolidating across Syria, governments around the world are weighing up whether — and if so, how — to resume contact with the emerging new Syrian leadership.

Some capitals are diving chin-first right into the shallow end:

• Turkey, which was already tight with the main rebel faction (HTS), was unsurprisingly first to reopen its embassy in Damascus last Saturday
• Qatar, which wants a regional power-broking role, then reopened on Tuesday, and
• The Saudis also sent a delegation this week though awkwardly, they’d already reopened their Damascus embassy way back in September (remember then?) based on an emerging consensus that Assad was there to stay. 

Others have been a little more cautious:

• The perma-concerned EU has pledged to reopen after talks with the rebels, though there’s no firm timeline yet (ditto several member countries)
• The US is sticking with shuffle diplomacy for now — senior diplomat Barbara Leaf (love that name) is now in Damascus to meet Syria’s new leadership, and
• Iran isn’t daring to show its face yet — locals stormed its embassy when Assad fled, venting their outrage at Iran’s support for his dictatorship. Tehran is now saying rather bureaucratically that it’ll return “when the conditions are right”.

And of course, most countries never had an embassy in Damascus to begin with, whether because it was too distant, irrelevant, or dictatorial. And that brings us to our point — how are foreign ministries now weighing up whether to (re)open in Damascus?

• 🌐 Interests 

In your dating profile, your “interests” might be reading Liane Moriarty, travelling to Bali, and taking long walks along Seseh Beach. But in geopolitics, it’s really about what you have at stake. For local powerbrokers like Turkey, the answers are obvious: they want to shape local events in their favour. But they’re basically still thinking about the same things as everyone else, just on a bigger scale:

• Diaspora: Many capitals want a stable Syria so local refugees can return
• Energy: Iraq and Egypt can sell oil and gas via Syrian pipelines, and Turkey wants to be the hub
• Business: Rebuilding Syria will cost ~$400B — that’s a lot of contracts up for grabs
• Crime: Assad mass-produced captagon (an illegal drug) to prop up his regime, and foreign police agencies now want local help shutting that trade down, and
• Location: Syria has a strategic perch, which is partly why rivals have fought over it since the Roman-Persian wars

So basically, capitals want to shape which Syria now emerges: will it stabilise ties with Israel; allow Russia to keep its bases; vote with Turkey at the UN; pioneer a new kind of Islamist technocracy that moulds (or threatens) political movements elsewhere? And so on.

• 💥 Risks

It’s ultimately a political decision whether to have your diplomats in some distant, volatile city. And the appeal of shaping events over there is balanced by the fear of those events shaping you back home: consider how attacks on US diplomats abroad derailed (rightly or wrongly) leaders back home, whether Jimmy Carter (the Iran hostage crisis) or Hillary Clinton (Benghazi).

Those political decisions are also shaped by bureaucrats’ advice: these are mostly regular, hard-working folks weighing up whether they or their colleagues (or even family) should be sent into the fray, and if so, how. As a result, they’re often cautious.

And zooming out, they’ll also evaluate the local foreign intelligence risk (spies), whether from the host country or elsewhere. It doesn’t entirely shape whether you re-open, so much as how: countermeasures are costly, and sometimes prohibitive. As for what’s happening in Syria? Sure, Assad’s spies are out, but everyone else is now in. Even ISIS.

• 💻 Logistics

This isn’t as dull as you think: reopening a diplomatic mission is a massive exercise. The French first had to send masked special forces to re-take their abandoned mission, and clear the street out front (a counter-terrorism nightmare). Then once you have a secure space, how do you (for example) even pay your team there? Syrian banks are still under sanctions, so some foreign diplomats will be wandering around town with wads of cash.

And that’s before we get to secure comms and accommodation, or even legal complexities: how do you deal with players your government still sanctions as terrorists?

Oh, and on that note (worthy of its own Intrigue lead), there’s the issue of whether to withdraw those terrorist listings: several Western capitals are already working on it, and will charge a price for international legitimisation, including pledges around the treatment of women and minorities, chemical weapons protocols, neighbourly ties, and beyond.

It’s a lot.

INTRIGUE’S TAKE

One capital that’s been relatively quiet through all the latest Syria intrigue is Beijing. That’s partly because its embassy in Damascus never actually closed, so there’s no binary ‘will-they-won’t-they’ story to drive media interest. But that relative silence is arguably also a reflection of a) the regional limits of China’s power, b) its preference not to highlight the fact it rolled the red carpet out for Assad, and c) its general discomfort around stories involving long-time authoritarians getting toppled.

Another thought: this is a life-defining moment to be present at the (re)birth of a nation, and have rare tangible impact in hopefully shaping things for the better. So despite all the risks, you can bet there’ll be no shortage of foreign ministry volunteers.

Also worth noting:

• There are so many other embassy examples happening right now: Australia just reopened its embassy in Kyiv, a year or two after most partners; Israel just closed its embassy in Ireland as ties soured; and the Afghan embassy in London just closed after the Taliban renounced it.
• Meanwhile, Syrian diplomats abroad have apparently received instructions from Damascus to keep working during the transitional period.