Is the EU Starting to Wobble on Freezing Out Assad?

After more than 11 years, Syria’s crisis continues. Active military conflict, geopolitical hostilities, and violence associated with terrorism and organized crime still occur daily throughout the country, while the levels of humanitarian suffering across Syria are worse today than they have ever been.

Although the scale and intensity of violence in Syria may be considerably less than in years past, approximately 7 million Syrians remain displaced inside the country, and a further 7 million are refugees abroad. Recent polling of Syrian refugees indicates one simple reality: There is virtually no interest in considering a return to a Syria controlled by Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

It is within this context that the international community has continued to frame its approach to Syria policy around U.N. Security Council Resolution 2254, which calls for a nationwide cease-fire, followed by a comprehensive political settlement involving free and fair elections and a Syrian-led political transition. This policy reflects a simple recognition that among the drivers of violence, instability, and suffering in Syria, the core root cause remains the Assad regime—and so long as it remains in place, along with its brutality and corruption, then so too will the crisis and its many troubling symptoms.

The policy is also a matter of basic morality—since 2011, the regime has carried out such an extraordinary array of war crimes and crimes against humanity that some of the world’s most experienced international prosecutors have declared that the evidence against Assad is the most extensive the world has seen since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg.

In Damascus, Assad’s government remains unperturbed. For a decade now, Syria’s regime has refused to engage meaningfully with a single round of negotiations, while it has violated every single cease-fire to which it has ever been a party. As far as Assad is concerned, he and his regime have won the major military fight and are now engaged in an attritional struggle—waiting for their Syrian and foreign opponents to give up.

In the meantime, while 97 percent of Syrians find themselves living below the poverty line, the Assad family and a network of business elites, warlords, and Hezbollah are enriching themselves like never before, running a $30 billion drugs empire with a reach into Asia, Africa, Southern Europe, and across the Middle East.

When faced with Syria’s troubling realities and the regime’s complete indifference to any consideration of compromise, some in the international community have left their morals aside and reengaged Assad’s regime.

In recent years, much of this abhorrent behavior has been limited to several governments in the Middle East, driven by a fatigued frustration with the impasse on Syria policy but also by geopolitics, financial ambition, and, frankly, some shared ideological values. Thanks in large part to the deterrent power of the Caesar Act (which legally requires the U.S. government to sanction any entity that engages financially with Syria’s regime), these regional acts of normalization have had a relatively minimal impact. And as long as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Qatar remain staunchly opposed to regional reengagement, it is unlikely to amount to much.

Yet there is another equally disturbing but potentially far more consequential trend toward reengagement developing behind the scenes—in Europe.

Alongside the United States and the United Kingdom, the European Union remains institutionally tied to the established international position on Syria, guided by Resolution 2254 and the need for a comprehensive political settlement. The EU maintains an expansive array of more than 350 sanctions against the Syrian regime and associated entities and continues to diplomatically oppose and block any aid-related activities in Syria that would benefit Assad, including any forms of reconstruction.

Despite the EU’s official position, though, cracks have begun to emerge among EU member states. Although minor differences in perspective have existed within the EU for some time, these have morphed into serious and substantive disagreements in recent months, according to four senior Western officials Foreign Policy spoke to in October on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.

According to multiple senior sources, governments including Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Poland have all been using their positions within the EU to press a number of policy lines and calls for policy change that align directly with the interests of Assad’s regime. Beyond EU chambers, some of these governments have also convened select groups of experts to brainstorm creative ways to bypass restrictive EU regulations and sanctions in order to “do more” in Syria.

The catalyst for this recent shift appears to have been a marked uptick this summer in migrant vessels leaving from Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey headed toward Greece, Malta, Cyprus, and Italy. In some cases, geopolitical opposition to Turkey appears to play a role, as does the rising influence of populist politics and resulting tendencies toward Islamophobia and pro-Christian and minority politics, as well as a general sympathy toward Russia’s stance on Syria, despite the ongoing war in Ukraine.

While a general fear of refugees—as well as populist, nationalist politics—may be driving the increase in calls to soften Europe’s stance on Syria, the verbally expressed justifications mostly align with assertions that Assad has won and only his regime can stabilize the country.

As increasing numbers of Syrian refugees—along with Lebanese migrants—began fleeing toward Southern Europe this year, these European states began arguing in favor of the EU significantly expanding its definition of “early recovery” to move away from limited and localized development work undertaken within a humanitarian setting and open the door to donor-funded activities that would amount to de facto reconstruction, according to multiple European officials.

Southern and Central European officials have also tabled repeated complaints about the EU’s standard use of the “safe, voluntary, and dignified” conditionality when it comes to refugee returns—arguing it was impeding returns and feeding migration. In reality, though, restricting refugee returns to those that are “safe, voluntary, and dignified” is intended to prevent the forcible and illegal return of refugees against their will and to an unknown and likely deadly fate.

On repeated occasions this year, several member states also issued private complaints about EU leaders’ consistent mention of Assad regime crimes in public statements on Syria. In their view, making a point to publicly describe these crimes was both unnecessary and an impediment to those keen on exploring an improvement of ties with Damascus. Variations on “Assad won; it’s time to move on” have become common refrains from these member states during Syria consultations, as has criticism of EU sanctions and other “unilateral coercive measures” against Syria—a phrase that refers to sanctions but is reserved almost entirely to sanctions critics.

In the opinion of one European official, the “exponential” increase in visible and official expressions of opposition to the EU’s policy of isolating Assad is “the most serious challenge” posed to the international community’s stance on Syria.

Since 2020, several of the governments in question have reestablished some form of diplomatic ties with Damascus, including Bulgaria; Hungary; Greece, which dispatched a chargé d’affairs to Damascus in 2020; and Cyprus, which moved into a new embassy in mid-2021. Italy reportedly played host to Assad’s intelligence chief, Ali Mamlouk, in early 2018, and Poland’s deputy foreign minister visited Damascus in August 2018, while sources tell me leaders in Austria are now reportedly considering some form of diplomatic contact, too. Even Denmark declared in April 2021 that regime-held areas of Syria were safe for refugees to be returned to.

The intensification of internal dissent threatens to unravel the EU’s policy on Syria altogether, as it relies on formal consensus. At best, it will lead to a gradual erosion of EU policy, as individual states peel off and engage in various forms of reengagement individually. Whatever the case, the consequences of a European policy breakdown on Syria threaten to uproot the entire international position, encouraging further regional steps toward reengagement and isolating those who remain committed to nonengagement.

Meanwhile, all the root causes and drivers of the uprising that developed in 2011 remain in place today, and most are worse. Chief among them remains the Assad regime, whose crimes have not only left 500,000 dead and over 100,000 more missing but have also destabilized large swathes of the Middle East and the world at large.

Refugees are not returning to a Syria controlled by the very regime whose brutality they fled in the first place. Thus, the policies of apologism and appeasement increasingly being embraced by certain governments within the EU are not only immoral, but they are also illogical. If they fear refugees so deeply, these governments ought to realize that letting Assad off the hook will only lead to even greater refugee flows than before. But as history has so often shown, politics can be blind to the truth.