Regime Change Has Its Perks

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 08, 2026

 

Just 18 months ago, Syria, under the thumb of Bashar al-Assad’s despotic regime, represented an outsize threat to American national interests in the Middle East.

 

Assad’s criminal regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians necessitated U.S. military intervention, if only to preserve the vital norm prohibiting the battlefield use of weapons of mass destruction. It incubated the Islamic State in a bid to present the West with a binary choice when contemplating intervention in the Syrian civil war: Assad or the Islamists. It was allied with America’s enemies: Russia, which maintained a naval presence at the Mediterranean port of Tartus, and Iran, whose terrorist proxies moved freely about the country and used Syria as a transit node for weapons and rockets bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

 

What a difference regime change makes.

 

Some in the West have wondered why those who reluctantly supported the deployment of U.S. troops to Eastern Syria under Barack Obama didn’t register their objections when the Trump administration announced its intention to withdraw those forces earlier this year. After all, the prospect of withdrawal (and the abandonment of the Kurdish forces in the region, who served as ground forces in the war against ISIS) yielded profound consternation during the first Trump administration and led Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to resign in protest.

 

The relative quiet is attributable to the dramatic change in the regional security environment precipitated by the collapse of the Assad regime. Not only has Ahmed al-Sharaa’s transitional government demonstrated the willingness and capability to prevent ISIS’s revivification, but it has also engaged in a normalization process with Syria’s Kurdish minority (among other minority groups), including “arrangements for civil and educational rights for the Kurdish community and guarantees the return of displaced persons to their homes,” one regional analyst observed.

 

That’s not the only way in which the al-Sharaa regime is demonstrating its support for Western security objectives.

 

This week, the Syrian government thwarted what was reportedly a sophisticated and advanced plot by elements of Iran-backed Hezbollah to throw the country back into chaos:

 

 

“Preliminary investigations revealed that the cell was planning ‘targeted assassinations against high-level government officials,’ the ministry statement said, adding that they seized military equipment, including explosive devices and RPG launchers,” Al Jazeera reported. This was, according to the astute Syria watcher Charles Lister, the “third serious Hezbollah plot foiled by Syria in recent weeks.” In a world in which Syria remained an Iranian satrap, Operation Epic Fury would have been a far more complicated affair.

 

Beyond American security imperatives, the new regime in Damascus is demonstrating how serious it is about reintegrating itself commercially with the West. It is shifting away from Ba’athist socialism to an open, market-oriented economy. It is inking major foreign direct investment deals with Gulf states and the regime’s Turkish sponsors. And Syria’s successes speak for themselves. After 15 years, for example, Mastercard — one of the world’s largest payment networks — is taking steps to allow international bank card transactions in Syria.

 

Progress does not follow a straight-line trajectory. Syria’s political evolution will come in fits and starts, and there is still plenty of sectarian violence inside the country that threatens to derail its transformation. But even though Syria is no liberal democracy, it is a far more pliant partner for the West than Bashar al-Assad ever was.

Half a Million Syrians Didn’t Have To Die

By Seth Mandel

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

We don’t know how much of Operation Epic Fury remains before us, and so it’s too early to know what lessons we’ll take from it. But while we can’t know the future, the past has been illuminated by the present.

 

And what’s been illuminated about the past is this: The world let hundreds of thousands of Syrians die needlessly. And no one could have done more to prevent that than the United States under Barack Obama.

 

President Obama made three determinations about Iran. The first was that the Islamic Republic’s quest for a nuclear bomb could only be postponed, not unilaterally ended. The second was that any significant setback to the nuclear program could only come through negotiations, because real progress on this issue required Iranian consent. The third was that getting any Iranian agreement to delay its nuclear breakout required ceding a degree of regional hegemony to Tehran.

 

Operation Epic Fury’s key purpose is to end the tyrannical and bloody rule of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The earlier mission to significantly set back Iran’s nuclear program was conducted by force, and it was successfully carried out without a single American casualty.

 

Six months before those strikes, Bashar al-Assad, the dictator with the blood of a half-million Syrians on his hands, fled Damascus, ending his family’s 53-year rule.

 

Six weeks before the ignominious end of the Assad dynasty, Syria’s patron Iran was brought low by Israeli retaliatory strikes that virtually wiped out Iran’s air defenses and froze its ballistic missile program. Before that, Iran’s other proxies were flattened by Israel in Lebanon and Gaza.

 

Assad’s power was an illusion. He was a paper tiger. So was Iran.

 

And yet, one of the gravest consequences of the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement toward Iran was the belief that in order to get a nuclear deal that was already stacked in Iran’s favor, no action could be taken to save the civilians being gassed by Assad and buried in Syria’s mass graves.

 

The defining moment of this shameful policy came in the summer of 2013. Obama had set out his “red line” that, when crossed, would trigger U.S. intervention in the Syrian civil war: Assad’s use of chemical weapons. As his administration argued, the use of illicit chemical weapons anywhere constitutes a threat to U.S. personnel and interests everywhere.

 

In August 2013, Assad unleashed a chemical weapons attack in the Syrian city of Ghouta, killing hundreds with poison gas. Obama acknowledged the line had been crossed and signaled that the U.S. would fulfill its own stated obligation to act. And then, as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius memorably put it, “it was all in motion, and at the last minute, the president blinked.”

 

From there, the administration welcomed Russian involvement in a failed diplomatic scheme to prevent future such attacks. It was emblematic of Obama’s overall Syria policy throughout the war.

 

But why?

 

“Getting a legacy-boosting nuclear deal with Iran was everything for the Obama administration,” recalled Frederic Hof, who worked on Syria policy for the Obama administration until 2011 and was highly critical of the White House’s inaction. “Nothing should be done in Syria that would offend Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ support for Assad’s mass murder strategy. Offending them — or so the theory went — might cause Iran to walk away from the nuclear talks and forsake a monetary cornucopia in sanctions relief and foreign direct investment.”

 

Syrians, Hof lamented, “have involuntarily paid such a high price” for America’s ill-fated nuclear deal with Iran.

 

Inaction in Syria was directly tied to the administration’s false narrative about the Iranian nuclear program. The nuclear program could have been dealt a far greater blow than Obama unconvincingly argued was being delivered by his capitulation to Iranian negotiators, and Syrians could have been saved.

 

Operation Epic Fury has not been designed to make a point about past Syria policy. But it has done so. And the point is a valuable one.

The Israeli Air Force Performed Midair Refueling in Syrian Airspace

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, June 13, 2025

 

For a long time, the conventional wisdom was that Israeli airstrikes against targets in certain parts of Iran would be difficult, if not impossible, because of the range of Israel’s variant of the F-16 fighter jet, about 1,040 miles.

 

But the Israeli Air Force has been practicing midair refueling.

 

On Aug. 15, 2024, the Israeli Air Force carried out an air refueling exercise involving their 707 “Re’em” tankers and F-35I “Adir” and F-15C/D “Baz” fighters. One extremely rare aspect of the exercise was that the receiver aircraft were all armed with live weapons.

 

“The exercise simulated long-range flight deep behind enemy lines, performing aerial refueling in short periods of time. Aerial refueling is an operational capability required by the combat force, enabling it to remain airborne for long periods of time,” mentioned the social media posts made by the Israeli Air Force.

 

…In the released images we also see Israel’s newest fighter, the F-35I “Adir”, flying in “full stealth mode” without radar reflectors. Notably, the Israeli Air Force has previously claimed their F-35s can reach Iran without refueling. The claim was vague and without many details, but it was assumed to be in reference to new, “stealthy” drop tanks or conformal fuel tanks (CFT).

 

Of course, a tanker plane and its trailing jet fighter are more vulnerable to attack when they’re refueling, so it is difficult, or at least risky, to refuel a plane over enemy territory. But with Syria under new management, the definition of “enemy territory” may be different from what it was before last December.

Already online there are claims that Syrian president Ahmed al‑Sharaa himself is said to have greenlit the use of Syrian airspace. While that claim is unproven, it is true that his comments about Israel are remarkably conciliatory for a former jihadist.

 

Syrian President Ahmed al-Shara has said that his country could cooperate with Israel on security matters and that he is open to negotiations between the two countries.

 

Al-Shara made the comments during a meeting in April with a delegation of American businesspeople led by Jewish-American entrepreneur Jonathan Bass, published in the Jewish Journal. The group traveled to Damascus with the aim of jumpstarting economic ties between the two nations and encouraging American investment in Syria’s war-ravaged economy. The meeting was seen as a potential stepping stone toward restoring diplomatic relations between Syria and the US, and to lifting a significant portion of American sanctions on Syria.

 

“I want to be clear,” al-Shara said in reference to Israel. “The era of endless mutual bombings must come to an end. No country can thrive when its skies are filled with fear. The reality is that we have common enemies, and we can play a major role in regional security.”

 

“Peace must be earned through mutual respect, not fear. We will engage where there is honesty and a clear path to coexistence — and walk away from anything less,” the Syrian president said regarding possible negotiations with Israel.

 

And as the man leading the forces that overthrew the Assad regime, al‑Sharaa does not have warm and fuzzy feelings for the Iranian regime. There’s also the not-so-small matter of the Syrian Air Force being a shadow of what it once was. Even if the new Syrian government wanted to attack Israeli jets refueling in their airspace, one has to wonder how enthusiastic any Syrian pilot would be to get into the cockpit of a MiG-21, which the Soviet Union stopped making in 1986 — and dogfight against the best jets of the Israeli Air Force.

Trump’s Stunning Syria Overture

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

 

Donald Trump’s first major trip abroad since retaking the oath of office may be remembered as a hinge moment and a seismic shift in Middle Eastern regional politics.

 

In a surprise announcement during a Tuesday speech in Saudi Arabia, the president revealed his intention to provide the post–Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria “a chance at greatness.” Toward that end, he would do what he could to withdraw all U.S. sanctions levied against the Assad regime in Damascus, some of which have been in place since 1979.

 

“There is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” Trump said to the applause of the delegates and business interests assembled in Riyadh. With that, Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), himself made an appearance in Riyadh. There, the Syrian leader met with Trump and posed for a photograph alongside the president and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

 

The withdrawal of U.S. sanctions is a gift to the revolutionary regime in Syria, which has been lobbying the West for relief and foreign direct investment almost from the very moment Assad fled Damascus for exile in Russia. It will provide the new custodians of Syria’s future with breathing space to consolidate power. But the Trump administration has its demands. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, they are as follows:

 

1.      Sign onto the Abraham Accords with Israel.

 

2.      Tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria.

 

3.      Deport Palestinian terrorists.

 

4.      Help the United States to prevent the resurgence of ISIS.

 

5.      Assume responsibility for ISIS detention centers in Northeast Syria.

 

These are all desirable objectives. Some items on this agenda, like deporting terrorist actors, Syria can and should do with relative alacrity. Normalizing relations with Israel and regaining military control over Syria’s ungoverned Eastern provinces will, however, require more time, resources, and a new political covenant in Damascus. Still, there is reason to hope that the new regime may soon become a genuine steward of Western interests.

 

There is still plenty of sectarian violence in the post-Assad Syria, but Sharaa’s interim government has made more than cosmetic efforts to ingratiate itself with Syria’s minorities — including its persecuted Christians and even the Alawite sect, from which the Assad clan hailed. His Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militants and their Turkish sponsors have been reliably hostile toward the Iranian assets that took root in Syria under Assad’s patronage. As they sacked city after city, HTS also rolled up the Iranian networks that smuggled weapons into Lebanon for use against Israelis. Sharaa’s envoys to the West have been making all the right noises about the desirability of “a new constitution” and “free and fair elections.” And there have been confidence-building measures between the U.S. and the Syrian regime, including in Damascus’s acquiescence to a U.S. demand that the regime arrest two senior members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad ahead of Republican Representative Cory Mills’s sojourn to Syria’s capital city in April.

 

The new regime’s gestures justify the Trump administration’s cautious optimism, but not every Republican shares the president’s confidence. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, urged the president to take a slower approach to engineering a thaw in relations with the new Syria. Only Congress can fully repeal the U.S. sanctions imposed on Damascus, he added, and lawmakers won’t do that absent proof that the Syrian regime no longer sponsors terrorism.

 

Graham’s concerns are likely to be shared by members of the Trump administration who are skeptical that HTS — a militant group sponsored by America’s unreliable allies in Ankara and which owes its origins to a hostile takeover of the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front — can ever be a true partner in peace. Indeed, even if Sharaa’s regime is sincere in its overtures to the West, the whole project may still come a cropper. After all, this is still Syria we’re talking about.

 

The problems of post-revolutionary governance in Syria are not going away. Indeed, as The Economist recently noted, they are becoming more acute:

 

In Homs and in Alawite-majority coastal areas, vigilante justice persists, driven in part by Sunnis frustrated by the government’s reluctance to prosecute figures from the Assad era. Efforts to weld Syria’s myriad militias into a national army have foundered. The issuance of ID documents has stalled. Civil registries outside Idlib have not reported births, deaths, or marriages since Mr Assad’s fall. The government seems loath to recruit minorities, particularly Alawites, into its new security institutions. Power is held tightly by a few men in Damascus; perhaps half a dozen people are making any big decisions.

 

As this report also observed, the “religious zealots” and “hardliners” in HTS are complicating matters for Syria’s interim president. When he called himself al-Jolani, he shared HTS’s official support for replacing the Assad regime’s Ba’athist ideology with a form of Sharia law — a goal Sharaa’s deputies haven’t abandoned. The harassment of Christians and Druze continues, and there have been reports of atrocities against women alleged to have violated Islamic modesty codes. This sort of thing has reportedly led skeptics of the new regime in Trump’s orbit — figures like National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Counterterrorism Director Sebastian Gorka — to recommend that the U.S. keep up the pressure on Damascus.

 

Their concerns are not unfounded. And yet, the president’s decision to side with those in his administration who counsel tentative engagement with the Syrian regime is a praiseworthy enterprise. If it succeeds, the benefits to the United States and the West would be immense.

 

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention — an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated the Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

 

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America — indeed, if it follows through with its democratic reforms, it may evolve from a “regime” into a “government.” If Damascus is willing to execute America’s security priorities in the region in exchange for commercial investment and cultural ties to the West, Washington should welcome and guide that transition.

 

Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.

A Clash of Foreign Policy Visions over Syria

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

 

The Trump administration is said to be riven by an internal debate over how the United States should approach the post-Assad regime in Syria. As the London-based, Saudi-owned outlet Al Majalla reported, the administration’s principals are divided into roughly two camps on the issue. One favors optimistic engagement with the new government. The other is more inclined to keep Damascus at arm’s length.

 

“Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Director of Counter-terrorism Sebastian Gorka are members of the latter, which rejects any engagement with the new Syrian administration,” the magazine’s report read. “In the other camp are US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Central Intelligence Agency.” Both factions have ample evidence to support their conclusions, and neither should be entirely confident in its assessment of the nascent regime. It’s a thorny question that deserves and must receive due consideration.

 

Those in the Gabbard/Gorka camp are right to note that, on paper, the regime in Syria is a project of Sunni terrorists. The outfit that made the biggest contributions to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime late last year, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has been designated a foreign terrorist group both by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations. It is the successor to the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate with a history of horrific atrocities and a stated desire to export terrorism to the West.

 

Ten years before he was installed as Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) called for replacing the Baathist regime in Damascus with Islamic law and appeared hostile to the presence of ethnic and creedal minorities in his country. But the new Syrian leader has undergone a reputational makeover in recent years, even before the fall of the Assad regime. At least, that’s the version of himself he’s presenting to the West.

 

Talk is cheap, of course, and the new Syrian regime has been in place long enough for us to judge it by its actions. When it comes to the debate over Syria in Washington, both sides can support their respective conclusions.

 

For those in the pro-engagement camp, there are indications that the HTS-led regime is preferable to its Iran-aligned predecessor and that courting it might advance U.S. interests in the region. During the Assad years and under Hezbollah’s supervision, the Syria-Lebanon border became a major corridor for the transit of weapons and drugs, such as the stimulant Captagon, to Islamist militants. From the outset, the new regime cracked down on these networks, leading to violent clashes along the border between Iran-backed forces and the provisional government’s.

 

Last week, the HTS regime arrested two senior members of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad — a move that, the New York Times notes, was timed to coincide with Republican Congressman Cory Mills’s visit with Sharaa in Damascus. This might have been a display for the benefit of Western eyes, but it’s one Washington should welcome. After all, if Damascus is only “eager to get relief from the sanctions imposed on the ousted Assad dictatorship,” that would be a welcome behavioral shift. Indeed, compelling policy shifts like that are what sanctions are for.

 

In some ways, the regime seems to be willing to walk the walk. The new Syrian government is mounting a diplomatic offensive aimed at attracting foreign direct investment from both its Arab neighbors and Western interests. “We need an inclusive transition leading to a new constitution, free and fair elections, in a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political process that will restore Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the country’s U.N. envoy said in January.

 

That comment comports with some of the regime’s actions, including Sharaa’s high-profile visit to a Christian cathedral in the central Syrian city of Aleppo (which wasn’t the first time Syria’s new leader had courted Christians). The interim president and his government have made welcome noises signaling their openness to an egalitarian covenant with the country’s minorities, easing religious restrictions on women, and to the centrality of the rule of law following the ratification of a new constitution.

 

Maybe the new Syrian government is merely trying to lull the West into a false sense of security only to establish itself. Or perhaps the regime wants to lull the West into a real sense of security. Time will tell, but those in Washington who are skeptical of the Syrian government’s pivot have reason to doubt Damascus’s newfound commitment to Western values.

 

Perhaps it is too much to expect that a postrevolutionary regime in the Middle East will eschew sectarian violence and revenge killings, but the new Syrian government has presided over events that could only be described as atrocities. According to the Times, in March, militants and “foreign fighters linked to the government but not yet integrated into it” executed attacks in Assad regime strongholds along the Mediterranean coast in which “hundreds of civilians were killed in just several days.” The reprisals were reportedly a misdirected response to an ambush of government forces by Assad regime loyalists, but not all sectarian violence can be attributed to counterrevolutionary activity.

 

That same month, as part of the regime’s effort to pacify areas dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, a fight between security forces and pro-Assad holdouts produced hundreds of casualties and allegedly claimed the lives of nearly 750 civilians. “The victims included women and children from the Alawite minority,” read a Reuters report, citing, but not independently verifying, a report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Nor are the country’s Christians satisfied with the regime’s conciliatory rhetoric. “We are entering a dangerous new phase,” one Assyrian Christian activist told Newsweek. He warned of “an escalating push toward hardline Islamic rule with crackdowns on alcohol sales and gender mixing.” Lurid tales of reprisals against Christians — in particular, the Kurdish Christians who so preoccupy the minds of HTS’s Turkish sponsors — abound.

 

The debate in Washington over whether to engage with or isolate the new Syria has high stakes. The Levant is home to some of the most fought-over soil in human history. U.S. forces have maintained a presence in Syria’s oil-rich west for ten years following the emergence of the ISIS caliphate. The strategic imperative to prevent Syria from once again becoming an Iranian vassal state and a network for terrorist activity is an Israeli objective as much as an American one. The U.S. does not want to see Syria become a host to terrorist elements, but nor can it cede that geography to Russian or Chinese interests — both of which are struggling to gain or maintain their presence in Syria.

 

So, who is winning the debate in D.C.? For now, the Trump administration seems to be leaning tentatively toward engagement. In a communiqué to the Syrian government in recent weeks, the administration threatened to take a “hard line” with the government if it did not crack down on extremists and take steps to verifiably secure Assad-era chemical weapons stockpiles. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the Trump administration’s failure to object to the continued presence of Russian naval assets at Syria’s ports does not suggest that the administration sees a potential to supplant an American adversary’s influence over Damascus. But the note could be interpreted as an olive branch so long as Damascus is willing to meet Washington’s demands. At least when it comes to the arrest of Palestinian terrorists, for example, it did just that.

 

The jury is out on whether Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff is right that Syria’s leader is “a different person than he once was.” Those who bank on engagement hope to guide the new regime toward a pro-Western orientation, which would no doubt be an improvement over a regime that aligned with Iran and sponsored terrorist attacks on the United States. Those who object to that course believe it’s a fool’s errand. America would only be squandering influence and capital on a lost cause, they fear. The faction that prevails could set the course of U.S. foreign policy in the region for decades.

Trump Puts Off the Reckoning for Hamas, Again

By Jim Geraghty

Monday, March 10, 2025

 

Spot the pattern:

 

Donald Trump, speaking of Hamas and the remaining hostages, February 11:

 

As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12:00 — I think it’s an appropriate time I would say cancel it and all bets are off and let hell break out. I’d say they ought to be returned by 12:00 on Saturday and if they’re not returned — all of them, not in drips and drabs not two and one and three and four and two. Saturday at 12:00, and after that, I would say all hell is going to break out. . . . You’ll find out and they’ll find out too. Hamas will find out what I mean. They’re going to find out what I mean. These are sick people.

 

Hamas did release some hostages, but the terrorist organization still has at least 24 living hostages, including Edan Alexander, a 21-year-old man from New Jersey, last seen alive in a Hamas propaganda video released November 30. Hamas also holding the bodies of 34 others who were either killed in the initial attack or in captivity, as well as the remains of a soldier killed in the 2014 war.

 

You may have noticed that all hell has not yet broken out upon Hamas. But Trump returned to the matter last week, as well.

 

President Trump on Truth Social, March 5:

 

“Shalom Hamas” means Hello and Goodbye — You can choose. Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you. Only sick and twisted people keep bodies, and you are sick and twisted! I am sending Israel everything it needs to finish the job, not a single Hamas member will be safe if you don’t do as I say. I have just met with your former Hostages whose lives you have destroyed. This is your last warning! For the leadership, now is the time to leave Gaza, while you still have a chance. Also, to the People of Gaza: A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD! Make a SMART decision. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW, OR THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY LATER!

 

Apparently, hell will be paid much later. “President Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, is expected to travel to the Qatari capital of Doha on Tuesday for ceasefire talks, according to a U.S. official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. They would be the first Gaza ceasefire negotiations since Trump took office.”

 

It turns out that for weeks, the U.S. government has been negotiating directly with Hamas; the U.S. government had bargained with the terrorist group directly before. For a long time, American policy was to never negotiate with terrorists, because “direct political talks hurt short-term objectives by providing legitimacy to violent, non-state actors and placing the public at risk by prolonging peace timelines.”

 

President Trump on Russia, on Truth Social, March 7:

 

Based on the fact that Russia is absolutely “pounding” Ukraine on the battlefield right now, I am strongly considering large scale Banking Sanctions, Sanctions, and Tariffs on Russia until a Cease Fire and FINAL SETTLEMENT AGREEMENT ON PEACE IS REACHED. To Russia and Ukraine, get to the table right now, before it is too late. Thank you!!!

 

That day, our old friend Kevin Hassett was asked to elaborate on the banking sanctions and tariffs options remaining to the president that haven’t already been enacted:

 

Q: The president just posted on Truth Social he’s considering sanctions on Russian banking maybe also tariffs to drive them to the negotiating table for a ceasefire, peace agreement. What levers haven’t been pulled yet? What companies could be in the crosshairs? Give us some details on what he’s looking at.

 

Hassett: President Trump is adamant that we need to get everybody to the table, and we could do that with carrots, and we could do that with sticks. And he’s talking to everybody, and he’s got you know, a whole litany of potential proposals that he could throw their way to get them to the table. But the bottom line is the president wants to stop the carnage. He wants to save lives and he wants to end the war and he’s doing everything he can to talk people into going to the table and trying to do that and exactly you know how they do it with carrots or sticks is something that’s a work in progress that it’s you know Marco Rubio and the president are working on that every day

 

Q: (inaudible) of what can be impacted?

 

Hassett: No. I don’t — I don’t have that.

 

Q: What’s left?

 

Hassett: I mean there are a heck of a lot of things that are — that are left for sure. But let’s see how it goes.

 

Not exactly an overflowing fountain of specifics!

 

In the days since Trump’s tariff threat, Russia has only intensified its bombing of Ukrainian civilians, which is now much more deadly and effective because we are no longer sharing intelligence and have cut off aid for counterattacks. This weekend, Trump sat down for an interview with Maria Bartiromo — whom he just appointed to the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center, alongside Laura Ingraham — and shrugged that Ukraine may not survive the war no matter what policies he enacts:

 

Bartiromo: Are you comfortable with that, the fact that you walked away, and Ukraine may not survive?

 

Trump: Well, it may not survive anyway. But we have some weaknesses with Russia. You know, it takes two. Look, it was not going to happen, that war, and it happened. So now we’re stuck with this mess. Think of what he stuck me with, open borders, where we have 21 million people came into our country, many of whom should not be here.

 

Bartiromo also asked Trump to explain the contrast in how he treats the hostile anti-American regime in Moscow with the hostile anti-American force in the Gaza Strip:

 

Bartiromo: Have you been as tough on Russia as you have been on Hamas? I mean, what do you want to say to critics?

 

Trump: Well, I have been much tougher, because I haven’t done to Hamas. That’s been Israel that has to do to Hamas. But Israel does tell me what’s going on. I think I have been very tough to Russia, tougher than anybody’s ever been to Russia, if you think about it.

 

Have you noticed the pattern yet? So far, President Trump’s second term has featured the direst threats, followed by . . . not much at all. The guy whose fanbase keeps depicting him as Rambo keeps turning into Woody Allen when push comes to shove.

 

Getting Out of Dodge at the Right Time, Before Syria Falls Apart

 

Have you ever heard about a terrible car accident at an intersection near your home, and thought, “I was just there!”

 

That’s how I’m feeling seeing the reports of abominable executions and piles of bodies in the streets in Latakia, Syria:

 

Syria’s interim leader has called days of violent clashes between pro-government forces and supporters of ousted former President Bashar al-Assad “expected challenges” as a monitor said the death toll has risen to 642 people.

 

Eyewitnesses have accused government supporters of carrying out execution-style killings and video footage has emerged of mass graves.

 

The UK-based Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) told CNN on Sunday that “non-state armed groups” that are loyal to Assad were responsible for the deaths of 315 individuals, which include 167 members of state security forces and 148 civilians.

 

I may well have visited Syria during the last days of its post-Assad (comparable) peace and stability.

 

The bloody 13-year civil war pitting the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad against assorted Syrian rebel groups was not a story of a good guy against bad guys. It was the story of one kind of bad guy against other assorted varieties of bad guys, with a handful of not-so-bad-guys from the American perspective in the mix. (The initial version of the Free Syrian Army was one of the better options of the lot, but they dissolved into myriad factions. A smaller group called the Syrian Free Army* is “a US-backed and trained unit of several hundred men” that “has been active in southern Syria at a site known as the Tanf Garrison.”)

 

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces are the West’s primary partner and have worked with U.S. forces against ISIS, but they only control a stretch of northeastern Syria.

 

But Syria’s fate was always going to be determined by the Syrians — the U.S. government did not play a decisive role in toppling Assad, and it’s unlikely that the U.S. would ever take actions sufficient to keep Assad in power, even if we were certain we wanted that outcome.

 

In some circles, particularly on the right, there’s this desire to retroactively paint Assad as some sort of noble defender of minority rights. That’s a serious oversimplification, to the point of being misleading.

 

·         During Assad’s rule, Christians civilians were shot, beaten to death, or left to perish in prison cells by government authorities.

 

·         Syria’s Christian communities were internally divided on whether Assad was a friend or foe.

 

·         Antoine Fleyfel, director of the Institute for Eastern Christians in Paris, said in December the regime “provided a certain level of protection. But it was an unhealthy protection that exploited them. The opening of prisons — where some Christians were also detained — has revealed the extent of the regime’s brutality, responsible for unbearable atrocities. Those Christians who showed any support for the regime likely did so as a choice of the lesser evil.”

 

Assad was a ruthless bloodthirsty bastard who used chemical weapons willy-nilly, and used his air force and the assistance of the Russians to bomb the bejeezus out of civilians. Assad’s relative non-hostility to minorities like the Alawites and Christians was primarily a reflection that they presented no threat to him and his brutality was focused on other groups that were a danger to his continued rule.

 

I attribute this retroactive Assad romanticism on the right to Tulsi Gabbard’s relatively warm-and-fuzzy view of the Assad regime. Gabbard endorsed Trump and became his director of national intelligence, and a lot of Trump fans want her to be right; therefore, Assad must be the good guy and the people he’s bombing must be the bad guys.

 

But just as HTS’s terrorism doesn’t make Assad the hero, Assad’s villainy doesn’t make HTS the hero of the story, either. Sure, new Syrian president Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa has spent the last three months saying the right things, and it’s conceivable that his top priority is a genuine desire to rebuild the burned-out husk of a country he’s inherited. Indeed, the U.S. government saw a handful of areas of potential cooperation with the nascent government — mostly intelligence-sharing to prevent ISIS attacks.

 

But if there are militias running through the streets of Latakia, killing Christian and Alawite civilians, and the new Syrian government can’t get those militias to halt immediately and bring them to justice, then there just isn’t going to be much room for cooperation with this regime.

 

*Get your “Judean People’s Front vs. People’s Front for Judea” jokes out of the way.

The Revived ISIS Threat Challenges Trump’s Instincts on Syria

By Noah Rothman

Friday, January 03, 2025

 

“Syria is a mess but is not our friend,” Donald Trump declared in mid-December as the 13-year-long Syrian civil war culminated in the shockingly swift collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s Baathist regime.

 

“This is not our fight,” Trump continued. “Let it play out. Do not get involved.”

 

The Pentagon and America’s allies abroad don’t seem to agree. Following the implosion of the Assad regime and the withdrawal of Russian air support over the territories it controlled, the United States executed dozens of airstrikes on Islamic State targets that were being sheltered by America’s enemies. The United States joined Israel in executing attacks on “Iran-aligned targets” and nonconventional weapons facilities inside Syria, too. Last week, the French engaged in the air campaign over Syria, designed to prevent the Islamic State from regaining a foothold in Syria’s ungoverned redoubts.

 

Preventing ISIS’s resurgence in the Middle East has taken on new urgency following a mass-casualty attack in New Orleans by an ISIS-inspired terrorist. Ahead of that attack, the Biden administration’s point person on ISIS warned that the group has secured a foothold in Afghanistan and sub-Saharan Africa, where about “60% of ISIS propaganda comes from.” Starving these affiliates of the inspiration and material support they enjoy from the heart of what was once their nascent caliphate is a strategic priority.

 

Recent events have scrambled the calculations to which some of America’s partners in the Middle East had previously committed themselves. “Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani said last week Islamic State had recently seized a large quantity of weapons belonging to the Syrian army, which it could use to expand in the region,” the Wall Street Journal reported this week. In recognition of the deteriorating security situation in his neighborhood, the Iraqi PM signaled his willingness to “to reassess a recently concluded withdrawal agreement that called for nearly all U.S. forces to leave [Iraq] within two years.”

 

Indeed, the roughly 4,500 U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq and eastern Syria are auspiciously positioned to influence regional developments at a time of profound dynamism, but Trump and the most vocal members of the MAGA movement have a dim view of those commitments. Prior to Assad’s ouster, some observers expected Trump to execute a withdrawal of U.S. forces from the oil-rich regions of eastern Syria where they are stationed — an operation he tried but failed to complete during his first term. Now, however, the value of the U.S. presence in both Syria and Iraq should be obvious to American policymakers.

 

Late last month, the commander of the primarily Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), General Mazloum Abdi, warned that Islamic State militants will attempt to liberate the tens of thousands of ISIS prisoners in their custody. So far, international diplomatic efforts have helped to preserve an anxious peace between the SDF and the militant groups backed by Turkey. Ankara will not allow an autonomous Kurdish political entity to take root, and foreign observers fear that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan will loosen the reins on Turkey’s proxies in Syria if that outcome appears imminent. That clash, should it occur, would provide fertile ground for Islamic State militants to revive the caliphate.

 

“It is in our national security interests that we help the Kurds who destroyed the caliphate on our behalf,” Senator Lindsey Graham said last month. “If chaos in the region leads to an ISIS prison jailbreak, it would be a nightmare for America,” he added. “The caliphate carried out and inspired some of the worst terrorist attacks the world has ever seen. We cannot allow ISIS to return.”

 

In this period of flux, the United States would not be well served by unilaterally sacrificing the leverage it currently possesses over the region’s actors. Retreating from the region and hoping for the best is not a strategy. That is, however, the approach many of Trump’s most performatively loyal advisers’ advocate.

 

American voters have no appetite for a large deployment of U.S. troops to the Middle East, and that is precisely what America’s relatively small footprint is designed to prevent. Trump will have to weigh his instincts against U.S. interests in the region and the sad fate that befalls America’s allies when we abandon them, as we too often do.

There Are No Lost Causes

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, December 23, 2024

 

Syria. Bangladesh. Poland. South African democracy. The Ukrainian defense forces. The Greek economy. If there is a lesson to be learned from the events of 2024, it is this: There are no lost causes.

 

After 50 years of brutal tyranny under the Assads—first Hafez al-Assad, then Bashar—the Syrian people won for themselves a chance at a different and better kind of future, with a remarkable 11-day campaign that saw the old regime, which had seemed to be one of the fixed facts of Levantine life, melt away. Bashar al-Assad is now in exile in Russia. (Where else?) There is good reason to be cautious when it comes to the emerging Syrian leadership, given the jihadist roots of so great a share of the anti-Assad forces. But, as Josh Rogin of the Washington Post argued (with perhaps a slight excess of emotion) during his lively interview with Jamie Weinstein on The Dispatch Podcast, Syria’s future is, as of this moment, unwritten. The West can choose to be engaged in Syria with an eye toward guiding its new leaders in the right direction—and, happily, what’s best for the people of Syria aligns with Western interests and particularly with U.S. interests—or our leaders could take the J.D. Vance approach and pretend that Washington has no interests beyond the price of eggs at Jungle Jim’s. Which is to say, Washington could assume that Syria is a lost cause and thereby create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Syria—which has about the same population as Florida but less than 1 percent of the Sunshine State’s economic output—has nowhere to go but up. It is worth keeping in mind that whatever else they were—murderers, torturers, tyrants—the Assads were socialists. Socialism was the ruling ideology of Syria until quite recently; Hafez al-Assad de-emphasized pan-Arab nationalism and emphasized more orthodox Marxist-Leninist measures; Syria was very much a Soviet satellite for many years. These socialist policies produced the same results socialist policies always produce—misery and stagnation—and Bashar al-Assad made a clumsy attempt at being the Baathist answer to Deng Xiaoping, notionally liberalizing some Syrian economic arrangements and inviting foreign investment. 

 

But Syria, after decades of profoundly corrupt and incompetent rule under a socialist personality cult, did not have the basic public goods (e.g., the rule of law) that would have allowed a free market to function. Unlike the case of China, where the people accepted political serfdom in exchange for material standard-of-living improvements, in Syria the people got the serfdom but not the relative prosperity. (We should not inflate the economic success of China, which still has a per-capita GDP lower than that of Mexico.) Syria also had intractable structural political problems: Brutal dictatorships are bad enough on their own, but brutal dictatorships led by minority groups—the Assads are Alawites, who compose about 10 percent of Syria’s overwhelmingly Sunni population—are typically unstable and often are in practice even more vicious and repressive as a result of their tenuous minority position.

 

As every bully, boor, and New York City subway maniac knows, one person or a small group of people can dominate and cow a much larger group of people simply by being willing to ignore rules and social conventions. Figures such as Assad use terror, torture, outrageous cruelty, and theatrical acts of repression as a substitute for the one thing they and their regimes lack: genuine strength. And it is remarkable how far cruelty can carry a political figure or a political movement that has few if any other virtues.

 

(Twice!)

 

But these regimes are almost always brittle, and autocrats typically end up all facing the same problem: While the ruling junta may have all the guns and the money, they never have the numbers. Assad’s 170,000 or so troops were never going to be enough to control 23 million Syrians if those Syrians should have decided not to submit. It is like Mohandas Gandhi supposedly said to the British authorities: There is no way for 100,000 Englishmen to control 350 million Indians if the Indians refuse to cooperate, even if a brute such as Reginald Dyer massacres unarmed protesters.

 

A junta can be brutal, but it can never be brutal enough to achieve its goals. That is not how the world works. Brutality is not the tool for the job when it comes to building a prosperous, powerful, stable society. People may not be naturally courageous in the main, but they’ll fight when they don’t have any other choice or if things just get bad enough. 

 

The fall of the Assad regime was an unintended consequence of two ill-considered military misadventures, neither of which originated in Damascus: One was the attack on Israel by Iran’s proxies in Gaza and Lebanon, and the other was Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Both Moscow and Tehran woefully miscalculated the desire of their respective targets to live and to continue on as nations. (So did U.S. intelligence.) Putin’s program is no less genocidal than that of the ayatollahs and the other jihadists: If Putin is allowed to have his way, there will be no such thing as Ukraine or Ukrainians. And so the Israelis and the Ukrainians fight—and have fought so hard that Iran and Russia were severely diminished in their joint capacity and willingness to support Assad. In that sense, the Syrians and the Israelis and the Ukrainians are all fighting the same fight against the same enemy. 

 

The people of Bangladesh, too. Sheikh Hasina’s government grew more oppressive and autocratic by the day until the July massacre. Sheikh Hasina is now living in exile in Delhi. 

 

How fortunate, by comparison, are the people of Poland! All they had to do to begin to end the creeping Orbánification of their country under nationalist-populist misgovernance was to elect the relatively liberal Donald Tusk, who has worked to make up ground Poland had been losing on democracy and the rule of law. There is much to criticize about Tusk—and the liberators of Syria, and the defenders of Ukraine, and the student-led revolutionists of Bangladesh, etc.—but Poland has been at least partly reoriented in the right direction, which is about all you can ask of mere democracy. As a child of the Cold War, I am accustomed to seeing Poland as a symbol of hope—as a witness to hope, as my friend George Weigel called his biography of the most significant Pole since Copernicus.

 

There are people who feel very much the same way about South Africa, where Nelson Mandela’s ANC squandered its moral legacy and, finally, found itself tossed out of power after three decades ruling the country. Throwing out one bad clique is no guarantee of success—and the country’s challenges are daunting—but prosperity is not generally associated with corrupt, effectively single-party states.

 

At their respective nadirs, I would not have held out much hope for the Greek economy (which still isn’t exactly Texas but has responded to better governance) or Syria or Bangladesh. I had a bit more hope for Poland, in part because I am of the opinion (a minority among conservatives, I think) that the European Union is a good project providing real benefits for its member states, both economic and political. The brief time I spent with the Ukrainians convinced me that they will not stop fighting—something that the Russians have been slowly figuring out even as Gen. Igor Kirillov learned his lesson abruptly.

 

There are no lost causes. 

 

But:

 

Polio. Inflation. A looming trade war.

 

There are no gained causes, either. 

 

And Furthermore … 

 

That T.S. Eliot line about lost causes and gained causes—which you will hear and see quoted around here often—came in the context of an essay about F.H. Bradley (does the name mean anything to anyone anymore?) and (secondarily) Matthew Arnold. In situ:

 

It is not to say that Arnold’s work was vain if we say that it is to be done again; for we must know in advance, if we are prepared for that conflict, that the combat may have truces but never a peace. If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.

 

If Bradley’s philosophy is today a little out of fashion, we must remark that what has superseded it, what is now in favour, is, for the most part, crude and raw and provincial (though infinitely more technical and scientific) and must perish in its turn. Arnold turned from mid-century Radicalism with the reflection ‘A new power has suddenly appeared.’ There is always a new power; but the new power destined to supersede the philosophy which has superseded Bradley will probably be something at the same time older, more patient, more supple and more wise.

 

Eliot writes about Bradley’s work “in the ’seventies and ‘eighties,” and I had to stop for a second to remind myself that he means the 1870s and 1880s.

 

Words About Words

 

A reader sends in a sample from the sports pages of the Washington Post:

 

Entering Sunday, the Celtics had a league-high four players—Tatum, Brown, Pritchard and White—who averaged at least 15 points, three assists and no more than three turnovers, per Basketball Reference. That doesn’t even include former all-stars Porzingis and Jrue Holiday. The Wizards had no players who met that criteria, but there’s potential for such a roster to develop.

 

There are a couple of interesting language things in there. One is the issue my correspondent notes: Criteria is plural, so that criteria is wrong—you want that criterion or those criteria, depending on the number of criteria at work. Words borrowed from Greek sometimes bring some tricky singular/plural issues with them from those sunny shores: criterion/criteria, parenthesis/parentheses, etc. Some escapees from Philistia insist that we should just treat those foreign words as though they were more common English words, but you can’t really do that with criteria and use criterion/criterions, because criteria is so much more common than criterion. And who wants to write about parenthesises? 

 

The other issue is: Why is the basketball team the SELL-tics while the languages and tribes are KEL-tic?

 

You can begin to answer the question by noting that no Roman had ever heard of a guy called SEE-zur. In classical Latin, C- at the beginning of a word is pronounced like the K- in English, “hard.” In classical Latin, the imperial name was pronounced more like the modern cognate kaiser than the modern English pronunciation of Caesar, with the S-sounding “soft” C-.

 

That soft C, however, is all over the place in Latin imports: century, centurion, etc. But the rise of the soft-S pronunciations didn’t happen in English—it happened in later Latin, so that by the time the French were borrowing the Latin word to create Celte, they were pronouncing it (as Merriam-Webster reports) like the C- in Cézanne. So the people in Boston (and in Glasgow) are using an older English pronunciation with SELL-tics, not a later corruption. The hard-C pronunciation of KEL-tic was dreamt up by 18^th-century pedants (my people!) who thought the word’s pronunciation should more closely resemble its classical Latin ancestor rather than its medieval Latin and French ancestors. Back to the OG version, as it were. 

 

We could solve this pretty easily by just using Latin like educated Europeans used to do—or we could make like those educated Romans those educated Europeans thought so highly of and use Greek. 

 

Economics for English Majors

 

At this point in the fiscal-crisis news cycle, you’ll hear me, and people like me, bitching about something called “regular order.” 

 

What? 

 

You wouldn’t know it to watch Congress in action, but our federal government has a pretty orderly process for spending money—on paper. It’s kind of a two-tier thing: There’s authorization, which establishes (or continues or modifies) agencies or programs; once spending is authorized, the spending authority continues as long as the authorization is in force, whether that is for a year or a period of several years or open-ended. But just because an agency is authorized to spend money doesn’t mean that it has money to spend. Congress has to appropriate that money. And Congress doesn’t have to appropriate the full amount authorized. 

 

Appropriations, which is the nitty-gritty business of putting money into agency coffers where it may be spent, theoretically happens in 12 parts, with 12 subcommittees writing appropriations bills and these then going to the House and Senate appropriations committees. The subcommittees are for the most part relatively capacious slop buckets: Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration; Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies; Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies; etc. Some are more focused, such as Defense—not to be confused with Homeland Security or Military Construction, Veterans’ Affairs, and Related Agencies. 

 

When things are working the way they are supposed to, the appropriations subcommittees spend a lot of time listening to testimony and holding hearings about this or that program and its financial needs, with members of each party negotiating with their own fellow partisans and with those of the other party, doing all the usual horse-trading and favor-swapping and such that constitutes ordinary politics. It is a long, complicated, exasperating, labor-intensive process that, for the average congressional specimen, is not nearly as much fun as getting a hit on Fox News or MSNBC. And so we end up with what Jonah Goldberg calls our “Parliament of Pundits,” where relatively little work is done in the way of the ordinary business of politics (much less the ordinary business of governing!) and, while our lawmakers and bureaucrats angle for television time and hone their own-the-opposition social-media strategies, the actual fiscal process lapses into chaos. Holding off that chaos is what such stop-gap measures as “continuing resolutions” and “omnibus appropriations” and such are all about.

 

It matters how much money Washington spends. It also matters—a great deal!—what it spends that money on. And here I do not mean big broad vague categorical buckets such as “defense” or “education” or whatever, but actual programs. There is some education spending that is excellent and worthwhile and worth expanding, and some education spending that ought to be eliminated entirely, the programs ended, the records burned, the bureaucratic fields sown with salt by libertarian centurions under the command of Nick Gillespie (if only because I think he is likely to own a toga in addition to his 41 black leather jackets). (Rough estimate.) Talking about “how much we spend on education” doesn’t get to the important details.

 

You know what probably could get into those details? Congressional subcommittees doing their g—mned jobs.

 

“Getting spending under control” is only in part about debt and deficits—as important as those factors are. It also is about making sure that the money we do spend, we spend on things that are useful and productive. And that is why it is important to understand that continuing resolutions and budget ad-hocracy isn’t just about avoiding the hard work of intelligent appropriations and oversight—it is about avoiding accountability. If you lump everything together into one big mess and then pass it at the last minute under the shadow of a budget crisis, then you can pretend that you have an excuse for not watching where the money is actually going. And then you can go back to your career as a half-assed cable-news pundit who also happens to serve in Congress.

 

In Conclusion 

 

My triplets have my wife’s eyes and her taste in music, so they’ve been bouncing along to “Mr. Sandman” by the Chordettes for the past week or so. I don’t know quite how that happened or where that song entered the rotation—Mrs. W. loves Christmas music, so that’s always on this time of year, and my 2-year-old asks her to play “Jingle Bell Rock” about 40 times a day. But when he’s hanging out with Papa in the evenings, he asks for—of all things—“John the Revelator,” which he likes me to sing for him while he’s having his bath. 

 

I am not Son House, but I do take requests at bathtime, and the little man is pleased enough with my renditions. The thing is: I have no idea how he first heard that song. I suppose I must have sung it for him at some point or played a recording. (My usual lullaby for the triplets is “Bankrobber” by the Clash.) 

 

One of the sobering things about having little kids is that, from time to time, you are reminded that you are constantly setting an example and putting things into their heads irrespective of whether you meant to. My 2-year-old son cries for reasons I don’t understand and sometimes stamps his feet like a cartoon toddler when he isn’t getting something he wants, but he also walks guests to the door and tells them “goodnight,” and says “please” and “thank you” and makes observations that I wouldn’t think a 2-year-old would make, and he says that combing his hair makes him “debonair,” which is important to him, and sometimes kisses one of his little brothers on the head if he’s crying, to make him feel better. 

 

A lot of what’s in these babies’ heads I put there, and a lot of what I put there I put there without really doing it on purpose—it’s just how life goes from day to day. And that is equal parts sweet and terrifying.