As Bashar al-Assad flees to Moscow – customary retirement home of tyrants – events in Syria may seem far away and shockingly new. But in many ways the seeds of this crisis were sown on 29 August 2013, in the House of Commons.
David Cameron had recalled Parliament to vote on joining the United States in military action against the Assad regime, after the dictatorship breached the West’s “red line” by murdering over 1,400 Syrian civilians with chemical weapons in rebel-held Ghouta eight days earlier.
The Coalition went into the vote having successfully secured the cross-party support of Ed Miliband, Leader of the Opposition, by watering down their motion. Or so they thought.
Labour voted against. Aided by government rebels and a few “accidental” abstentions (two Tory ministers claimed not to have heard Parliament’s Division bells), they inflicted a shock defeat on Cameron by 285-272.
It was the biggest foreign policy defeat for a government in modern times. The Commons was thrown into turmoil – bitter recriminations followed on all sides. But the die was cast, and Cameron abided by the decision.
The course of events in the Middle East hinged on that vote. With its closest ally unwilling to join them, the United States under Barack Obama chose not to act. The Syrian civil war raged on and Assad stayed in power as a direct result.
There are lessons for us today from those events years ago in Westminster and their consequences thousands of miles away.
First, that while isolationism may be intended to keep us out of matters abroad, on the basis they are “not our problem”, those issues swiftly arrive at home. Most obviously, the refugee crisis that arose from continued war in Syria swept across Europe and upended the politics of this country and our neighbours.
Russia, which stepped into the power vacuum left by Western inaction, gleefully used the Syrian refugees as a weapon against Western Europe. From the spike in concern about illegal immigration that contributed to the debate over Brexit, to the small boats controversy which dominated so much of the 2024 general election, the idea that we are merrily insulated from events overseas proved to be a fantasy.
Second, the foreign policy theory that a strongman dictator is an acceptable price in return for stability evidently does not work.
Tolerating Assad’s savagery against his people drove far greater instability in the Middle East and beyond.
The continuation of the war opened the opportunity for Isis to rise in Syria and Iraq, and then to export their death cult into the West.
On Assad’s side, Iran used Syria as a testing ground to battle harden and lionise their Hezbollah proxies in his service – emboldening Tehran to overreach in ways that directly contributed to Hamas’s assault on Israel, the resulting war in Gaza and the recent conflict in Lebanon. Putin, too, seized the opportunity to extend his influence in the Levant.
All the while, Assad used the freedom we had given him to exterminate his enemies. The democratic elements of the rebels were singled out for elimination – conveniently bolstering his propaganda message that he was a bulwark against extremism.
Now he is gone, 11 years and hundreds of thousands more lives later, and those sweeping into Damascus are led by a proscribed terrorist organisation formerly linked to Al Qaeda.
So much for a strongman in return for order. The strongman fell anyway, and in return we got more and worse instability.
The next lesson is that if you set red lines then you must enforce them. Having said we would not tolerate the use of chemical weapons – a war crime – in Syria, the world watched as we did exactly that. We bound our own hands, and nobody else’s.
The immediate impact was bad enough, affirming Assad’s belief that he could slaughter his people unimpeded. But Putin and others took the lesson, too, that the free world is weak and its warnings can be ignored. When he disregarded our warnings not to invade Ukraine, or to commit atrocities such as the devastation of Mariupol and the kidnapping of thousands of Ukrainian children, he was no doubt reassured that our words are hollow and without consequence.
To continue that theme, British foreign policy must learn that dictators are interconnected. That was true in 2013, and it is true now. Russia struggling in Ukraine and Iran struggling in Lebanon led directly to Assad’s fall, as his military and political allies became too weak to prop him up.
The effect works in reverse: let one win anywhere and they all become more powerful. When we decide what level of support we give to Ukraine today, for example, we should be informed by the knowledge that as well as aiding or abandoning the Ukrainians, we are contributing to the survival or the death of others, in other conflict zones, too.
The last lesson of that ill-fated vote 11 years ago is perhaps the most fundamental: what Britain does still matters in the world.
On that occasion, it was a decision not to do anything, and a negative impact. Nonetheless, this huge issue, and all the knock-on consequences, hinged in the end on what our Parliament decided.
There is hope in that fact. It might clash with the pessimism and declinism about our country which seems so common, but it remains true all the same. If we, and the MPs who represent us, can shape events so drastically, then we should commit serious effort to ensuring we use that power positively. We have the capacity to influence the world around us for good – and perhaps we can walk a little taller if we do so.
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