The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin noted this week that Bashar Assad must be held responsible for the fate of around six Americans in his custody.
Let me go further than that. The Trump administration should make clear to Assad’s regime that it knows the regime has been holding courageous journalist Austin Tice since August 2012. If Tice is killed or “disappeared,” the U.S. should destroy Assad’s security command infrastructure in Damascus and sanction Russia. That threat will increase pressure on Assad to release Tice, while dangling the prospect of punitive and painful retaliation if he is harmed.
It’s important for two reasons that this threat be made explicit.
First, because the risks to Tice are increasingly significant. Assad and Vladimir Putin grow increasingly frustrated with America’s refusal to accept their fake peace plan to end the Syrian Civil War. Known as the Astana track, this plan involves crushing any political rights for those that Assad has spent the past eight years slaughtering. With President Trump rightly retaining a small U.S. military force in Syria, the U.S. retains physical influence with which to extract concessions from Assad.
The risk is that while Tice provides Assad with an obvious bargaining chip, his increasing frustration with the U.S. means that he may decide Tice’s detention causes more harm than good. Moreover, because Assad denies his regime is even holding Tice, although the U.S. knows it is in control of his custody, the dictator may decide to get rid of Tice by using a militia or other deniable force to do its dirty work. It might even hand Tice over to a terrorist group in an effort to cover its tracks.
The second interest here is ensuring that Russia understands it will share in Assad’s culpability if anything does happen to Tice. Due to its salvation of his regime, Putin’s Russia is now Assad’s effective boss. That means the Russians know full well what Assad does, especially in relation to controversial international concerns such as the detention of U.S. prisoners. To avoid the Russian complaints of unfair treatment that would inevitably follow U.S. sanctions in the event of Tice’s demise, the U.S. should make clear now that those sanctions will come into force if Tice is harmed.
Ultimately, the hope here is that some kind of diplomatic deal can be reached which brings Tice home. But to make that deal likelier, the U.S. must more overtly dangle the stick in Assad’s face.
