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Matthew Moran et al., "Coercing Syria on Chemical Weapons" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci, an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today I'm here with Professor Jeffrey Knopf. Professor Knopf is the co author together with Matthew Moran and Wynne Bowen of a new book. The book is titled Coercing Syria on Chemical Weapon Weapons. The book was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press in their Bridging Their Gap series. Professor Knopf, thank you for joining us and welcome.
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Thank you. Thank you very much, Eleonora, for inviting me on. It's a pleasure to talk to you about the book.
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B
Let's start with the puzzle at the heart of your book. In 2012, President Obama drew a red line against serious use of chemical weapons and then Syria crossed that red line. The US Tried various forms of coercion, deterrence and compellence. Those strategies produced mixed outcomes. What sparked your interest in this case and what does the case tell us about the challenges of coercive diplomacy in the 21st century?
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A
So that's a great question to kick us off. And before I answer the question directly, I think I want to take you and your listeners back a little bit in history just to set the context. So let me literally first off, just reacknowledge my co authors. This book was written by myself with Wynne Bowen and Matthew Moran, both at King's College London. And all three of us really contributed equally to the final product. So I'm speaking to you today on behalf of myself and my two really terrific co authors. So your listeners may remember 2010, 2011, there was a wave of popular protests across North Africa and the Middle east that was called the Arab Spring. And some longtime dictators in the region got overthrown. And in spring 2011, the Arab Spring reached Syria and there were some peaceful protests calling for the long serving dictator at the time, Bashar Al Assad, to step down and allow a transition to democracy. He was the son of the previous dictator, Hafaz Al Assad. So between the two of them, they ended up ruling Syria for more than 50 years. President Assad and his regime by this time had seen what had happened to some other rulers in the region, like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. They had been overthrown. They didn't want that to happen in Syria. So they reacted very swiftly with a really brutal crackdown on the protest, imprisoning people, killing people to prevent this from spreading. And so very quickly, the opposition to the Syrian ruling regime was pushed into taking up arms and becoming an armed rebellion. And the whole thing got really complicated really fast. Initial opponents were more or less what we in the west would describe as sort of moderate, but they were very quickly joined by jihadist groups, groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, later on, groups affiliated with ISIS. And so by the end of 2011, Syria was in a full blown, very bloody, very messy civil war. Now, Western governments, including the Obama administration, which was in power in the United States at the time, were very well aware that Syria over the years had developed a quite large and sophisticated arsenal of chemical weapons. They had an active program that dated back to the 1970s. They were known to possess multiple kinds of chemical weapons, which also included nerve agents, which is sort of the deadliest kind of chemical weapon. So at this moment in time, you know, this is still not too long after the United States had gone into Afghanistan and then had gone into Iraq, and those wars were both still ongoing at the time. And President Obama and his administration really didn't want to get drawn into a third armed conflict in the Middle East. So their instincts were to stay out of it in Syria. But they decided internally that the one thing that might force them to take action would be the issue of chemical weapons. So in August 2012, at a press conference, President Obama made a sort of unscheduled appearance in the press room and response to a question he got from one of the reporters about Syria, he made the famous red line comment that you referenced, saying, essentially, if we see a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being prepared for use or transfer, that would cross a red line for him, and that would force him to reconsider his instinct to try to stay out of Syria. And weirdly, at that time, they were more concerned about the possibility of chemical weapons falling into the hands of non state actors. So either that Sunni affiliated jihadist groups that were opposing the regime might overrun a chemical weapons depot and capture the weapons, or alternatively, that the Assad regime would transfer them to an allied group like Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia. So the red line warning was more concerned with that, and I think as a secondary thing, referenced the possibility that Assad might himself use chemical weapons on his own people. That got taken at the time as a deterrent commitment. If you cross our red line, we will retaliate. And don't cross the red line because you don't want us to retaliate. And the administration eventually made that official and repeated that a bunch of times. By late 2012, and certainly by spring 2013, credible reports were starting to come out of kind of low level use of chemical weapons by forces associated with Assad against rebel groups, and pressure started growing on the administration to do something. And then literally a year to the day after Obama made that redline comment, there was a massive chemical attack, the biggest one of the whole war. Syrian military launched a chemical attack on a suburban region outside the capital city of Damascus. US intelligence estimated that about 1,400 people were killed, including women and children. And so at that point, it was clear that the red line had been violated on a big scale. Very flagrantly. President Obama started making preparations for a US Military strike in retaliation. But he then decided that this wasn't something he felt comfortable doing on his own authority as president. And he wanted to go to Congress to get congressional authorization for this. And then the whole thing got bogged down in Congress and it never happened. So in the aftermath of this, Obama got a lot of criticism that he put U.S. credibility on the line. Then he hadn't acted, he hadn't enforced the red line. But very soon after that, another thing happened which was the United States and Russia ended up partnering with each other and working together to put pressure on the Assad regime to sign the Chemical Weapons Convention. This was a treaty that was negotiated in the 1990s that outlaws chemical weapons completely. Syria had, had stayed out of the treaty, but they had their arms twisted and were basically forced to sign the treaty. And as a result of signing the treaty, they were supposed to declare what kinds of chemical weapons they had and turn them over so that they could be destroyed. So this was actually a pretty big breakthrough. It led to thousands of tons of chemical agents being removed from Syria and in a very complicated process, being destroyed. Most people thought at the time, and it became apparent later on, that Syria cheated on the deal and they didn't turn over everything for destruction. But it was still a big breakthrough. So around that time, really, kind of coincidentally, I traveled to King's College, London for a completely different purpose. But I met with my eventual co authors, Wynne Bowen and Matthew Moran. And it turned out that both the two of them and me, we were all interested in this case and we decided to work together. And it's partly motivated by just the horrible reality of chemical weapons were being used and people were being killed and suffering from the attacks. But we're academics, so there was also a quite interesting intellectual puzzle at the heart of this. So when people study strategies that involve coercion, coercion, when we use that word, we mean sort of conditional threats, right? If you do something, I will do something in return. Or if you don't do something, you know, I will do something. And traditionally we distinguish between two kinds of coercion, deterrence and compellence, or coercive diplomacy. Right. Deterrence is the more familiar word that aims to prevent things. So like, if you haven't launched a chemical attack yet, don't do it. Right. That's a deterrent threat. Right. Compellence tries to force people to stop doing something that they're already actively doing or to start doing something they don't want to do. So you had better sign the Chemical Weapons Convention and give up your chemical arsenal. That's a compelling threat. We have assumed in the academic field all along the compellence is harder to make work than deterrence. When somebody's deterred and they don't do anything, they have a face saving way out. They can say, oh, I was falsely accused, I never meant to launch an attack, I didn't yield to your deterrent threat. I was just never going to do this. You don't have that option with compellence. When somebody makes a coercive threat that's compellant and the other side yields, it's really obvious that they've given in to a threat and they take the hit to their own reputation from doing that. So the assumption has always been your success rate will be higher for deterrent threats and it's much harder to make the compelling threats work. So, you know, by the time you get into 2014, you've got this really weird puzzle that the, the deterrent threat totally failed, but right after the compellent threat succeeded, and it succeeded after the United States had fluffed and had failed to use military force. So it should have damaged its credibility. So it was a really interesting question of like, why did we get this sort of upside down, backwards kind of outcome? Because we were unfortunately somewhat slowpokes in completing the project. We kept working on it through the end of the Obama administration and into the succeeding first Trump administration. So the book ends up covering both Obama and the first Trump term. And you have some more plot developments along the way, but that was really the motivating puzzle for us.
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B
So this is great. You told us how you came to this question and then I was going to ask you why the Syrian case matters, but you explained it well in that answer, so I won't ask that question. I want to ask something about the argument you put forward. You draw on the existing literature on deterrence and coercive diplomacy and you Identify three key propositions on the way we understand credibility, motivations and assurances. Can you walk us through a specific moment in the Syria case that illustrates one of these factors in action?
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Yeah, I'd be happy to. So, yeah, fortunately, we didn't have to reinvent the wheel in this book. We thought that all of the ideas to understand what happened in this case were available in existing research. Somewhat. Unfortunately, sometimes the people who write about and study deterrence and the people who write about and study compellence or coercive diplomacy operate in somewhat separate lanes. So one of our goals was to synthesize these approaches and bring them together. We found three arguments, three factors that we thought influenced the outcomes in the case. The first one's pretty obvious. It's credibility. And especially in the deterrence literature, that's often assumed to be the only thing that matters. So people have a one factor explanation for things. If somebody makes a threat and it's credible, it should work and the other side should be deterred. If their threat's not credible, it will fail and the other side will act. And then there's a set of critics who reject that. And what we tried to do in the book was look for the middle ground in that particular debate. So we accept the premise that credibility can be important. Other things being equal, if the threat's more credible, it should have a higher chance of succeeding. But we agreed with some of the critics that you can sometimes find cases where a threat should have been very, very credible, but it still fails. Right. And that was our assessment of what happened with the red line. So a lot of people took advantage of hindsight and they said, oh, the red line threat failed. That must be because Obama wasn't credible. But if you look at all of the criteria that analysts use to code, is a particular threat credible or not? Obama's red line threat met all of them pretty clearly. Right. There was a clear deterrent commitment. It was communicated very clearly to the other side. The United States had all the military capabilities it needed to back it up. Right. So the other thing that people often look at is resolve, right? Do you have the will to follow through on your threats? And after Obama didn't enforce the red line, his reputation for resolve was damaged. But before Syria used chemical weapons, Obama should have been very credible on that dimension. He had increased the use of drone strikes to go after terrorists. He had approved the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. He brought the US into military intervention in Libya in an intervention that eventually overthrew Colonel Gaddafi. So there was A pretty clear track record of Obama saying yes to being willing to use military force. So credibility wasn't going to cut it for that sort of first phase of the Syria case. So we looked at the literature and we pulled on two other threads that are very important. One is what's sometimes called the balance of motivations. What are the interests at stake for. For the threatening side that's trying to coerce, and what are the interests at stake for the target actor? And it's going to be pretty obvious where this one goes. The Assad regime, their motivations were much, much higher than for the United states and for U.S. allies, for the U.S. and for Britain and France, which sort of joined in on this. It's sort of upholding a norm. We don't like chemical weapons to be used. Maybe a modest interest in trying to make sure that some terrorist groups don't get them, but they didn't have vital national interests on the line. For the Assad regime, it's literally survival. If they lose the civil war, at best, they're overthrown. At worst, they're actually executed. So maybe their lives, literally. If you're sitting in Damascus and you're making calculations, you're saying, well, I can use chemical weapons and the US Might drop some bombs on my country, but maybe I defeat the rebels and I stay in power and I live. If I don't use chemical weapons, maybe I'm overthrown and I'm killed. Right? It was worth it to defy a very credible deterrent threat because the stakes were so high that essentially the price of retaliation, the price of getting bombed in return, was sort of baked into the calculus for them. The third factor, motivations, was the most important. But a third factor that we also found to be relevant is what people in the literature called assurances. And this is an idea that comes from a really influential theorist named Tom Schelling. And his way of explaining it is still the best. In one of his books, he has a line that goes something like, if you tell somebody, take one more step and I'll shoot implicitly. You're also promising them that if they don't take that step, you're not going to shoot them in that second half. The promise not to shoot them is what he called an assurance. So conditional threats have to have both halves, right? I will execute the threat if you cross my red line, but I won't hurt you if you don't cross my red line. And the Obama administration had a second problem here, which is they had made very clear early on in the civil war that they thought the Assad regime had gone too far and was too brutal and they had publicly committed US policy to the removal of Assad that one way or another, we want to see him step down or be pushed out of power. And so that made it hard to provide assurances to the Assad regime, like, you use chemical weapons, we're going to try to get rid of you. You don't use chemical weapons, we're still going to try to get rid of you. Right. So there wasn't a lot of incentives for the Assad regime to comply with the threats. So the thing that changed, that made the compelling threat successful later on, was two things. One is having defied the red line and carried out this large scale sarin gas attack and seen President Obama prepared to use force, it was pretty clear that although he had stepped back at this moment, if Syria ever used chemical weapons again, there would be so much pressure on Obama that he would probably just blow off Congress at this point and go ahead and order bombing. But even more important was that Russia agreed to work with the United States on this. And Russia's calculations here, I'm not going to paint them as the good guys, they're 1000% cynical here. Assad was Putin's last ally in the Middle East. There were Russian military bases in Syria. The Russians were terrified that the United States would eventually be forced to intervene. And if they intervened, it would be the same fate that Gaddafi had suffered in Libya, that Assad would be overthrown and they would lose their ally in the Middle East. So the Russians made this very cynical calculation that if they can convince Assad to give up the chemical weapons, they can remove the one thing that would get Obama to intervene and they could keep Assad in power. And so they metaphorically held a gun to his head and said, you're going to sign this deal, but in return, we will have your back. We'll support you in staying in power. And so that made the threat more credible because the Russians are now siding with the us but it also provided the assurance part that if the Americans come after Assad later, Russia's basically promising that we'll help you stay in power. And they in fact delivered that. In 2015, Russia sent its own military into Syria to assist Assad in the civil war. So that was the one time in the case where all the ingredients of credibility and balance of motivations and assurance lined up in a way that was sort of favorable for coercion. And so you got that one breakthrough.
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So you went through and sort of. You illustrated your argument for us. Was there, like as you said during your previous answer, your book spans nearly a decade of policy across two administrations. Were there any moments in your research where you were surprised by what you found?
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Yeah. So I think for us, the bigger surprise was when Donald Trump became president for the first time, because he had campaigned as somebody that was about as different from President Obama as you could imagine. And, in fact, it became very clear from early in the time that he took office that he had a bit of a bee in his bonnet about Obama. And a lot of what he wanted to do as president was just reverse anything Obama had done. So, for example, he pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal that President Obama had negotiated. He pulled out of the Paris climate accords. If Obama did it, he wanted to do the opposite. So the thing that I think was most surprising to us was that on Syria, he ended up being in a very similar place to Obama at the end of the day. So when Trump was campaigning, he's like, america first. We're not going to do nation building. We're not going to do intervention. Iraq was a mistake. What Obama's doing on Syria is a mistake. So we had really expected that he would just wash his hands of the whole thing and not care what happened. But, in fact, he was, I think, personally angered by the regime's use of chemical weapons after he became president, in part because people, including his own daughter, showed him photos of some of the victims, including babies who had sort of died of being exposed to poison gas. And so his emotions got involved. And unlike President Obama, President Trump actually did order two rounds of airstrikes on Syria in retaliation for chemical attacks. And the second time around, the UK and France joined in. So there were three parties responding with military force in Syria, ironically. And again, I think this sort of damages the people who focus only on credibility and miss everything else. Two rounds of airstrikes wasn't enough to restore deterrence. Right. Syria continued to use chemical weapons even after that. So just showing willingness to use force turns out not by itself, to be a magic bullet.
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Yeah. It goes back to your point that when survival is at stake for one of the parties, that changes everything. Yeah, that's great. Could you tell us a bit about the sources and the methods you used in this book?
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Sure. So I'm going to start with the one thing that I think we, as authors recognized was a weakness. You know, none of us are Arabic speakers. We don't have sources from the Syrian side for, hopefully, obvious Reasons, you know, we couldn't go to Damascus and ask to interview. Right. President Assad and his advisors. So all of our sources come from outside Syria. We did a lot of interviews with people, primarily my two co authors did the vast majority of the interviews. But we interviewed people who'd served in government in the United States, in Britain, in France. We interviewed some people who had good insight into Israeli intelligence. And thinking about that, we got a lot of help from one of my current colleagues. Now, although she wasn't working with us then, Hana Nota, who had, for a dissertation project of her own, interviewed a lot of the Russian folks and she shared that interview data with us. So we had a lot of primary source material that came from speaking to policymakers and experts in all of the outside countries that took an interest in this. We also got a lot of really useful information from looking at a lot of congressional testimony. So in the United States, Congress had a bunch of hearings on what was going on in Syria, and high ranking US officials and high ranking military officers would come and actually share pretty good information within the realms of classification about what they were seeing and how the administration was thinking and calculating about it. And then we took advantage of some of the methodological techniques that have been developed within the case study literature. So for people who do have a little academic background, when I did my PhD in a previous millennium, my dissertation supervisor was an academic named Alexander George, who was one of the path breakers for how to do case study research to try to learn useful policy lessons. And one of the case study research techniques that Alex George helped innovate was what's called process tracing, which is more or less what it sounds like. You have some ideas about the variables that you want to keep track of, and then you just try to construct the linear narrative events as they happened. And are changes in your variables mapping more or less in real time onto changes in events and outcomes? So it's a really classic process tracing, comparative case study research design.
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B
That's awesome. That's awesome. It took a lot of work because there's a lot of countries that got involved.
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A
Exactly. Lot to keep track of. Yeah.
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B
So let's talk about the lessons from the book. What are the key takeaways from this book?
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A
Yeah, so we explicitly identify a whole series of policy lessons at the end, and they're kind of a mix of, I say positive and negative findings. So one big one on the more positive side is that it is sometimes possible for coercive strategies to work. Syria was put in a box at one point. Where they were successfully pressured to do something they really didn't want to do. Sign the Chemical Weapons Convention, dismantle a lot of their chemical production facilities, turn over a lot of the chemical agents to be destroyed. So when outside powers can get things to align in the right way, they can still enjoy coercive success against the WMT programs of other states. But I think a lot of the other lessons are maybe more negative. Coercive strategies also fail a lot. So they're not a magic wand or a silver bullet or whatever metaphor you want to use. People, I think, default a lot to threat based strategies like, oh, somebody's going to do something we don't want, let's threaten them. And it's almost a knee jerk automatic reaction. And that requires more, I think, thinking through ahead of time, like, hey, are the conditions really appropriate for this to be an effective strategy? And if not, what else, what other strategies do people have in the toolkit? And in particular, we give a lot of emphasis to non proliferation efforts. Right. If you can convince countries not to get these weapons in the first place, then you don't have to fall back on coercive threats, you know, later on to sort of figure out what, you know, what to do with them. So maybe pick something that's in the news, you know, today, if President Trump in his first term hadn't walked away from the Iran nuclear deal that Obama had negotiated and if Iran had in fact continued to comply with the deal, that's a, that's an important if. We wouldn't be in the situation today where, you know, Israel and the United States had to bomb Iran last year and were the US is contemplating whether to bomb them again. All of that more forceful action was made necessary by the failure to accept a diplomatic outcome that had been reached earlier on. We also have a really important, I think, insight about how leaders think about deterrence. And we label this what we call the resolve plus bombs formula. So people who work at lower levels of government or the military or academics who study deterrence will talk a lot about what is sometimes called tailored deterrence and what's the right kind of thread and what's the right way to communicate it to the other side to understand their mindset and where they're coming from. But in practice, it seems to us that leaders at the top don't actually operate this way. And so another thing that was, I think, surprisingly ended up being very similar across the really different personalities of Barack Obama and Donald Trump is that they both made their threats in pretty much the Same way, right? That kind of vague but menacing kind of language like this is a red line or don't do this or there'll be serious consequences. And where there's a pretty clear understanding that if the red line is crossed, the consequences will take the form of air power. We'll fly planes overhead and drop bombs and we'll launch cruise missiles. So you demonstrate your resolve by talking tough. You threaten to drop bombs. Of this resolve plus bombs formula, I think is so part of the strategic culture of the great powers or just the mindset of leaders that they enact this script without really thinking about it. Like, oh, well, of course this is the way to practice deterrence. And sometimes it's not a good fit for the situation. Sometimes you need a different kind of threat. So it's not clear that anything could have worked against the Assad regime, but if anything would have been effective, it had to take account of his motivations. So you would have had to be willing to hold regime survival at risk, like, hey, you keep using chemicals and we really will do something that probably makes it more likely that you get overthrown. Right. And if you don't use chemicals, then we're willing to kind of step back and hold our noses at how awful you are, but we won't try to overthrow you. It's not clear that even doing that well would have worked, but we think it's. Of all the strategy options that were available, it had the best chance of working. The United States and US Allies never wanted to go there because it had other problematic features for them. They weren't actually sure that they wanted to overthrow Assad because a lot of the opposition was jihadist and it was like, well, do we really want Al Qaeda or ISIS to take over? So they were reluctant to make the threat that would have mattered. But also morally, it was really problematic to say, kill people however you want, except with chemicals. Most of the fatalities in the civil war were from conventional bombing and military attacks. And I think a lot of people would have been upset if you said it's okay to kill people that way as long as you don't use chemicals. So in theory, on paper, there was a way to make deterrence work, but in practice, the political constraints were ruled it out.
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B
That's an interesting and interesting point you make and a tough pill to swallow. I think the book is an important contribution in that it makes us think hard about these trade offs that are unpleasant, but I really are the motivating factor behind so much of what we see. But we have taken Enough of your time today. So we usually ask one last question, which might be an unfair question given that you just published this book. What are you working on right now?
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A
Yeah, so right now I'm probably between projects. I had one other thing that I was working on separate from the book, which just got published at the very end of the year last year, which was something I did as part of a working group called the Beyond Nuclear Deterrence Working Group. And it was a paper in which I make a somewhat unusual argument for an academic social scientist, which is I argue that it's actually impossible to predict the outcomes of nuclear deterrence, that we can't figure out in the future how long nuclear deterrence relationships will stay stable or what would be the circumstances under which they might fail and leave us with use of nuclear weapons. So an attempt to try to make us, I think, all a bit more cautious and sober about continuing to rely on nuclear deterrence. There is still one possible journal article that would be spun off from the book that my two co authors and I need to return to and see if we can't bring it to the finish line. We published a paper that was just our case study of the Obama administration, and we had one on the Trump administration that got a revise and resubmit from an academic journal. And then we moved our attention to finishing the book first. And usually that means you can't publish those because journals don't want to publish material that's already been published in other form. But we've been in touch with the journal editors to say, well, what if we could update it to make some comparisons with some of the decisions that President Trump has been making now that he's in office for a second time? And in what ways are they similar to or different to his decision making around Syria? So I think that's probably the next thing I'll work on once I get on top of other teaching and administrative things I need to do further down the road. I think most of my next projects will probably be related to nuclear weapons issues. There's a whole interesting body of literature that has come out where people use a technique called a survey experiment to test whether or not there's support for the idea of a taboo on using nuclear weapons. And I have some critiques of that literature. So I think I probably just want to do kind of an old fashioned literature review and kind of write up my observations about that literature. I'm guessing that's next on my agenda.
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B
Well, we all learn to do leet reviews from your piece on leaked reviews. So this is very exciting news. And if there's ever going to be a book on the horizon, then. Then you must come back and tell us all about it. But for now, I will just go ahead and thank you, Professor Knopf, for taking the time to talk with us today. My guest has been Professor Jeffrey Knopf. He's the co author of a new book, Coercing Syria, on chemical weapons. The book was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press and it's in their Bridging the Gap series. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. Until next time.