David Willetts is a member of the House of Lords

The collapse of the evil Assad regime in Syria has been the best news of the year.

The uprising against Assad began as part of the Arab Spring back in 2011. But the high hopes then were soon disappointed as civil war broke out and dictatorships survived across the Middle East. It would be an extraordinary coda if, almost 14 years after the start of civil protests in Syria, they finally get some kind of victory and peace. The chances of a Western liberal democracy are low but the Assad regime was so cruel that almost any alternative will be better.

The Arab Spring began with a revolt in Tunisia. It spread across much of the Arab world.

A surge of young people, as medical advances brings down infant death rates whilst mothers are still having lots of children, is the big demographic challenge facing every society on its route to modernity. If an open labour market sets these young people to productive work then you are on your way to prosperity. But the closed patronage-based labour markets of the Arab world created millions of under-employed discontented young people, ripe for revolt.

The Libyan dictator Gaddafi faced domestic rebellion which he tried to repress.

David Cameron was repelled by his behaviour and caught the public mood that we should intervene.  In March 2011 the Coalition won the Parliamentary vote to intervene by 557 to 13. We enforced a no-fly zone in Libya in alliance with France and Italy and a very reluctant President Obama. Gaddafi was killed in October 2011 but the National Transition Government collapsed and Liby drifted into tribal conflict.

The turbulence undermining effective Government in Tunisia and Libya meant they became the main routes for illegal migration from Africa to Europe. There was no longer a barrier to stop millions across sub-Saharan Africa fleeing from hardship and famine seeking a route to Europe.

Italy has faced a small boat problem even worse than ours. Giorgia Meloni has recently had conspicuous success in getting the EU to strike deals with Tunisia and Libya offering them substantial financial aid and practical assistance to stop the boats. Her approach is working with the number of refugees in small boats arriving in Italy down from their peak of 125,000 or more in 2023. She is now further ahead in the polls than when she was elected. She has turned out to be an exceptionally successful European leader: being tough on illegal migration is a key reason for her success.

The intervention in Libya did not lead to any kind of peaceful transfer of power or the creation of effective Government. That was the backdrop to the Syrian crisis two years later when Assad crossed a red-line and used chemical weapons against his own people.

It looked as if Obama was intending to intervene and he sought British support. So David Cameron rushed through a parliamentary vote to authorise it in August 2013.  He believed he had the support of Ed Miliband, the Labour leader. But in the event Cameron lost the vote by 13 votes because Ed Miliband withdrew his support and 30 Tories rebelled.

Obama decided not to intervene after all. Garvan Walshe in his recent column on ConservativeHome argues rightly that this episode was a key moment in the weakening of the West. It emboldened Putin and the Assad regime whose attacks on their own people were so bad that the Syrian refugee crisis reached a peak in 2015  Angela Merkel  responded in August 2015 by letting them all in to Germany.

Just imagine that those two crises had gone the opposite way. Imagine that the West had not intervened in Libya. Gaddafi might have survived. He was a dictator but perhaps for the average Libyan things would have been no worse than the decade of civil conflict which followed his fall – what Obama subsequently called “a shit show” which lowered the West’s willingness to intervene elsewhere.  A functioning Government would have ensured no surge of refugees across the Mediterranean.

The West would then have been more likely to have intervened in Syria after they crossed the red line of use of chemical weapons. Assad would have been much weaker. The Russians would have been less likely to get involved as there would not have been the same power vacuum left by the West. The regime might have collapsed. There might well have been refugees but probably not on the scale we saw in 2015.

We ended up with the worst combination of events leading to the twin refugee crises of Libya and then Syria. They had a massive influence on politics. Without those images of refugees pouring into Greece and Italy Brexiteers would probably not have won the referendum which was heavily influenced by fears of surges of migrants which the EU could not control.  Ironically the so-called Australian points based system they set up post Brexit then licensed more legal migration from across the world than the EU regime but that is a story for another day.

One of the most powerful features of the populist reaction against the political elite is foreign entanglements. For Trump that is above all a reaction to Neo-Cons imperialist dreams. If America had not intervened in Iraq on the false belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11 then Trump would never have become President.

The mismanagement of the decisions about when the West should intervene is key to Brexit too and the rise of the populist Right across Europe. Liberating Kuwait after Iraq invaded and punishing Syria for the use of chemical weapons but not Iraq II and not Libya would have left America the world’s hyperpower, Putin on the side-lines, Britain in the EU and not have fuelled the rise of the populist Right.

There is a lot of sense in wariness of foreign entanglements.

The post David Willetts: The big lessons for the UK from Syria and Libya – be wary when and where you intervene appeared first on Conservative Home.



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