Hey Professor: David E. Sanger on Syria

In a prime-time speech on Tuesday, President Obama addressed the nation to make the case for intervention in Syria and outline recent developments. FM caught up with New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent, HKS Adjunct Lecturer, and former Harvard Crimson editor David E. Sanger ’82 to hear his assessment of the situation now.

FM: The New York Times printed a poll before Tuesday’s speech reflecting scant public support for military intervention in Syria. Do you think the President was able to move the dial on those numbers after his speech?

DS: He moved it some. He made a much better case than ... he had made to date. If you look at the instant polls you will certainly see that. I don’t think he moved it dramatically.

FM: On Monday, Russia unexpectedly called on Syrian President Bashar Assad to hand over his chemical weapons stockpile to the international community. Say this offer is real and we go through with it. It doesn’t seem that we would have achieved U.S. objectives, if our objectives are in fact to achieve a diplomatic transition in Syria and the removal of chemical weapons in the country; it would achieve the latter but not the former. What would our foreign policy look like thereafter?

DS: Well, there’s two sets of issues here. You’ve got a first set of issues that have to do with the chemical weapons, and a second set of issues that have to do with the civil war. What [President Obama] has done with the civil war so far is that he’s lightly armed rebels, and he’s barely done that even. So he needs a much more comprehensive policy—but how to do deal with the civil war is separate from this objective.

FM: Secretary of State John Kerry generated a lot of buzz earlier this weekend when he said that any strike would be “unbelievably small.” In an interview with NBC’s Savannah Guthrie, President Obama responded: “The U.S. does not do pinpricks.” What do you think military strikes, if we took that route, would look like?

DS: So they were trying to alleviate the political objective that the United States was intervening for a long period of time. Obama was saying that by Syrian standards this would be a quite major strike. Both of those things could be true. But it could be major and still not be decisive—in other words, we might temporarily stop Assad from using chemical weapons but that’s not likely to change the balance of power in the global war. ... But Obama’s never argued that the attack would oust Assad.

This interview has been edited for concision.