After a massive earthquake devastated Turkey and Syria causing billions of dollars in damages and killing around 50,000 people (6000 in Syria alone) has actually caused Syria to be able to jump into the international world. Syria which has been embroiled in a 12 year long civil war has lost around 226 billion dollars which is about 4 times Syria’s entire GDP. This loss isn’t just in building but transportation, infrastructure, electricity, and etc with the earthquake only making things much worse with it destroying a lot of sanitation and water systems making the possibility of disease outbreaks possible. sympathy from the world through his jumpstarted Syria with the Arab League considering bringing them back into the group after they had been suspended for human right abuses. This earthquake has caused multiple previously hostile countries like Saudi Arabia and its allies (Russia,China) to give aid. It’s also led to countries ending Syria’s political isolation with Tunisia and Egypt starting to establish ties. Syria hopes that these allies will help in its rebuilding but there are two main obstacles in being the sheer amount of money needed and secondly that the U.S. still is hostile so Syria must make concessions either politically or other to gain everything so complete rebuilding is highly unlikely a U.S State Department spokesperson told The Associated Press. “Absent enduring progress toward a political solution to the Syrian conflict, we will not normalize relations with the regime, nor will we support other countries normalizing relations.”
Syria is a mess, a gigantic mess. years of war have caused an extreme amount of damage to anything important you can think of that’s needed to run a country. fracture, electrical grid, water, sanitation, roads, transportation, etc. and Syria is an extremely poor country though it’s important to note that even if they weren’t to be able to rebuild itself would cost literally hundreds of billions of dollars (around 400 billion actually) which isn’t even considering that if the war continues they’d have to rebuild oftenly. Now that’s not to say that any rebuilding is bad syria’s people need it badly and this newfound sympathy in the international world will help with syria possible being brought back into partnerships that will include economic help and the like and potentially help with peace talks but again it’s important to note that these states are not idiots and sympathy will only get syria so far i mean there’s a reason these states didn’t want to allied with them originally so syria must make a change and this is best exemplified with US relations. the united states has held anti-syrian views and the earthquake hasn’t changed anything and the US has gone out and directly said that unless there is political/governmental change they will not improve relations and this a view i believe more and more countries will have as why would you help syria if they are only going to continue this war and need more and more money. so the hope currently si that the earthquake has backed both sides into a corner and peace can be achieved.
The way this connects back to class 2 ways I think. The first is that states are opportunists. If there’s a way to increase power or influence whether it be economically, militarily, and etc they will take it and this is shown by Syria as they have jumped on the chance for partnerships as soon as they could after the earthquake. They understand that they right now are seen as victims and they will use that to their advantage in becoming politically active and getting allies. The second thing though is reciprocity. We’ve talked about how states will remain in alliances so long as they get back as much as they put in but with Syria that simply isn’t possible they are a dirt poor country in need of dire assistance that is still embroiled in war so while right now they may be getting assistance from a lot of states eventually they will leave if syria can’t do anything for them or holds no importance because why would they.