The Fairy Tale Jeffrey Sachs Told in Antalya

One of the more interesting guests at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum was Jeffrey Sachs—though the interest, of course, comes from what he said. In Türkiye, we tend to offer people an immense amount of credit upfront as long as they say things we like to hear. That generous credit often blinds us to other, less comfortable truths about them.

Take Sachs, for instance. His remarks about the destructive roles of Israel and the United States in our region quickly went viral on social media and across news websites, capturing widespread attention.

If Sachs had simply said, “The U.S. and its ally Israel are responsible for many of the wars and crises in this region, and they’re doing it deliberately,” he would’ve been applauded as someone brave enough to speak a well-known truth as an American. But like many others, Sachs doesn’t stop there. He follows up these undeniable facts with narratives that obscure everything else that’s been going on in the region for years — effectively casting a shadow over the full picture.

Of course, Sachs has said many things that are true — like his claim that “Israel wouldn’t be able to fight for even a day or carry out genocide in Gaza without U.S. political, military, and financial support.” But then he goes on to claim that the entire Syrian uprising was just a U.S.-Israeli plan to topple Assad. Speaking at one of the world’s most high-profile diplomacy forums, in Antalya no less, he confidently told the audience:

“The war in Syria is just one of six wars Israel encouraged. The others are in Lebanon, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. This list was already out there — in 2011, Wesley Clark said he’d seen a memo at the Pentagon outlining a plan to start seven wars in five years. The only one that didn’t happen, to Netanyahu’s dismay, was with Iran. Israel is still trying to provoke that one.”

Where do we even begin with this? It sounds like the kind of statement someone might make if they either think their audience is gullible or they themselves are utterly naïve.

He’s telling us that the U.S., acting on Israel’s request, orchestrated the Syrian war to bring down Assad — that it trained and armed all the rebel groups — and yet, somehow, it failed to topple Assad, despite the regime killing one million of its own people and displacing 12 million more over 14 years. According to this narrative, no other actors — no people, no regional powers — played any role. Everything is attributed solely to U.S. and Israeli plotting. This line of thinking, while appearing to critique U.S. power, ends up reaffirming it by placing them at the center of everything.

In this version of events, Assad bears no responsibility. The brutal repression, the torture, the massacres — the sheer force that pushed the people to the brink of revolt — none of it matters. Are we to believe that the uprising didn’t happen because people were enraged after Assad’s forces tortured and killed the children of Daraa and insulted their families? That when those families were shot for asking for their kids back, the people weren’t moved by that — only by Obama’s alleged call to revolt?

Was Israel really looking to overthrow these regimes — or was it just too comfortable?

Let’s ask this plainly: Did Israel really want change in these countries? Why would it? What problem did it have with Mubarak, Gaddafi, or Lebanon’s government? Was it just bored with how easy things were going? In reality, those regimes already operated in complete alignment with Israel’s interests. The Arab Spring actually disrupted the U.S. and Israel’s comfort zones in the region. Popular movements were bringing real people into power, and that made Israel nervous.

What followed — the waves of counter-revolutions — were essentially efforts to restore the old order. Was it really Israel that wanted Mubarak gone just to end up with a Morsi-led Egypt? Could Israel have moved as freely in the region with Morsi in power as it did with Mubarak? Of course not. And didn’t Israel throw its full support behind Assad to avoid another “Morsi scenario” in Syria?

Here’s what really happened. The domino effect of revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen shook the region — and every single one of those movements was anti-Israel. So when it came time for Syria, the hand behind the curtain stepped in and ensured that no revolution would succeed there. Yes, at first the U.S. joined the “Friends of Syria” coalition with the stated goal of toppling Assad. But once they were in, the agenda abruptly changed. They invented a phantom enemy called ISIS and focused solely on that.

And now Sachs comes along to tell us that ever since then, the U.S. has been trying to oust Assad — and some in Türkiye, who have for years shared solidarity with Assad’s victims, are clinging to this as if they’ve found a long-lost truth. Do they even realize how absurd it is to paint the all-powerful U.S. as incapable of removing Assad, after 14 years of trying? The U.S. may not be omnipotent, but it certainly wasn’t so weak that it couldn’t unseat a blood-soaked dictator — if that’s what it really wanted. In fact, the U.S. went out of its way to block rebel momentum when it nearly toppled Assad. It actively preserved his regime. Why? Because Assad was always Israel’s “favorite dictator.”

Israel never had a problem with Assad — neither father nor son. They were both reliable custodians of Israeli interests. Assad owed his power in part to having given up the Golan Heights — and he never made a serious effort to get it back. So when it looked like he might fall, Israel panicked. Syria was, in effect, an Israeli protectorate. And with the revolution, Israel lost a kind of territory it had controlled by proxy.

The same Western powers — the U.S., the UK, and France — that toppled Gaddafi in Libya in just a few days could have easily done the same in Syria. In fact, they waited “patiently” for Türkiye to sever ties with Assad before making their move. We thought they were preparing to strike. They came. They could have done it. They had the full backing of a people who had suffered under five decades of tyranny. They had all the legitimacy they needed under international law due to Assad’s war crimes.

And then? Assad simply vanished from their agenda.

What happened? Were they scared of Iran? Of Russia? Of Assad himself? Who could possibly believe that? Back then, Russia hadn’t even thrown its full weight behind Assad yet — they hadn’t signed any deals, made any moves. Only Iran and Assad were standing. And the people — the ones risking their lives — were ready to help bring them down.

So why didn’t they? Because they realized that for their interests, there was no acceptable alternative to Assad. Even now, 14 years later, the thought of a post-Assad Syria is Israel’s nightmare.

So yes — letting Sachs tell this fairy tale at the Antalya Diplomacy Forum, and watching a crowd hang on his every word, is another story entirely.