Four Seas Policy - Bashar Assad

(watch the water meaning possibly)

https://syncreticstudies.com/2017/11/13/the-syrian-war-and-the-strategic-logic-of-us-imperialisms-drive-to-dominate-the-middle-east/

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad recognised this vital positioning and in 2009 unveiled a ‘Four Seas’ policy that hoped to create a “nexus of economic integration” between Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran, thereby linking the Mediterranean, Caspian, Black Sea and Persian Gulf into one bloc (Brooks 2010). However the establishment of a successful economic nexus between these states would threaten Washington’s hegemonic plan for the region. Effectively, NATO member Turkey would be integrated with Syria and Iran, as well as with an Iraq in which the United States had spent billions of dollars and destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives to bring state-owned oil under corporate control. The wave of protests that engulfed the Arab world in December 2010 provided Washington with the opportunity it needed to manipulate peaceful protests in Syria into an armed insurgency against the state.

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However Syria has always been targeted by US imperialism, and that is why the wave of the Arab Spring was seen as finally opening an opportunity to destabilise the country (Flounders 2011). On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, General Wesley Clark, a retired 4-star U.S. Army General and former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia, revealed that he was made aware in 2002 of a plan by which the United States would intervene in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finally Iran (Clark 2003: 130). Although this did not occur within the five-year time frame that General Clarke was told, we have seen the destabilisation of all these states. In the case of Iran, the destabilisation was through intense US-led sanctions and cyber warfare (Sanger and Schmitt 2017). As can be seen in the 2017 Venezuelan crisis – where violent forces were portrayed in western media as peaceful protestors resisting violent security forces – Syria in 2011 was much the same target for media manipulation. All violence was blamed on security forces, providing excuses for ‘humanitarian intervention’ (see Anderson 2016).