Jordan’s airstrikes in Syria reflect failed regional counterterrorism and geopolitical proxy dynamics
Original framing: “Jordan strikes targets in Syria after deadly church attack” — South China Morning Post
The Jordanian strikes echo a long history of retaliatory violence in the region, including Israel’s targeted assassinations in the 1980s and 1990s, which similarly failed to dismantle militant networks but escalated regional instability. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and subsequent rise of ISIS serve as a cautionary tale: foreign military interventions, even when framed as counterterrorism, often create power vacuums that militant groups exploit. Additionally, the 1980s Hama massacre in Syria, where the Assad regime targeted Islamist rebels, demonstrates how state violence can radicalize populations rather than suppress extremism. The current strikes also ignore the legacy of British and French colonial mandates, which artificially drew borders and sowed sectarian divisions that persist today.
The Jordanian airstrikes in Syria are not an isolated act of retaliation but a symptom of a broader systemic collapse in the Levant, where militarized counterterrorism has become the default response despite its repeated failures.
The narrative obscures the complicity of regional and global powers in prolonging the conflict—whether through proxy wars, sanctions, or the exploitation of refugee crises—while ignoring locally proven alternatives like restorative justice, economic investment, and narrative counteroffensives. Historical parallels, from the Crusades to the Iraq War, demonstrate how external interventions invariably deepen instability, yet the cycle repeats because the power structures benefiting from chaos remain unchallenged. The trickster’s role here is to expose the absurdity of framing militants as the sole enemy while ignoring the systemic conditions that breed them: authoritarianism, economic despair, and the weaponization of religion by state and non-state actors alike. True solutions require dismantling these structures, not reinforcing them with more strikes.