Until last week, Syria’s civil war was a classic example of a “frozen conflict”: A cease-fire in 2020 had stanched the fighting, but the sides had reached no permanent political settlement. Little happened that rose to the level of active warfare—and yet the country could not really have been said to be at peace.
The conflict’s reignition probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise under these circumstances, especially because conditions around Syria have changed in recent years. Since the war began in 2011, President Bashar al-Assad had relied on support from Russia and Iran-backed Shia militias to hold on to power against rebel forces. Now Moscow is busy in Ukraine, and Tehran’s so-called Axis of Resistance has been battered by Israel. Anti-Assad rebels seized the opening and, within days, captured territory across Syria’s northwest, including Aleppo, the country’s commercial hub.
The sudden thaw in Syria reveals the folly of ignoring frozen conflicts. The post-2020 calm had lulled many countries into thinking that Syria shouldn’t be a priority so long as combatants weren’t exchanging fire. But disregarding a conflict when it’s frozen tends to mean being forced to address it at an unexpected time, when the stakes are higher. Now Syria’s war risks bringing in many foreign powers: Turkey, a NATO country supporting the opposition; Iran and Russia, Assad’s main backers; the United States, which maintains hundreds of boots on the ground; Israel, Lebanon, and Iraq, Syria’s neighbors; and the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, which have historically championed Assad and the opposition, respectively. As Syria shows, frozen conflicts can heat up at any moment. Leaving them unattended is not only shortsighted but potentially catastrophic.
The term frozen conflict was popularized in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union to describe sovereignty disputes in republics such as Georgia and Moldova, where Russian-backed separatists fought with newly independent governments. It applies to more than a dozen areas around the world today. These include situations where the sides haven’t exchanged fire in decades, such as in China’s quarrel with Taiwan, but also conflicts like the one in Syria, where the fighting never stopped but the front lines hardly ever budged.
Conflicts usually freeze when the balance of power around them offers neither side any decisive advantage in pressing forward militarily. And they tend to thaw under two scenarios: One is when the balance of power changes, as it did in Syria, such that the rebels find themselves with the upper hand; alternatively, one side can become so motivated to achieve its goals that it’s willing to assume the risks and costs associated with all-out war. This was Vladimir Putin’s calculation in 2022, when he staged a full-scale invasion of Ukraine after nearly a decade of frozen conflict in the Donbas.
These types of conflicts generally resist diplomatic solutions—that’s why they freeze in the first place—but that doesn’t mean that regional or global powers shouldn’t try to seek resolutions to the world’s dormant battles. Suddenly defrosted disputes can impose a range of costs on neighboring or even far-flung countries: waves of refugees, trade disruptions, economic shocks, civilian casualties. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict offers the most dramatic recent example, having pulled in states across the Middle East and beyond.
The United States has the might and reach to be particularly persuasive in resolving frozen conflicts, but in recent years it has largely chosen to ignore them. For more than a decade, the U.S. has devoted scant strategic focus to Syria, even though hundreds of American soldiers continue to serve there. Last week, the White House took more than two days to come up with a pro forma statement that did little more than “urge de-escalation.”
And Syria’s is not the only frozen conflict to have slipped off the American priority list. During his first term, President Donald Trump never filled crucial vacancies in the State Department, making even some routine diplomatic work impossible, let alone the sustained care and attention necessary to resolve stubborn disputes. Still, Trump did bring about two historic deals in 2020. The first was an economic agreement between Serbia and Kosovo, which had been in what could be considered a frozen conflict since the 1990s. The second was the Abraham Accords, which normalized long-chilled relations between Israel and four Arab countries.
But the Trump administration showed no patience for follow-through. The Abraham Accords failed to address the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, arguably the world’s most dangerous frozen conflict; for this reason, the agreements didn’t meet the conditions that would have allowed most Arab countries, such as the regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia, to recognize Israel. Similarly, Trump’s bromance diplomacy with Kim Jong Un was long on photo ops but short on easing the North Korean nuclear crisis.
The frozen conflicts in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula are both high-profile and particularly intractable. Others, though, could be more susceptible to diplomatic intervention—for instance, Somalia’s civil war, which has stalled on multiple fronts. The breakaway region of Somaliland has developed a relatively successful economy and a political regime that scores significantly better on Freedom House’s index than its neighbors. But neither Somalia nor any other state recognizes the territory’s independence. And Somaliland’s ongoing skirmishes with nearby autonomous regions, such as Puntland and Khaatumo, might intensify at any moment. Securing internationally recognized sovereignty could allow the territory to enter international treaties and take part in global trade, ultimately advancing it and Somalia toward a permanent peace. A diplomatic push involving great powers such as the U.S. and regional behemoths such as Ethiopia, which supports Somaliland, and Turkey, which stands with Somalia.
The next conflict to unfreeze could be one that the outside world has all but forgotten—but that has the potential, like Syria, to draw outside powers into confrontations none of them want. Take Cyprus, which has been disputed by Turkey and Greece for decades. One side could choose to take the plunge toward battle, raising stakes for countries all around the Mediterranean, including France, Egypt, Israel, and Libya.
When a hot war freezes, the world is tempted to consider it one less conflict in need of settlement, but in fact, the opposite is true. A frozen conflict is an opportunity for outside powers and even private individuals and NGOs to engage the parties and try to move them toward resolution. In 2007, Nelson Mandela founded the Elders, an NGO that sought to find solutions to the world’s most intractable clashes. Its current chair is Colombia’s former president Juan Manuel Santos, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 for his role in mitigating Colombia’s long-running, and often stuck, domestic conflict.
History suggests that the most effective approach to resolving frozen conflicts is multilateral, with governments and officials across countries working in concert to mediate disputes. Deteriorating relations among the world’s superpowers will no doubt make such coordinated action harder—and more necessary.
