Trying to make sense of what just happened in Syria — where the seemingly impregnable regime of Bashar Assad abruptly collapsed two weeks ago in the face of an unexpected rebel onslaught — runs straight into the central paradox of global affairs: Everyone believes they’re on the right side of history, and can tell the good guys from the bad guys. They’re likely to be wrong on both counts, but even if they’re not, that kind of moral certainty leads to disaster.
There’s not a whole lot of moral clarity available in the treacherous political and historical landscape of Syria, except that almost no one laments the downfall of the 54-year Assad dynasty. Like most nations of the modern Middle East, Syria was carved out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, although in a different sense it’s the oldest country on earth, since it contains the archaeological remains of the earliest known human civilization. Today it’s a uniquely strategic and highly diverse “crossroads of religions, ideologies and terrain that borders five other Middle Eastern nations,” as Liz Sly writes in a useful Washington Post analysis.
Syria is also the site of this century’s longest civil war and worst refugee crisis, and its self-destruction under the Assad regime has changed the world. At least six million Syrians have fled the country over the past 12 or 13 years, creating an interlocking set of humanitarian and political emergencies that have fueled the rise of far-right or neo-fascist movements in more than a dozen countries (our own included). The ugly international scramble now underway in Syria resembles an old-fashioned Great Power struggle of the early 20th century in more than one sense: While the players on the global chessboard plot their moves, regular people struggle, suffer and die.
At least four different nations have troops on the ground in the wake of Assad’s fall: Israel, Russia, Turkey and the United States, which recently and begrudgingly admitted that its military presence was larger and more entrenched than was publicly known. That’s without counting the various Islamist, Kurdish, Druze, pro-Iranian and/or leftist militia groups who may or may not have played a role in overthrowing Assad, or the remnants of the official Syrian military, most of which has either melted into the civilian population or fled into Iraq or Lebanon.
At near-certain risk of oversimplification, here’s the summary: The Israelis are there to guard their frontier along the Golan Heights, which most of the world still thinks should belong to Syria. The Turks are there to suppress the Kurdish nationalists, who most of the world believes should get their own territory. The Russians and Americans … well, that’s confusing. They were both there to combat Islamic State militants, at least officially, but at times have also waged a proxy war to prop up or undermine Assad, respectively.
Exactly what those Russian and American troops in Syria have been up to since Dec. 8, when Assad fled to Moscow and the Islamist rebel faction known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, rolled into Damascus, is not entirely clear. At least on the surface, that event took all the above-mentioned nations and the rest of the world by surprise. Lina Khatib of the London think tank Chatham House calls it “an earthquake in the regional order,” whose long-term effects may be comparable to the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe.
That remains to be seen, but Khatib’s essay for Foreign Policy hints at a chilling but compelling possibility: Some parties to the Syrian conflict were less surprised than others by what happened, and most Western media analysis has failed to perceive the underlying dynamics. Her most important observation is that the dramatic collapse of the Assad regime marked the end of a Cold War-style “confrontational status quo,” in which Israel, the U.S. and their various Arab and European allies tolerated Syria’s deepening entanglement with Russia and Iran as preferable to the alternatives: “They saw it as lower risk compared with the unknown forces that sudden political change in Iran or Syria could unleash.”
That raises the question of whether certain players in the Syrian drama concluded that the time to roll the dice on “sudden political change” had arrived, and who might benefit most from this disruption. Khatib never flat-out says that Israel was the driving force behind the lightning victory of HTS, but her entire analysis could be read as pointing in that direction. (Any such relationship, for obvious reasons, would have been painstakingly concealed and conducted through multiple intermediaries.)
At the very least, the “cui bono” question is clear enough: Khatib concludes that “the collapse of the Assad regime will inevitably mean the end of the Iran-dominated regional order,” to be replaced by a new order built around Israel as “the Middle East’s agenda-setter.” This was the denouement, she suggests, of a three-part Israeli power play aiming for regional supremacy, in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack: First came the destruction and depopulation of Gaza, next was the decapitation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and then, last but not least, the ouster of Assad. Israel's real target the whole time, in this scenario, was Iran, until now the dominant Muslim power in the Middle East.
Khatib goes even deeper by implying that Israel’s relatively amicable relationship with Russia — perhaps it's not surprising that Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu feel a certain kinship — could be a factor in building that new order. Conventional wisdom may suggest that Assad’s fall was a major defeat for Putin, but she speculates (again, without exactly saying so) that from Russia's point of view this might have been a strategic withdrawal. Russian troops could likely have stepped in to halt the advance of HTS at any point, with little risk of direct military confrontation with U.S. or Turkish forces. But they didn’t, and recent reporting by the New York Times suggests that Putin concluded the Assad regime couldn't be saved. As Khatib suggests, Putin decided to abandon his “transactional partnership” with Assad and focus on other priorities — for instance, a favorable conclusion to the Ukraine war under the incoming Trump administration.
It’s stretching the circumstantial evidence past the breaking point to suggest that Putin cut a secret deal with Benjamin Netanyahu: You get the Middle East, I get Ukraine. But considered as a hypothesis or a thought experiment, it’s a parsimonious explanation of why Assad’s government collapsed so quickly and when it happened, barely a month before Trump takes office.
That also underscores that the Biden administration, with its endlessly mockable insistence on a “rules-based order” (in which it sets the rules), was caught flat-footed by events in Syria, while most mainstream media commentary remains imprisoned by the moral blindness I mentioned above, and unable to shed its Cold War beer-goggles.
This affliction is found clear across the ideological spectrum, from the neocon dinosaurs who still dream of regime change in Iran (and damn near everywhere else) to the “liberal interventionists” who are still mad that Barack Obama declined to go to war in Syria a decade ago to the galaxy-brain, left-wing “anti-imperialists” who have made endless excuses for the inexcusable crimes of the Assad regime and its Kremlin sponsor.
On one side we have New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, voice of the foreign policy establishment stuck in the mud, literally suggesting that the U.S. should try nation-building just one more time in another Middle Eastern country that would much rather we didn’t. This of course comes from the dude who told us that Mohammed bin Salman was the young lion who would reform the Arab world, and also made sweeping promises of a “Biden doctrine” that would free the Israeli hostages from Gaza, forge a two-state solution and bring peace to the entire Middle East.
On the other side we have a loose alignment of left-wing critics of U.S. policy who, for various reasons and to various extents, bought into the myth of Assad’s Syria, in alliance with Iran and Russia, as the backbone of “anti-Western, anti-Israel resistance in the Middle East,” in Khatib’s words. (These people, some of whom I know personally, lack Tom Friedman's platform and prestige. Many have honorable records in other respects. In the interests of not punching down, I'm not going to name or shame anyone.) This is about halfway defensible: Their basic premise that the U.S. is always and everywhere a baleful influence is one widely shared around the world, and not easy to falsify. But siding with the small-minded torturers, zealots and dictators in Damascus, Tehran and Moscow was taking the enemy-of-my-enemy fallacy to an absurd and pathetic extreme; it was like a third-generation, low-ink photocopy of the leftist romance with the Soviet Union, which at least pretended to believe in something.
To make matters very slightly worse, some of the more deluded or imaginative of those left-wing thinkers have occasionally pretzeled themselves into optimism about Donald Trump’s foreign policy, basically on the stopped-clock theory. It’s true that Trump’s ignorance, carelessness and xenophobia render him uninterested in overseas power plays that lack any obvious short-term benefits. He doesn’t care what happens in Syria or Ukraine or any other incomprehensible sh**hole trouble spot, at least not until Elon Musk or Stephen Miller or some paleocon underling convinces him that a Fox News propaganda victory is there for the taking.
If there was actually some private understanding between Putin and Netanyahu, Trump will be angry he was left out — an early sign of his lame-duck irrelevance, but only the first of many. Needless to say, he will not lift a finger or waste a thought on the future of the Syrian people, who were never consulted about any of this. What are the odds that's likely to change?
