Syria and Uncle Sam as the Hegelian Hammer

Why the Assad regime had to fall

After 61 years of Baathist rule and 13 years of civil war, the Syrian regime has collapsed. Assad is in Russia, and what happens next in the country he left behind is anyone’s guess. There are reasons to be pessimistic. We can’t be sure that the rebels have given up on their fundamentalist goals, and even if they have, power vacuums tend to lead to chaos and there is no guarantee anyone will be able to establish control over the country. The best predictor of a future civil war is having recently had a civil war, and Syria is both Muslim and extremely underdeveloped, both factors that have also been associated with poor prospects for democratization. The skeptic looks at the Arab mobs toppling statues and hitting them with their shoes and listens to talk of moderate rebels and notes that we’ve been here many times before.

That said, this had to happen. The Assad government could not survive indefinitely in the absence of being able to credibly legitimate its regime. Bashar al-Assad was an accidental leader and his state always ruled through fear, which meant both terrorizing the Syrian population and arguing to domestic minorities and the West that the only alternative to itself was complete chaos or Islamism. This could not be treated as a reason to allow one demented family to own a nation in perpetuity. The collapse of the Syrian government provides an opportunity to reflect on the nature of political legitimacy, the broad trajectory of history, and the American role in moving it forward.

Syria experienced four different coups throughout the 1960s. It wasn’t until 1971 that Hafez al-Assad, then Minister of Defense, fully consolidated power and became president. His oldest son Bassel was expected to be his successor before dying in a car crash in 1994, reportedly while going 150 miles per hour through foggy Damascus streets to catch a private plane meant to take him to a skiing trip in the Alps.

Bassel had an older sister named Bushra, who many think was competent enough that she could have been Hafez’ successor had she not been a woman. The second son therefore only got his job because one of his older siblings was female and the other engaged in typically male stupid risk-taking behavior.

Upon Basel’s death, Bashar enrolled in the military academy at Homs and was groomed to take over. Hafez died in 2000, the Syrian constitution was soon amended to lower the minimum age for president from 40 to 34, and the transition was a smooth one.

This means that, now, in 2024, until two days ago the president of Syria happened to be nothing more than the oldest living son of the man who happened to end up on top over half a century ago after a succession of coups. Hereditary rule has been common throughout history and some monarchies survive even today, but Syria has always called itself a republic, and Bashar’s title was president, not king. The absurdities didn’t stop there. The ruling Baathist ideology stressed socialism, secularism, and pan-Arabism, yet it could only rule through suppressing the Arab masses. The Assad family belongs to the Alawite sect of Shia Islam, which makes up about 15% of the population, and opposition to it has historically come mostly from Islamists.

Syria was defeated by Israel in 1967, losing the Golan Heights, and the regime has always used the Palestinian cause to bolster its own legitimacy. Yet even here, the government has spent decades too weak to either get its territory back or do much for the Palestinians. It eventually took a back seat to Saddam Hussein, and then later Iran and Hezbollah, as a patron of the Palestinians in their struggle against Israel, at least in the Arab imagination. The fact that Syria retained its anti-Zionist posturing while losing control over its own territory, inviting Iran to occupy it, and getting regularly bombed by Israel only added to the absurdity of the situation.

Assad’s Syria was a republic based on hereditary rule, an Arab nationalist state that justified itself on the grounds that Arabs couldn’t be trusted, and an anti-Zionist regime that was completely helpless in the face of Zionism. It’s little wonder that it took so much brutality to continue such an unnatural state of affairs.

The less legitimacy a state has, the more it has to rely on either the indifference of the population or grind it into submission. Whatever else one can say about them, Arabs have never been indifferent towards politics and the question of who is allowed to rule over them.

When the Arab Spring reached Syria in early 2011, hundreds of thousands of people went to the streets demanding an end to the regime. The government declared them all terrorist sympathizers, and came down harshly on the demonstrators. This wasn’t a complete fabrication. Throughout the post-World War II era, the only people in the Middle East crazy enough to stand up to brutal totalitarian regimes have often been religious fanatics. In 2013, ISIS began seizing parts of Eastern Syria, and eventually ruled one-third of the country. Al-Nusra, which pledged loyalty to al-Qaida, would establish itself in Idlib province in the North.

Through the help of Russian air power and Iranian and Hezbollah fighters on the ground, the Syrian regime was eventually able to reestablish rule over the major population centers of the country. In February 2020, it finally regained control over the M5 highway, which connects the three largest cities in the country: Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, along with Hama, which is the fifth largest.

The regime ran into a brick wall elsewhere, as Arab rebels backed by Turkey controlled the northwest and Kurds supported by the US held the northeast. But until last week, things looked somewhat stable. Few were expecting the Syrian regime to face any more existential threats, and steps were being taken to normalize relations with other countries in the region after they had been damaged or broken off during the civil war.

And then out of nowhere, over the last eleven days, rebels swept into Aleppo, and went down the M5 highway until reaching Damascus, taking the capital virtually unopposed. The leader of the conquering army is a man who goes by the name Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. Thus far, he’s been saying the right things to reassure the rest of the world that he is definitely not al-Qaida anymore. Al-Jolani began his career as a militant by going into Iraq to fight the American occupation in 2003. By 2012, he was back in Syria as the leader of al-Nusra. He finally renounced international jihad in 2017, consolidated his base in Idlib by defeating al-Qaida and ISIS forces, and declared that he was focusing exclusively on liberating Syria. Al-Nusra was consolidated with other groups in Northern Syria and the new entity created was called Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which spearheaded the drive to Damascus.

Throughout the recent offensive, Jolani has been saying the right things. He claims that he accepts Syria as a multicultural nation, promises to protect the rights of all minorities, and even says diversity is his nation’s strength. So far, there have been no real reports of persecution of non-Sunnis, and HTS has been doing things like showing the world that life is going on as normal in Christian areas of Aleppo.

There’s a nice story we can tell here, in which the Syrian rebels started to win when they began to be tolerant. The Assad regime, as mentioned, has always been a historical absurdity. The entire justification for its existence was that the Syrian people could not be trusted to rule their own country, and they needed a strongman to protect minorities and stop a descent into theocratic madness. Without any real internal legitimacy, the Syrian government’s strategy has been to just kill its way out of every problem, having to resort to help from foreigners to do so. This simply wasn’t stable in the long run, and as soon as Russia got distracted in Ukraine and Hezbollah was devastated by Israel, the rebels reemerged as a potent force and the regime collapsed.

In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama talks about the path to liberal democracy as a Hegelian dialectic process. Populations want recognition, and eventually converge on states that respect individual liberties and focus on improving people’s well being. At first glance, this is in the process of happening in Syria. Islamists who openly called non-Sunnis heretics and dreamt of establishing a new caliphate never came close to taking Damascus. In the end, power was seized by those who talked about diversity and respected symbols of tolerance, if not Pride flags then at least Christmas trees.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that nice guys always win in the long run, and the End of History unfolds as an automatic process. It was Western pressure that ensured some third option other than Assadist mass murder or jihadist savagery could emerge. Given the role that Islamists have historically played in resisting authoritarian rule in the Muslim world, it was unsurprising that until five or six years into the Syrian Civil War, the strongest non-Kurdish opponents of the Assad government were always some variant or subsidiary of al-Qaida or ISIS.

Yet neither organization was ever going to be allowed to rule for long. At its peak in 2014-2015, ISIS controlled about 30-40% of the territory in both Iraq and Syria. Ending its rule required a brutal war that killed tens of thousands of militants and displaced millions of civilians, in which Russia, Iran, the United States, Europe, and Middle Eastern governments were all on the same side. Only with the total defeat of ISIS did you get the new diversity-appreciating HTS as the main opposition to the Assad regime.

It is important to remember that it was American military power that stood in the way of the complete destruction of minority groups and all hopes of secular government across wide swaths of Iraq and Syria. A decade ago, the choice in Syria was between a brutal regime with its boot on the neck of the majority of the population and an Islamist movement that sought the complete subjugation if not elimination of secularists and minorities.

The United States could not accept either option. Analysts often look back on Obama’s “red line” comment on Syria and consider it a great foreign policy failure of his administration. Yet it was fear of American military action that ensured that the US and Russia would work together to remove all chemical weapons from Syria. This shouldn’t be underestimated, as recent events might have unfolded very differently if the regime still had them. As it ensured there were limits to how much Assad could brutalize his population, Washington also kept the rebels fighting him at arm’s length, and sometimes made war on them.

The US in effect worked to make sure no side could win the civil war. Sometimes people see a policy like this that seems incoherent on its surface and attribute the outcome to malice. Maybe the United States just wants Arabs to be weak and divided, for the sake of controlling all the oil or protecting Israel or some other reason. A better explanation is that Elite Human Capital in the West, and to a lesser extent much of the international community, simply recoils when seeing certain actions taken by movements and governments. The American alliance with the Kurds has shown that working alongside partners on the ground is possible when there are shared values. But the Kurds were never going to take the capital, and since neither Assad nor Islamist rebels could be completely supported or totally opposed by the US, what American policy seemed to help facilitate was chaos without any larger purpose.

Yet the long-term effect has been to keep the Syrian conflict burning until the hope of something better emerged. America of course wasn’t alone. Others in the region also took the position that Assad killing his way back to complete domination and Islamists gaining territory were both unpleasant options, although Syria’s neighbors were more willing to accept the latter in the early days of the civil war and the former over the last few years. Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah were fine with helping the Syrian government reestablish control through pure force, but the rest of the world wasn’t, and this led to a stalemate. With ISIS reduced to relative insignificance due to the war that has been waged against them and the Syrian regime significantly weakened by international pressure, foreign support for rebels, sanctions, and the surrender of its chemical weapons, there was finally room for HTS to act.

The lesson here is that the American empire can do good even when its approach to foreign policy is self-interested or incoherent. Simply recoiling from evil does not seem like a plausible or acceptable strategy for a serious country. But as long as we do not go down the path of trying to nation build again as in Iraq and Afghanistan, a strategy of killing the most vicious terrorists and harassing the world’s most brutal dictators is far from the worst thing in the world that a great power can be doing.

We can think of geopolitics as a stage where competition between various interests and Hegelian dialectics work themselves out. New ideas pop up, like a modern caliphate or Russkiy mir, and they cause backlashes. Authoritarian governments always use the threat of chaos or extremists to justify their own harsh methods. There is a general trend towards liberalism since non-liberal ideas tend to fail by the standards of what people want. Nationalism and religious fundamentalism can be exciting in the short run, but if they lead to poverty and oppression, as they almost always do, the spell wears off and populations start looking for something else. That said, authoritarian governments can rule in defiance of the wishes of those who live under them for a very long time, and the groups that oppose them are often no less illiberal than those they seek to replace. One can picture American foreign policy as providing the financial support and firepower necessary to place limits both on the degree to which such forces gain power, and how far governments can go when using them as an excuse to crack down on their own populations.

The fall of the Assad regime was as easy and clean as one could hope for, but Syria still faces a difficult road ahead. Islamism, sectarianism, and the general dysfunction that is common in failed third world states remain as threats. Now, however, there is at least hope for something better, if not in the immediate aftermath of Assad’s overthrow, then at some point down the line. America’s role as the Hegelian hammer continues, as US Central Command announced dozens of airstrikes against ISIS on the same day Damascus fell. The United States should remain involved in Syria, knowing that while it can’t micromanage events, it can continue to guide events towards a better path, by applying selective financial, diplomatic, and military pressure to ensure that the most illiberal forces in the country are not able to capitalize on the opportunities that the fall of the regime presents.