Excellent writeup - I appreciate the positive view of US foreign policy here. It's easy to criticize and more challenging to demonstrate how the least bad path is still worth celebrating.
HTS should thank the heroes in the IDF for pursuing their enemies no matter where they tried to hide - whether that be Hezbollah leadership Beirut or Hamas leadership in Tehran.
On October 23rd, 2023 President Biden pleaded with Israel to not invade Gaza. In May of 2024, President Biden told Israel to "don't do it," when it came to invading Rafah. As of December 7th, 2024 - Hamas leadership is dead and decimated, Hezbollah is broken, Assad fled to Russia - and Iran looks weaker at any point than it has in the past 25 years.
The Trump administration should learn from this as it outlines its foreign policy goals for Ukraine and Taiwan. President Biden was so obsessed with this idea of preventing escalation that he ended up negotiating with himself and coming down like a ton of bricks on our allies rather than coming down like a ton of bricks on our enemies. We should be less afraid of other countries escalating than they should be of us escalating. Same goes with the late authorization for extended ATACMS usage in Ukraine.
No it's actually Trump's policy that probably took Syria down it was those Caesar sanctions those sanctions are devastating and the Assyrian economy such an agricultural is probably what wrong side down people can only put on misery for sale on
I think your article pays too little attention to historical US policy towards the Assad regime. Most of the US sanctions on Assad originate from Syria's inclusion on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism since the inception of the list in 1979 (Syria shares the "honor" of inclusion on this list with only three other states at the moment. Unlike Gaddafi's Libya and Saddam's Iraq, Syria was never removed from the list since it never made an effort to distance itself from organizations considered terrorist by the US government.) As a state sponsor of terrorism, Syria was not eligible for receiving any arms or economic assistance. Therefore, the US kept Syria at arms length and under sanctions during the entire pre-Syrian Civil War era.
So why was Syria included on the list of state sponsors of terrorism? Because it "supported" (in fact, tried to co-opt) the PLO in Lebanon. Notice that the issue was NOT human rights per se. Nor was it even Syria's attempt to annex northern Lebanon, although the occupation of Lebanon added fuel to the fire to the fire of Western discontent as attempts to seize territory by force are very, very destabilizing to the international system. In fact the 2003 Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, which largely determined US policy towards Syria during the War on Terror, doesn't mention human rights at all. It is entirely focused on Syria's foreign policy and WMD programs.
The reason this history is important is that it shows why US policy towards Syria differed from US policy towards (for instance) Saudi Arabia, which crushed its 2011 Arab Spring protests with US weapons and US diplomatic support. Saudi Arabia was never included on the list of state sponsors of terrorism because it did not provide much support to militant groups which opposed US-Israeli policy vis a vis the Palestinians, which was the main issue of concern when the state sponsors of terrorism list was first created. In fact, support for militant Palestinian resistance groups has always been the US's red line in the middle east, as shown by the U-turn in US-Israeli policy towards Egypt after Sadat supported the Camp David Accords, which included no Palestinian input and provided the Palestinians with no mechanism to engage with the Israeli government.
It's true that a lot of people began complaining about Assad's human rights violations in 2011, but there had been virtually no concern over human rights violations prior to 2011 (even though Syria was known to have an extensive secret police and political prison/torture camp system dating back to the beginning of Hafez al Assad's consolidation of the Syrian state.) But at the same time as US complained about Syrian human rights violations, it supported the violent crackdown by the Saudis on protests in 2011 and direct Saudi intervention in Bahrain to crush Arab Spring protests in the country.
Had Assad been provided with US weapons and security cooperation, I suspect that he would have been able to suppress the Syrian rebels before the Syrian Civil War erupted using methods no less brutal but far more effective, following the Saudi example.
In a nutshell: US concerns over human rights don't explain why SA and other Arab states enjoy US support but Syria doesn't.
As usual I think that the new Richard Hanania is too optimistic about the US-led, Fukuramist order's ability to actually promote liberal democracy. Yes, al-Jolani is saying nice things about how Christians and Shi'ites and other minorities will still be tolerated, albeit without the wild corruption and brutality of the Assad regime. Yet Christians are still skeptical enough to be fleeing - here is a Syrian Catholic archbishop saying: "This is the end of the great history of Christians in Aleppo." https://catholicvote.org/syrian-archbishop-this-is-the-end-of-the-great-history-of-christians-in-aleppo/
Obviously I hope that al-Jolani's moderation turns out to be sincere and that he keeps his promises... but the recent history of the Middle East gives plenty of reasons to be pessimistic.
Also, I think that in your Fukuyamist triumph, you have almost totally ignored the equally important events going on in Romania. Where last week the Constitutional Court just cancelled the presidential elections, not because they'd determined, after some sort of fair hearing, that there was credible evidence of fraud... but because they really, really didn't want the election to be won by a man with bad opinions about the US and EU who wanted détente with Russia. Look, if the judiciary can behave that way and not be overthrown (and so far there has been little armed resistance) then democracy in that country is just as fake as democracy in Iran (i.e. where people still get to vote sometimes, but election results are carefully controlled by the "Supreme Leader" and "Council of Experts" to ensure that the right kinds of people always win.)
And I know that you used to take a much harder line against judicial power-grabs in the US... at one point you attacked Roe v. Wade and Obergefehl v. Hodges as the antidemocratic power-grabs they were, and now you seem to like those decisions because they advance liberal civil-rights causes that you agree with. So is Mr. Hanania now an advocate for what one might as well call "post-Democratic liberalism?" Cheer on the side that is vaguely aligned with the US State Department, the NGOcracy, human rights bureaucrats, the European Union, and George Soros... and call it democratic without bothering to inquire into the details?
All the Romanian court has done is say they have to do over the primary. The judiciary can't pick the winner, they are just hitting a redo button while people get more information, and the decision was based on alleged violations of campaign finance fraud. I don't know if it was a good decision or not, but this is the definition of separated powers and an example of what's good in a Democracy. No one group or faction has complete control. If they could ban the candidate they didn't like without due process, that would be a clear violation of democratic principles but that's not what's happening.
The idea that, in Romania's system, "no one group or faction has complete control" is pure duckspeak - the Constitutional Court has complete control; elections are tolerated to the extent that the Court wants them to be. Why is a Russian social media campaign grounds to annul an election, but outside influence from the US and EU (which is much more common) isn't? Because the Court said it is. It has nothing to do with the constitution. We will find out, sometime next year, whether or not they let Georgescu run when they finally resume the election. In the meantime, though, I'm going to give the pro-democracy side (i.e. Georgescu and his voters) the benefit of the doubt, and call a coup a coup.
That’s completely illogical. Is the Constitutional Court passing new laws? Running the police departments? Giving orders to military commanders? Dictating foreign policy decisions and negotiating international treaties? Issuing government contracts for infrastructure projects? They have a very narrow kind of power. It’s a very strong power, but very narrow.
Passing new laws and running the police departments and all those things are usually done by elected officials. So if the Constitutional Court can cancel elections when the wrong guy wins, then yeah, the Court has all the power.
(It's worth noting that if this was really about having a "do-over" due to citizens not being informed about Russian involvement, then the Court would have annulled the 1 Dec parliamentary elections too. But it didn't, because the left-leaning Social Democratic Party got the most votes and had enough allies to form a coalition. Elections are only a problem when the wrong people win.)
That’s like saying the Governor has complete power over the legislature because he can veto some legislation. It’s nonsense. The court can force an election redo, but they can’t pick the winner. If no one changes their mind, then maybe the guy they don’t like still wins. That’s just checks and balances.
But the constitution doesn't even say that they can order the election redone. That's just a power that they granted to themselves by "interpreting" it. If they wanted to further "interpret" the constitution to ban certain candidates, they could do that to.
I think that further arguing is fruitless now. We will see early next year whether they ever decide to hold a new election in which all parties are free to compete, or whether they ban one or more parties, or whether they election gets postponed indefinitely. In the meantime, I figure you will just find other ways to show how much you love Big Brother.
North Korea is also a republic with hereditary rule, which began decades before Assad's regime in Syria, and is still going without any civil wars.
> It’s little wonder that it took so much brutality to continue such an unnatural state of affairs.
I don't think there was nearly as much brutality prior to the Arab Spring. Hafez Assad was able to put down Islamists quickly rather than fighting a prolonged civil war a la Algeria.
> 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.
I think religious minorities already got wrecked in Iraq.
> The lesson here is that the American empire can do good
It's too soon to tell whether this outcome is good at all.
> Simply recoiling from evil does not seem like a plausible or acceptable strategy for a serious country.
Neutrality has worked out fine for Switzerland & Sweden, though I guess you wouldn't consider them "serious".
> harassing the world’s most brutal dictators
As you've acknowledged on Twitter, Assad was an unremarkable person. The civil war itself pushed him to respond brutally, as anyone would if they expected their family or community to be slaughtered by Islamists otherwise.
> if not in the immediate aftermath of Assad’s overthrow, then at some point down the line
I can generally agree with your skepticism on these points, but the Arabs' republican dictatorships are definitely worse than their monarchies, and I think Hanania is correct to say they have a real problem of legitimacy.
If your only claim to authority is being the son of the previous guy (who himself wasn't especially great at governing, just at taking power), then it's a lot better for national stability if you can at least carry around a lofty title and a storied dynastic name and a defensible claim to being a 40th-generation direct descendant of Mohammed.
East Asians can make republican dictatorships work OK, I suppose, because they can at least govern as technocrats and achieve some legitimacy through economic growth or other national achievements. Even North Korea, despite being a dystopian hellscape, has real achievements far in excess of any Arab republic.
I'll agree the monarchies tend to be less bad, but that wasn't on the table in Syria. Instead it's an Islamist revolt, which in Iran appears to be worse than the Shah (a guy who inherited from another guy who pulled off a coup against a monarchy).
North Korea has accomplished the creation of nuclear weapons and the hacking of Sony, but not really economic growth. I guess they were also beating the hamstrung South Korean military when they invaded until the UN intervened.
Yes, there are no good options for Syria. But there's also a lot of room for improvement. So who knows?
I'll argue that the Islamic Republic of Iran, while not a place I would care to live, is a far better form of government than Arab republican dictatorships. It's basically a semi-constitutional monarchy in which the monarch is chosen from a group of legitimate religious scholars. Again, that at least offers a basis for legitimacy and stability.
But I wouldn't hold out hope that Syria will function as well as Iran. There's a critical difference between a popular religious scholar who arises via mass political means and a religious warlord who arises by having the best-functioning army at the time of state collapse.
As for North Korea:
Don't forget the rockets!
And yes, I would argue that North Korea's achievements in that war still far exceed the uniquely poor military achievements of modern Arab states. So poor, in fact, that efforts to quantify national military power objectively seem to require a large "Arab penalty", even after trying to account for everything else.
You can read my entire comment here above, but anyway, one can believe that Assad is a total piece of shit while still fearing that what replaces him could be even worse. Taleb had (has?) this position:
Think of it this way: There were plenty of reasons to dislike the Russian Tsar and the Iranian Shah before 1917 and 1979, respectively. But once they got overthrown, did Russians and Iranians really end up becoming better off?
Good article, but I'm less sure about the hypothesis that a brutal regime can't survive for a very long time without a lot of popular legitimacy, at least in some cases. North Korea is still going strong, after all, and the Bolsheviks/Communists in Russia have also managed to maintain power for over seven decades prior to their whole house of cards collapsing (in large part due to the elites themselves no longer believing in it). We can also look at present-day Taliban-ruled Afghanistan: Do you expect that regime to collapse in a decade or two or three due to its extremely oppressive policies?
As a side note, while regime change has often resulted in a lot of optimism, its benefits have often been mixed. Both Tsarist Russia and the Shah's Iran, in spite of them being relatively brutal, were much better in comparison to what came after them. The Afghan King was certainly an improvement over both Communists and the Taliban as well, as was Cambodia's Sihanouk an improvement over the Khmer Rouge. For that matter, Imperial Germany was much better than Nazi Germany was. Sometimes people yearn for a better future, and their ambitions should certainly be supported, but ultimately end up getting something even worse than the regime that they had previously overthrown. One might have wanted the Russian Tsar or the Iranian Shah out of power without wanting Bolshevik fanatics or Islamist fanatics (wizards) to replace them, but the problem is that the other political forces in Russia and Iran back then were too incompetent to prevent this outcome once the Tsar and Shah, respectively, were overthrown by their own people.
Arguably, the best move for the US and the West right now would probably be to offer sanctions relief for Syria in exchange for the creation of at least a relatively liberal and democratic regime over there. But I don't know if Syria's new leadership would actually accept this. The Taliban haven't, after all. They prefer oppressing women and minorities too much.
Richard Narnia I'm going to slightly critique you here Nadia it is true that conservatives generally do have a lower IQ than liberals but that's changing in Edward Dunn's book the past of my future country he lays it out well the fertility rate of liberals who have an IQ above 140 is 1.3 well below what demographers called the replacement rate conservatives with the similar IQ happy birthday to 2.4 and Nike is partly hair anymore so these conservatives with their hierarchy will become more numerous in the future than these levels because liberals embrace maladaptive things like transgenderism homosexuality and anti-natalism
I'm with you on opposing reflexive anti-Americanism (I live here after all), but I have my doubts the Syrians are going to be that much better off, especially after a few months when the USA is distracted by whatever Trump or Taylor Swift is doing. I think the Syrians would be better off with fewer civil wars--other than that I don't think the change of dictator is going to matter all that much overall.
After the Iraq War I've pretty much lost all faith in the USA's ability to have any kind of an effective foreign policy in the Middle East except for killing guys like Bin Laden who mess with us directly. You kill a few thousand of ours, we'll go to war with you. Otherwise, we'll leave you alone. We don't understand that part of the world and they don't want us there anyway.
It's also not clear to me that liberalism is better than, say, exam-based bureaucracy in China. But the Chinese are used to that form of government and it's adapted to their culture--we shouldn't try to adopt it here. There's really no reason to try to spread democracy around the world like it's 2005. There's no end of history and no final form of government--it's just one damn thing after another. Maybe climate change will cause the collapse of our overnetworked society; maybe not. What will 2100 look like? Who knows? We'll find out in 2100...those of us who are still alive, anyway.
Excellent writeup - I appreciate the positive view of US foreign policy here. It's easy to criticize and more challenging to demonstrate how the least bad path is still worth celebrating.
HTS should thank the heroes in the IDF for pursuing their enemies no matter where they tried to hide - whether that be Hezbollah leadership Beirut or Hamas leadership in Tehran.
On October 23rd, 2023 President Biden pleaded with Israel to not invade Gaza. In May of 2024, President Biden told Israel to "don't do it," when it came to invading Rafah. As of December 7th, 2024 - Hamas leadership is dead and decimated, Hezbollah is broken, Assad fled to Russia - and Iran looks weaker at any point than it has in the past 25 years.
The Trump administration should learn from this as it outlines its foreign policy goals for Ukraine and Taiwan. President Biden was so obsessed with this idea of preventing escalation that he ended up negotiating with himself and coming down like a ton of bricks on our allies rather than coming down like a ton of bricks on our enemies. We should be less afraid of other countries escalating than they should be of us escalating. Same goes with the late authorization for extended ATACMS usage in Ukraine.
No it's actually Trump's policy that probably took Syria down it was those Caesar sanctions those sanctions are devastating and the Assyrian economy such an agricultural is probably what wrong side down people can only put on misery for sale on
Israel was pursuing Shia militia in Iraq? I thought that was left to the US.
You’re correct. I’ll amend it. Thank you.
I think your article pays too little attention to historical US policy towards the Assad regime. Most of the US sanctions on Assad originate from Syria's inclusion on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism since the inception of the list in 1979 (Syria shares the "honor" of inclusion on this list with only three other states at the moment. Unlike Gaddafi's Libya and Saddam's Iraq, Syria was never removed from the list since it never made an effort to distance itself from organizations considered terrorist by the US government.) As a state sponsor of terrorism, Syria was not eligible for receiving any arms or economic assistance. Therefore, the US kept Syria at arms length and under sanctions during the entire pre-Syrian Civil War era.
So why was Syria included on the list of state sponsors of terrorism? Because it "supported" (in fact, tried to co-opt) the PLO in Lebanon. Notice that the issue was NOT human rights per se. Nor was it even Syria's attempt to annex northern Lebanon, although the occupation of Lebanon added fuel to the fire to the fire of Western discontent as attempts to seize territory by force are very, very destabilizing to the international system. In fact the 2003 Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, which largely determined US policy towards Syria during the War on Terror, doesn't mention human rights at all. It is entirely focused on Syria's foreign policy and WMD programs.
The reason this history is important is that it shows why US policy towards Syria differed from US policy towards (for instance) Saudi Arabia, which crushed its 2011 Arab Spring protests with US weapons and US diplomatic support. Saudi Arabia was never included on the list of state sponsors of terrorism because it did not provide much support to militant groups which opposed US-Israeli policy vis a vis the Palestinians, which was the main issue of concern when the state sponsors of terrorism list was first created. In fact, support for militant Palestinian resistance groups has always been the US's red line in the middle east, as shown by the U-turn in US-Israeli policy towards Egypt after Sadat supported the Camp David Accords, which included no Palestinian input and provided the Palestinians with no mechanism to engage with the Israeli government.
It's true that a lot of people began complaining about Assad's human rights violations in 2011, but there had been virtually no concern over human rights violations prior to 2011 (even though Syria was known to have an extensive secret police and political prison/torture camp system dating back to the beginning of Hafez al Assad's consolidation of the Syrian state.) But at the same time as US complained about Syrian human rights violations, it supported the violent crackdown by the Saudis on protests in 2011 and direct Saudi intervention in Bahrain to crush Arab Spring protests in the country.
Had Assad been provided with US weapons and security cooperation, I suspect that he would have been able to suppress the Syrian rebels before the Syrian Civil War erupted using methods no less brutal but far more effective, following the Saudi example.
In a nutshell: US concerns over human rights don't explain why SA and other Arab states enjoy US support but Syria doesn't.
excellent article.
As usual I think that the new Richard Hanania is too optimistic about the US-led, Fukuramist order's ability to actually promote liberal democracy. Yes, al-Jolani is saying nice things about how Christians and Shi'ites and other minorities will still be tolerated, albeit without the wild corruption and brutality of the Assad regime. Yet Christians are still skeptical enough to be fleeing - here is a Syrian Catholic archbishop saying: "This is the end of the great history of Christians in Aleppo." https://catholicvote.org/syrian-archbishop-this-is-the-end-of-the-great-history-of-christians-in-aleppo/
Obviously I hope that al-Jolani's moderation turns out to be sincere and that he keeps his promises... but the recent history of the Middle East gives plenty of reasons to be pessimistic.
Also, I think that in your Fukuyamist triumph, you have almost totally ignored the equally important events going on in Romania. Where last week the Constitutional Court just cancelled the presidential elections, not because they'd determined, after some sort of fair hearing, that there was credible evidence of fraud... but because they really, really didn't want the election to be won by a man with bad opinions about the US and EU who wanted détente with Russia. Look, if the judiciary can behave that way and not be overthrown (and so far there has been little armed resistance) then democracy in that country is just as fake as democracy in Iran (i.e. where people still get to vote sometimes, but election results are carefully controlled by the "Supreme Leader" and "Council of Experts" to ensure that the right kinds of people always win.)
And I know that you used to take a much harder line against judicial power-grabs in the US... at one point you attacked Roe v. Wade and Obergefehl v. Hodges as the antidemocratic power-grabs they were, and now you seem to like those decisions because they advance liberal civil-rights causes that you agree with. So is Mr. Hanania now an advocate for what one might as well call "post-Democratic liberalism?" Cheer on the side that is vaguely aligned with the US State Department, the NGOcracy, human rights bureaucrats, the European Union, and George Soros... and call it democratic without bothering to inquire into the details?
All the Romanian court has done is say they have to do over the primary. The judiciary can't pick the winner, they are just hitting a redo button while people get more information, and the decision was based on alleged violations of campaign finance fraud. I don't know if it was a good decision or not, but this is the definition of separated powers and an example of what's good in a Democracy. No one group or faction has complete control. If they could ban the candidate they didn't like without due process, that would be a clear violation of democratic principles but that's not what's happening.
The Romanian court decision to have a do-over is trash.
Its justification amounts to little more than criticism of how social media works.
The idea that, in Romania's system, "no one group or faction has complete control" is pure duckspeak - the Constitutional Court has complete control; elections are tolerated to the extent that the Court wants them to be. Why is a Russian social media campaign grounds to annul an election, but outside influence from the US and EU (which is much more common) isn't? Because the Court said it is. It has nothing to do with the constitution. We will find out, sometime next year, whether or not they let Georgescu run when they finally resume the election. In the meantime, though, I'm going to give the pro-democracy side (i.e. Georgescu and his voters) the benefit of the doubt, and call a coup a coup.
That’s completely illogical. Is the Constitutional Court passing new laws? Running the police departments? Giving orders to military commanders? Dictating foreign policy decisions and negotiating international treaties? Issuing government contracts for infrastructure projects? They have a very narrow kind of power. It’s a very strong power, but very narrow.
Passing new laws and running the police departments and all those things are usually done by elected officials. So if the Constitutional Court can cancel elections when the wrong guy wins, then yeah, the Court has all the power.
(It's worth noting that if this was really about having a "do-over" due to citizens not being informed about Russian involvement, then the Court would have annulled the 1 Dec parliamentary elections too. But it didn't, because the left-leaning Social Democratic Party got the most votes and had enough allies to form a coalition. Elections are only a problem when the wrong people win.)
That’s like saying the Governor has complete power over the legislature because he can veto some legislation. It’s nonsense. The court can force an election redo, but they can’t pick the winner. If no one changes their mind, then maybe the guy they don’t like still wins. That’s just checks and balances.
But the constitution doesn't even say that they can order the election redone. That's just a power that they granted to themselves by "interpreting" it. If they wanted to further "interpret" the constitution to ban certain candidates, they could do that to.
I think that further arguing is fruitless now. We will see early next year whether they ever decide to hold a new election in which all parties are free to compete, or whether they ban one or more parties, or whether they election gets postponed indefinitely. In the meantime, I figure you will just find other ways to show how much you love Big Brother.
North Korea is also a republic with hereditary rule, which began decades before Assad's regime in Syria, and is still going without any civil wars.
> It’s little wonder that it took so much brutality to continue such an unnatural state of affairs.
I don't think there was nearly as much brutality prior to the Arab Spring. Hafez Assad was able to put down Islamists quickly rather than fighting a prolonged civil war a la Algeria.
> 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.
I think religious minorities already got wrecked in Iraq.
> The lesson here is that the American empire can do good
It's too soon to tell whether this outcome is good at all.
> Simply recoiling from evil does not seem like a plausible or acceptable strategy for a serious country.
Neutrality has worked out fine for Switzerland & Sweden, though I guess you wouldn't consider them "serious".
> harassing the world’s most brutal dictators
As you've acknowledged on Twitter, Assad was an unremarkable person. The civil war itself pushed him to respond brutally, as anyone would if they expected their family or community to be slaughtered by Islamists otherwise.
> if not in the immediate aftermath of Assad’s overthrow, then at some point down the line
Without a time limit, this is unfalsifiable.
I can generally agree with your skepticism on these points, but the Arabs' republican dictatorships are definitely worse than their monarchies, and I think Hanania is correct to say they have a real problem of legitimacy.
If your only claim to authority is being the son of the previous guy (who himself wasn't especially great at governing, just at taking power), then it's a lot better for national stability if you can at least carry around a lofty title and a storied dynastic name and a defensible claim to being a 40th-generation direct descendant of Mohammed.
East Asians can make republican dictatorships work OK, I suppose, because they can at least govern as technocrats and achieve some legitimacy through economic growth or other national achievements. Even North Korea, despite being a dystopian hellscape, has real achievements far in excess of any Arab republic.
I'll agree the monarchies tend to be less bad, but that wasn't on the table in Syria. Instead it's an Islamist revolt, which in Iran appears to be worse than the Shah (a guy who inherited from another guy who pulled off a coup against a monarchy).
North Korea has accomplished the creation of nuclear weapons and the hacking of Sony, but not really economic growth. I guess they were also beating the hamstrung South Korean military when they invaded until the UN intervened.
Yes, there are no good options for Syria. But there's also a lot of room for improvement. So who knows?
I'll argue that the Islamic Republic of Iran, while not a place I would care to live, is a far better form of government than Arab republican dictatorships. It's basically a semi-constitutional monarchy in which the monarch is chosen from a group of legitimate religious scholars. Again, that at least offers a basis for legitimacy and stability.
But I wouldn't hold out hope that Syria will function as well as Iran. There's a critical difference between a popular religious scholar who arises via mass political means and a religious warlord who arises by having the best-functioning army at the time of state collapse.
As for North Korea:
Don't forget the rockets!
And yes, I would argue that North Korea's achievements in that war still far exceed the uniquely poor military achievements of modern Arab states. So poor, in fact, that efforts to quantify national military power objectively seem to require a large "Arab penalty", even after trying to account for everything else.
Persians are arguably more competent than Arabs. Persian intellectuals basically took over Islam once the Persians were converted.
I agree.
found an error:
“ . . . a brutal regime with its throat on the neck of the . . . “
otherwise, though, i thought the piece was excellent. well done as usual.
Thanks
You can read my entire comment here above, but anyway, one can believe that Assad is a total piece of shit while still fearing that what replaces him could be even worse. Taleb had (has?) this position:
https://medium.com/opacity/the-syrian-war-condensed-a-more-rigorous-way-to-look-at-the-conflict-f841404c3b1d
Think of it this way: There were plenty of reasons to dislike the Russian Tsar and the Iranian Shah before 1917 and 1979, respectively. But once they got overthrown, did Russians and Iranians really end up becoming better off?
Good article, but I'm less sure about the hypothesis that a brutal regime can't survive for a very long time without a lot of popular legitimacy, at least in some cases. North Korea is still going strong, after all, and the Bolsheviks/Communists in Russia have also managed to maintain power for over seven decades prior to their whole house of cards collapsing (in large part due to the elites themselves no longer believing in it). We can also look at present-day Taliban-ruled Afghanistan: Do you expect that regime to collapse in a decade or two or three due to its extremely oppressive policies?
As a side note, while regime change has often resulted in a lot of optimism, its benefits have often been mixed. Both Tsarist Russia and the Shah's Iran, in spite of them being relatively brutal, were much better in comparison to what came after them. The Afghan King was certainly an improvement over both Communists and the Taliban as well, as was Cambodia's Sihanouk an improvement over the Khmer Rouge. For that matter, Imperial Germany was much better than Nazi Germany was. Sometimes people yearn for a better future, and their ambitions should certainly be supported, but ultimately end up getting something even worse than the regime that they had previously overthrown. One might have wanted the Russian Tsar or the Iranian Shah out of power without wanting Bolshevik fanatics or Islamist fanatics (wizards) to replace them, but the problem is that the other political forces in Russia and Iran back then were too incompetent to prevent this outcome once the Tsar and Shah, respectively, were overthrown by their own people.
Arguably, the best move for the US and the West right now would probably be to offer sanctions relief for Syria in exchange for the creation of at least a relatively liberal and democratic regime over there. But I don't know if Syria's new leadership would actually accept this. The Taliban haven't, after all. They prefer oppressing women and minorities too much.
Nobody can still say what the new Syrian state would be but these first steps look like encouraging*: https://www.sotwe.com/tweet/1866086905571655990
*Of course Assadist righoids will say this is another proof Jolani is a woke Quaedist…
That appears to be in French, and quickly gets blocked by a popup that isn't easily removed.
Translation:
"Syria: The opposition groups leadership has issued a directive banning any interference with women's dress."
Richard Narnia I'm going to slightly critique you here Nadia it is true that conservatives generally do have a lower IQ than liberals but that's changing in Edward Dunn's book the past of my future country he lays it out well the fertility rate of liberals who have an IQ above 140 is 1.3 well below what demographers called the replacement rate conservatives with the similar IQ happy birthday to 2.4 and Nike is partly hair anymore so these conservatives with their hierarchy will become more numerous in the future than these levels because liberals embrace maladaptive things like transgenderism homosexuality and anti-natalism
I'm with you on opposing reflexive anti-Americanism (I live here after all), but I have my doubts the Syrians are going to be that much better off, especially after a few months when the USA is distracted by whatever Trump or Taylor Swift is doing. I think the Syrians would be better off with fewer civil wars--other than that I don't think the change of dictator is going to matter all that much overall.
After the Iraq War I've pretty much lost all faith in the USA's ability to have any kind of an effective foreign policy in the Middle East except for killing guys like Bin Laden who mess with us directly. You kill a few thousand of ours, we'll go to war with you. Otherwise, we'll leave you alone. We don't understand that part of the world and they don't want us there anyway.
It's also not clear to me that liberalism is better than, say, exam-based bureaucracy in China. But the Chinese are used to that form of government and it's adapted to their culture--we shouldn't try to adopt it here. There's really no reason to try to spread democracy around the world like it's 2005. There's no end of history and no final form of government--it's just one damn thing after another. Maybe climate change will cause the collapse of our overnetworked society; maybe not. What will 2100 look like? Who knows? We'll find out in 2100...those of us who are still alive, anyway.
Sorry removing for all CAPS