An unexpected juncture
The Assad regime’s fall voids many of the Middle East’s old certainties
What if Syria abandoned its hostility to the West and stopped menacing Israel?
The long battle to topple Bashar al-Assad may have ended this week, but the air-raids did not.
The day after Syria’s dictator of 24 years fled, no fewer than three foreign armies bombed targets inside the newly liberated country.
America pounded the remnants of Islamic State, a jihadist outfit that once ruled much of Iraq and Syria, lest it take advantage of the chaos to regroup and expand.
Turkey sent warplanes to help a proxy force battling a Kurdish-led militia it accuses of aiding terrorists.
And Israel bombed anything that might conceivably be used against it in a hypothetical future conflict, from suspected chemical-weapons facilities to the Syrian navy’s handful of decrepit warships.
Foreigners played a big part throughout Syria’s civil war.
Jihadists from around the world flocked to fight Mr Assad’s secular regime.
Iran, Russia and Hizbullah, a Lebanese militia, sent weapons and troops to prop up the dictator.
America and Turkey intervened to oppose particular rebel factions.
Both America and Russia have bases in Syria to this day.
A pivotal moment
All this hints at how strategic Syria is and how Mr Assad’s fall could change the region.
For more than a decade Syria has been exporting instability by providing a haven for extremists and sending out refugees by the million.
For more than 40 years it has allied itself with Iran, helping to develop an anti-Western axis that spans the Middle East.
And for more than 75 years it has made a showy hostility to Israel a central pillar of national politics.
These old certainties are suddenly in question.
Whether outside forces encourage change or derail it is equally in doubt.
The web of anti-Western alliances Syria has spun since Mr Assad’s father, Hafez, became president in 1971 is unravelling.
Its close ties with Iran are being cut.
On December 11th the new government’s leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, better known by his nom de guerre, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, said he was keen to keep Iran out of Syria.
That will further diminish Iran’s fast-shrinking clout in the region.
Israel has dealt hammer blows in recent months to two of Iran’s main regional proxies, Hamas in Gaza and Hizbullah in Lebanon.
Resuscitating Hizbullah will be much trickier without Syrian help, since Syria was the main conduit for Iranian arms.
Indeed, a whole new alignment is possible in Lebanon, too, since Mr Assad’s regime was the main power broker there.
These reversals seem to be inducing Iran to rethink its foreign policy.
Its proxies, by pulling it into direct conflict with Israel, have proved to be more liabilities than assets.
It appears to be shifting instead to more conventional deterrence, through its missile and nuclear programmes.
During Mr Assad’s final days in power, it launched a military satellite.
Some hawks within Iran argue that it should cross the nuclear threshold and test a bomb.
Iran’s strategic setbacks may also strengthen the hand of reformists who have long criticised foreign-policy hawks for squandering the country’s resources on foreign ventures.
They hope Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, will lend more support to those promoting diplomacy over confrontation and curb the army’s enormous political and economic influence.
Mr Assad’s fall also seems likely to create a rift between Syria and Russia.
To defend Mr Assad, Russian warplanes mercilessly bombed the now-victorious rebels.
In return Mr Assad granted Russia an air base near the city of Latakia and its navy access to the port of Tartus, its only foothold on the Mediterranean.
The air base is a useful way station between Russia and Africa, where Russia’s military presence has been increasing.
The naval base, meanwhile, allowed Russia to position ships armed with cruise missiles on NATO’s southern flank.
“This base is essential to us,” declared Viktor Chirkov, commander of Russia’s navy at the time, in 2012.
Russia wants to strike a deal to retain access.
A spokesman said the Kremlin had taken “necessary steps to establish contact in Syria with those capable of ensuring the security of military bases”.
Russian media hurriedly changed its label for HTS, the militia leading the new government, from “terrorists” to the “armed opposition”.
That is unlikely to win HTS and its allies over.
And whatever the fate of the bases, the damage to Russia’s prestige is done.
Its intervention in Syria in 2015 was supposed to mark its rebirth as a global military power.
That narrative is in tatters.
Fyodor Lukyanov, an analyst close to the Kremlin, argues that Russia is better off as a regional power focused on Europe.
“Moscow does not have sufficient military forces, resources, influence and authority to intervene effectively by force outside the former Soviet Union,” agreed Ruslan Pukhov of CAST, a think-tank in Moscow.
A shift in Syria’s alliances seems inevitable, but that will not necessarily make it more stable.
Whether it continues to spread conflict, drugs and refugees is of paramount importance to Europe, where politics was shifted dramatically rightward by an influx of Syrian migrants after 2011.
Mr Assad’s plane had scarcely left the tarmac before a number of countries, including Germany, which hosts 1m Syrians, announced that they would stop processing Syrian asylum requests.
Austria’s interior minister directed officials to “prepare an orderly repatriation and deportation programme”.
A German MP suggested giving €1,000 ($1,050) and a plane ticket to any Syrian willing to return home.
But without a modicum of stability and reconstruction, Syria is likely to continue to generate migrants, not lure them back.
There has been little talk from Europe of aid and investment.
In part that stems from a natural caution about the new regime, but it also reflects the overstretched finances of many European countries and the heavy burden of assisting Ukraine in its war with Russia.
Regional powers, too, may pass up the chance to help stabilise Syria.
Turkey dearly hopes that some of the 3m Syrians it hosts will soon return home.
But it also cannot resist the urge to press its fight against the SDF, a Syrian alliance led by a Kurdish militia, which it accuses of abetting Kurdish separatists in Turkey.
By the same token, the United Arab Emirates, which is one of the most obvious sources of finance for reconstruction, is neuralgic about anything that smacks of Islamist extremism.
It is unlikely to help much as long as HTS, a former affiliate of al-Qaeda, is the main force in the new government.
Standoffish Uncle Sam
How much America will help restore stability is also in doubt.
Donald Trump, the president-elect, was emphatic about Mr Assad’s fall: “THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
Elon Musk, his billionaire buddy, bemoans the waste of taxpayer dollars in Syria.
Joel Rayburn, a State Department official in Mr Trump’s first term who is helping to prepare for his second, is sceptical about HTS’s professed retreat from Islamist extremism and favours keeping sanctions in place until its intentions are clearer.
Yet lifting the sanctions is an essential step towards economic recovery.
Perhaps the biggest geopolitical question posed by Mr Assad’s fall is what it means for Israel.
Iran’s loss in Syria ought to be Israel’s gain. HTS does not rail against Israel the way many Islamist militias do. Mr Sharaa says he does not want Syria to get involved in any more conflicts.
“There are more opportunities for Israel in Syria than threats now,” says Carmit Valensi of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
The new regime is unlikely to pose a direct threat, argues Amos Yadlin, a former military-intelligence chief.
Yet Israel’s government seems to be acting on the opposite assumption.
On December 8th Israeli tanks entered the buffer zone that had separated Israeli and Syrian forces since 1973.
A team of Israeli commandos occupied the abandoned Syrian observation post on Jabal al-Shaykh, at 2,814 metres the highest point in Syria.
Israel says these seizures are only temporary and intended to protect the adjacent Israeli territory—but that territory itself was originally Syrian.
Israel occupied it in 1967 and formally annexed it in 1981.
Israel’s air force has also launched hundreds of strikes throughout Syria, destroying not only chemical weapons but also long-range missiles, anti-aircraft systems and ammunition depots.
It also destroyed Syrian fighter jets, although Syria’s air force, like its navy, is antiquated and of little threat to Israel.
Israeli officials argue that the weapons it destroyed might have fallen into the hands of hostile forces.
They also worry that HTS might strike a deal in which Iranian-backed fighters leave Syria but Iran continues to send weapons to Hizbullah via Syria.
Whether Israel’s aggressive military stance is the best way to head off that possibility is debatable, however.
It might just as easily curdle HTS’s apparent lack of interest in Israel into hostility.
As with so many aspects of Mr Assad’s fall, there is clearly an opportunity for change, but also a risk it will be squandered.
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