Syria’s collapse and the global balance

Some of the Syrian navy vessels destroyed by Israel, December 7–9

In the course of just ten days, starting November 28, the system of (Baath Party + military) governance that the Asad family had maintained over Syria for 53 years underwent a catastrophic and complete collapse. This collapse had been many years in the making; and now, it has numerous implications for the regional balance in West Asia — not least for the serious blow it has delivered to “Axis of Resistance”, the previously hardy alliance of regional forces working together to resist the cruel, expansionist assaults of the Israeli military. Asadist Syria had not been an active participant in those efforts, but it provided a key land bridge for interactions between the resistance forces in Iran/Iraq and those in Lebanon.

The severing of this land bridge will have significant, though almost certainly not fatal, effects on the capabilities of Hizbullah and its resistance allies in Lebanon. (We discussed some of these effects in the discussion I was part of in the Electronic Intifada livestream on December 11.)

A potentially much more serious effect on the anti-Israeli resistance may well turn out to be the re-emergence throughout West Asia of the same kind of harshly anti-Shi-ite sectarianism that has been publicly displayed by leaders (and rank-and-filers) of the victorious, al-Qaeda-style Hai’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) movement that rode into glory in Damascus on Sunday and Monday. (We discussed that, too, in the livestream. An imperfectly edited version of the transcript of our convo can be downloaded here.)

But even far beyond West Asia, the collapse of Asadist Syria, and indeed of the Syrian state itself in any recognizable form, and the manner in which that collapse transpired, will have stark — and as of now, only dimly predictable — repercussions on a global balance that has anyway been in an increasing degree of flux over recent years.

At the regional level, the most evident features of the collapse were:

1. The speed and breadth of the collapse itself, as nearly all arms of the state including crucially its once-feared military seemed to fall apart simultaneously, often long before the HTS fighting units even made contact with them. (Alastair Crooke referred to some of the causes of this in this December 10 discussion with Chris Hedges.)