President Bashar al-Assad ruled his country with an iron fist for 24 years, as his father had done for 30 years before him. When he appeared to prevail in Syria’s civil war, it was widely assumed he would remain in power until he was ready to hand over to his own son. Instead, his supposedly indomitable regime turned out to be a hollow shell, crumbling in only 11 days in the face of an advance by lightly armed rebels. As opposition forces converged on Damascus from the north and the south Assad fled to the airport and boarded a plane, according to Syrians in Damascus.
Russian state media reported Sunday that he had been granted asylum in Moscow. By the time the end came, Assad was isolated and alone, abandoned by his main international allies, Russia and Iran by an army that was no longer willing to fight for him, and by his minority Alawite constituents, many of whom chose to defect or flee to their coastal heartland. Assad made no public address in his final days in power and remained out of sight, except for one meeting, photographed by state media, with the Iranian foreign minister. A widely anticipated speech expected Saturday night never materialized. “He did not say a word of comfort to us, and we are disappointed,” said an Alawite woman in Latakia who had remained a staunch supporter of the president, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of rebel reprisals.
LEGACY OF HAFEZ-AL-ASSAD’S FIFTY YEARS RULE
He leaves a legacy of cruelty, fear and destruction that has disfigured the modern Middle East. Huge swaths of Syria are in ruins, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the country’s civil war and tens of thousands are missing, many of them vanished into the black hole of the regimes notorious prisons. The speed of the rebel successes stunned the world, catching off-guard an international community that had long ago given up on the Syrian opposition and had become reconciled, in varying degrees, to the seeming inevitability of Assad’s rule. But the warning signs of a collapse were there all along.
Assad missed multiple opportunities to reconcile with his opponents and the international community, and failed to implement policies that might have rescued his country and united his people, Syrians and analysts said. “He had no answers and no solutions,” said Amr Al-Azm, a former Damascus University professor who teaches at Shawnee State University in Ohio. “Just more of the same, the same intransigence, the same oppression.” “He brought this all on himself,” said Andrew Tabler, who founded Syria Today in the early 2000s under the auspices of Bashar’s wife, Asma. He later wrote a book about Assad and is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “In the end he lost everything and it cost the Syrians hundreds of thousands of lives.”
After Assad succeeded in putting down the uprising, there had been an expectation among his followers of a “peace dividend” — a revival of the shattered economy, at least some steps toward reconstruction, perhaps a new chance for acceptance on the global stage. But none came. Eventually, even those Syrians who remained loyal because they saw him as a bulwark against the Islamists, they feared became disenchanted, Azm said. The Assad family ran the country as though it was their personal piggy bank, and the lavish lifestyles of the president’s relatives, frequently shown on Instagram, fueled the resentment.
Meanwhile, the country was descending ever deeper into deprivation. According to the United Nations, ninety percent of Syrians are living in poverty and half are food-insecure. “His biggest problem was that he didn’t seem to care,” Azm said. “Things were economically extremely dire. When even his own people couldn’t put food on the table, he lost all support from his own base.” Assad squandered numerous opportunities to shore up his status externally and internally, with his stubborn refusal to make the kind of concessions that could have brought him international recognition and desperately needed economic relief. Russia, his chief ally, made strenuous efforts to bring about a peace settlement that would have been accepted by the West, but he refused to compromise when it came to his absolute hold on power.
HOW ASAD FAMILY SQUANDERED OPPORTUNITIES FOR RECONCILIATION
In the weeks before the rebel offensive, he rebuffed several fresh approaches from global powers that might have helped secure his rule. One, made indirectly from the United States through the United Arab Emirates, would have lifted crippling U.S. sanctions in return for Assad severing Iran’s ability to arm and sustain Hezbollah militants in Lebanon using land routes through Syria, said Bassam Barabandi, a former Syrian diplomat who defected in the early days of the revolt. Perhaps more fatally for his regime, he also rejected an olive branch from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was seeking to normalize relations with Damascus in return for efforts by Assad to keep Kurdish forces off his border, engage in dialogue with the Syrian opposition and accept the return of at least some of the millions of Syrian refugees who have sought sanctuary in Turkey.
TURKISH EFFORTS TO BRING BACK ASSAD REGIME FROM DISASTER
Turkey has long backed parts of the Syrian opposition and appears to have countenanced the rebel offensive as a retort to Assad’s rejection, Erdogan hinted recently. “We had called Assad. We said, let’s determine the future of Syria together,” Erdogan said Friday, expressing hope that the rebels would reach Damascus. “We did not receive a positive response.” The Turkish efforts “all failed,” Foreign Minister Hasan Fidan said recently in Doha, Qatar. “We knew something was coming.” Assad’s departure heralds an end to one of the most brutal dictatorships in the modern Middle East, one that stretched back to Assad’s father, Hafez, who seized power in a coup in 1970 and became president the following year. Hafez established the family’s reputation for cruelty with a harsh crackdown on a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982, which killed tens of thousands of people. Bashar assumed the presidency after his father died in 2000, and there were hopes that he would introduce reforms and modernize the centralized, state-run economy. But after a brief flowering of freedoms in the early 2000s, known as the Damascus Spring, he reverted to repression.
ARAB SPRING AND ASSAD REGIME
By the time the Arab Spring protests swept the Middle East in 2011, Syrians were more than ready to join in. Protesters surged onto the streets of villages, towns and cities around the country chanting for “freedom” and “justice,” only to be met with hails of gunfire from the regime’s security forces. Initially, Syrians aimed their protests not at Assad but at the corruption of the officials and family members surrounding him. In the first few weeks of the nationwide protests, he seemed to be willing to countenance reforms that might have appeased the demonstrators, according to Syrians involved in the discussions. Instead, he chose to crack down, unleashing the vicious civil war that would forcibly displace millions, help fuel the rise of the Islamic State and draw soldiers from the United States, Turkey, Russia and Iran into the country.
RUSSIAN INTERVENTION AND ASSAD REGIME’S RESPONSE
Almost from the outset, Assad’s army was bolstered by the presence of advisers and fighters from Iran, but it was the intervention of Russian warplanes in 2016 that definitively turned the war in his favor. Four more years of bloodshed followed before a ceasefire deal negotiated by Russia and Turkey brought the fighting to a halt in the north — freezing the conflict but not resolving it. Assad survived in Damascus, but two-thirds of the country remained beyond the control of his forces, with the opposition still holding an enclave of territory in the north. Kurdish forces, backed by the United States, controlled the east and northeast.
In 2019, the Arab countries that had broken ties with Assad and backed the opposition began reestablishing diplomatic relations with Damascus, starting with the UAE. The reasoning, Emirati officials said at the time, was to lure Assad away from his dependency on Iran and thereby reduce its expanding influence in the region. To that end, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries followed suit, and in 2023 Syria was readmitted to the Arab League after being expelled for its brutal crackdown on protesters. Yet for all the regional efforts to restore Assad’s standing, he refused to break ties with Tehran, lamented a former Egyptian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “We spent a lot of efforts,” the official said. “But he was in the arms of Iran.” In his final weeks in office, Assad seemed oblivious to fast-changing regional dynamics, as Israel’s military pummeled Hezbollah, which had contributed thousands of fighters to defend the Syrian government at the peak of the civil war.
ASSAD’S ADVISERS RECOMMENDED US OFFER TO SEVERE TIES WITH IRAN
Some of his advisers recommended that he accept the indirect U.S. offer to sever ties with Iran in return for the lifting of sanctions, Barabandi said. But Assad held firm, he said, thinking he might get a better deal once President-elect Donald Trump was in office. As rebels raced south toward the Syrian capital, Iran began withdrawing its forces and Assad’s time ran out. In the end, analysts said, it was the president’s intransigence, overlain with arrogance, that proved his undoing — speaking to a deeper failure to ever truly grasp the realities of his or Syria’s circumstances. “He was never the bright one in the family,” Azm said. “He missed so many opportunities because of his stubbornness.”
US DOLLAR POWER’S INFLUENCE IN WORLD TRADE
Part of what undergirds this power is well known: much of the world’s trade is conducted in dollars. The dollar is one of the few currencies that almost all major banks will accept, and certainly the most widely used one. As a result, the dollar is the currency that many companies must use if they want to do international business. There is no real market in which the Peruvian company could exchange Peruvian soles for Malaysian ringgit, so local banks facilitating that trade will normally use soles to buy U.S. dollars and then use dollars to buy ringgit. To do so, however, the banks must have access to the U.S. financial system and must follow rules laid out by Washington. But there is another, lesser-known reason why the United States commands overwhelming economic power. Most of the world’s fiber-optic cables, which carry data and messages around the planet, travel through the United States. And where these cables make U.S. landfall, Washington can and does monitor their traffic—basically making a record of every data packet that allows the National Security Agency to see the data.
The United States can therefore easily spy on what almost every business, and every other country, is doing. It can determine when its competitors are threatening its interests and issue meaningful sanctions in response. Washington’s spying and sanctioning is the subject of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman.
This revelatory book explains how Washington came to command such awesome power and the many ways it deploys this authority. Farrell and Newman detail how September 11 pushed the United States to begin using its empire and how its many constituent parts have come together to constrain both China and Russia. They show that although other states may not like Washington’s networks, escaping them is extremely difficult. The authors also demonstrate how, in the name of security, the United States has created a system that is often abused. “To protect America, Washington has slowly but surely turned thriving economic networks into tools of domination,” Farrell and Newman write. And as their book makes clear, the United States’ efforts to dominate can cause tremendous damage. If Washington deploys its tools too often, it might prompt other countries to break up the current international order.
US COULD SLOW DOWN CHINA’S ECONOMIC GROWTH
The United States could push China to cut itself off from much of the world economy, slowing global growth. And Washington might use its authority to punish states and people that have done nothing wrong. Experts must therefore think about how to best constrain—if not quite contain—the United States’ empire. Assad’s fall was swift and unexpected. But the signs were always there. Assad missed multiple opportunities to reconcile with his opponents and the international community, and failed to address his country’s economic suffering.
ASSAD FAMILY FLEES TO RUSSIA FOR POLITICAL ASYLUM
Russian state media reported that he had been granted asylum in Moscow. By the time the end came, Assad was isolated and alone, abandoned by his main international allies, Russia and Iran by an army that was no longer willing to fight for him, and by his minority Alawite constituents, many of whom chose to defect or flee to their coastal heartland. Assad made no public address in his final days in power and remained out of sight, except for one meeting, photographed by state media, with the Iranian foreign minister. A widely anticipated speech expected Saturday night never materialize. “He did not say a word of comfort to us, and we are disappointed,” said an Alawite woman in Latakia who had remained a staunch supporter of the president, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of rebel reprisals. He leaves a legacy of cruelty, fear and destruction that has disfigured the modern Middle East. Huge swaths of Syria are in ruins, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the country’s civil war and tens of thousands are missing, many of them vanished into the black hole of the regime’s notorious prisons.
WORLD STUNNED BY THE SPEED OF CAPTURE OF DAMACCUS
The speed of the rebel successes stunned the world, catching off-guard an international community that had long ago given up on the Syrian opposition and had become reconciled, in varying degrees, to the seeming inevitability of Assad’s rule. But the warning signs of a collapse were there all along. Assad missed multiple opportunities to reconcile with his opponents and the international community, and failed to implement policies that might have rescued his country and united his people, Syrians and analysts said. “He had no answers and no solutions,” said Amr Al-Azm, a former Damascus University professor who teaches at Shawnee State University in Ohio. “Just more of the same, the same intransigence, the same oppression.” “He brought this all on himself,” said Andrew Tabler, who founded Syria Today in the early 2000s under the auspices of Bashar’s wife, Asma. He later wrote a book about Assad and is with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“In the end he lost everything and it cost the Syrians hundreds of thousands of lives.” After Assad succeeded in putting down the uprising, there had been an expectation among his followers of a “peace dividend” — a revival of the shattered economy, at least some steps toward reconstruction, perhaps a new chance for acceptance on the global stage. But none came. Eventually, even those Syrians who remained loyal because they saw him as a bulwark against the Islamists, they feared became disenchanted.
POVERTY IN SYRIA WHILE ASSAD FAMILY LIVED LAVISHLY LIKE SRI LANKAN RAZA PAKSE FAMILY
According to the United Nations, 90 percent of Syrians are living in poverty and half are food-insecure. “His biggest problem was that he didn’t seem to care,” Azm said. “Things were economically extremely dire. When even his own people couldn’t put food on the table, he lost all support from his own base.” Assad squandered numerous opportunities to shore up his status externally and internally, with his stubborn refusal to make the kind of concessions that could have brought him international recognition and desperately needed economic relief. Russia, his chief ally, made strenuous efforts to bring about a peace settlement that would have been accepted by the West, but he refused to compromise when it came to his absolute hold on power. In the weeks before the rebel offensive, he rebuffed several fresh approaches from global powers that might have helped secure his rule.
ASSAD AND THE KURDS
Assad survived in Damascus, but two-thirds of the country remained beyond the control of his forces, with the opposition still holding an enclave of territory in the north. Kurdish forces, backed by the United States, controlled the east and northeast. In 2019, the Arab countries that had broken ties with Assad and backed the opposition began reestablishing diplomatic relations with Damascus, starting with the UAE. The reasoning, Emirati officials said at the time, was to lure Assad away from his dependency on Iran and thereby reduce its expanding influence in the region. To that end, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries followed suit, and in 2023 Syria was readmitted to the Arab League after being expelled for its brutal crackdown on protesters.
CONCLUSION
Yet for all the regional efforts to restore Assad’s standing, he refused to break ties with Tehran, lamented a former Egyptian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “We spent a lot of efforts,” the official said. “But he was in the arms of Iran.” In his final weeks in office, Assad seemed oblivious to fast-changing regional dynamics, as Israel’s military pummeled Hezbollah, which had contributed thousands of fighters to defend the Syrian government at the peak of the civil war. Some of his advisers recommended that he accept the indirect U.S. offer to sever ties with Iran in return for the lifting of sanctions.
