The Middle East After the Fall of Assad
In a wide-ranging interview, the political economist Helen Thompson discusses how the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria has transformed the region. With an incoming Trump administration, the stage is now set for hawks to confront an isolated Iran.
A defaced poster of Bashar al-Assad is seen outside a Syrian Army recruitment center on December 26, 2024, in Damascus, Syria. (Chris McGrath / Getty Images)
- Interview by
- Samuel McIlhagga
Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, the nation has become a battleground for competing hegemons. The United States, Turkey, Russia, and Iran have all attempted to exert influence over a fragmenting Syria. This has led to unlikely alliances, such as the joint US-Russian campaign against ISIS in Syria or American backing for the anti-imperialist Kurdish forces in the North, which was partly withdrawn under the Donald Trump administration.
In a wide-ranging conversation, Helen Thompson, a scholar of global politics, energy, and history at the University of Cambridge spoke to Jacobin about the great-power politics within the Middle East following the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Seen from the longue durée, it is clear that American power within the region is waning. But the collapse of Hezbollah, Turkey’s willingness to project power across the region, and Israel’s sensing of Iran’s weakness is likely to increase, rather than reduce, tensions across the region in 2025.
Zooming in, how do you think material politics has impacted the fall of Assad in Syria? The collapse brings to mind the [Vladimir] Lenin quote, doesn’t it? “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”
There’s a sudden acceleration of historical forces in a short time. Are there longue durée, political, economic, and energy trends underlying the rapid fall of Assad that have been going on for much longer?
We’re still trying to get to grips with what has happened, sitting here in the UK, from the outside: it’s pretty difficult. I don’t think that there’s anything on the energy front that is decisive in explaining what has happened. Instead, we need to think about the impact of an economically weakening Iranian regime over some time: in its ability to support a client regime in Syria. I don’t think, in the period of [Joe] Biden’s administration, Iranian decline has been decisive, because the US sanctions haven’t been that toughly enforced.
However, I don’t think there’s any doubt that, if you looked at Iran over time, going back to 2018, when the sanctions were put back on after Trump ended the nuclear deal, Iran has not been in a good position economically. It has been quite difficult for either Russia or China to act as external economic support for Iran. The sanctions on Syria since 2020 [the Caesar Act was passed in 2019] did hurt the Assad regime, making it difficult to pay salaries in the army. That’s also had some effect.
Syria is not a significant oil exporter. To the extent that the country does matter in energy terms: it’s in the Kurdish area, in the Kurdish statelet, rather than in any part of Syria that Assad controlled until recently. I think that there’s a longue durée story, if you like, about the overstretch of the Iranian regime and the effect of weakening Iran’s ability to earn revenue from oil exports. But it’s not the crux of what has happened. We’ve got to think about the weakening of Iran by Israel, particularly since last April, accelerated since the device attack [aimed at Hezbollah operatives] and also the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House. This has incentivized [President Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan to increase Turkish leverage in Syria.
What’s your read on Turkish involvement in the current Syria situation? Obviously, there are directly Turkish-backed rebels in the north of Syria, used as a beachhead — especially to counter what they see as PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] activity in Rojava. But the link between Turkey and what used to be called the Al-Nusra Front, and now HTS [Hayat Tahrir al-Sham] in the area around Idlib, has always been less direct.
Turkey is this kind of odd player in the region, in the sense that it’s formally part of NATO, but it has a moderate Islamicist agenda and a kind of neo-Ottoman expansionist agenda. It also collaborates, from time to time, with Russia and Iran, not ideologically, but in a pragmatic way. Some consider Turkey a kingmaker in the region. What role will it play in the new Syria?
I don’t think you can understand what has happened over the last two weeks without making Turkey pivotal. I think it’s true that Israel’s actions against Iran, and Hezbollah in particular, created a strategic opportunity for Turkey. Turkey is the external state that was the decisive player in encouraging Abu Mohammad al-Julani to act. Not necessarily, I think, to bring down the Assad regime: I’m not sure that on November 27 when things began Erdoğan was thinking in those terms. But what increased pressure on the Assad regime?
You can’t separate Julani’s actions, or indeed, the subsequent actions of the Syrian National Army against the Kurdish statelet without bringing Turkey into it. After all, the actions against the Kurdish statelet were backed by Turkish air forces from December 6 to December 11 until, effectively, the Americans imposed a cease-fire. And in that sense, you might say that the longue durée competition around Syria for the last decade was between Turkey and Iran. Now Turkey is in the ascendant.
Do you buy the 2010s line that the Syrian civil war is not just a proxy conflict between Turkey and Iran, but also a religious, or semireligious, war between Sunni and Shia (and Alwalite)? I’ve always thought it seemed more complex than that.
I think it is more complicated than that. And I don’t think that you can think of Turkish-Iranian rivalry and reduce it simply to Sunni versus Shiite. I think that that is too simple. It is an element of Turkish-Iranian rivalry. If you think about it, historically, in terms of the continuities of territorial power in the region (over very long periods) — it’s Egypt, Turkey, and Iran.
You have similar delineated “spheres of influence” going back to the Ottoman Empire, the Safawids and Sassanians, that have shifted a bit over time but also have a level of continuity, right?
You might say that the interesting thing, in a way, if we start from that premise, is that there was a period after the Cold War ended when Assad had quite good relations with both Iran and Turkey. Relations significantly improved between Assad and Turkey in the years leading up to the Syrian civil war. Then they crashed very quickly. The Assad regime was in a great deal of trouble by, I’d say, 2012. Iran comes in and moves from being a state that effectively provides an external support structure for Syria to one where, you might say, Syria is a client state — underwritten by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah.
There’s that third organization that was like a front for Iran in Iraq and Syria [the Popular Mobilization Forces]. It crossing the border during the prime ISIS conflict years was also really major.
There’s Iraqi militias coming in to do fighting as well as the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah on Assad’s behalf.
I find it interesting that you go to Iran first as the prime, not great power, but large power, underwriting Assad. Obviously, in the mainstream liberal Anglo-American press, the New York Times, etc., the line was very much that Assad was a force of [Vladimir] Putin. I take it your interpretation is that Iran is the pivotal powerbroker.
What’s true is that Iran was absolutely pivotal in 2012. The Assad regime might have collapsed in 2012 without the Iranian intervention. Obviously, the Assad regime had lost control of a not insignificant part of territory in northeast Syria. It’s not like the Iranians could guarantee the territorial integrity of Syria for Assad in that period in the 2010s. Things were looking quite difficult for Assad again, even with Iranian help, in 2014 — because of the rise of ISIS and the caliphate. ISIS changed the context in which the external sponsors of Assad were picked. At that point, Iranian and Hezbollah troops on the ground were not going to be sufficient: air power was going to be necessary against ISIS.
Hence, you get the Russian intervention from September 2015. What’s interesting at that point in the decade is that you have a period of time, in the first nine months of 2016, where one is moving toward, effectively, American-Russian cooperation against ISIS. Between the period of the attempted Turkish coup through to late September 2016, the Russians and the Americans are actually planning to coordinate joint military action against ISIS. Then a plane gets shot down, and it’s all off the table. Even from a liberal perspective, if you like, before Trump took office in 2016, Russians weren’t even straightforwardly the “bad guys.”
In foreign policy circles, on Syria, there’s a much more pragmatic view of the alliances that can be forged. Even the US sponsorship of Rojava is a case in point of a “realist,” or at least pragmatic, alliance. Rojava is openly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist — a very odd alliance to have with CIA funders. In the crucible of those middle years of the 2010s, especially with the threat of ISIS, there seems to be a willingness to forge unusual alliances, no?
In the second half of the Trump presidency, the contradictions in American policy come to the fore — because, on the one hand, you’ve got the Americans using air power against ISIS, needing the Turkish air bases to do that. But when it comes to fighting on the ground in northeast Syria, they want the Kurdish YPG [Peoples’ Protection Units] to do that. That’s a big problem for the Turks. Once you get to late 2019, when it seems in Syria that ISIS is being defeated, and Trump wants to pull back from any American engagement — the corollary is that he gives a free hand to Erdoğan to move against the Kurds.
At the same time, that horrifies other people in Washington, because they think that Rojava is the one bulwark against the resurgence of ISIS. There is some parallel here between the Russian and Iranian situation. The Russians provided the air power, and the Iranians and Hezbollah provided the soldiers on the ground. The US provided the air power, and the Kurds provided the soldiers on the ground. When it comes to the crisis in 2024, for the Assad regime, it doesn’t look like the Russians were willing to do much beyond a demonstration of air power in the first few days — trying to defend Aleppo. Nothing came after that [from the Russians for Assad].
In terms of an analysis of causation. You have a protest movement that erupts out of the Arab Spring in the early 2010s that then finds its way into the Syrian National Army, which then splits off, you get this military-led, elite-led rebellion. Syria ends up in a war of attrition: combining five or six different sides. This has lasted since I was a teenager: a long time as twenty-first-century conflicts go. Suddenly the stasis dissolves and HTS manages to capture most of the main cities in Syria. I’m just wondering what you think the largest point of causation is. In your analysis, what’s the primary factor?
It does have to be the weakening of Iran’s position by Israel — in particular, the decapitation of Hezbollah. The reason there’s a caveat, or paradox, in Syria — when HTS was controlling Idlib, there were Hezbollah fighters up there that were affected by the cease-fire between Hezbollah and the Israeli government. Somehow, we need a causal explanation that sees the defeat, or the relative defeat, of Hezbollah as a massive change in the politics of the wider region. Not least because Hezbollah’s decline unconstrained Israel from some things that have generally constrained it since its withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.
Yet, the immediate trigger of events is going on in the northwest of the country and has got, at the very least, a Turkish green light to move. Then you need an explanation of how Erdoğan, at this moment in time, wanted to take advantage of the strategic change in Syria. You could explain Syria just in terms of Turkish-Iranian rivalry. But one probably needs something that takes account of the way Erdoğan is thinking about Trump’s imminent return to the White House. That brings back to the table, so to speak, the crisis that played out in the autumn of 2019 [between the US, Turkey, and the Kurds]. Erdoğan was able to do what he wanted to a considerable extent after Trump’s withdrawal from the region, but he did get hit by quite hard sanctions when he went further than Trump wanted.
What’s going through Erdoğan’s mind? Trump ran on a semi-isolationist policy slate. And yet, in terms of his probable appointees to prime foreign and defence policy positions, he seems to be going for old-fashioned neoconservatives, people who are fairly hawkish across the board. If I were Erdoğan, I’d be struggling to figure out what the foreign policy context in his patch of the world, especially northern Syria, is going to look like under a Trump administration.
I think Trump has been pretty hawkish on Iran. That was true in terms of ending [Barack Obama’s] Iran nuclear deal, putting sanctions back on Iran, and the criticisms he made about the Biden administration’s foreign policy toward the Middle East and North African nations, both while Biden was still a candidate and then when [Kamala] Harris became the candidate. The period when the Biden administration was trying quite hard to restrain Israel’s second big attack on Iran: trying to get them not to attack either oil facilities or nuclear facilities. Trump was very critical of that move by the Democrats.
I think the sanctions against Iran will be toughened, or enforced more tightly, by the Trump administration. I don’t think that will have the same economic effect on Iran as it did back in 2018. Back in 2018, Iran was exporting oil to many different countries, including European nations. Now 90-plus percent of Iranian oil exports are going to China. It’s going to be a lot more difficult to enforce sanctions that hurt China than it was to enforce sanctions that hurt European countries.
What do you think the fall of Assad says about the recent developmentalist and institution-building models in the Middle East? Parts of the Middle East and Central Asia were seen as a tabula rasa by certain segments of the Western foreign policy elite.
If one looks comparatively at recent US-led Western state-building experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then the earlier Ba’athist-, Arab nationalist–style institution-building experiment from the 1950s and 1960s, what emerges? The Afghanistan Islamic Republic [2004–2021] was very fragile and didn’t work as an institution-building practice. In the Iraqi case, the jury’s out. There was a period in the 2010s when it felt like the US-constructed Iraqi state was going to collapse, but it’s maintained itself, from the Sunni uprising in the early 2000s, up until now, which is quite surprising in retrospect. Then you have these longer-lived states, like Ba’athist Syria, which, a year or two ago, you’d have had some people saying: “These are the institution-building projects that have a long-term ability to last.” They’ve been around, in some shape, since the 1950s.
Yet, we’ve seen the final collapse of institutions built by Ba’athism in the space of a couple of weeks. I wonder what that says about how institutions are built, be that from the top down, by sort of hegemonic powers like the US, or, organically and in situ?
Several things are interesting about this. On the one hand, you can tell the story, in the way that you just suggested, about the continuity of the Ba’athist state in Syria from 1970 all the way through to 2024.
Didn’t Ba’athist Syria go slightly further back into the 1960s?
Let’s say 1963. I was thinking about Syria, for that moment, in terms of Assadist Syria. You could argue that the basis of Ba’athism originates from when there’s a coup that takes Syria out of the Egypt-Syria union, which isn’t a union in any kind of equal terms. The union effectively subsumed Syria into Egypt. That ended in 1961. You could argue that there’s a state structure that’s continuous from that point. If you think in those terms, then the astonishing thing is that beyond all the geopolitical junctures in the Middle East from that period on, the Ba’athist regime in Syria survives them all.
Perhaps most striking, in a way, is that Ba’athist Syria survives the end of the Cold War: given the fact that it had a Soviet security guarantee since the 1980s. It also survived the fall of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003 as the other existing Ba’athist state. In this context, it looks odd that Assad and Ba’athism can fall in a fortnight unless one applies a Lenin principle to Syria. Syria fell apart in a quite significant way; in retrospect, it ceased to exist, in some sense, from 2012 — from then there has been no territorial integrity. It’s being carved up in the northeast, it’s then going to get carved up in the northwest. Through that period, from 2013 through to 2019, ISIS effectively tried to establish a caliphate running through part of Syria and joining Iraq.
I mean the whole Sykes-Picot settlement [which was established in secrecy by the United Kingdom and France to divide up the remanent of the Ottoman Empire in 1916] almost breaks. I remember ISIS soldiers crossing the Syria-Iraq line in the desert and declaring Sykes-Picot over.
Absolutely. In a sense, it’s not that this regime fell apart in two weeks.
Instead, what we’ve been witnessing, for more than a decade, is the territorial disintegration of the Syrian state, along some familiar fault lines. If you look at the collapse from a very long historical perspective, if you look at the map where the French carved up the Syrian mandate after they got it in 1920 — they did not rule Syria as any kind of unified state — including carving out Lebanon. That territory never went back to Syria.
You might say that it was only in a relatively short period, if you look over a long historical period, that there is something that could be called a unified Syrian state. I think you could still argue that the unified Ba’athist state was always dependent upon an external guarantor — the Soviet Union in the Cold War period and then Iran in the period thereafter. Because Syria still had some use for the Russians — Russia was there, until a few weeks ago, to act as a backup for the Iranian support.
There’s an explanation a lot of people have reached for immediately: “Oh, Russia is overstretched. It piled its resources into the Ukrainian conflict, it’s in a phase of imperial overreach and therefore its ability to underwrite Syria has been affected — that’s why Syria under Assad has fallen so suddenly.” I assume you think that’s overdetermined?
It’s not that it’s insignificant in a sense. If you’re Putin looking at the prospect of the Assad regime falling, it occurs to you that you might think about sending some Russian troops there. But, in reality, you’re not going to do that when you’re fighting a war in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, I think that it is reasonable to say that the principal means of Russian military intervention in Syria since 2015 was air power. And in this situation that developed pretty quickly after November 27, 2024, I think it was clear that [Russian] air power alone was not going to save Assad. Someone was going to have to do the fighting: that wasn’t going to be Assad’s Syrian army, demoralized, scarcely paid, or Hezbollah, which was significantly weakened.
Was Iran in a position to say, at that moment in time, that it wanted to double down on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s presence in Syria? I don’t think so. Without anything like an effective Syrian government army, or the ability of the Iranians to do that much in the circumstances, it’s very difficult to see how Putin was going to say: “Right, what I’m going to do is send troops in.” Regardless of what was going on in Ukraine, Putin wanted to use air power in Syria from the beginning, and not ground troops.
There’s a theory that people overlay on top of these political phenomena and have been for a while now. The idea was found in [the fourteenth-century Arab philosopher] Ibn Khaldun and his Muqaddimah of peripheral nomads or warlords taking advantage of a reverse pendulum of historical forces, where the central state becomes “decadent and weak,” whether that be through capitalism or older ideas of corruption.
People got keen on this theory with the fall of the Afghanistan Republic, looking at the Taliban. No matter what you think about their politics, or how reactionary they are, they were these competent state-builders, in microcosm, through militias between the early 2000s and the 2020s. In addition, the state-building that was pursued by the US was achieved, partly, through proxies: NGOs, think tanks, BlackRock, and private mercenaries like Blackwater.
In Afghanistan, under US hegemony, there was no centralized vision of what the state should be, only competing outsourced forces. In contrast, the Taliban were consummate at the basics of state-building: learning on the sidelines.
I wonder if that will apply to HTS. We’ve had all this rhetoric about Julani reading Why Nations Fail. Is that just a meme? How much does it feed into reality? This is a long way of asking: Do you see HTS as an organization restricted to warlord and/or microstate status as they were around Idlib? Are they going to be able to successfully manage the diversity of Syria in terms of ethnicity, religion, political, and economic interests? Are they going to be able to build on momentum successfully?
I think it’s going to be very hard. Particularly, if you look at the fact that even leaving the Kurdish area aside, there are significant chunks of Syria they’re not in control of at the moment. You can see why Julani wants to present himself and these rebels as almost semi-technocratic: I think that’s nonsensical. But there’s a certain presentation of that going on — stressing detachment from ISIS, stressing no threat to Israel, no interest in the Israel-Syria border, or even particularly, supporting the Palestinians. There is no way that Julani can present HTS in any other way. If there’s the slightest whiff of ISIS about HTS, it’s going to be hard to get external recognition for them as a government in Damascus.
Erdoğan won’t want things presented as too radical either. The last thing that Erdoğan wants is a strong perception of a threat around the return of ISIS. Because that means he’s going to have difficulty in trying to claw back territory from the Kurdish statelet. The justification for the Kurdish microstate, in the US’s eyes, is to fight ISIS. An ISIS threat makes it harder for Turkey to deal with their “Kurdish problem.”
Do you think it’s worth drawing a parallel between HTS and the Azov battalion in Ukraine? Azov goes from being very explicitly neo-Nazi and far-right and openly described as that in the Western press during Euromaidan. Then you get to 2022 and the Ukraine war. Suddenly, Azov has this rebrand. Some pundits are very keen to describe it as a much friendlier, nationalist, semi-technocratic elite military unit.
I wonder if a sort of similar process of forgetting is going to be undertaken concerning HTS and its links and growth out of Al-Nusra and then beyond that Al-Qaeda. If we know anything about US foreign policy it’s that, actually, it can be incredibly pragmatic and also have a short memory. See, for instance, the transformation of American support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Ten to twenty years later, the US is fighting the Taliban, an outgrowth of that earlier movement, in a vastly different geopolitical dynamic. Is the goodwill toward HTS contextual?
I think that’s true. I think you can see some people who, in the past, have been pragmatic about these questions in the Republican congressional leadership, such as Lindsey Graham, who doesn’t sound quite so pragmatic this time round. This is where it is different from the situation at the beginning of the Syrian civil war, where, perhaps, there wasn’t intense discrimination in Washington about the rebels that they ended up de facto backing. Though, as we know, there was one point where you got CIA-backed rebels and Pentagon-backed rebels in actual conflict. I think that everything that’s happened since will make the US foreign policy establishment a bit more wary about which rebels they decide can be transformed into “our kind of rebels.”
The US has had a history of backing the Kurds and bits of the Syrian Sunni opposition — but they don’t feel like the kingmakers in this situation. Compared to Iran, Turkey, or Israel even, America feels peripheral to the emerging situation. Would that be right? Or would you say that they are still playing an important role in Syria?
No, I think that that’s true. I think that this goes back to the difficulty that successive American administrations have had in finding any coherent policy toward Syria. That was true under the Obama administration, it was true under Trump. It was only perhaps not true under Biden, to some extent, because, from about 2020, from the fall of ISIS, there was a territorial stalemate. That froze things for four years, which largely coincides with the Biden presidency. He was spared the dilemmas on which both Obama and Trump strung themselves out. Trump now absolutely has Syria as a major headache. Particularly when you consider that he was saying in his initial reaction, that the Americans should have nothing to do with what comes next in Syria.