It may be said without fear of contradiction that events in Syria took most observers by surprise. In particular, the speed with which the Assad regime collapsed appeared to defy both logic and circumstance. While the principal focus of the commentariat has been to talk of which power won and which one lost, it is incumbent on scholars of International Relations to at least look at the origins and causes of this geopolitical disaster.
The “realist school” supports the hypothesis put forward by Ambassador Talmiz Ahmad that the overthrow of the Assad regime in such quick time could not have happened without the US, Turkey and Israel closely coordinating and orchestrating events in Syria. Ambassador Ahmad is not just a practioner who has spent an awful lot of time in the region but is also at present a scholar-practioner whose knowledge is formidable and therefore deserves to be taken seriously. The theory put forward by him has merit on the face of it, but as with everything else must be examined on the basis of available evidence. There is no doubt that there is total strategic convergence between US and Israel when it comes to Syria and that the overthrow of Assad was a goal shared by the two countries for a long time (see Jeffrey Sachs’ version of events below). But even the US must have mixed feelings of the new leader, Abu Mohd al-Jolani, taking over the reins in Syria; after all, there is still a bounty of $ 10 million on the head of al-Jolani. Turkey, however, is a different kettle of fish. For starters, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is a powerful military faction in Syria and this is basically a Kurdish coalition that has governed North-Eastern Syria since 2012 when Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) withdrew from there. It is thus hard to see any strategic convergence whatsoever between Turkey and the SDF. The US support for SDF has also been on and off. And then, there is the Syrian National Army (SNA) backed by Turkey which obviously resents the power of both SAA and more important, SDF. In this latticework of military factions, it is difficult, if not impossible, to think that somehow, suddenly, the US, Israel and Turkey closely orchestrated events in Syria and unseated Assad in December. Because it implies, implausibly, that SDF and SNA have somehow buried their differences, albeit temporarily. This then is a conundrum for those who believe in the US, Israel and Turkey getting together and overthrowing Assad within a relatively short period of time. At a mimimum, it is clear that further factual evidence is needed to support this proposition, which may well be forthcoming in the near future. That said, a respected retired Indian Vice Admiral who is associated with numerous think tanks in Delhi clearly confided, in anonymity, that the “neo-imperialist/zionist” theory is simply implausible at best and hogwash at worst.
In direct contrast to the above school, is the theory put forward by the respected journalist Praveen Swami in “The Print” on 10 December in an article entitled: The Assad regime fell due to its own failures, not geopolitical plots. As the title indicates, this “constructivist school” (my phraseolgy and I am taking liberties here) lays the blame squarely on Assad. The key portion of his article is reproduced below: “Although some accounts have cast the collapse of the regime as an Imperialist-Zionist plot, Assad knew the real problem faced him in the mirror. For two generations, the al-Assad family used cold cash and raw terror to hold together a complex ethnic-religious mosaic. Today, Sunni, Shia, Alawi, Armenian, Christian, and Kurd could fracture into warring communal-based emirates.” Among the sins of the Assad regime that Swami points out, the following stands out:
The Ba’ath regime stamped out the Islamists, killing tens of thousands in a brutal counter-insurgency campaign. To secure his regime against future threats, Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad staffed key positions in his regime with loyalists picked from his own sect, the Alawi. Large-scale development projects and revenues from oil, geographer Fabrice Balanche records, allowed Hafez to rent—not buy—the local tribes. The communal demographics of Syria explain how this happened. In 2010, the last year for which figures are available, some 65 per cent of the population was Sunni Arab, 15 per cent Kurdish, 10 per cent Alawi, 5 per cent Christian, 3 per cent Druze, 1 per cent Ismaili, and 1 per cent Shia. In other words, the Assad regime was not representative at all, was backed by outside powers like Russia and Iran (not counting Hezbollah) and had scant regard for human rights. The key contention is this: Without the domestic situation in Syria providing a fertile environment, there is no way the cookie could have crumbled the way it did.
Lastly, the redoubtable Jeffrey Sachs, who has emerged as a bitter critic of his own country’s foreign policy, puts forward his version by arguing how the “US and Israel destroyed Syria and called it peace”. He not only talks of Israel’s longstanding strategy to overthrow Assad, but also refers to “Operation Timber Sycamore” which was reportedly a billion-dollar CIA covert program launched by former President Obama to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. This they did through the CIA by funding, training, and providing intelligence to radical and extreme Islamist groups in Syria. This then is the “historical theory of IR” explaining how the US and Israel set about their goal to carry out regime change in Syria. Assuming this was true, the question still needs to be posed as to why the collapse happened when it did in Syria. And the one possible explanation is that the regime’s backers such as Russia, Iran and Hezbollah were arguably too weak to bail out Assad this time around.
A far easier assessment concerns which powers won and which ones lost. Conventional wisdom suggests that while Turkey has emerged as the biggest winner followed by Israel and the US, the biggest losers would appear to be Russia and Iran. As to whether this is a win for ordinary Syrians, only time will tell.
So, where does this leave us in answering the fundamental question: why did Syria collapse like a house of cards? It seems to me that there is some validity in all the three different explanations given above (there could be others as well). It would be highly irrational for a International Relations scholar to exclusively support one theory and ignore the others. An objective methodology would suggest attaching different weight to the various theories and then come to a rational conclusion about recent events in Syria. The bottom line, however, is this: the domestic situation in Syria was of paramount importance and therefore a necessary factor, even if not entirely a sufficient factor, in explaining the serious geopolitical events that occurred in Syria in the first week of December.
Diplomacy and Geopolitics 