Hot Take: Assad’s Fall and Regional (and Israeli) Security?

The fall of the Assad regime is the completion of the Arab uprisings, which progressed in a punctuated manner. The regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya fell in the first stage in 2011-2013. The second stage, 2019- 2020, led to the fall of the regimes in Algeria and Sudan and to great challenges to the regimes in Iraq and Lebanon, stymied largely by Covid limitations. Lebanon’s governance has not recovered from those events, and the state has been largely ungoverned and in an economic freefall for the past five years. The delayed (by Hezbollah, Iranian and Russian efforts) completion of the Syrian revolution and fall of its regime, pretty much complete the extinction of the “neo-Mamluk socialist republican” governments which morphed into one-person or one-family regimes governing in the region for 60 to 70 years. Assad was the last of the pre-2011 “republican” leaders to remain.

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A lot of the discussion that is going on now in terms of whether Syria will remain one state, break into statelets, be a source of regional instability, and how Israel and Jordan will be able to deal with these issues, is simply Back to the Future to 2011 to 2013, when all of these issues were significant, because it seemed as if the Assad regime was about to collapse. On both Jordan and Israel’s borders, there was a governance vacuum which led to the rise of local groups, utilized to an extent by those countries to prevent jihadi groups from taking root directly on their borders, as well as stem the entrenchment of Iran and Hezbollah forces in those regions. Israel made significant efforts in the ungoverned areas adjoining the Golan Heights both for humanitarian purposes and to create a local security architecture which kept threats manageable. That seems to be where we are going now, as well. It will be made harder by the lack of great power willingness or capacity to buttress the developing security and governance architecture in Syria, as the US and Russia did in the previous decade. On the other hand, Israel’s hundreds of strikes over the past days to systematically destroy Syria’s advanced military technological capabilities, and prevent them from falling into unknown hands, should serve to reduce the direct military threats posed by a state which, until 2011, was considered the main conventional military threat to Israel.

Turkey had been going through a hard and unsuccessful few years in the MENA region, which forced it to largely abandon dreams of muscular regional leadership and pursue rapprochement with Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt. It may emerge satisfied and emboldened by the success of its proxies and allies in Syria. It may well have more of a say and influence in internal political developments than the conservative Arab states, whose reconciliation with Assad over the past few years, culminating in his readmission into the Arab League, may well be seen, including by the new Syrian political forces, as backing the wrong horse. On the other hand, economic needs will prevail over anger, and the Gulf states will participate in the reconstruction of Syria if and when it starts, and – depending on if and how fast the situation stabilizes – may even consider assimilating it into their far-ranging plans for regional connectivity and for the Levant serving as part of a multimodal trade route (parallel to sea routes through the Red Sea and around Africa) from Asia, through the Gulf, to Europe.

The most significant strategic change here of course is the collapse of the Resistance Front, as well as the corresponding blow to Russia’s position in the region, which seems to be ever-improving since 2015. Hamas’ invasion of Israel in October led eventually to the decapitation of Hezbollah and to direct conflict between Israel and Iran for the first time, which until this moment has been an Iranian failure. The Assad regime during the events of the past year, had actually been playing a passive role, and its lack of activity against Israel weakened the Front’s ability to effectively respond to Israel’s dismantling of Hamas and then Hezbollah. The only component of the Front still effective is its newest and most junior partner, Ansarallah in Yemen, who continue to displace and limit world trade.

There is definitely the possibility that Iran’s vulnerability, proven by Israeli strikes, lack of significant conventional ability to do major damage to Israel, loss of its Lebanese forward base – which it saw as a key element of its balance of deterrence with Israel and especially the loss of Syria – its only state ally since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, but also its line of communications to its allies in the Levant – may push it to restart its nuclear program. That is what the alarmists are predicting, maybe rightly; However, Teheran’s leadership also seem to be quite concerned by the rise of Trump and what his presidency may mean for them. This may be seen as a time for Iran to test Trump’s willingness, expressed in the past, to go for a deal. The problem is that displaying weakness at this time may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy, and lead to Iran being the last Republic in the region to fall.

Israel has been able to shake itself off and implement in Lebanon steps that it had planned and prepared over many years to carry out, severely attriting what until October 7 was considered the most significant and immediate military threat, Hezbollah. But while prime minister Netanyahu is spinning the fall of Assad now as one in a series of successes in a grand strategy to reshape the region, we must remember that this all began with the great intelligence failure, operational failure, and human tragedy of October 7, and that the key strategic challenges of the future of Gaza – and the return of Israeli hostages who paid the price for intelligence failure and lack of preparedness on October 7- are as far as ever from resolution.

It’s hard to predict how this will all play out, and if October 7 has taught us anything, it’s how hard prediction is and how states have to build into their national security systems the ability to respond quickly and effectively to events, even in the absence of warning. This is the second major intelligence failure in a little more than a year. That is significant for Israel but also for other countries, who have now gotten major questions wrong twice and were blindsided. We need perhaps to be more modest about intelligence’s ability to predict major “seismic” events, and shape decision makers’ expectations correspondingly, though we will not be relieved of the necessity and demand to try and predict.

(First published by Foreign Policy Research Institute, December 10, 2024)