Philip Wasielewski

Bashar al-Assad’s fall from power has ended the Baath Party’s and Assad dynasty’s long rule over Syria. The Baath Party is secular, but the Assads are Alawites, a Shia-sect found mostly along Syria’s coast. Today, the force controlling Damascus is neither secular nor Shia but a Sunni coalition named Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which in an earlier incarnation in the Syrian civil war was the al-Qaeda (AQ) affiliate Nusrah Front. HTS is still designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department but HTS claims that it broke with AQ years ago and is Islamist but not jihadist. Still, there are many competing factions within this coalition from hard-core Salafists to Syrian nationalists in the Free Syrian Army. What direction this coalition will take Syria in is currently unknown. Because of political and religious differences within the rebel coalition, there may be another civil war in Syria within its ranks to determine this direction. 

So far, the West has benefited from the fall of Assad. Russia may lose its bases in Syria and therefore much of its capacity to project power into the Middle East and Africa. Iranian influence in Syria and its land bridge to support Hezbollah in Lebanon has also been lost. Millions of refugees may now return to Syria and this will relieve domestic political pressure on governments in Turkey and Europe, which have housed them for over a decade. However, these gains can be lost if the West does not keep an eye on which direction HTS takes. If it returns to its Nusrah Front roots then Israel will have just exchanged one security problem for another and counterterrorism efforts against AQ and the Islamic State will go back to square one. In many ways, the war over Syria’s future has just begun.    

Mohammed Soliman

Syria stands at the threshold of an unprecedented moment, one whose consequences ripple far beyond its borders. The Assad regime, long sustained by Russian and Iranian support, has finally crumbled under the weight of its failures. Armed opposition forces, dormant for years, have surged back to life, seizing Aleppo and triggering a domino effect that has left regime frontlines collapsing one after another. These cascading defeats culminated in Assad’s flight to Moscow and the end of his regime in Damascus. The endgame has begun, and its outcomes are poised to reshape the balance of power across the Middle East.

For the first time since the 1970s, Syria is undergoing a profound reordering. The collapse of Assad’s regime marks not merely the fall of a dictator but the unraveling of a regional axis painstakingly constructed by Iran and supported by Russia. Syria was the linchpin of Tehran’s ambitions in the Levant—a vital corridor to Hezbollah in Lebanon, a frontline against Israel, and a symbol of Iran’s strategic depth. Its loss fractures Iran’s axis of influence and signals the shaky grounds of the ideological and strategic project initiated by Ayatollah Khomeini. Isolated and abandoned, Tehran now faces a future defined by heightened regional vulnerability. Russia, too, confronts a reckoning. In 2015, Moscow’s military intervention rescued Assad from imminent collapse and secured strategic air and naval bases in Tartus and Khmeimim, solidifying its presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. From Syria, Russia projected power into Libya, the Sahel, and beyond, anchoring its broader Middle East and Africa strategy. Yet the unraveling of Assad’s regime imperils these gains. Should Moscow be forced to withdraw or significantly reduce its footprint, its hard power in the region and its ambitions for influence in the Mediterranean and Africa would diminish.

Meanwhile, Turkey has been playing its strongest hand yet in Syria. Ankara has outmaneuvered both Russia and Iran, solidifying its influence in shaping the post-Assad  landscape. This underscores Turkey’s emergence as a decisive power in the Middle East and a pivotal player in the broader geopolitical arena.

For Washington, this moment presents a pivotal challenge. The United States must decide whether it can block Russia from maintaining a military foothold in Syria. This is not merely about Middle Eastern geopolitics—it is about raising the costs of Putin’s adventurism in Ukraine, particularly as the conflict with Kyiv moves toward a protracted freeze.

The fall of Assad’s regime is nothing short of a Berlin Wall moment for Iran’s regional project. Within months, critical figures in its axis—first Nasrallah, now Assad—have been neutralized. Unlike the Soviet Union’s decline, driven by internal reforms, the collapse of Iran’s proxies has been enforced on the battlefield, against Tehran’s will.

The collapse of Assad’s regime does not merely redraw the map of Syria; it redefines the power dynamics of the Middle East. Iran’s ambitions lie in tatters, its regional project unraveling alongside the fall of Damascus. Russia faces an existential challenge to its Mediterranean and Middle Eastern strategy, and Turkey emerges as a leading force in shaping the region’s future. 

Nikolas Gvosdev

The events in Syria have been dramatic, but we should be cautious in our assessments as to what happens next.  Iran loses guaranteed access to the Mediterranean, but may regroup with its proxies in Iraq and Yemen. For now, the interim government in Damascus seems disinclined to try and force Russia from its key bases along the Mediterranean coast. Israel has taken advantage of the situation to forcibly disarm and degrade Syrian capabilities–especially its air force and air defense systems. Behind the scenes, the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad changes–but does not end–a series of dialogues between Moscow and Ankara and Moscow and Jerusalem on a series of informal arrangements that have worked to regulate competing interests. Given very mixed signals coming from the incoming Trump administration about the extent it plans to be actively involved in the region, neither Recep Tayyip Erdogan or Binyamin Netanyahu may be interested in completing eliminating the “Russian hedge” within the Middl East.

As we have seen, from Afghanistan in 1992 to Libya in 2011, unity is easier to maintain in opposition than in victory. Looking at color-coded maps purporting to show the control different groups exercise over territory in Syria ignores the reality that many of these groups rely on patchwork arrangements with local leaders and groups. The critical question now is the fate of the assets and structure of the Syrian state. It seems HTS would prefer to inherit intact institutions, but other groups may seek to dismantle or alter those arrangements. The most pressing issue is the relationship of the new interim arrangements with the Syrian Kurds, because how this is handled will determine the extent to which Syria can be rapidly stabilized.

Stabilization is important because European governments, under electoral stress, are hoping to begin a rapid process of repatriation of Syrian refugees. The migration crisis has been the single most important driver of instability in European domestic politics. A follow-on driver has been the energy crisis. Europe’s deindustrialization crisis is driven by the massive spikes in prices for energy since the start of the Ukraine war. As Europe looks to a long-term divorce from Russian energy (and North American LNG is still pricey), the attractiveness of developing pipelines from the Gulf to Turkey increases–but such projects depend on stability. Similar proposals for pipelines from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean have foundered on Afghanistan’s perennial crisis. 

Joshua Krasna 

One of the big issues here 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. 

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.