The Syrian Consequence: Iran Goes “Defensive”

Flag of Iran

Syria was critical for Iran’s influence in the Arab world. For 40 years the Iranians could project power via Syria and Hezbollah, but the collapse of the Assad regime means Syria’s role as buffer and distraction has ended. So, what’s next for Iran?

With Hezbollah in Lebanon severely weakened and Hamas constrained in Gaza, there’s not a whole lot of reliable proxies distracting regional powers. As eyes turn to Iran, it will need to shift its focus to threats that are closer to home. We’re talking Pakistan, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

As these regional adversaries begin putting pressure on the Iranians, they will likely respond more aggressively than we’ve seen in recent times. This could lead to heightened tensions and potential conflict with the likes of Saudi Arabia.

This marks a larger shift in the Middle East, as regional instability moves eastward toward Iran’s borders.

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Transcript

Hello, everybody. I’m here coming to you from Okura Kuru in New Zealand. Today we’re going to talk about, more consequences of the Syrian civil war coming to an abrupt shift with the fall of the Assad regime. And today we’re going to talk specifically about Iran. Now, Iran’s primary method for intervening in affairs in the Arab world has been through Syria, because here you have a nominally Arab Sunni state in the middle of the region. 

Now, Syria has never been ruled by the Sunni Arabs in the modern age. It’s always been by the Assad family, who are a minority called Alawites, which are generally considered to be a heretical sect. But by influencing, affecting, emboldening and empowering the Assad dynasty, the Iranians were basically able to keep everyone on their toes and off balance. 

One of the things to keep in mind if you’re a country like Iran, which is basically a mountain fortress, is that, if everyone can concentrate on you, you don’t stand a chance. So the trick for successful management is to make sure people are occupied with other problems. And in a world where the dominant superpower is a naval power, the United States. 

You want to keep them locked down with concerns on land somewhere else. And so that’s why the Iranians were always active in Syria. That’s why the Russians were active in Syria. It was just a distraction play more than anything else. Well, now that Syria has fallen, now that the Assads are gone, now that Syria is going to find a different course, Iran is discovering that everything that has worked for in the last 40 years is kind of falling apart all at once. 

Hezbollah, which is the militant faction in Lebanon that intervened in the Syrian civil war and has gone to war with Israel a couple times, has basically been beheaded. And the question is whether it can reform at all. And Hamas is now in a box. That’s the militant group in Gaza, and there’s really nothing left, which means that everyone can focus on Iranian issues that are closer to Iran proper, which is a real problem for the regime. 

Now, I don’t think that overthrowing Iran is even remotely realistic. This isn’t Russia, where it’s a cluster of people at the top. This isn’t China where it’s a one man show. This is not 

Syria where there’s a dynasty. Iran is a theocracy. And so there’s a class of over 10,000 mullahs that rule the country. 

And that would be a hell of an assassination program in order to overthrow the political system. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t threats. And that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways that Iran can be contained and contained. And mostly that’s going to have to do with local issues that have to do with naval prominence and energy policy. Keep in mind that the Persian Gulf is where half of all internationally traded oil is sourced from Iran, even in low times, is going to be a major oil producer and exporter. 

So as you crunch down the outer perimeter of where the Iranians have influence, and it moves from Lebanon to Syria to Iraq in the Persian Gulf, it is easier for external powers to pressure Iran right at home. In many ways, this is the worst of all worlds. And what we’re probably going to see in the next few years is Iran being forced to respond in kind within its own inner periphery. 

And so that’s less stuff going on in the Levant. That’s less stuff going far away in places like Yemen. And it means having to deal with opposition, both international and local, right around their inner perimeter. Expect to see more going on with Pakistan and the Baluchi rebels that are operate on both sides of the border. With now the Iranians more on the offensive and suffering from Baluchi attacks, rather than empowering them somewhere else. 

Expect to see Azerbaijan, which is majority Shia but secular, taking a more pro-American line to contain Iranian power to the north. Expect to see Iraq empowered, which, you know, Iraq is a majority Shia state, but they’re Arabs and not Persians. And in times when Iran tends to get, how should I say this? Insecure, they tend to be very active in what we think of as Mesopotamia, today’s Iraq. 

And I would expect that to become much more inflamed, especially as Turkey becomes more involved in the broader region. But the real issue, the real fight is going to be between Iran and Saudi Arabia, because they are the two biggest energy powers. They were the two largest economies in the Persian Gulf. And in any scenario where Iran is on the defensive. 

Saudi Arabia has a really big checkbook. And while Sunni militants have hit out at the United States and hit out at Israel and hit out Russia and everyone else, the ethnic group, the religious group that the Sunni Arab militants like okay, are most opposed to are Shia Persians. Most of these groups were originally founded with the intent of taking Iran or its predecessors down a notch or three. 

So expect to see a lot more violence as Saudi Arabia starts to write a lot of checks to hem in Iran on all possible points of the compass. And the only way that Iran can return the favor in any meaningful sense is to do a normal war. So, ironically, the end of Iran’s power in the western parts of the Middle East, in places like Syria, is probably going to lead to a more aggressive Iran. 

And from their point of view, a defensive Iran. And the only way that they can stop the attacks that are likely to increase upon them is to take the fight to a country like Saudi Arabia. That’s, to be perfectly honest, doesn’t have a functional military on its own. So the next chapter of Middle Eastern history isn’t going to be any more or less violent than the one that came before. 

It’s just the violence is going to be further east and closer to Iran’s borders.

The Syrian Consequence: Israel’s Opportunity

Photo of Israeli flag in from of some buildings

The Russians aren’t the only ones trying to figure out what to do following the chaos in Syria; Israel is also reassessing their regional positioning. However, while Israel’s regional strategy will need to be revamped, they have an opportunity to capitalize on this situation.

Syria previously limited Israel’s ability to find security in the region, but a window for change has been opened. With the Shia crescent and its influence on this region being disrupted, the threat that Iran and Hezbollah once posed to Israel has greatly diminished. And while Israel is a bit preoccupied with Gaza and Hamas, there’s not a real threat to Israeli statehood.

It would seem Israel could be ready for a new strategy, but regional relations will be critical in determining how that plays out. Between Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iran, there’s plenty of countries to keep an eye on; although, the most important places to watch will be Syria and Turkey.

As Syria builds back, we could see a Sunni Arab consolidation, which might cause bigger problems for Israel down the road. But Turkey will be the final boss here; depending on how Turkey approaches Israel, that will determine which strategic path Israel will be forced to go down.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here. Coming to you from Egmont National Park. That’s Mount Taranaki in the background. And I’m walking through the ahu Kawakawa swamp, which is nonstandard. Anyway, we’re gonna continue talking about the consequences of the fall of the Syrian government. And today we’re going to cover Israel. There’s an old adage going back to the late 70s, that says that there is no war without Egypt and no peace without Syria. 

The last major Israeli, Arab conflict was in 1973, and it was a surprise attack. That probably shouldn’t have happened, but it ended with a resounding Israeli victory. And after that, it set the stage for peace talks with the Egyptians, which concluded under Jimmy Carter in 1979. But Syria always stayed on the outside. And the whole concept of that phrase is that Israel is a vulnerable state, and until it has peace with all of its neighbors, it has peace with none of its neighbors, because there just isn’t any strategic depth. 

But now the situation has changed. And there is an opportunity here for Israel to do a few things differently, should it so choose, the border with Egypt is internationally monitored, and Egypt is as close to a friend as the Israelis have in the region. And that provides some strategic opportunities here, especially since now that the, northeastern border is open. 

So this is gonna take a few places. First of all, the Golan Heights, that’s a chunk of territory that the Israelis captured from the Syrians in a series of conflicts throughout, the 20th century. It hasn’t really been settled, because there’s always this idea that there was eventually going to be a land for peace deal. Well, that doesn’t have to happen now. 

So you should expect to see the Israelis make the most of what is actually some significantly fertile territory that, could help a country that imports over half of its foodstuffs. Second, the remaining security concerns are now somewhat limited. There’s this thing called the Shia Crescent that starts in Iran, goes through Iraq, through northern Syria and into Lebanon. 

And the idea is this is the area that the Iranians would use to project power. And one of the big fuck ups that the Americans did with the Iraq war is basically shatter what was an Arab Sunni power that ruled that area and allowed the Iranians to penetrate into the region very, very deeply. They don’t control Iraq, but they’re certainly the first power in the country. 

Well, now, with Syria broken. The Shia crescent has been cut in half, and the Iranians can no longer drive or even reliably fly equipment or arms or men, to the western part of the crescent, which means that Hezbollah, which is the militant group that the Iranians founded and sponsored, but the Syrians manage, that operates mostly in Lebanon. 

Is now, I don’t want to say dead. That’s maybe the wrong word, but certainly gutted. And it will have to do with its own resources and without the Syrians or the Iranians to manage them or reinforce them or provide them with weapons. That’s not a lot. And that’s before you consider that over the last couple of months, the Israelis have done a damn solid job of gutting the entire, Hezbollah leadership. 

So there’s still a lot of anger. There’s still plenty of people to recruit from. But as a functional organization, Hezbollah is functionally gone at this point. And with Syria now gone, there’s really no way to rehabilitate it very quickly. This is not the cold War. This is not a period of heavy globalization where freedom of the seas is sacrosanct. 

This is a world where if you want to get equipment from A to B, you have to basically get it there yourselves and provide the military escort that’s necessary. And Iran’s not a naval power. Okay. That just leaves where this all started. In recent days, Hamas in Gaza. Now, my assessment of what’s going on there really hasn’t changed. 

Hamas, rules Gaza. Gaza is occupied territory. As long as it’s occupied territory, there will be no end of people who are willing to fight the occupiers. And the occupiers are the Israelis. The only question is whether or not the organization that runs the place can get enough equipment and weapons, to fight back in a meaningful way like they did, a year ago, October, when they did that big assault that killed a thousand people. 

The Israelis are in the process of crunching that down. They’re building a cordon in the edge of Gaza, and then cutting it in half, basically splitting into tiny little cantons that they feel they can manage more directly. Now, this will guarantee that the population will always be hostile to them. But you’re talking about a low level simmering insurgency, as opposed to something that could generate the military organization that’s necessary to actually attack a state. 

So it’s ugly. It will continue to be ugly in fact, it will probably from a human rights point of view and a starvation point of you get uglier. But that doesn’t mean it’s a threat to the state of Israel. And that’s everybody, everyone around, Israel has now been clipped or befriended. Jordan is basically an economic satellite who’s indirectly sponsored by Israel and the United States. 

Egypt is relatively friendly. Lebanon, in a good day, is a failed state, and without Hezbollah, they might actually be able to make a go of being a semi ish kind of sort of normal state. And Iran lacks the ability to, dick around in Israeli affairs so long as there is no Syria. Now, there’s two things to keep in mind for a longer term. 

First of all, Syria itself. One of the reasons that the Israelis never got involved in the Syrian civil war is they felt that if the majority in Syria was able to take control, the Sunni Arabs, then they would be dealing with something like Gaza and Hamas, but on a much larger scale. And so they didn’t like Assad or Assad Syria, but they felt it was the least bad option. 

 

So as whatever post-assad Syria consolidates into a new form, the Israelis are going to be acting very, very cautiously. You’re going to be watching very, very closely. And they’re May based on the way politics evolves, maybe a strong, far stronger case for Israeli intervention in post civil war Syria than there was during civil war. 

Syria, of course, will probably have a second civil war. Now all the Sunni Arabs figure out who’s in charge. So as long as it hasn’t consolidated, Israel is fine. Once it starts to consolidate, Israel is going to be watching very closely because it might not like the form that it takes. What’s next? Second. And the bigger question, the longer term question and the question that ultimately is going to occupy, Israeli strategic thinkers for decades is the relationship with Turkey. 

Now, in the past, the Israel Jews got along with the Ottoman Empire. And during the Cold War, the Israelis got along with Cold War era Turkey. But that is not where we are right now. Turkey is in the process of redefining what it is to be Turkish, and based on how that definition goes. There may or may not be room for Israel in that definition. 

The issue is, is that Turkey is a major power and there is nothing that Israel could ever do to change that. And so Israel is stuck dealing with whatever the new Turkish identity happens to be. Now, me taking the arm chair, look, a a turkey that partners with Israel is one that de facto controls the entire eastern Mediterranean. 

Egypt would probably be brought along for the ride and becomes a major regional power in its own right. An Israel that doesn’t get along with Turkey is one that is locked down in a series of local conflicts. That greatly sap its power and its ability to project in any direction. So if the government of Turkey can decide that Jews are okay, then we go one direction. 

And for the powers of Europe, all of a sudden Turkey is a major player that they can’t be ignored. If the Turkish leadership decides that the Jews are the problem, then we have a very different situation with the European side, with the Israelis, to keep the Turks boxed up. Now that is a debate and a question and a time frame that would be decided years from now. 

But now that Syria has been broken, that is the next big thing on the Israeli and the Turkish agenda.

The Syrian Consequence: Russia’s Withdrawal

Guard of honor at the Eternal Flame on the Red Square in Moscow

Much has changed since I left for New Zealand a few days ago, and I’m sure everyone has already caught up on the Syrian unraveling. So, let’s dive into the history of Syria and the consequences that all this will have, specifically what this means for Russia.

Think of Syria as the runt of the litter. Post-World War I, all the big dogs in the region carved out the valuable territory and what was left..became Syria. No matter which way the cookie crumbles, the Syrian experience was never going to be pretty. The overthrow of the Assad regime is just another chapter in that rough history.

Russia fits into this picture as a decade-long supporter of Assad, which included military support and intervention via the Wagner Group. With Assad’s overthrow, Russia’s position in Syria is fading, and quick. Syria’s collapse means Russia’s influence in the Middle East and Africa will be threatened, since supply routes to these regions will be cut off.

In the coming days and weeks, I would expect to see a series of embarrassing strategic losses for Russia. We’re even seeing Turkey jumping on the opportunity to complicate Russia’s withdrawal from the region. This could even spell trouble for the Russian’s broader military presence.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter. Zain here. Coming to you from Egmont National Park in New Zealand, that’s Mount Taranaki, this is Holly Hutt. This is where I’m spending the night. A little chilly here today. Anyway, things are on fire in Syria. I apologize that, apparently the country fell, one was airborne. And that I wasn’t there to, like, tell you what it all meant. 

But we recorded a couple things before I got some of those already out. Some of them are coming. Today we’re gonna talk about consequences. We’re going to start with the country. That is really the only reason that Syria has lasted this long. Now, let’s dial it back. Okay. Series. An artificial construct. The territory that is now Syria hasn’t been a functional government in centuries. 

The only reason we are aware of this thing called Syria is because in the aftermath of the mandate period, that’s after World War one. The colonies were basically broken up. And independent states were allowed to rise, and everyone in the region basically took the good part. So Mesopotamia went one way, became a rock. Saudi Arabia found oil in its own way. 

Egypt got independence and picked a fight. Didn’t win it anyway, in the case of Syria, Syria was what was left over. The Turks wouldn’t took the chunks that they wanted, specifically the heart, which is the north east corner of the Mediterranean, which is like the only part of the region that gets reliable during fall. 

The French made Lebanon its own thing, and Syria was the rump. So the idea that anything can arise out of this is kind of a stretch. So we’re probably looking at a prolonged period of civil war, no man’s land as various groups vie for control. The group that ultimately took control of Syria ended up to be a group called the Alawites, who live on the coast. 

And they basically partnered up with every other minority in the country against the Sunni, Arab majority. And it’s the Sunni Arabs who have thrown this revolution and have now overthrown the Assad regime. The Assads were Alawites, by the way. So, getting something coherent out of this is, at best going to take a very long time anyway. 

This whole system would have come crashing down a decade ago if not for the Russian government. The Russians Soviets had always been relatively pro-Syrian because the Syrians were anti-Israeli and the Israelis were on the side of the United States. So it’s just a plain old cold word, tit for tat, using the regional politics as the backdrop. 

But, more recently, the Putin government, realizing that it needed to launch a series of ever more aggressive wars in its own periphery and eventually moving into the European space, they wanted a way that they could distract the Europeans and, to a lesser degree, the Americans, from anything they were doing in Syria was perfect. The civil war had already started without them. 

And so the Russians stepped in to protect the Assad government, transferring a lot of military assets, most notably aircraft and mercenaries, under the banner of something called Wagner. Now, you may have remember, Wagner was a group that through a brief coup, having already been out for a year relatively recently. 

That was, Putin’s preferred way of pulling the strings, saying that, oh, these aren’t actually Russians. 

But eventually they ended up sending, like, fighter bombers, and that was pretty obvious. So, the Russians have a substantial military footprint in theater with, thousands of troops and one of their most powerful task naval task forces. Now, the Russian Navy is not known for being competent or large, but if the ships can sail away from port, that’s usually the better ones. 

And so on the Levantine coast, especially in places like, Banias and Tartus. Tartarus, Tartarus, Tartus. Target this, you have Russian naval bases and Russian and naval attachés and staff and all that good stuff. Now, here’s the problem. Russia can’t project power on the seas unless everyone else along the way lets them do it. So ten years ago, when the Russians intervened forcefully in the Syrian 

Civil War, the Assad government was on its last legs at that point, under siege from all sides. But the Russians basically brought in more and more and more forces through these ports distributed into the country, didn’t go after ISIS at all. They primarily went after the secular, Sunni Arab opposition. 

And this is what led them to use several dozen artillery pieces in the vicinity of Aleppo, which is the second largest city, and basically just fire 

tens of thousands of shells into the city. Probably killing around 100,000 people. That was carried out over and over and over again throughout populated centers. 

So all of the war crimes style military operations that you’re seeing in Ukraine right now were, if not birth, certainly honed in the Syrian battle space. Well, that means that there aren’t a lot of Syrians who really want the Russians to do anything but die. But the Russians don’t have the airlift capacity to get their forces out of interior Syria. 

This isn’t the United States. This isn’t the global superpower that has all kinds of transport options. So if you think back to when the Biden administration ordered the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, we now have that going in a multitude of places in Syria, but without the aircraft to move things around. So the Russians are having to basically make a run for the exits. 

But they can’t go south because they get into Jordan, which is a U.S. ally. They can’t go to the southwest because they get into Israel, which is U.S. ally. They can’t go east because they go get into Iraq, which there’s still remnants of ISIS running around. And even if they could get interactors, they would have to go to Iran and then to go to asset hunting there. 

Now they can’t go north because the Turks maybe then orchestrate this last big push by the militants. But they certainly greenlighted it and assisted it and empowered the militants to be successful. And the Turks are thrilled that the Russians are getting trashed. So their only option is to take a very narrow corridor, to the coast through the city of Homs, which is obviously one of the cities that the militants are after. 

In fact, by the time you get this, the military have it. But even if the Russian forces can get to the ports, that doesn’t solve the problem, because Russian ships suck and there’s only two places they can theoretically go. The first is they can go out through the Mediterranean, out the Strait of Gibraltar, around Iberia, by France, by Britain, by Scandinavian, to the port of Murmansk, above the Arctic Circle. 

If they do that, I’d be impressed, because I’m not sure any of their ships can make it that far. These are some of the best ships that the Russians have, but they can’t make port calls any more because there’s a war on in Ukraine. And the Europeans, if these ships were to dock, would just confiscate them. 

And I don’t think they can make that trip. I needed. The closer port is number of sea squishes in the eastern part of the Black Sea, but under something called the Treaty of Montrose, which the Turks manage and enforce. Warships aren’t allowed to transit the Turkish straits from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea and back. And while many of these ships that the Russians have are consider that their home base, it’s up to the Turks to decide what can go and when. 

So you’re more likely to have the ships stalled on the coast while the civil war in Syria moves into its next phase, as the Sunni Arab militants who hate Russia more than anyone else moved to consolidate control of the country. And as the factions start trading chips, control of those ports and the control of the Russian ships that are there are likely to be high up on the list, because there’s any number of countries that might be willing to aid the new Syrian government, whatever form that takes in exchange for certain considerations, and destroying the Russians most capable. 

That naval task force would be an amazing coup by anyone. Or the ships could try to sail all the way to Murmansk and sink along the way, which would also be delightful. So 

whatever you think of this war, and there’s a lot of things to think about. This is only the beginning of a series of strategic humiliations for the Russians. And regardless of how this is sorted out one way or the other, those ships, those ports, that is how the Russians get all of their equipment and the material and their troops into the African theater. 

So whether it’s in Burkina Faso or Niger or Sudan, wherever the Russians currently have a military footprint anywhere in Africa, Libya, that just got cut off because the Russians can no longer supply any of it. So we’re going to see this cascade of strategic collapses of the Russian position throughout the entire Middle Eastern theater, throughout the entire African theater. 

And it’s probably not going to take any more than a few weeks to months. So stay tuned. Get some popcorn. There’s going to be a show.

Toppling Assad: Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s Fragile Grip on a Divided Syria

Flag of Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham

The Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has succeeded in toppling the Assad regime.

But beating Assad hardly means they’ve succeeded in conquering Syria. In fact, they’ve merely inherited the previous regimes headaches: managing a deeply divided ethno-sectarian landscape, with little hope of a quick or easy consolidation of power.

Adding to the headache is the lack of a reliable, capable foreign partner like Assad had (until, of course, he didn’t).

HTS and whatever group or constellation of entities replaces them will also have to contend with myriad external forces—the US, Israel, and Turkey among them—acting to advance their own interests with impunity.

Cover photo of the flag of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham by Wikimedia Commons

Here at Zeihan on Geopolitics, our chosen charity partner is MedShare. They provide emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it, so we can be sure that every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence.

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Syria Breakdown: What Led Them to This?

Photo of a bombed out Syrian city

A New Twist in the Syrian Civil War

Syria is back in the headlines as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (which is basically a rebranded Sunni militant group) has added some gasoline to the civil war fire by capturing the city of Aleppo.

Minority coalitions have historically ruled over Syria’s Sunni majority, including Assad’s Alawite-led regime. But that’s all changing. As external supporters like Russia and Iran get distracted, Assad’s exposure will dramatically increase. And if the US shifts policies to support opposition groups, we could see some changes coming down the pipe in Syria.

As Assad’s regime grows increasingly isolated, conflict in Syria will likely intensify and instability will grow. So buckle up…

 

Friday’s Update on Syria…

Conditions on the ground in Syria are shifting quickly, with rebels poised to advanced toward the critical regime-held city of Homs.

Here’s what we’ll be watching for this weekend as the Assad regime mounts what could very well be its final major defensive position in Syria’s decade-plus long civil war.

 

Syria Updates on Sunday

Peter recorded this video on the morning of 12/6, as insurgent fighters were moving through Hama on their way to Homs.

Events have definitely taken a turn for the worst for Assad, whose regime has not been able to count on the critical Iranian, Russian and loyalist support necessary to push back Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s offensive.

With that said, the last chapter of the Assad family’s control over Syria (or Damascus and its environs) just means the Levant is going to see another phase of fractious, sectarian fighting. We feel like this video and its explanation of the Syria’s geopolitical reality is still incredibly informative and beneficial in understanding the region’s future.

We will continue to update on events as they unfold—Peter when he is able, and the rest of the team as needed. -ZoG

Nothing in the Middle East is easy, and Syria is not exception.

Its fragmented dessert-and-mountain geography has allowed for roughly a dozen major ethnic and religious groups to carve out their own independent fiefdoms over the last few centuries, often times built up around a significant trade route, a vital water source or for the luckiest, both.

The Assad regime is facing the most significant threat to its already-tenuous hold on power in years, and we may very well be seeing the end of the Iranian-backed Alawite regime in Damascus.

But even if Assad and the Alawites lose, it will be difficult to determine who will actually win. If anything, we are most likely to see the beginning of a second Syrian Civil War, as the various tribal and religious groupings of the Sunni Arab majority vie for dominance amongst themselves, and seek to co-opt or crush the region’s many, many religious and ethnic minority groups.

 

Turkey’s Future and What to Focus On

Turkey has a lot of things going for it: a stable, or even strong, demographic profile, a burgeoning industrial base and an impressively unified political structure. Not too shabby for what was once the most coup-prone member of the wider US alliance structure.

It’s not all rosy for Ankara, though. Recent political decisions over monetary policy have led to some struggles with inflation, and being in the center of the world means you risk being surrounded by problems: Turkey not only borders Iran, but is also just a short hop across the Black Sea from the Ukraine war, and is sandwiched between both the Balkans and the Caucuses. To say nothing of the current… excitement happening in the Levant along its southern border.

In fact, Turkey’s biggest challenge in hefting its geopolitical weight will be having the strategic discipline and foresight to pick which arena it wants to play in. If we look to history, the Ottomans expanded into southeastern Europe—present day Greece, Romania and Bulgaria—before moving into the Levant and Middle East. (While many think of the Ottoman Empire as an Eastern empire because of the religious leanings of the ruling elite, the Ottoman Empire only made meaningful expansions beyond Turkey’s current borders in the latter half of its history. Its core territories were always the Bosporus and immediate surrounds, i.e., Europe.)

Turkey is a capable geopolitical player, and growing stronger every day. But it cannot project power everywhere along its borders at once. While many in Europe (and Russia, and the United States) might hope and expect Turkey to be a bigger regional player in the Middle East, the strategic gains there are ultimately limited. The Turks could very well see their greatest future successes where their Ottoman forebears did: the eastern borderlands of an [aging] European core

Prefer to read the transcript? Click here

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For those who would like to donate directly to MedShare or to learn more about their efforts, you can click this link.

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Transcript

Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. It is the 2nd of December. The big news in the Middle East over America’s holiday break for Thanksgiving was that an opposition group by the name of Harriet Tahrir al-Sham—and yes, if something happens in your corner of the world, you can look forward to me mispronouncing it—

Harriet Tahrir al-Sham has captured the city of Aleppo and is moving on towards the core of Syria. Let’s hit this from a geographic point of view and then from a policy point of view.

First, geographic. The bulk of the population in Syria is to the east of the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon Mountains in a corridor that goes north-south from the Turkish border to Damascus. Basically, these are a combination of oasis cities and cities that are on rivers, so these are some of the very, very few parts of the country where you can actually grow food. Yes, yes, yes—you’ve got the Fertile Crescent and the Euphrates and all that.

But the Euphrates floodplain is very, very narrow, in some cases just a few miles end to end. So it’s never been an area that’s been able to generate a sustained civilizational impulse or create an empire. Whereas this corridor here has always been populated. In fact, it’s one of the most consistently populated areas on the planet going back to antiquity.

If you move to the west into Lebanon and the Syrian coast, you’re on the other side of the mountains, and so that’s where you get a lot more minorities, whether they be Druze, Shia, or Alawite. Anyway, this core has always been vastly, super-majority populated by Sunni Muslims. Usually, what happens in Syria is all the other groups gang up on the Sunni Muslims.

The current government of the Assads is an Alawite-led group. Basically, you’ve got a coalition of small minorities that have banded together to avoid being destroyed by the Sunni Muslims. When the civil war broke out in Syria—this was about 15 years ago now—you basically had the Sunni Muslims, who are the super-majority, rising up, rejecting minority rule, and trying to reestablish themselves.

The fact that Sunni Muslims form the backbone of most of what we would consider Islamic terror groups, such as ISIS, meant that the terror groups had a lot of willing collaborators throughout the majority population. What’s going on now is this new group is basically a rebranded old group and is making another go of it, way too soon if they’re going to be successful.

In addition to Aleppo, you’ve got Homs, Hama, and of course, Damascus itself. There’s a long way to go, but a few things have changed.

Number one, the only real reason why the Syrian government is still in play is because the Russians intervened forcefully over ten years ago and propped them up. Well, Russian support is not what it once was. The Russians are a little occupied over in the Ukraine situation, so it’s not clear that Syria is going to have the same degree of support that they once had.

The second degree of support is Iran, but with the Trump administration incoming, that’s probably going to be dialed back a little bit.

The third is, indirectly, the United States. After 9/11, the United States decided that we didn’t like Sunni Arab Muslim militant groups and went to town on them in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. The lingering American commitment to the Syrian civil war has been about breaking groups that are ISIS or ISIS-affiliated. This new group is just a rebranding of what used to be called the Al-Nusra Front—Nusra, Nusra, or something like that anyway.

Which brings us to policy.

The United States has a long history of backing the smaller group against the larger group, no matter who’s involved or where it is. The idea is that if regional powers are tied down with local affairs, they can’t consolidate, become bigger and bigger, become imperial, and eventually threaten the United States in the Western Hemisphere.

It’s something we’ve been doing at least since the early 1800s, from our on-again, off-again indirect interference with the Napoleonic Wars all the way up to the current day. Certainly, we did a lot of this during the Cold War.

Now, besides the fact that we have a changing of the guard in Washington, we also have a different situation in Syria. We certainly don’t like the Syrian government—it’s genocidal, dictatorial, all the things you’re not supposed to like—and it’s being backed by all the traditional powers that have been hostile to the United States.

There’s just one fly in the ointment: we now find ourselves against Russia, against Syria, against Iran, and against Islamic militants. If the United States were to change its mind on just one of those, all of a sudden, the game changes, especially when you consider how occupied the Russians and Iranians are about to be.

The group that is most likely to have a change in circumstance is going to be the Islamic militant groups—the former Al-Nusra group. The reason is pretty simple: the United States has a long history of backing Islamic militants against powers that we find more problematic.

We’ve done it for militant groups in the Iran space. We’ve done it in Afghanistan against the Soviets. We’ve done it with the Chechens in Russia proper. To think this is going to be the one exception where that’s convenient but isn’t going to happen is kind of a stretch.

The militants have already done us the favor of renaming themselves so they can be a fundamentally “new” group. If you think the US can’t or won’t do this, just keep in mind that we did it last time, and the time before, and the time before that, and the time before that.

One of the weird things we’ve seen in the last 15 years is that one of the strongest unofficial supporters of the Syrian government has been the United States, because we have removed from the equation the group that was most likely to overthrow Assad.

Expect to see a policy change—formally or informally—in the months ahead, and expect that to reignite the Syrian civil war in a very big way. This time, the Syrian government will mostly be fighting on its own.

It can’t rely on the Russians—they’re occupied elsewhere. It probably can’t rely on Iran or Iranian-backed militant groups in the region, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, because the Israelis have now gutted them.

All of the traditional pillars of support the Assad government has come to rely on during the entire civil war are snapping right now, and things are about to get lively.

So watch this space. I’ll keep an eye on it for you.

Goodbye to the Middle East

This day was always going to happen.

On October 7, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a partial withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria. Soon after, Turkish forces began moving south across the border to strike Kurdish forces which had been until extremely recently under American protection. Two days later the partial American withdrawal was upgraded to a full evacuation of all forces.

Wailing and gnashing of teeth across the American political spectrum quickly erupted, with many condemning the tactical and political aspects of the president’s decision. I’m of mixed minds:

On the one hand, the Kurds – whether in Syria or Iraq – have been America’s only reliable regional allies since America’s first major confrontation with Iraq back in the early 1990s. When we have asked, they have answered. Every single time. In many cases U.S. forces didn’t even do the heavy lifting, but instead relegated themselves to providing intelligence and materiel support. Without the Kurds’ assistance the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would have been far nastier affair, post-Saddam Iraq would have been far less stable, the defanging of ISIS and the destruction of the ISIS caliphate would not have happened. In Syria in specific, the Kurds habitually provided at least five times the forces the Americans did.

On the other hand, the United States was always going to leave Syria. If the Americans were unwilling to commit 100,000 troops to the overthrow of Syria’s Assad government and its subsequent forcible reconstruction, then there was little reason to become involved in a decades-long, grinding multi-sided civil war.

The primary reason American forces remain in Syria at this point is to limit Iranian penetration. That battle was lost six years ago when then-President Obama allowed the Syrian government to cross Obama’s own red line on the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians. Obama made it crystal clear that any U.S. military action would be small scale, focused on Special Operations Forces, and largely dedicated to backing up the Syrian Kurds. Whether under Obama or Trump, an American withdrawal has always been inevitable. It’s just taken seven years of Syrian-Russian-Iranian victories on the battlefield and the large-scale dismemberment of the ISIS Caliphate to make it imminent.

Aside from the Iranian vector, American national and strategic interests in Syria are utterly nonexistent. Syria – even backed up by Iran – is a military pigmy that Israel could easily shatter. If Jerusalem really wanted to, it could roll into Damascus in a long weekend. (Sticking around, of course, would be a barrel of shiv-wielding monkeys.) American interests in Lebanon are less than American interests in Syria. Jordan has been a de facto Israeli client state for years. And that is quite literally all she wrote.

The far more important fact – comfortable or uncomfortable depending upon your view – is that the evolving American view of Syria is really little more than a microcosm of an evolving American view of the Middle East writ large. American troop deployments throughout the region have been plunging for a decade and are now down to about one-tenth of their peak. America now has more troops in Afghanistan than the rest of the region combined, and that deployment is well on its way to a complete phase out. CENTCOM HQ in Qatar will almost certainly be closed soon (you don’t need a forward command center if there’s nothing to command). The Iraq advisory force is leaving. Kuwait, once the launchpad for multiple wars, has been reduced to lilypad status. The Turks are certain to eject U.S. forces from the Incirlik base within a year.

Within two years the total regional deployment figure will be in the low-to-mid single digits of thousands, at most one-fifth of what is there today.

That sounds shocking and, considering it wasn’t that long ago that the Americans had a quarter-million troops in-region, it kind of is. But take a step back and look – really look – at the region, and it actually isn’t all that mind blowing.
 
Iraq is falling apart. Mass unrest is now entering its third week and if it continues along its current trajectory it risks bringing down the government. That isn’t “bring down the government” European-style which would mean new elections, but instead “bring down the government” in the post-Arab Spring style, which means an extended period of mass chaos, violence, and very likely a return to some degree of civil war. While it is true that Iraq has experienced cyclical public unrest since 2015, never has the regional climate been more tenuous, with Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia openly involved in regional conflicts – meaning the normal balancing act between Iraq’s Shi’ites, Kurds and Sunnis (and their foreign backers) is over. Stabilizing this mess would require the Americans (re)injecting 100,000 troops. Far more likely, the Americans will remove the five-ish thousand troops which remain, taking the last thin reed of stability with them.
 
Iran is the regional bugaboo that most Americans fear. Since the end of the Clinton Administration American policy has held quixotic goals: we want the Iranian government gone, but we don’t want to use U.S. forces to do it. Under Clinton that meant the dual containment. Under W Bush it meant a forward blocking position in Iraq. Under Obama it meant trying to set up a regional balance of power. Under Trump it means economic sanctions backed by exactly zero military force.
 
None of it has worked. None of it was ever going to work. The Shia clergy is the Iranian political elite, giving the Iranians the deepest bench of political leadership in the region. You’d literally have to kill 10,000 mullahs to induce a shift. Nor is Iran revolution-prone. The first task of the country’s infantry-heavy military is to occupy Iran to ensure domestic unity. There are solid reasons why Iran’s 2009 “Green Revolution” was over in under a month.
 
Nor is knocking Iran off feasible. Iran is a mountain nation, granting it a defensibility which partially obviates the sort of air and tank warfare for which the Americans are renown. Moreover, Iran’s population in 2019 is over triple that of Iraq in 2003. Overthrowing the government would necessitate a force over twice as powerful as the one that took down Saddam’s Iraq, followed by an occupation force three times as large. No thank you. The U.S. military and public has exactly zero interest in putting 400,000 troops back into the Middle East to fight another grinding war of occupation.
 
What about America’s “allies”?

The Persian Gulf

Qatar is the perfect example of a friends-like-these ally. In per capita terms it is almost certainly the top financial supporter of Islamic terror groups in the world (I say almost certainly since Qatar doesn’t disclose their terror accounting). On the nicer end Qatar fundees include the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, ramping up to more knifey groups like al Qaeda and ISIS. Doha also has a nuanced-to-positive relationship with Iran for various reasons, not the least of which is its gas wealth stems from the shared North Dome/South Pars gas field. Qatar has hosted the operational headquarters for most U.S. warfighting in the region for the past two decades despite being a place that is in part responsible for the Americans needing to do the warfighting in the first place.
 
That’s nothing compared to Saudi Arabia. A half century from now when today’s headlines are parsed for the history books, the world will remember Saudi Arabia’s current de facto leader – Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) – as one of the evilest individuals in modern history.
 
The sheer volume of public support, money, arms and ideological cover given to religiously-tinted fighters – that’s jihadis or terrorists based on your politics – by various Saudi citizens and royals alike has boomed in step with the Kingdom’s regional ambitions. (Qataris have been implicated in plenty of terrorist financing schemes, but fewer than a relative handful have taken up arms themselves; 9/11 shows that the same cannot be said for Saudis.) Saudi Arabia habitually backs the most extreme, violent interpretation of Islam and regularly exports it far and wide at the end of a gun or leading wave of an explosion.
 
MBS has taken things further. Once he realized the Americans were serious about leaving the region, he shifted tact and instead of simply seeking destabilization of his enemies, he now seeks to burn down the pillars of civilization across the entire field of competition. Much of the Sunni Islamic extremism in Syria can be laid at his feet, as can much of the ongoing violence and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor are MBS’ actions limited to the battlefield. About a year ago on MBS’ orders, a hit squad suffocated and dismembered a Washington Post columnist in Istanbul, transported his remains to the Saudi consul general’s house where they were incinerated in a custom-built “barbeque pit” just before the consul hosted a massive party that utilized the same pit to help degrade any lingering forensic evidence.
 
MBS is not a friend, nor is Saudi Arabia an ally. America used to have to put up with this sort of activity from the Saudis during the Cold War because without Saudi oil, the global trading system would have collapsed and taken the American alliance network with it. Courtesy of America’s shale revolution, those days are over.
 
Rhetoric aside, even President Trump doesn’t see the bilateral relationship as all that close. Last month the Iranians launched a drone and missile attack on Saudi energy facilities, taking some 5 million barrels of daily output offline. Under normal circumstances that would have prompted massive American military retaliation. Instead, Trump’s response to MBS’ call for assistance was something along the lines of, “sorry, I have a fundraiser.” For those of you who think oil is a globalized commodity and so the U.S. remains vulnerable to price swings, think again. The president has preexisting authority to limit U.S. crude exports. Should global prices get too crazy, an executive order can keep U.S. shale output at home, splitting the North American energy market off from the global market. The Saudi headache is now optional.
 
Even Israel isn’t what it once was. Within the next decade the country’s mostly-Palestinian Muslim population will become the majority, although about 90 percent of them have no political rights in the Israeli system. The two-state process that sought to generate a country for the Palestinians has been dead for years and we have already seen the Israelis implement a very successful separation plan more than a bit reminiscent of South Africa’s Apartheid.
 
In fact, Israeli ultranationalists in private conversations even welcome the comparison to Apartheid, because they think Apartheid was gentler than what modern Israel has achieved. Under Apartheid, the black South Africans could travel to white-controlled zones for work. Under the Israeli program the Palestinians languish behind 35-foot-tall concrete walls in what are little more than open air prisons with the Israelis controlling Palestinian access to power, food and water. As the thinking goes, who cares if this radicalizes the Palestinians if they are radicalized on the other side of a wall. Arguably, places like Tunisia or Pakistan are now “more equal” democracies than Israel. (Ugh, I’m going to get so much hate mail for these last two paragraphs.)
 
Turkey and the United States have been pulling apart for three decades. In a world where Soviet containment is the end-all be-all, the alliance was everything. Remove the Soviet threat, however, and the Turks have interests in the Balkans, Caucasus, Persia, Mesopotamia and the Levant that have next to nothing to do with American interests. Turkey is reasserting itself as a major regional power, and since the American military position in places like northern Iraq and Syria are largely dependent upon supply routes through Turkey, there is no long-term American strategic position in these regions without express Turkish assistance. That assistance has been removed, so the Americans – regardless of domestic policy preferences – have no choice but to leave.
 
That just leaves the Kurds, a mostly mountain people. That makes them a fractious bunch whose fractured leadership has traditionally been willing to fight to the last Kurd to determine who is in command, while enabling more homogenous ethno-sectarian groups on all sides to easily demonize them, oppress them, and play them off one another. They are the largest ethno-sectarian group in the world without a country, and their entire land-locked population is split among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. For those familiar with West Virginia, Switzerland or Chechnya, squabbling oppressed mountain people make great fighters, and since they lack a country they have little to lose by allying with, well, anyone. No wonder the Americans depended on them so much.
 
But the Kurdish dream of independence was never going to be more than a dream. Landlocked and partitioned, the only way a real Kurdistan could emerge would be if one of the four countries which house Kurds actively sponsor it. That’s just not in the cards. The Kurds are a lost cause; They were never more than an ally of the moment.
 
They are hardly the only ally of the moment the Americans have abandoned. At the end of the Vietnam War the Americans left the Hmong – another fractious mountain people who allied with the Americans – in the lurch. Their massacre at the hands of the Vietnamese is the stuff of legend. Something similar is about to happen to the Syrian Kurds at the hands of the Turks. The biggest difference between the two groups is there are too many Kurds to resettle them to Minnesota.

So why all the noise back in the United States? Aren’t the Americans exhausted with the Middle East? Shouldn’t they be celebrating?
 
In part it is because the extreme unpopularity of Donald Trump means any decision he makes is going to be parsed for negative sound bites, and there is no end of hypocrisy in play. My personal favorite are the former Obama team talking heads hitting the airwaves who only now find Syria’s murder and mayhem worthy of American military action.
 
In part it is because abandoning an ally is bad form, particularly if you think the U.S. should play a role in preventing genocide, promoting human rights, stymieing traditional rivals, or keeping a hand on the throat of the global economy. Even if you think none of this is the U.S.’ business, you’ve got to admit a lot of stuff happens in the region, and having a finger in the pot does prove useful from time to time. In the grand scheme of things, 2000 troops in Syria isn’t that big of a deal.
 
A deeper (and IMO far more substantive) issue is the fate of America’s national security professionals. Trump initially liked the generals because of their “yes sir” and “can do” attitudes. After all, civilian supremacy means the president is in charge, you do what you are told and if you have a problem with the president’s policy you don’t undermine him, you leave. Well, two years on, pretty much all of them have left.
 
The break has become so extreme that Trump now considers national security-minded Republicans to be greater ideological foes than the Democrats. One of the big outcomes of the 2018 mid-term elections was the wholesale ejection of that faction from Congress as well as from the Republican Party leadership itself. For many of this group, Syria is the prefect example of poor leadership: Trump’s policy not only betrays a loyal ally, it abdicates an American role throughout an entire region. We can debate the pros and cons of that abdication, but for folks in the military, intelligence and diplomatic communities this is a step that unwinds a half-century of painstaking military, intelligence and diplomatic efforts paid for with untold resources and blood. You don’t have to view the world their way to understand why they’re pissed.
 
That doesn’t change the simple fact that if not for the seemingly bottomless volume of TrumpDrama in America these days, most Americans would probably be sighing in relief right now. If the Americans really don’t have an interest in maintaining a global Order, then the Middle East is barren of American national interests and it can now firmly be someone else’s problem. It isn’t nice. It isn’t responsible. It won’t be pretty. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
 
Of course the road from here to there is neither straight nor level. There are still plenty of land-mines to dodge:

  • The evacuation of U.S. forces has been ordered, but it has not been completed. That evacuation has to proceed through the Turkish advance and through Turkey. Things are already looking dicey. Shortly after the initial withdrawal order some Turkish forces apparently (intentionally) dropped some artillery near remaining American outposts, forcing the remaining Americans to scramble lest they find themselves in a shooting war with the Turks. The U.S.-Turkish alliance is over, but based on how events unfold in the next couple of weeks a U.S.-Turkish hostility may emerge.
  • The Kurds of Iraq and Syria are both armed and trained and experienced and on the edge of statehood. Just because they (especially the Syrian Kurds) are doomed to fail does not mean they are doomed to fail today. How they fight back and/or seek alignment with Syria and/or Iran and/or Russia will determine the region’s next set of battle lines. This matters the most for the Turks. The Turks are out of practice, having not fought a meaningful military campaign since World War I. If they perform badly it will reshape their regional ambitions. If they perform well there are lots of regional players – Armenia, Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia come to mind – who will be extremely worried.
  • Of those, by far the most important one is Russia. Like American forces, Russian forces can really only operate in Syria with Turkish acquiescence. With the Americans gone and the Turks ramping up, it’s probably the Russians’ turn to GTFO of the region. If they don’t, a direct Turkish-Russian clash that leaves the Russians on the wrong side of all their backup will ensue. The climbdown and/or massacre would be globally humiliating.
  • One smallish bit of good news is that the ISIS Caliphate is definitely gone, and the ISIS militant movement is broken and on the run. Many have opined that without the American-Kurdish alliance ISIS in any form would have never been defeated. That is true. But that’s not the same as saying that ISIS is doomed to rebound. Historically, the territory that comprises eastern Syria and western Iraq – the ISIS heartland – has been on the bleeding edge of useless. Rain doesn’t happen and the only crops grown are those in the Euphrates floodplain. In most places that band is less than 20 miles across. Civilizing this region is wildly expensive, and so the powers of the region tend to ignore it…until some wackadoo group like ISIS starts causing problems. Then one of the region’s powers invades and burns everything to the ground. From 2003 until 2018 the region’s powers were non-functional: Iraq and Syria had civil wars, while Turkey was gun-shy. The fact that the ISIS Caliphate lasted as long as it did was testament to how abnormal the region had become. Well, Turkey is now invading. It will burn everything to the ground. The atrocities the world is about to pin on the Turks mean we are returning to something a lot more normal.
  • Europe is… screwed. It is one thing to have to deal with a prickly Turkey who stays at home. It is quite another to have Europe’s largest land army deploying in force in a way that most Europeans have publicly condemned. With the exception of the French, no European power has the capacity of independent power projection to the region. And now Turkey is publicly threatening to herd millions of Syrian refugees to Europe’s doorstep unless the Europeans shut up about Turkey’s new military campaign. After the United States, Turkey ties with Russia for being Europe’s most important partner. Expect those ties to burn in the months to come.
  • Finally, there’s Saudi Arabia. In the aftermath of the Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities, the Saudis have paid the Americans to deploy 3,000 troops to the Kingdom. Two things from this: First, sooner or later the Americans will internalize just how messed up the Saudis are and will evacuate everything at once, precipitating a whole new regional crisis. Second, the Americans going pseudo-mercenary is about to be the new normal. If you cannot provide something shiny to bait the Americans into your region (cash is shiny), then you are on your own. That development will reverberate far beyond the Persian Gulf region.

The Syrian War, 2.0

The Israeli Air Force announced April 21 that it would scale back participation in the Red Flag exercises in Alaska. The joint Red Flag drills are regular events hosted by the United States, with the upcoming April 26-May 11 exercises allowing the Israelis to train in an environment they rarely experience (non-coincidentally, Alaskan terrain is somewhat similar to the Persian highlands). IDF spokespersons attributed the decision to keep Israeli F-15s at home due to the changing situation assessment of tensions along its northern border that have left everyone holding their breath.

We weren’t kept waiting long. In the early morning hours of April 30, the Israelis launched a series of significant strikes throughout western Syria, targeting infrastructure that supports weapons development and distribution. A rocket factory made for some particularly impressive fireballs.

The Israelis normally hold their cards much closer to their chest than this – particularly when it involves possible actions in their close-in neighborhood. But these are not normal times. The open secret is that the United States sees almost no role for itself in Syria going forward (at least, compared to what American engagement in the Middle East typically looks like). The Americans’ primary goal in Syria has been the eradication of ISIS. With the terror group’s holdings nearly obliterated, so too goes a compelling case for extending American involvement in Syria. This is compounded by the fact that a country as broken as Syria needs the kind of costly, involved, long-term occupation and rebuilding efforts the Americans pursued in Germany and Japan after World War II – a cost the Americans were unwilling to pay in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

The pending American withdrawal evolves the Syrian War in a much fiercer direction. Initially, the primary players in the fight were domestic: the Assad government, ISIS, the Syrian Kurds, and the various collections of anti-regime elements who seemed to occupy every spot on the spectrum from wonky democrats to those who felt ISIS would have been more successful if it had just been a bit more brutal. Foreign powers used these factions as proxies to meet their tactical and strategic needs in the country without committing significant troops. It also created plausible deniability in a very volatile situation with many major actors. In exchange, these factions received intelligence, money, weapons and on-site support far superior to anything they could hope for otherwise, not to mention promises for their role in the future in Syria that may or may not be fulfilled. While those foreign players could certainly make their presence felt, using proxies inherently means the foreigners were rarely present in sufficient strength to dictate events on the ground. (The sole exception might be Iran’s proxy militant group in Lebanon, Hezbollah, which has apparently redirected nearly all its fighters into the Syrian theater to assist the Assad government. More on that exception in a moment.)

The presence of U.S. forces in Syria has limited what all the outside players could do, as well as the sorts of risks they were willing to take. The Americans may have never had more than a couple thousand troops in-country, but their vast array of naval firepower combined with the base at Incirlik, Turkey meant they could at a moment’s notice squeeze off missile and bomb barrages at any target they desired. There was no point in baiting the eagle (as Moscow discovered Feb 7 when the Americans obliterated a Russian probe attempt).

But take the Americans out of the equation, and the lid comes off the pot. And since everyone has different goals, Syria is about to get consistently lively:

Russia was an early participant in the Syrian conflict for a mix of reasons:

  • Syria is one of the few of Russia’s Cold War-era proxies that is still of some use, so propping up Assad holds some slight strategic value all its own.
  • Politically, being involved where the Americans were not helped burnish Russia’s credentials as a player, guaranteed it a seat at any table that discussed Syrian issues, and was an easy propaganda win back home.
  • Being in Syria annoyed the crap out of the Turks, forcing Ankara to rivet its gaze to its south rather than to the north where more core Russian interests were in play.
  • Being able to twist the Syrian fighting this or that way enabled the Russians to generate scads of refugees on demand. A mix of geographic, climatic and infrastructure patterns meant that most of those refugees could only go north to Turkey and Europe, enabling Moscow to scramble European politics with nothing more than a few dozen bombs.
  • More recently, the Russians have turned Syria into a vast testing and training range for its forces. Russia’s military may be huge, but it hasn’t seen 1% of the sort of expeditionary combat American forces have seen since 1992. Syria let’s the Russians play catch up.

What do all these reasons have in common? Russia has a vested interest in seeing the Syrian War never end.

Moscow, Russia

Iran is the closest to a strategic ally that the Assad regime has, and Syria has quite surprisingly – to Iran – become the lynchpin in Iran’s entire regional strategy. The most important tool Iran has is the militant group Hezbollah, which Iran uses not simply as a foothold in the Levant, but to threaten Israel and pressure the United States. When Saddam ran Iraq, the Iranians were able to shuttle support to Hezbollah via Iraq and Syria into Lebanon. Well, the Americans overthrew Saddam and now civil war threatens Syria. The Iranians didn’t just have no choice but to go all-in in Syria, but they are now the power seeking to maintain governments in the region rather than seeking overthrow them. That requires a degree of political, strategic, military and economic commitment that is downright… American.

Assad may have won the civil war, but now Iran has to hold the place together, and as the Americans learned in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, the second phase is far more difficult. But unlike the Americans, the Iranians can’t just go home. An ongoing Assad victory is absolutely critical to maintaining Iran’s current sphere of influence from Mesopotamia to the eastern Mediterranean. In short, the Iranians can never go home.

Directly opposite the Iranians are a series of powers that seem to be somewhat confused about what’s going on in their neighborhood: the Gulf Arab states – Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Their efforts in Syria are, in a word, messy.

  • Part of this is due to geography: large swathes of desert terrain separate the Gulf Arabs and Syria.
  • Partly it’s a lack of experience: the Gulfies are among the most dependent countries on earth when it comes to relying on the American security blanket.
  • Partly it’s ineptitude: Saudi and Emirati and Qatari-backed groups spend as much time fighting each other in Syria as they do Assad or anyone else.
  • Partly it’s an issue of distraction: these same powers are also fighting a war in Yemen.

It all adds up to a lot of ammunition backed by a lot of money that’s causing a lot of deaths. And that just might be the point. For decades the Americans’ took on the mantle of preserving countries in their current form; If your job is to maintain the global system, then you want stability. But with the Americans leaving, the only power that really wants a stable Syria is… Iran. And if there is one thing the Saudis do not want, it is an Iranian-dominated anything. Better to burn the whole place down than allow the dust to settle in an arrangement that doesn’t suit Saudi preferences.

Which puts Israel and Saudi Arabia more or less on the same side, with Israel in the perfect strategic and political position. The regional powers with which the Israelis have passably good relations – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and Egypt – are fighting against Assad and Iranian influence, which means Israel is free to strike targets according to its own national security prerogatives with little risk of even angry tweets from regional stakeholders.

The Syrian War has quietly ushered in a new era of Israeli security relations with its neighbors: rather than relying on the Americans, Israel is aggressively, proactively and decisively pursuing its national security interests and intervening in Muslim conflicts… and no one except Syria and Iran has anything to say about it. The Israeli Air Force has attacked over 100 targets within Syrian territory since 2012, from suspected missile and arms deliveries en route to southern Lebanon to high value Hezbollah and Iranian targets. With the Iranians now the force for order in the country, the Israelis will gleefully expand their target list to anything that will cost the Iranians lives, equipment or money.

It’ll be a long list.

Tehran, Iran

The role of Turkey in Syria has been… unmoored for a reinforcing pair of reasons.

  • First, Turkey’s World War One defeat was so total and humiliating that Turkey in essence took a vacation from the world that lasted a century. The Turks are out of practice using the political, diplomatic, economic and military tools that are standard for pretty much everyone else. The learning curve is fairly steep, but it is still there and the Turks are starting from almost zero.
  • Second is that the political situation within Turkey is flattening that learning curve. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has largely completed the process of purging the country of, well, everyone who opposes him. That has left this very Trumpian personality with zero competent allies, which means he is running Turkey’s $900 billion economy, 80-million citizens, and 900,000-strong military all by himself. Such concentration of power makes for erratic decision-making, with Erdogan highly vulnerable to bad intelligence, fake news, Russian manipulations, personal mental blocks, and a host of other issues that would routinely be filtered out in a more decentralized system.

At the end of the day the Turks’ primary concern in Syria is the military capacity and de facto independence of the Syrian Kurds. Ankara/Erdogan fear – with significant reason – that a Syrian Kurdish statelet will provide a template that could be reproduced within Turkey’s own Kurdish regions. To that end and despite Erdogan’s best efforts, the Turkish military/intelligence apparatus is steadily constructing effective networks of military groups throughout northern Syria. When the Turks do decide to move in force, they’ll be able to.

And let’s not kid ourselves. Unlike the United States, Russia, Iran or Israel, Turkey can put troops on the ground in Syria in the hundreds of thousands if it wants to and the Turks have the motivation and staying power to see their strategy through in what will be a complex and bloody new stage in the war. It is ultimately Turkey that will decide what Syria will look like, and years from now we’ll all be looking back at the 2018 American withdrawal as the event that unleashed Turkish power in the region.

I’d like to end with one particularly dark thought. The primary reason the Americans were in Syria at all was because a militant group called ISIS was stupid enough to post the beheadings of a few American co-eds on social media. Expunging ISIS is pretty much done and so the Americans are now leaving. But look at what enabled ISIS to exist in the first place: local sectarian divisions, multiple competing power centers, an arid geography that complicates regional consolidation, meddling outside powers, and a metric butt-ton of easily attainable military-grade weapons. None of these factors have gone or are going to go away. Every power playing in the Syrian sandbox is creating, sponsoring and supporting their own constellations of mutually-antagonistic militias. It isn’t so much a petri dish from which will emerge the next ISIS as it is an ISIS factory.

Happy Monday.