Friedman: Five quick takes on the regime change in Syria

By Thomas L. Friedman / The New York Times

For the past few weeks, I have been arguing that Israel has inflicted the equivalent of a Six Day War-level defeat on Iran and its resistance network, and that this would have vast consequences. Well, irony of ironies, the Assad family in Syria took power in 1971, in part because of Syria’s devastating defeat in the 1967 war. What goes around comes around.

Hold on to your hats, though; you haven’t seen anything yet. Here are five quick observations.

Funniest statement by any world leader so far: That award goes to … President-elect Donald Trump for his social media post: “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” Attention Mr. Trump: Syria is the keystone of the entire Middle East. It just collapsed like a blown-up bridge, creating vast new dangers and opportunities that everyone in the region will seize upon and react to. Staying out of this is not on the menu, especially when we have several hundred U.S. troops stationed in eastern Syria. We need to figure out our interests and use the events in Syria to drive them, because everyone else will be doing just that.

Biggest U.S. interest: This is also a no-brainer. It’s that this uprising in Syria in the long run triggers a pro-democracy uprising in Iran. In the short run, it is sure to trigger a power struggle between the moderates there — President Masoud Pezeshkian and his vice president, former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif — and the Revolutionary Guard hard-liners. We need to shape that struggle. The events in Syria, on top of Iran’s military defeat by Israel, have left Iran naked. This means that Iran’s leaders will now have to choose — quickly — between rushing for a nuclear bomb to save their regime or getting rid of the bomb in a deal with Trump, if he takes regime change off the table. That is why, Mr. Trump, to put it in your typeface: WE CAN’T HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THIS.

Biggest known unknown: Who are the rebels who took over Syria and what do they really want? A pluralistic democracy, or an Islamic state? History tells us that in these movements the hard-line Islamists usually win out. But I am watching and hoping it will be otherwise.

My biggest worry expressed in a single headline: That goes to the Israeli newspaper Haaretzl: “Post-Assad Syria Is in Danger of Being Run by Out-of-control Militias.” We are at a moment in the history of the Middle East where there are many countries that I would describe as “too late for imperialism, but they failed at self-government.” I am talking about Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan. That is, no foreign power is going to come in and stabilize them, but they have failed at being able to manage their own pluralism and forge social contracts to create stability and growth. We have never been here before in the post-World War II era; a moment when so many countries have descended into this Hobbesian state of nature, but in a much more connected world.

This is why, having just spent the past week in Beijing and Shanghai, I repeatedly told my Chinese interlocutors: “You think we are enemies. You are wrong. We have a common enemy: Disorder. How we collaborate to shrink the World of Disorder and grow The World of Order is what history will judge us both for.” (Not sure they got it, but they will.)

Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria: “It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, then to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.