It's easy to look at the rapid fall of Syria's odious Assad regime and conclude that its dynastic ruler, Bashar al-Assad — flying off to safety in Moscow while Turkish rebels stormed his palace and freed his political prisoners — was the big loser. It would be easy, and it would be wrong.
Before we get to the big losers, the big winner (as I wrote last week) could prove to be Turkey's Recep Erdoğan. The HTS rebels who stormed Damascus on Saturday are designated as a terrorist group by Ankara, but Erdoğan has also given them unofficial support. Partly as a counterbalance to Syrian Kurdish groups (also terrorists as far as Ankara is concerned) and partly as a counterbalance to Russia's presence.
Erdoğan has long held Ottoman-style imperial ambitions. Knocking Iran out of Syria and locking Russia out of its bases there would make Turkey the most powerful local player in the Levant, except for Israel.
Now for the losers.
The big one is Iran's supreme ruler, Ali Khamenei. Syria was his conduit for supplying Iran's Hezbollah terrorist proxies in southern Lebanon. That's now gone. Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah said in a statement on Monday that Assad's fall is a "major, dangerous, and new transformation." It certainly is for Hezbollah. That group has had a bad few months, getting pummeled by Israel, and now its major sponsor has been cut off.
That's great news for Israel and a major blow to the Islamic Republic's imperial ambitions.
For Vladimir Putin, it's complicated. Syria was a vital imperial outpost for Moscow, providing naval and airpower projection into the Mediterranean and, perhaps more importantly, a logistical hub for Russian and Russia-supported fighters in mineral-rich Africa.
And Another Thing: There's been speculation that Donald Trump's pullout from Syria in 2019 delayed Assad's inevitable fall by five years. Maybe, maybe not — there's nothing inevitable in war or peace. Besides, we've yet to see whether Syria's new government is any better or even worse than Assad's. It also remains to be seen whether the various rebel factions can even form a cohesive government.
It was certainly a humiliation for Putin, ordering military assets to return home to Mother Russia — including Russia's entire naval presence in the Med. Whether Putin can negotiate leases and return to Khmeimim Air Base and the naval base at Tartus is up to HTS leader (and defacto head of Syria for now), Abu Mohammad al-Jolani — or maybe Erdoğan.
(It remains to be seen whether Jolani is a reformed al-Qaeda or just an al-Qaeda with better training in handling the press. But that's a topic for another day.)
But the bigger humiliation for Putin is political. Syria was a Russian ally and client state for 50 years, and Russia has had a direct role in maintaining the Assad regime since 2015. The whole world watched Russia's client regime dissolve in just 11 days because Putin's "Special Military Operation" against Ukraine means Russia has no strength to spare anywhere else.
What happens to Ukraine remains to be seen, but everywhere else, Putin has been exposed as a weak horse.
Then there's Barack Obama. Last summer, he lost his Oval Office puppet when Biden was forced out. Last month, he lost any chance at a shadow fourth term. Last Saturday, his vision of a Middle East dominated by Iran fell to pieces. Even his "reset" buddies in the Kremlin have been given the boot from the region, at least for now.
No wonder Obama was so cranky in that speech last week.
Assad might have lost a country — a country that hated him, a country he couldn't even fully rule. But Putin and especially Khamenei lost an imperial outpost. And with it, Obama lost his foreign policy legacy.
Well, good.
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