Whether noble or naive, this project now looks doomed as AANES’s great power backers turn their fickle attentions to Damascus, and the Damascus government has in turn successfully reasserted its control through military coercion. Within a matter of days, as its Sunni Arab levies turned their affections to their ethnic kin in Damascus and their guns on their former allies, Northeast Syria switched from a bold experiment in multi-ethnic governance to a desperate, rearguard battle for Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. The war, at its presumed end, reverted to the dynamics of its earliest days, when Ahmed al-Sharaa, then leader of the Syrian al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra, had attempted, along with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and tribes of changeable loyalties, to seize control of the oil-rich, and newly Kurdish-run region, Syria’s breadbasket.

Simultaneously rich in resources yet neglected by its central government, and host to the country’s richest mix of ethnic and religious minorities, alternately the tools and the victims of the central state, the Syrian Jazira had always run according to its own dynamics. Both colonial French and independent Syrian administrations in distant, Levantine Damascus expended significant, if sporadic, effort in absorbing this neglected region of Mesopotamia within the modern state system, privileging one ethnic group against another for reasons of statecraft, and building model towns and vast dams, as evocative in their current dilapidation of failed modernities as the ancient tells dotting the landscape, now repurposed as gun emplacements, are of earlier lost civilizations.

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Perhaps the AANES experiment can now be added to this melancholy list. Birthed from the fusion of Kurdish nationalism and Marxist-Leninist thought that initially drove the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) independence movement, the AANES, a project of the PKK’s Syrian sister organization, the Democratic Union Party ‎(PYD), performed an attempted shift to anarchist political theory. The thought of the American writer Murray Bookchin, as reworked by the PKK’s occluded godhead figure Abdullah Öcalan from his Turkish jail cell, was its most notable innovation. Echoing Öcalan’s rejection of the PKK’s previous project of independence for the Kurdish nation, the AANES presented itself as an explicitly multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian state in which the greatest possible autonomy was devolved to religious and ethnic communities, beneath the benign framework of Jazira’s de facto autonomy from Damascus. In practice, the quasi-anarchist devolution of power resulted in the proliferation of bureaucratic structures. Local empowerment, similarly, meant the elevation of new elites loyal to the project, and the freezing out of dissidents, particularly rival Kurdish factions. Imperfect though it may have been, compared to the overt totalitarianism of the Baathist state, the anarchic infighting of the FSA rebels, and the gothic cruelties of ISIS, history is likely to remember it more favorably than today’s discourse would suggest.

Barely populated until the French Mandate period, except during the annual circulation of nomadic Bedouin shepherds, the portion of Syria east of the Euphrates underwent during the early 20th century a transformative period of internal and external immigration and development analogous, in a modest way, to that of California or Australia. Ethnic Kurds fleeing the collapse of proto-nationalist rebellions in Ataturk’s Turkey, along with Syriac Christians fleeing the Seifo genocide and many uprooted Armenians streamed south across the culverts and rusting tracks of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway line, which still marks the modern border, joining their ethnic kin residing there from the beginning of recorded history. Ethnic Assyrians from British-Mandate northern Iraq similarly sought French protection from the predation of the Iraqi state and its Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen auxiliaries, establishing a string of fiercely Christian villages along the Khabur river. Northeast Syria was shaped by the cultural memory of ethnic conflict; its past decade of governance was an attempt to evade the return of its attendant cruelties.

As such, the AANES project was always as much one of necessity as Leftist idealism. The Kurdish regions of northern Syria, stretching West of the Euphrates into Aleppo, were separated from each other by clusters of Arab and Turkmen towns and villages, in large part the result of the Baathist state’s settlement of Arabs from Syria’s desert hinterland to hinder any Kurdish attempts at secession. While the early successes of the Syrian Kurds under the PYD, following a negotiated handover of control by Assad’s overstretched government, resulted in what was essentially the occupation by its YPG military forces of Arab settlements, loyal to one or other rebel or jihadist faction, America’s decisive intervention in the war against ISIS resulted in both sudden and unexpected great power backing for Northeast Syria and an evolution of Kurdish political attitudes towards local Arabs.

Partly at America’s behest, in a failed attempt to assuage the Syrian rebels’ combative Western think-tank diaspora, and partly a genuine attempt to impose progressive governance among a population Kurds frequently portray as stunted by its own reactionary obscurantism and crude ethnic chauvinism, Northeast Syria’s autonomous quasi-government undertook a project of delegating political and military authority to Arab regions won back from ISIS. It was an ambitious goal which seemed, for a decade, to have won majority acquiescence, if not affection. It became the boast of the regional administration that its armed forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was now predominantly composed of Arabs, a feat of enlightened governance that rapidly proved hollow, over the past two weeks, when the majority of these Arab fighters effortlessly switched sides. Having lost almost all its Arab accretions, the SDF was once again, in practice, the Kurdish YPG, an ethnic militia fighting for purely Kurdish goals. Now that, under the threat of military defeat, a shrunken version of these forces will be subsumed under the Damascus government’s control, their future role — on paper, and in reality — remains to be seen.

The integration terms finally accepted, at gunpoint, by the autonomous administration last weekend, though better than those of a fortnight ago are worse than those of the unimplemented March agreement. Consequently, much has been made in recent days of the AANES’s failures to come to terms with al-Sharaa’s shock capture of the Syrian state just over a year ago, and negotiate a settlement with the new reality. Certainly, the region’s political focus had, since the seeming cornering of the Sunni Arab rebellion into its Idlib Bantustan, centered on negotiating re-integration into Assad’s Baathist state in a manner that preserved some means of political and military autonomy. Yet Assad, over-confident of his own position as victor of the long and bloody war, refused to offer more than integration into the central state on terms that amounted to surrender. The new regime in Damascus now offers little different: what has changed is its greater power of coercion, and international backing, compared to its previous Baathist iteration.

Putin, once an occasional, tacit partner of the Kurds west of the Euphrates, has fully backed the new Damascus government, another instance where Russia, once America’s rival in Syria, shares increasingly aligned interests with the Trump White House. Calls for the protection of Kurdish cultural rights and social norms by European states are outweighed by their overriding political interest in the accelerated removal of their more than one million mostly Sunni Arab refugees. Regionally, the success or otherwise of the Northeast’s reintegration will determine Israel’s ability to justify its military protection of Druze autonomists in the southern province of Sweida. Relations with mostly Shia Iraq, which has its own reasons to look askance at Sunni jihadist governance and is currently making a show of reinforcing its border with Syria, will be fraught at best. Given the sheer improbability of fate’s wheel suddenly projecting al-Sharaa into Assad’s Damascus palace, it would be foolhardy to offer any firm predictions, rather than vague anxieties, for the country’s future.

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For the Kurds themselves, the experiment in enlightened multi-ethnic governance proved, at the crucial moment, a dramatic and costly Achilles heel. The result, over time, will likely be the weakening of PKK ideology in favor of some form of pan-Kurdish ethnic nationalism, whose early stirrings are apparent in the flow of volunteers from northern Iraq to defend their ethnic kin, the sudden revival of the Kurdish flag, Ala Rengin, in Northeast Syria, and in the readoption of the ethnic term Rojava, or West Kurdistan, in place of its previously bland geographic descriptor. When even Abdullah Öcalan’s nephew Ömer, an MP in Turkey’s parliament for the movement-aligned DEM party, feels compelled to proclaim “Long live the Kurds and Kurdistan”, and “the Kurdish nation will not forgive the enmity committed against it”, we sense the tectonic plates of Kurdish politics shifting away from Leftist post-national idealism towards an embryonic ethnic nationalism. The decade-long experience of Kurdish self-governance, military success and international diplomacy will shape whatever follows the likely collapse of the AANES statelet, whether what replaces it will coalesce in the mountainous redoubts of eastern Turkey, Western Iran and northern Iraq, or in the grey cities of the European diaspora. So, too, will bitter analysis of the project’s failings.

Yet it would be unfair for harsh self-criticism to so soon follow hindsight. For all its faults, the Kurdish project of autonomy from the Syrian central state evolved, through managing the dynamics of their multi-ethnic region, into one that ironically and idealistically attempted to make the very idea of equable Syrian co-existence a political possibility. Inversely, the current Damascus project of re-centralization has, in western Syria, been accompanied by sectarian massacres and other abuses, which have increased the antipathy of peripheral minority populations towards the central state. Sunni Arab supporters of the al-Sharaa government, whose decade-long displeasure at having their ethnic kin ruled by minorities is accompanied by certainty of their own natural right to rule those same minorities, have made much of Kurdish intransigence while minimizing or even justifying the starkest governance failures of their own new regime. Yet the past year’s massacres of Alawites and Druze, punctuating the failed integration talks with the AANES, only heightened the Kurdish disinclination to disarm and dissolve its forces and place the fates of its people in the benevolence of the central state.

Syria’s post-independence oscillation between peripheral revolts and centralized coercion, the very cycle that produced both Assad and his own overthrow, is simply the remorseless logic of a country, like neighboring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics. Whether or not the new Syria can break this cycle is an open question. It will take great feats of governance, and of control over his own disparate armed forces, by al-Sharaa to avoid the logic of Syria’s demographic confusion weakening his own state-building project just as, suddenly and catastrophically, it did for the Kurds. Syria’s ethnic and religious complexity makes it a hard country to rule, historically veering, as a result, between instability and oppression. The Kurdish attempt to find another, progressive path ultimately failed, for the same reasons. The lessons, it ought not to need underlining, reach far beyond Syria’s borders.

Birthed in the heady aftermath of the Second World War, the Arab Socialist Baath Party went through three major stages, each closely related to the vexed political history of the region. The first stage was one of utopian dreams. The second involved military action, power grabs and coups. The third, and worst, was of ideals betrayed, of personal dictatorships and brutal death squads. Yet, if Baathism has finally entered history, with the Syrian party officially dissolved in February, its story is far from over.

On the contrary, the lessons of Baathism must now urgently be absorbed by a new generation of Arab leaders. From the way it pitted the region’s Arab majority against minorities, and in how it took the ideology’s mythical sense of destiny and placed it into the hands of strongmen, there’s plenty for men like Ahmed al-Sharaa to think about, even if they emerge from very different ideological backgrounds — especially if they hope not to end their premierships either exiled or hanging from a noose.

Founded in Damascus in April 1947, Baathism was the most enthusiastic iteration of Arab nationalism. Whereas Gamal Abdel Nasser understood the Arab world in hard-nosed strategic terms, as a place to exert his own influence, the Baathists had an almost mystical sense of the Arabs as a nation transcending historical forces. As one of its founders put it, this was a people with a “natural right to live in a single state”.

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Such high-minded ideas are unsurprising. After all, the ideology was founded by Syrians who had immersed themselves in European philosophy, from Marx to Nietzsche, while studying at the Sorbonne. Two of the three founders were members of minority communities, and it’s useful to think of Baathism as a way of constructing an alternative Arab identity to Islam. While Salah al-Din al-Bitar was a Sunni Muslim, Michel Aflaq was an Orthodox Christian. Zaki al-Arsuzi, for his part, was an Alawite who later embraced atheism.

What all three shared was an eagerness to blend Enlightenment modernism with Romantic nationalism. Arsuzi, for instance, believed Arabic, unlike other languages, to be “intuitive” and “natural”. Aflaq, for his part, turned the usual understanding of history on its head. He considered Islam to be a manifestation of “Arab genius” and deemed the ancient pre-Islamic civilizations of the Fertile Crescent to be Arab too. Never mind the fact that the Assyrians or the Phoenicians had never spoken Arabic.

Like other grand political narratives of the 20th Century, then, Baathism was an attempt to repurpose religious energies for secular ends. Even the word “Baath” means “resurrection”. Consider the party slogan, “umma arabiya wahida zat risala khalida” in Arabic. That means “one Arab nation bearing an eternal message” — which sounds strangely grandiose, even before you realize that “umma” is the word formerly used to describe the global Islamic community, and that “risala” is used for the divine message the Prophet Muhammad delivered to humanity.

If a secular form of messianic faith was one wing of Baathist ideology, you get a sense of the other from the party’s motto. Proclaiming “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”, it evoked a single, unified Arab state stretching from the Atlantic in the west to the Arabian Gulf in the east, and from Syria in the north to Sudan in the south. This Arab state, Baathists argued, must also be free of foreign control, and construct a socialist economic system. That makes sense: the region had long been exploited, both by the Ottomans and their European imperialist successors.

At first, Baathism was spread by rural doctors and itinerant intellectuals. In those early days, the leadership consisted disproportionately of schoolteachers, ruling over a membership of schoolboys. In 1953, however, the party merged with Akram Hawrani’s peasant-based Arab Socialist Party. This brought it a mass membership for the first time, and it came second in Syria’s 1954 election.

By then, though, democracy was becoming ever rarer. Since Colonel Husni al-Zaim’s March 1949 coup, the first in Syria and anywhere in the Arab world, politics was increasingly being determined by men in uniform. The most significant of these soldiers was Nasser, who seized power in Cairo in 1952, and promptly became a pan-Arab hero after successfully confronting Britain, France and Israel over the Suez Canal in 1956.

Nasser’s popularity fueled an already raging popular desire to eliminate colonial borders and, at the behest of Baathist officers in Damascus, Syria and Egypt merged into the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. Yet Nasser’s conception of unity, one which the Baathists would emulate, was totalitarian. There should be only one leader, one party, one truth. Following Nasser’s orders, the Syrian Baath dissolved itself. It would never be a grassroots movement again.

In the meantime, Syrian officers seconded to Cairo formed a secret Baathist military committee. This marked the start of the Baath’s next stage, with the party now belonging firmly to military elites. Following the collapse of the UAR, in 1962, Baathists tasted power for the first time, seizing control of both Iraq and Syria. The Iraqi Baath had a different sectarian make-up to the Syrian. Its membership was mainly Sunni Arab, which was a minority locally but the majority across the wider Arab world. Iraq’s Shia Muslims, therefore, associated Baathism with Sunni identity and were more likely to join the communists, then Iraq’s largest party. This meant that the Iraqi Baath appealed to some — and may well have been sponsored by the CIA — as an anti-communist force. Its March 1963 coup was accompanied by a massacre of Leftists. In November, however, it was ousted by another coup.

The Syrian Baath retained power from 1963 onwards, but was riven by conflict, culminating in 1966 in an internal coup by Salah Jadid. Arsuzi was brought back from obscurity to play the role of ideological figurehead of the Syrian wing, but most of the party’s original leadership, including Aflaq, fled abroad. Bitar was assassinated in Paris in 1980.

The Baathists turned on each other, its Syrian and Iraqi wings becoming irreconcilable enemies. In Syria, an endless series of purges further sectarianized an already sectarian army. Competent officers were replaced by loyalists, overwhelmingly from the same Alawite community as Jadid and his ally Hafez al-Assad. The consequent weakening of the army may explain the catastrophic loss of the Golan Heights in 1967, when Assad, then defense minister, gave the order to retreat long before Israeli troops actually arrived.

Under Jadid’s “Leninist” leadership, the Syrian Baath practiced a top-down Leftism aimed at eliminating the old bourgeoisie. In 1970, however, the “pragmatist” Assad launched a new internal coup. Jadid was sent to prison, where he languished until his death. Assad eased off the class warfare, concentrating instead on building his own power base. The Iraqi Baath, meanwhile, had returned to power in 1968, and Saddam Hussein ascended within it until he became absolute leader in 1979.

This marks the third stage of the Baath, in which the party became a vehicle for one-man dictatorships. Cults of personality exalted Assad and Hussein with mass rallies and titles like “first pharmacist” or “hero of war and peace”. They were lionized as “eternal leader” and “symbol of the Arab revolution” — as if the hitherto deified nation had been reduced to a single figure.

Some sections of society benefited, for a while at least, from this system. Members of hitherto marginalized rural communities, including religious minorities, entered the army and security services. Some of the urban working class benefited from jobs in the rapidly expanding state sector. In Iraq, enormous oil wealth allowed rapid development of civilian infrastructure. Yet terrifying political repression and massive corruption caused a brain drain, scaring off investment from both Damascus and Baghdad.

Then Hussein’s regime squandered Iraq’s wealth on wars of choice. Despite bloody stalemate against Iran, and embarrassing defeat in Kuwait, Hussein hailed his victories. In this, he borrowed from the Baathist playbook: Assad had done something similar in 1973, after losing to Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The gap between rhetoric and reality was vast and growing, perhaps inevitable given Baathism’s totalizing aspirations.

All the while, both Assad and Hussein built fearsome security states. Far from uniting the people, repression in both countries soon took on ethnic and sectarian overtones. Hussein killed tens of thousands of Kurds — the 1988 chemical atrocity at Halabja was especially infamous — before exterminating Shia Muslims when they rose against him in 1991. Hafez al-Assad responded to the challenge of the Muslim Brotherhood by killing up to 40,000 people in Hama in 1982. Then Assad’s son Bashar, who inherited the presidency in 2000, outdid his father, responding to the 2011 revolution by killing hundreds of thousands.

Hussein was deposed by the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003, and soon met his end at the gallows. Many of his security officers later joined ISIS which — despite its religious rhetoric — is actually the Baath’s closest successor: both revel in mass surveillance, detention and torture.

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So what became of “Unity, Freedom, Socialism”? Instead of unity, the Baath brought divide and rule, splintering society by ethnicity, sect, class and region. Instead of freedom from foreign powers, Iraq and Syria ended up occupied. In both countries, socialism ended in sanctions, neoliberalism and graft.

In Greek drama, the tragic hero is brought down by a fatal flaw in their character. The Baath party’s flaw was its identification of the Arabs with state power, and then the reduction of the state to one-man rule. An Arab nation can be said to exist, and sometimes it even transcends state borders. The Arab Spring proved this, when Arabs from Tunis to Sana’a, influencing each other, all revolted simultaneously. But the Arab countries include non-Arab peoples, and the Arabs themselves are plural and diverse, far greater and more creative than a single man or a single mystic ideology could ever be.

That still leaves one more question: what lessons should present and future leaders learn from the failure of Baathism? First, that strong men are brittle and easily broken, whatever their ideology. Second, that the highly centralized, hyper-authoritarian states built by such men end in military defeat and economic collapse. These dictatorships weaken and impoverish society, and provide security to no one, not even to the strong men in the end.

There’s a foreign policy dimension here too. The Arabs have long been assaulted by a string of foreign states: Israel, the US, Russia and Iran. The need to win freedom from the nation’s enemies — or at least to deter their aggression — is more crucial than ever. But seizing control of the state by military force is not sufficient to shift the balance. There are no shortcuts. Lasting power can only be built by liberating the people rather than smothering them: and that means human and civil rights are essential tools in constructing national power. Once the peoples of the Arab and Muslim region are able to express themselves freely and determine their affairs democratically, then their various polities will be ready to coordinate their energies. And that, more than Baathism ever did, will truly change the world.

For a quarter of a century, Putin has dreamed of ending the era of American hegemony that followed the Cold War. Just 11 days after his shock appointment as acting president in 1999, Putin signed a National Security Policy declaring that “Russia will facilitate the formation of an ideology of establishing a multipolar world”. In theory, the “multipolar world” describes the end of American unipolarity. In reality, it is a synonym for the return of Russia’s international standing. After years of humiliating decline — a national debt crisis, a military disaster on home turf in Chechnya, and Russia’s increasing marginalization in international security discussions — Putin was promising a new era of national and international strength.

Russians hoped their nation would once again become a great power. Back in the Seventies, the Soviet Union was a major player in Africa and the Middle East. By funnelling money, arms, and propaganda to support friendly countries, and fuel chaos and revolution in unfriendly ones, the Kremlin was, effectively, wrestling with the USA in proxy economic and physical wars. But as the Soviet empire unravelled at home and economic strife hit, Moscow’s influence waned. Formerly friendly countries looked to Washington instead. Throughout the Nineties, the government of the new Russian Federation was powerless to stop its influence collapsing.

Yet Syria remained one of Moscow’s most enduring friends and obedient servants, a role it has played for much of the last 80 years. After the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1944, the USSR openly advocated on behalf of Damascus. Moscow poured arms and money into Syria as the country ended French colonialism in the Forties. The following decades saw ever more tokens of friendship. A Soviet naval base opened in Tartus in 1971, and Moscow assisted Syria in the Yom Kippur War. Billions of dollars went to propping up the relationship, all eagerly received by the Syrians themselves.

Even as the USSR’s foreign power flagged in the Eighties, then president Hafez Assad’s government expressed support for the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and continued to rely on Moscow for assistance. Their enduring relationship exemplified the old, bipolar world order. Come what may, the Syrian regime relied on Moscow for military and ideological firepower. Syria, in turn, was an unusually stable country in an often fractured region, while the Soviet Union could count itself a major regional player thanks to this one-sided relationship.

In the Nineties, Russia’s inability to provide any real support to Syria saw the partnership wither. Under Putin’s aegis, a plan was hatched to revive it. While Moscow was hesitant at first to directly intervene in the Syrian Civil War, its airpower and ground forces proved crucial in helping Bashar al-Assad cling on to power as rebel forces gathered steam. The Russian Air Force’s brutal bombing campaigns were conducted with the same disregard for humanitarian law and civilian casualties as its earlier war in Chechnya, and foreshadowed Moscow’s approach to the Ukraine conflict. In return for propping up Assad, Russia was able to keep its naval base in Tartus, which allowed it to reach further into Africa. More important, Putin sent a clear message: he was willing to use any means necessary to ensure Russia was a global power that Washington and its allies could not ignore. The “multipolar world order” — if that meant the West listening to a powerful Russia — seemed to be coming to life.

Assad has stuck by Moscow like few others in recent years. While other countries in the Kremlin’s economic and military orbit, including traditional partners in Central Asia and Africa, have attempted to play off Russia and an ascendant China, Assad remained the perfect vassal. Speaking at the Kremlin last year, the former Syrian leader expressed his fealty by parroting Russian propaganda. He offered support for Russia’s war “against neo-Nazis and their predecessors”, and went on to speak of his “devotion” to Russia and the “need to stabilize the world”. Subjugation to Russia meant stability for the dictator.

Today it transpires that this stability has been, along with Moscow’s military, economic, and cultural strength, another of Putin’s grand illusions. Just as the campaign against Ukraine revealed military weaknesses in hours, so Russian power in Syria has evaporated in a matter of days. Stretched to the limit by its war in Ukraine, where despite recent progress some 30,000 soldiers and billions of dollars are being lost every month, the Kremlin has no more forces, no more men, and no more money to send to the Middle East. The best it can offer is asylum to the humiliated Assad. Today’s “multipolar world order” has turned out to be a sham, more akin to the Eighties world of ailing Soviet power than the genuine strength of the post-Second World War decades.

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Putin’s power is crumbling across the old Soviet Empire and beyond. Ukraine may not take back Crimea and its eastern regions in the near future, but the country’s population has definitively turned away from Moscow. Ten years ago, for example, Ukrainians were ambivalent about NATO and EU integration. Today, they overwhelmingly embrace both. Across Central Asia, countries look to China, not Russia, for development aid. Azerbaijan behaves without regard for Moscow’s opinion, while Armenia looks to India, China, and the USA for support.

Even worse, Russia has been forced to accept ever more negative trade terms with stronger countries, such as India and China, thanks to the West’s firm approach to sanctions. Its few real alliances, like those with North Korea and Iran, see the smaller partners dictating terms. Today, Putin needs those countries more than they need him, and they are extracting maximum benefits in exchange for providing soldiers and military equipment to Moscow. At any moment, Putin’s whole foreign policy facade could crumble.

Russian diplomats might today claim that their country “does not betray its friends in difficult situations”, but their world is one of smoke and mirrors, in which Moscow’s PR men project dominance, with fake news, disinformation, and braggadocio about everything from Syria to ballistic missiles, to cover up their country’s comparative weakness. Russia deployed its usual range of propaganda tactics to claim Assad’s position was impregnable, but at the first sign of trouble, some of its propagandists now claim that Syria never mattered anyway.

Ever since 1999, Putin’s aim has been to recreate Russian power with mastery over vassal states like Syria and Ukraine, but he has presided over chaos. Moscow is capable of breaking things, of instigating revolutions, of creating this chaos, but it does not have the strength to institute new international power structures.

Russia no longer has any control over Syria, which is likely to collapse into a period of turmoil as new leadership is asserted and contested. It seems unlikely that the new Syrian leadership, carried to power by soldiers with memories of being brutally attacked by Russian forces, will be as favorable to Moscow as any of its predecessors. Russia today has less power in the Middle East and across the post-Soviet space than it did a decade ago. A combination of big economic and military players — above all China — and chaotic, independent-minded groups, like in Syria, is filling that vacuum.

The Kremlin lacks the money, materiel, and motivation to do little more than hope that its international influence does not erode further. Short on options, and following his response to the Arab Spring, Putin will likely attempt to boost his domestic standing with attacks on Ukraine and more aggressive nationalism at home. This inward turn is not the multipolar world order Vladimir Putin was hoping for.

This time around, we may still hope that things turn out differently. Rather than a reversion to the great crisis of a decade ago, the dramatic events of the weekend, and the international reactions, highlight how far the region, and the wider world, have changed since the war’s bloody height.

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Now locked in dangerous rivalry over Ukraine, the United States and Russia had, over the past decade, come to a workable modus vivendi over Syria. The assumption was that Russian intervention had more or less won the war for Assad, with only the details of a final durable peace to be settled. Indeed, Moscow’s 2015 intervention was itself a response to just such a sudden jihadist-led offensive — led by the same actors breaking out of their Idlib confinement, with what is now HTS then the Syrian al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat al-Nusra. Rhetoric aside, the Russian intervention came as a welcome opportunity for Washington to wash its hands of the long-derailed Syrian revolution, focusing instead on the campaign to dismantle the Islamic State, the war’s most dramatic unintended consequence, using the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) as its most reliable and least problematic proxy.

This time around, the United States, which in 2015 was still officially committed to Assad’s overthrow, but in practice focused on arming Syrian rebels enough to force him to the negotiating table, is happy to take a back seat. The State Department’s communique emphasising that Washington has no hand in the matter, that HTS is still on America’s list of proscribed terrorist groups, and that the ultimate cause of the renewed fighting is Assad’s intransigent refusal to come to a durable peace settlement, is a masterpiece of the genre. The United States is, in 2024, physically present but for the most part genuinely uninvolved in a conflict in which strategic defeat at Russia’s hands had come to seem the most stable and manageable outcome. Aloofly urging all sides to respect human rights and come to a quick and lasting peace settlement, as the US statement does, is probably the optimum American attitude to the current crisis.

For European powers, whose ambivalent attitude to the Syrian revolution itself was rapidly overshadowed by the consequent refugee crisis, which upturned the continent’s politics, the only current strategic interest in Syria is in preventing a reprise of the same demographic tsunami. European diplomatic normalisation with Assad, with the aim of returning as many Syrian refugees as possible, is, we must assume, now on hold. Pragmatic normalisation with HTS itself, with the same motivation, is not out of the question. The overriding European fear will be that any attempted Damascus campaign to reconquer its newly lost territory will mean a resumption of the devastating aerial campaign of the 2010s, backed by Russia with all the additional innovations in the art of killing learned in Ukraine. Equally, any HTS persecution of the ethnic and religious minorities now under its rule will provoke its own new refugee flow. Either scenario, should those uprooted direct themselves to Europe’s shores, would represent another body blow to Europe’s wavering liberal order. Who rules Syria, and how, is now far less of a concern for European leaders than who will rule Europe, and how.

Instead it is regional actors, and Russia, that will determine the outcome of the war’s sudden reflorescence. During the 2010s, the Arab states dramatically prolonged and worsened the Syrian war through their backing of rival rebel groups for their own narrow ends. Qatar and Kuwait funded jihadist groups so lavishly that more or less secular rebels adopted increasingly fundamentalist rhetoric and aesthetics to procure weapons and influence. Saudi Arabia, contrary to the perception many Western observers held, favoured various broadly secular potential strongmen among the rebel leadership, as part of its general fear of jihadist militancy at home; Jordan reluctantly backed broadly secular rebel groups to keep the war as far from its borders as possible and satisfy the geopolitical whims of its American patron.

This dynamic is long gone: the Arab League, committed to normalisation with Damascus, now firmly backs Assad, removing one escalatory factor from the current equation. Working towards a stable relationship with Iran, today the Gulf states have no desire to involve themselves in a revival of the Syrian war. Only Iraq, an Iranian ally with a justifiable fear, after its bitter experience of the Islamic State expansion from Syria a decade ago, is likely to involve itself directly. The Shia Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), the Iraqi militias which fought Islamic State so effectively, are already streaming into Syria to defend Assad. Yet their arrival along the overland supply route to Damascus, through which Iran supplies Hezbollah with munitions, will also likely attract the attention of the Islamic State, still a menacing presence in Syria’s eastern desert. At the same time, a closer Iraqi PMF presence will unsettle Israel, for whom any disruption to Hezbollah’s logistics comes as a welcome development. It is in the world’s interest, as well as the region’s, for the Syrian war, if it must restart, to confine itself to Syrian territory: yet the unstable dynamics of today’s Middle East, centred on Israel’s current spiral of wars, may yet work against any desired quarantine.

Indeed, the timing of the HTS offensive, just as Israel concludes its truce with Hezbollah, highlights both the linkages between the differing theatres of regional instability, and the group’s own careful attention to wider diplomatic nuances. Focused on its own struggle for survival, Hezbollah will not be available to rush to Assad’s aid, as it did so effectively at the war’s beginning. Perhaps HTS held off mounting its offensive while the war with Israel was ongoing: to be seen as benefiting from Israel’s campaign, or worse, coordinating with it, would seem impolitic. In stark contrast with the fearsome reputation Jabhat al-Nusra won among Syrian minorities a decade ago, this time around HTS is making every effort to assuage both domestic and international audiences that they are now a more tolerant actor committed to serious state-building. As well as diplomatic outreach to Iraq, the initial, stunning capture of Aleppo was accompanied with a press release, in Russian, insisting that HTS was a mature and capable actor with which Moscow could come to a mutually profitable arrangement.

Had the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) collapsed over the weekend, it is not impossible that Putin, as pragmatic and cynical as any Syrian militia commander, would have been tempted. Assad’s stock as a local security provider had plummeted, and Moscow is known to be frustrated at his intransigence in negotiating a peace deal which would have secured its long-term role in the country. A successful HTS push through Hama towards Homs would have isolated Russia’s two most important strategic assets in the country, Khmeimim airbase and Tartus naval base — vital for power projection in the wider Mediterranean. But the Syrian Army’s last-minute staunching of its own headlong retreat on Saturday night, along with Russia and Iran’s reconfirmed support for Assad’s continued rule, have seemingly put paid to the HTS gambit. The SAA has held, for now, as a battle for Hama looms, and Assad remains in the game. The unfortunate result is that loyalist areas of Aleppo spared aerial bombardment at the war’s height will likely soon experience it a decade later, unless some grand regional diplomatic bargain can swiftly be produced.

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On the domestic plane, a flurry of communiques have come from HTS Leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, urging his fighters to respect civilian lives and the rights of minorities, with specific outreach being made to Aleppo’s large, and overwhelmingly pro-government, Christian community. Equally, while demanding that the Syrian Kurds withdraw their forces from their autonomous stronghold in northern Aleppo, they are doing so as politely as possible, declaring that civilians will be protected and that Syria’s “diversity is our strength.” Both Christian and Kurdish communities have every reason, though, to be wary of rule by a former al-Qaeda faction at whose hands they have suffered before. At the same time, Aleppo’s Christians, abandoned by the Syrian army, appear to have no choice but to accept jihadist rule for now, while the Kurdish declarations that their forces will stay put, unless rescinded, will pit both HTS and the Kurdish-led SDF in Aleppo against each other in a war both factions, equivalently pragmatic actors, would rather avoid.

For the Kurds themselves, the greatest risk are the various rebel factions, including those once mooted by Western commentators as future rulers of Syria, who have evolved as Turkey’s anti-Kurdish proxy, the Syrian National Army (SNA). Long disinclined to fight Assad, the primary function of these militias, prone to ethnic cleansing, rape, banditry and infighting for the spoils of Turkish occupation, and now scorned as “pirates” by the US government, is to push autonomous Kurdish forces away from Turkey’s borders, while securing the Turkish semi-annexation of large parts of Northern Syria. When HTS launched its shock offensive against the Syrian government, the SNA launched its own offensive against the isolated surviving Kurdish pockets of northwest Syria, as the government forces whose deployment saved the local Kurds from total collapse during the 2019 Turkish invasion melted away.

Allied with the United States east of the Euphrates, as part of the anti-Islamic State campaign, the Kurds also rely on Russian patronage in northwest Syria, west of the river, for preservation from Turkish invasion. And they manage the support of the two rival sponsors as delicately as can be imagined. Until this new phase of the war, both the US and Russia were broadly aligned on the Kurdish question, both encouraging the SDF’s reabsorption into the SAA with some degree of autonomy for their northeastern region. Yet the unknown stance of the incoming Trump administration, whose last iteration was nearly fatal for Syria’s Kurds, is a complicating factor: he may still wish to pull American forces out entirely; yet, equally, the recent heightened focus on Israel’s security may make an American military presence in eastern Syria more desirable. Qamishli airport, an island of government-held territory in a Kurdish-held zone, directly abutting Turkey’s border, was until now a curious backwater in the Syrian war: with Aleppo airbases lost, and Russia and Iran preparing for a new campaign of reconquest and aerial bombardment, it may now assume new importance on the Syrian chessboard.

So far, the Russian air force has bombed SNA troop concentrations preparing to assault Kurdish positions, and Turkey has yet to actively join the fray: doing so would likely push Russia and the SDF closer together, as each seeks to preserve their gains with each other’s support. For the Kurds, who have reiterated their desire to stay out of the current fighting, the only option is to defend their areas as best possible and hedge against a total dependence on either the United States or Russia by maintaining relationships with both. It is an unenviable military-diplomatic position that may yet prove usefully flexible in negotiating Syria’s rapidly shifting tectonic plates.

Over the course of a weekend, HTS, long-penned into a corner of the country abandoned by world opinion as a doomed jihadist reservation, managed to wreck the narrative of the Syrian war, not only placing Assad’s eventual victory in doubt, but threatening even his short-term survival. Such a dramatic upturning of the chessboard is not necessarily a terrible result for Syria or the region: the Astana peace process between Russia, Turkey and Iran over the country’s future had become a dead end, primarily due to Assad’s disinclination to compromise. With his seat on the throne threatened, an alternative future for Syria, whereby the regional powers negotiate a sustainable settlement between themselves, with heightened urgency and without Western involvement, could plausibly deliver meaningful results. This offensive could, perhaps, have been the jolt necessary to finally bring the Syrian war to a decisive end.

The ongoing flurry of diplomacy between Russia, Iran and Turkey holds out the slender possibility of a hopeful outcome: neither Russia nor Iran, busy with other fronts, needs the Syrian war to spring back into full, bloody bloom. Equally, both Arab and Western states, tacitly or openly resigned to Assad’s survival, just want the whole thing to end. It would be pleasing to hope, now that so many of the external actors whose involvement in the war’s high period have removed themselves from the table, that the catastrophic errors of the previous decade could this time be sidestepped. But Syria has proved itself the graveyard of optimism many times before. For all HTS’s attempts at diplomatic outreach, Russia and Iran, locked in confrontation with the broader West, have no real incentive to tread gently in securing their greatest strategic victory of the last decade. Syria spent the 2010s as the harbinger and proving ground of today’s wider international crisis — and once again, the Syrian people, on all sides, look doomed to pay the price of the shifting world order.