REALITY HAS NO REGARD FOR YOUR PROCESS WORSHIP.

Arnold Kling says that about the likely future of Syria.

It is not ready to become a democracy. North, Weingast, and Wallis describe two forms of order: one is the natural state, in which violence is contained by having the violent groups form a coalition to rule. The rulers exclude everyone else from forming large organizations, either political or commercial; the other form is an open-access order, in which anyone can form a political party or a corporation.

Syria does not have the background conditions or institutions to be an open-access order. If Syria attains any stability at all, it will be as a natural state. But I am not sure that a stable coalition can be had there.

Loosely, because several of Syria's neighbors disagree on the nature of that natural state.

At Free Press, Eli Lake expands on a suggestion Cold Spring Shops offered yesterday.  "Syrians are free from Assad in spite of the Biden administration, not because of it."

Try not to laugh.

Biden attributes the woes that have befallen this alleged “Axis of Resistance” to “the blows Ukraine [and] Israel have delivered upon their own self-defense with unflagging support of the United States.”

This isn’t just a deceptive telling of recent history. Biden has it backward. While it’s true that Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia are weaker today than they were when Biden was inaugurated as president, it’s not because Biden had the foresight to unleash the Jewish state against America’s enemies in the Middle East. It’s because Israel defied Biden’s efforts to restrain it. Syria has toppled its tyrant in spite of the Biden administration, not because of it.

When Israel took the very steps that have weakened Iran and its proxies, it was greeted by threats and disapproval from Washington.

Thanks, Obama.

A year later, thanks to Israel’s robust response, Hamas and Hezbollah are hobbled. Their leadership is largely eliminated, and Assad’s regime has fallen. Obama’s wisdom, in retrospect, looks foolish. It turns out that Iran was not here to stay. It turns out that another regional power—Israel—was able to extinguish much of Iran’s vaunted ring of fire, despite the warnings, arm-twisting, and weapon-shipment delays from the Biden administration. The Saudis, the Syrian people, the Lebanese, and the Israelis had a choice all along. They did not have to “share” the region with a regime intent on dominating it.

He concludes,

How much of this bloodshed could have been spared if Obama hadn’t clung to the fantasy of a Saudi-Iranian cold peace? It wasn’t just Obama. It was a Washington foreign policy establishment that persuaded itself of the futility of fighting a regime dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. Israel could not afford that illusion. In decapitating Iran’s proxies and destroying its air defenses, Israel paved the way for the toppling of the cruelest tyrant of the twenty-first century. It also demonstrated the fragility of Iran’s imperium and Obama’s delusions about that imperium.

Biden’s empty boast about Assad’s demise is a punch line. But his foreign policy was not an anomaly. He channeled the Obama-era conventional wisdom that captured a generation of Washington’s foreign policy elites. Their assumptions about Iran now lay bare and exposed for the world to see as the region realigns. And yet they remain in their perches on Congressional committees, at the best think tanks, and in the top op-ed pages. So it’s worth asking: What else might they be wrong about?

We could start, I suppose, with Michael Tomasky in The New Republic.

It’s a fortunate thing that Bashar Al Assad’s regime collapsed before Tulsi Gabbard became our country’s director of national intelligence. A well-known Assad suck-up, Gabbard might have been able to feed this bloodthirsty tyrant—a man who killed 11,000 or so of his own people with bombs that, upon detonation, indiscriminately released thousands of pieces of metal shrapnel into the air to kill, maim, and disfigure anyone with the bad fortune to be nearby—with all the support he might have needed to stay in power for a few more years.

Assad’s demise is obviously a development to be celebrated. It’s great to see this ruthless authoritarian gone and Iran and Hezbollah weakened, which they are, at least for now. No, we can’t know who or what might fill the vacuum. It’s not like Syria is going to become a peace-loving democracy overnight, but it is nevertheless hoped that the Syrian people, who’ve known nothing but hardship and impunity, might eke out something of a sane and dignified existence. They certainly deserve nothing less.

Unfortunately, as it often is with lousy university administrators, the successor to a tyrant will be worse.

While we whisper our hopes, however, some caution is definitely in order. Hayat Tahrir Al Sham, or HTS, the group that toppled Assad, has been in control of most of Idlib province in recent years, and the 2020 State Department human rights report notes that the U.N. Commission for the Inquiry of Syria reported that year that HTS “routinely detained and tortured civilians” in territory it controlled. It’s a recurring lesson: One never knows if yesterday’s revolutionaries will round into tomorrow’s statesmen or tomorrow’s tyrants.

It's a good bet that when revolutionaries turf out tyrants they will become tyrants themselves.  It's also a good bet that New Republic propagandists will fret about Donald Trump returning to the White House.

And the weird, and worrying, thing is that even though Trump was president before, we don’t really know all that much about his foreign policy instincts because he was never really tested on foreign policy in his first term.

Think about it. There were no major crises during Trump’s term. There were no 9/11 attacks, obviously, but even beyond that, there weren’t any major wars; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came after he lost reelection. There was no big uprising like the 2014 Maidan Revolution, or the Tahrir Square and Arab Spring revolts of 2011. The Middle East was comparatively quiet, especially to those of us who recall the fraught part of 2006 or the past year’s conflagration that followed in the wake of Hamas’s attacks in Israel. Assad’s butchery was an ongoing affair, but that’s not the same as a new broad regional conflict kicking off, which forces an American president to decide what moral face the United States is going to present to the world. Compared to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Trump had it pretty easy—it even fell to Biden to keep the commitments to wind down the war in Afghanistan and honor the hideous commitments Trump made to the Taliban, much to Biden’s detriment in public opinion polling.

Arab Spring and Maidan:  Obama's watch.  Afghan pullout: the allegedly smart people advising Dementia Joe made the case to stay longer than Mr Trump's time frame.  None of which stops the allegedly smart people from fretting about more worst-case scenarios.

That probably sounds fine to most Americans. But what happens if HTS starts detaining and torturing Christians and Alawites? America won’t care about Alawites, but Christians are Trump’s base. Besides, we’re the United States. We’re supposed to give a shit about the slaughter of innocents (at least when we’re not causing or financing it). People from all points on the spectrum heaped abuse on Obama for getting involved in Libya; but remember that Muammar Qaddafi’s son promised that rivers of blood would flow in Benghazi. Our intervention there may have saved many thousands of lives. Is the United States just going to sit back and let Syrians slaughter each other, if that’s where this goes? I fear that the answer to that in Donald Trump’s America might be “Hell, yes.” That isn’t an America I want to be a part of.

The other place we might wind up is one where the U.S. under Trump just becomes another member-state of the Global Authoritarian Caucus—Russia, China, Iran, Egypt, Turkey, Hungary, El Salvador, and so many others. These sorts of despots are the type of corrupt rulers the United States of America used to oppose. Under Trump—who said on Meet the Press Sunday that he might indeed look to leave NATO—it’s a club of maniacs that the U.S. is very likely to join.

Trust the coastal cosmopolitans to come up with new justifications for nation-building wars, or to proffer doomsday scenarios for the so-called rules based international order.  We can revisit these fears in another four years.