This article is translated by artificial intelligence. If you want to report errors you can write to sito@ilfoglio.it What does it mean today to be struck by lightning on the famous road to Damascus? Sebag Montefiore is one of the most important historians around, and yesterday afternoon, upon hearing the news of the end of one of the world’s bloodiest dictatorships, that of Assad, he wrote three comments on X (formerly Twitter) that help, without hypocrisy, to give the right perspective on the Syrian turning point. The first key point is that it is impossible to look at the fall of the brutal tyranny of the Assad family without feeling joy. For 53 years, Montefiore says, "this dynasty ruled Syria with ever-increasing ferocity, culminating in the barbaric nihilistic massacre in the years after the Arab Spring, supported by a murderous alliance of Iran, Russia, and Hezbollah, which transformed the country into an Iranian vassal state. Around 600,000 Syrians were killed while Assad, the Iranians, the Russians, and Hezbollah perpetrated by far the worst carnage in the modern Middle East, symbolized by the slogan: 'Assad or the country burns!' The fall of Assad's statues, the opening of infamous and hellish prisons (in which some prisoners survived for 40 years), the flight of the secret police, and now the disappearance of the dictator himself are a surprising, encouraging, and joyful development." The interesting part of the analysis is that it focuses less on the effects of the fall and emphasizes more the causes. Among the factors behind the Syrian turning point is a far more solid force than the one that fueled the fleeting Arab Spring of 2011: Israel. The Assad regime fell, first of all, because those who should have defended Assad—namely, the Iranians and Hezbollah—were severely weakened by Israel, and the fact that the most menacing generators of terrorism in the Middle East have been weakened reminds us that the battles Israel fights are also our own. On one side, there is this point. On the other side, the defenses provided by Putin's Russia were also lacking. Russia, so engaged in defending itself from the Ukrainian counteroffensive, failed to dedicate sufficient attention to the Syrian scenario, where it had intervened in 2016 to guarantee stability and seize control of a strategic Mediterranean port. One might say that history books will one day account for how Syria was saved from Assad's brutality thanks to its Israeli neighbors, who delivered heavy blows to Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, preventing them from saving the Assad regime, and thanks to the blows dealt to Russia in Ukraine (both the Iranians and Russians had long used the Syrians as pawns in their anti-American and anti-Israeli resistance front). Time will tell, says the historian, if the former al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Nusra, now known as HTS, and its chameleon-like leader al-Jolani, an Islamist who promises nothing good, "were serious when they announced tolerance for all sects, including Christians, Alawites, and Kurds, and if they really want to create a democracy at peace with Israel, or if this is simply the latest twist in their long history of rebranding, a new deception on the road to creating an Islamist state over which Turkey could exert significant influence." However, what we can already say today is that in recent months, thanks to Israel and Netanyahu, the Middle East has witnessed the fall of a series of actors that had caused its destabilization over the last decades. In this sense, the slaughter of October 7, promoted by the executed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, was a disaster, says Montefiore, not only for the Palestinians and Israelis, whose civilians suffered severely, but also for the entire "Resistance" axis made up of Iran and Hezbollah, which was destroyed by Israel, collapsing decades of Iranian empire: the Shia Crescent from Iran through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Montefiore suggests that, in an ideal scenario, the long wave of the Syrian crisis could serve as an incentive to promote a similar one in Iran, and there’s no doubt that to decapitate the engine of global terror, one would need to aim for the big target, the head of the octopus. What is also certain is that the Syrian story highlights a major hypocrisy in contemporary Western foreign policy, based on the idea that the West should disengage as much as possible from what happens around the world, because exporting democratic principles outside democratic contexts is counterproductive and breeds hatred toward the West. Syria shows the opposite, reminding us that the world destabilizes when the West retreats (this also applies to Ukraine) and when it ignores crisis scenarios, creating a vacuum that someone, sooner or later, will fill. From this point of view, the failure of President Obama in 2015, when he failed to enforce his red lines after Assad used chemical weapons against his own people, as always pointed out by the historian, was a disaster for U.S. power in the region. The U.S. failed to prevent what happened in the years that followed: the surrender to Iranian hegemony. In this sense, Syria today is a mirror of what we do not want to see: the effects of Western disengagement are not only regional but global, and correspondingly, the effects of supporting Israel have a global significance, because Israel’s enemies are the enemies of the West, and if Israel’s enemies weaken, the free West is more likely to be protected in the future. Montefiore concludes: the tragedy of Syria could lead to a wonderful flourishing of tolerant democracy, with the end of repression, Islamism, and the conclusion of Syria’s recent history as a pawn for foreign powers. Or it could be just the final act of a failed Syrian state, with its tragedy as the battlefield of local contenders, Iran, Israel, Turkey, and the great powers, the U.S. and Russia. A Middle East designed as Israel dreams it is an opportunity for the West. But a Middle East where the West chooses to take another step back, as Donald Trump today promises to do, could create the perfect conditions to give free rein to other extremists. To be struck by lightning on the famous road to Damascus today means above all this: to understand that when the West fights to defend itself, it achieves important results. And to understand that when the West chooses not to defend what it believes in, someone will fill that vacuum, generating new chaos and new terror. The compass in the Middle East exists; following it could be the first step to prevent that vacuum from turning into a new extremism.
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