Dictatorship is not going anywhere anytime soon, contrary to the hopes and dreams of policymakers in the West. Yet the shocking collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has become the latest temptation to make analytic leaps about the impending collapse of authoritarian regimes worldwide. Indeed, the fall of the Syrian regime has sparked a new round of discussion over the stability and fragility of authoritarian regimes writ large. As Assad’s military, his coterie of repressive security forces, and its bevy of pro-regime militias melted into thin air and the dictator himself fled to Moscow, some have suggested that this course was a reminder of an ever-present “autocratic fragility.” And more importantly, that such events could quickly transpire in other wartime dictatorships—not least of all, in Russia.

As a particularly public example, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy connected the two regimes directly, rhetorically asking where Putin will “run away” to when his time came. Others have made similar claims for Iran’s imminent demise. And one CNN article stated baldly: “Assad’s fall is huge blow for Putin, highlighting fragility of his own rule.” But is that true?

The presumed pervasiveness of autocratic fragility should not be the primary takeaway from the surprising Syrian case, although it is a reasonable stretch for observers who conceive of all authoritarian regimes as one single type of polity. When autocracies collapse in succession, they sometimes do so in grand waves undergirded by shared, permissive conditions of regime delegitimation, government indecision, mass elite defection, and ideological optimism for alternatives. This gives us an understandable feeling that autocratic collapse is just around the corner for every single adversary regime in the world.

This would be a mistaken belief, however, and we certainly cannot view events in Syria in this light. Syria is not a case of generic authoritarian weakness, but a uniquely specific congeries of degradation, bad management, and poor prospects. Assad’s Syria was a perversely longstanding personalist dictatorship that, even so, was institutionally rotting from within (and had been for decades), while the connective tissue between regime and society decayed rapidly, and which was unusually dependent on outside support for its daily functioning to a much, much greater degree than the average nondemocratic regime.

In fact, perhaps unusually, we are ultimately better served by avoiding quick takes on authoritarianism and focus instead on insights from Syria’s own authoritarian backers and how they have viewed the unfolding Syrian situation. Explaining regime collapse from the perspectives of the authoritarian states most interested in exactly this issue is likely to provide greater insight than an exercise in generalization.

In this way we avoid grand pronouncements on the fragility of authoritarianism writ large. Rather, we can focus on what our adversaries are contemplating as they survey the wreckage—the inability to achieve decisive outcomes in the civil war, the collapse in productive linkages between the authoritarian state and society, and a failure to properly institutionalize or professionalize the Syrian army while also relying on (ultimately unreliable) foreign backers as a crutch.

Lessons in Sudden Collapse

It is certainly true that regime change can follow Hemingway’s adage on bankruptcy—something that happens “gradually, then suddenly.” In some ways, authoritarian regimes are peculiar characters in this sense, often held up through forms of legitimacy and repression that seem especially capable of simply disappearing into the ether if a few key regime pillars fall.

One example is the famous dissolution of socialist authoritarianism across the Eastern Bloc at the end of the 1980s. Those cases saw a process of regime collapse that involved long-cowed populations engaging in what Timur Kuran referred to as a rapid “preference cascade” in which mass protests and elite demoralization took place suddenly in environments where the day before there had been quiescence and the appearance of total control.

This and related frameworks, such as Samuel P. Huntington’s “waves of democracy” and Seva Gunitsky’s “hegemonic shocks,” have tremendous value and explain important political phenomena. Many of these arguments, however, emphasize truly macro-level patterns on regional or global scales. And they are situated in time periods when democracy was on the move across the world—not our current era of democratic decline and revitalized authoritarian rule.

The most famous preference cascades are similarly massive in size and often rely on key external factors, such as Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to let the Warsaw Pact states go after years of dithering, as highlighted by Vladislav Zubok’s recent magnum opus on the collapse of communism. And in the most recent round of regime collapses in the Middle East during the Arab Spring, as the scholar Eva Bellin has pointed out, it was the interaction of a region-wide social mobilization trigger with security service reluctance to brutalize its own population and patterns of military defection that produced a much more localized and mixed result of regime change in a few places—and bloody civil war elsewhere.

General Lessons or Case Uniqueness?

Taking these cautions to heart, we should be cautious about overemphasizing a blanket assumption of autocratic fragility as universally applicable. The still-evolving Syrian scenario is truly extraordinary and highly case specific, being nested in a decade-long, multifaction internal war with extensive, longstanding, and direct kinetic international involvement. Very few contemporary authoritarian regimes currently face such strong and internecine headwinds, let alone for so long. A comparison to modern Myanmar or perhaps Ethiopia may indeed be apt and informative on this count, but drawing a broader lesson is far trickier. Neither Russia nor Iran, the two states most frequently raised in light of Assad’s ouster, face such internecine domestic fragmentation and political disorder.

Similarly, the tendency to treat all personalist dictatorships the same can often obscure more than reveal. As the observational data trickles in, we see a Syrian regime that was hollowed out at the elite level, among key security and military institutions, and surprisingly devoid of popular support—or critically, local militia backing—when the going got truly tough. This is an impressive failure for a regime that lasted sixty years (almost twice as long as the average democratic regime outside of Europe and North America today), even if the legacies of the once cohesive Ba’athist party had long begun to fade. But personalist regimes are not all created equal, and we should not assume the same degree of brittleness applies elsewhere. In fact, many personalist regimes are notable more for their resilience in the face of complex challenges—and the ever-present and often disastrous problems of succession crop up only after the dictator dies, relative to other, more fleeting authoritarian regimes.

Indeed, we can bring in the Russian case as a useful counterexample of a state in a wartime emergency. Since 2022, Russia has faced major strategic frustrations, high casualties, economic degradation and isolation, destabilizing rounds of purges in its Ministry of Defense, and an outright armed rebellion (albeit an aborted one). Yet it has weathered these challenges with aplomb and considerable flexibility, while learning from its battlefield reverses and keeping social discontent at bay. For certain socioeconomic segments in Russian society, the regime is perhaps more popular than it used to be.

Meanwhile, while increasingly economically intertwined with China, even as the junior partner in that relationship Russia still maintains vast economic autonomy (relative to a small, dependent state like Syria) through resource rents and other traditional export strengths such as grain and military sales, and continues the Putin-era tradition of corruption-defying, high-quality institutionalized management of the macroeconomy even under considerable pressure. This is quite simply a different analytic category of state in terms of bureaucratic, political, and economic effectiveness and maneuverability, despite superficially sharing the personalist label.

Finally, the institutional reliance on foreign support in the Syrian case renders it a difficult one to bring into dialogue with the most important questions of autocratic resilience today. The Syrian state has been uniquely reliant on international aid from other key states, most notably Russia and Iran. The long-shrinking Syrian state budget has been supported for years by transfer payments and investments from Iran, to the tune of up to $50 billion dollars in the last decade. Russia has also involved itself economically in Syria, especially through support via considerable wheat exports. Almost no other contemporary regimes have this degree of foreign dependence among autocracies while in wartime conditions. In fact, the regime that perhaps comes closest is Ukraine’s in its ongoing state of emergency, although the context and characteristics are obviously quite different.

Similarly, Syria’s military institutions directly relied on what amounted to strategic and operational bailouts during crisis periods from both of its regional backers, most critically Russia during the 2015 crisis and in follow-up campaigns into the late 2010s. Elements of the Syrian Arab Army itself had been interconnected with foreign backers, including Russia’s proxy command of the so-called Tiger Forces (and related structures) and Iran’s deep ties to the 4th Armored Division and National Defense Forces, let alone other less formalized units. At a minimum, this undercut the capacity of the regime proper to exercise greater operational control and probably complicated the maintenance of clear hierarchies of loyalty and authority from key armed actors to the regime itself.

Most authoritarian regimes today are significantly less indebted to constant reinfusions of military support to simply maintain the status quo and have to deal with far less foreign influence on organic domestic forces. And when this support was withdrawn or otherwise hamstrung—due to Russian distraction in the Ukraine theater and the end of easy expeditionary support through Wagner ground operations, as well as the degradation of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Hezbollah assets in the ongoing conflict with Israel, as regional analyst Nicole Grajevski has emphasized—the consequences proved to be particularly systematic.

The Syrian case is therefore very unique and rather far from an obvious case as the modal form of autocratic fragility. Nevertheless, there are important lessons to be learned from the Syrian case. Indeed, the Assad regime’s allies are already taking a close look at exactly what went wrong and how. A brief survey of ongoing and evolving debates in Russia and Iran are quite instructive in this regard.

Autocratic Fragility from the Autocrat’s Perspective

Russian think-tankers and academics have already begun discussing lessons of the Syrian regime’s collapse. For example, Ruslan Pukhov, in a Kommersant op-ed mostly about Russia’s own mistakes in its Syria approach since 2015, also gave one particularly brutal perspective on the Syrian regime itself: “The Assad regime, as a typical Eastern despotism, didn’t need ‘reforms’ to survive and maintain internal support but demonstrative dancing over the corpses of its defeated enemies.”

Indeed, Pukhov saw much to fault the failure to gain full control on the ground as the major takeaway, a lesson he analogizes to American learning from failures in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Russia, seeking to minimize its costs in Syria, increasingly focused on maintaining the rotten and ineffective status quo there for the sake of the status quo, essentially protecting the decaying and delegitimized Assad regime by the civil war without any prospects and at the same time having no opportunity to influence the growing dynamics of other forces and players,” which was further underlined by “military-strategic weakening” of Russia’s operational capabilities in Syria due to the Ukraine war, as well as the loss of Wagner’s expeditionary forces as a means to exercise military power. Thus, lack of a decisive victory, plus foreign dependence, rendered Syria ripe for collapse.

Elsewhere in the Russian commentariat the analyst Kirill Semenov wrote in Vedomosti that “the army and the people voted against Bashar al-Assad,” suggesting that domestic legitimacy issues ultimately doomed the regime and that the slow-moving collapse in state-society connections played a pivotal role. And Middle East specialist Nikolai Surkov wrote that Syria’s future regime trajectory would either resemble a “war of all against all” followed by the division of the country into “several quasi-state entities” or an Iraq-style federation managing coalitions along ethnoreligious lines and “characterized by the active interference of external forces in politics.”

Meanwhile, Iranian reportage on the Syrian government’s collapse has varied, with much commentary happening through news agency framings in addition to public figures. Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araqchi stated publicly that Assad had never asked for Tehran’s assistance against the militants that seized Damascus and that the Syrian armed forces’ inability to fight against terrorists as well as the unexpected pace of developments in the Arab country was surprising. The Iranian press agency Fars News noted that Araqchi “found Assad surprised and complaining about the state of his army.” These remarks underlined the problem of foreign reliance for the Assad regime as well as issues of regime disconnection from its own institutions and nominal backers.

Other Iranian reporting has highlighted what amounted to a comprehensive set of arguments for Syria’s collapse, citing an “unfavorable economic situation, the weakening of the Syrian army in the civil war, [and] the lack of political reforms by the Syrian Baath party” while the framing from the political desk at Tasnim News was more externally focused on “the entry of terrorist groups and foreign interference” as “the main cause of the turmoil” in Syria. Institutional sclerosis, state-society degradation, and foreign involvement in an environment of poor decision-making led to the regime’s denouement from the Iranian perspective.

Surveying just the most immediate round of discussion within the authoritarian public spheres in Russia and Iran reveals a number of relevant points of interest at a more granular level than generic autocratic fragility.

First, the need for decisive victory in the war was highlighted by Russian commentators specifically, no doubt with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war held in the background. Second, public discussion emphasized the importance of maintaining societal and institutional connections with the regime—the melting away of the military and security apparatus amounting to a final vote against the regime. Third, it noted the particular difficulties of being beholden to foreign powers militarily, economically, and structurally. And yet still the Syrian regime lasted over a full decade into the civil war before ultimately succumbing to these fatal maladies.

Autocracies can certainly be fragile, but we can explain Syria with recourse to the specifics of an extraordinary case without relying on overly general assumptions.

Julian G. Waller, PhD, is a research analyst in the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA Corporation) and a professorial lecturer in political science at George Washington University.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the author’s employers or affiliated organizations.

Image credit: mil.ru, via Wikimedia Commons