“No one should shed any tears over the Assad regime.” US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Daniel Shapiro’s reaction to last week’s toppling of the Assad family’s decades-long rule in Syria is fully justified given Bashar and his father Hafez’s infamous brutality. Having forcibly disappeared nearly one hundred thousand people, including thousands of children, and murdered hundreds of others in 2023 alone, and with a long track record of other atrocities and human rights violations, Shapiro is right. The most appropriate reaction to Assad’s flight to Moscow is good riddance.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s time to celebrate. History is replete with short-term victories that have evolved into long-term losses.
In 1917, at the height of World War I and the dawn of the Russian revolution that year, Germany was struggling to bring at least one front of its two-front war to a close. As part of the solution, the German government organized and funded a secret train with thirty-two Russian revolutionaries—chief among them V. I. Lenin—to foment turmoil in Russia and guarantee Russia’s permanent exit from the war. It did. And yet it also led to the founding of the Soviet Union, the future source of a seemingly inexhaustible well of people who were essential in defeating Germany just over two decades later.
In 1953, with approval from senior officials in the Central Intelligence Agency, US spies engaged in the opposite, propping up the unpopular Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and stymying an attempt by the Soviet-backed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh to strip the shah of political power and concentrate it in his own hands. The spy driving this operation forward, Kermit Roosevelt, trumpeted his success in his book Countercoup, ironically published in 1979. That same year, Ruhollah Khomeini led the Iranian revolution, ushering in the Iranian theocracy that has proved so problematic for US foreign policy since.
Would the Soviet Union have emerged as a thorn in Germany’s side without Lenin? Or Iran in the side of the United States with Mosaddegh? It is hard to say. But it is doubtful that things would have turned out much worse for those Germans and Americans who respectively meddled in their affairs.
From this long-term perspective we can better understand the hesitance on the part of President Joe Biden’s administration to get further involved in Syria today following its passing of secret messages to Syrian rebels in the lead-up to Assad’s removal. Perhaps Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group at the head of the rebel takeover and also a former al-Qaeda affiliate and current US-designated terrorist organization, will usher in a moderate theocracy that returns to Syrians some of the freedom they once knew. Or perhaps not. While HTS has distanced itself from al-Qaeda in recent years, its leader is a former Islamic State soldier who certainly seemed intent on establishing a caliphate in the past, declaring in 2018, for example, “With this spirit . . . we will not only reach Damascus, but, Allah permitting, Jerusalem will be awaiting our arrival.”
The truth is, we don’t know what the future holds for Syria. What we do know is that political events often have effects that unfold across many years, even decades, sometimes boomeranging in ways that are difficult to anticipate at the outset.
The German facilitation of Lenin’s return to Russia and the CIA’s “countercoup” in Iran are of course imperfect proxies for the present situation in Syria. If HTS returns to its roots in the coming months or years, US leaders will at least be able to take solace in the fact that while they did not resist the rebel surge to Damascus, they did not support it either, retaining their designation of HTS as a foreign terrorist organization.
Meanwhile, Syrians are understandably celebrating in the streets of Damascus. Supporters of the shah also celebrated in the streets of Tehran in August 1953. So too did the marching band joyously greeting Lenin and company as they passed through Finland—the same Finland victimized by the Soviet Union in its 1939 Winter War, with nearly twenty-five thousand dead Finns in less than four months of fighting.
“Lenin’s entry into Russia is successful. He is working exactly as we would wish,” wrote a German Foreign Ministry official within a week of the Bolshevik revolutionary’s arrival in St. Petersburg. In the days that followed Roosevelt’s “countercoup” in Iran, he too triumphantly recounted his exploits to UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and, later, US President Dwight Eisenhower. It will be many years before we know whether those who passed secret messages to Syria’s rebels while watching from the sidelines as they toppled Assad have celebrated similarly.
Regardless, we should not mourn Assad’s fate. Nor should we call out the marching bands, at least not yet.
Collin Meisel is the associate director of geopolitical analysis at the Pardee Institute for International Futures at the University of Denver, a senior fellow with The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, a nonresident fellow with The Henry L. Stimson Center, and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
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, or Department of Defense.