The rapid development of events in Syria over the past few days resulting in the end of the rule of former Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad on 8 December has been accompanied by many attempts to explain what took place to bring it about.
All these attempts are worth a thorough examination, together with the assumptions they are built on and the conclusions they have reached. This article will look at the general picture and approach the scene in its overall context, while taking into consideration political developments over past decades and more specifically since the end of the French mandate in Syria and the country’s independence in 1943.
It will look at the continuing impact of these historical developments on the current scene, linking them with the scenarios and plans of some regional and international actors regarding the future of the Middle East as a whole and redrawing the map of the region.
The first thing that comes to mind is what was mentioned many years ago by the late British journalist Patrick Seale, who specialised in Middle Eastern affairs and worked for many years in the region as a correspondent for the British newspaper The Observer.
Seale was the author of two important books on Syria, the first published in 1965 under the title The Struggle for Syria and dealing with the country’s history from the end of World War II in 1945 and Syrian-Egyptian unity in 1958, and the second being Assad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East published in 1988 and covering the rule of the late Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad after his assumption of power in November 1970.
The reason for mentioning the late Patrick Seale is the fact that in his first book on Syria and later he considered that the “control” of Syria, whether in the direct or indirect sense of the word, was the key to the “control” of the Middle East as a whole. He argued that the party, or parties, that had the upper hand in determining the pattern of events in Syria would be in a much better position to dictate the rules of the game and impose their agenda on the rest of the region.
History tells us that Syria’s role was critical in the struggle that the region witnessed regarding who would control it after the end of classical European colonialism in the 1950s. There was the assumption that as the Arab countries constituted the majority of the countries of the region, they would determine the course of events there if they managed to act collectively.
Another assumption was that neo-colonialism would try to control the region through setting up pro-Western political and military alliances in the context of the Cold War that had already started between the Western camp led by the US and the Eastern camp led by the former Soviet Union. These alliances were planned to include the Arab countries and some non-Arab countries in the region, such as Iran under the rule of the Pahlavi Dynasty and Turkey, which was and is a member of NATO.
Syria’s official and popular policies in the 1950s played an important role in aborting the proposed pro-Western alliances by positively supporting Egyptian positions opposed to all such formulae. These included the Baghdad Pact and other such alliances that the Western powers aimed to establish to fill what the West perceived as a “strategic vacuum” in the region, the result of the end of classical colonialism. Syria also supported Egypt when the latter nationalised the Suez Canal and confronted the Tripartite Aggression against it in 1956.
Developments then led to Egyptian-Syrian unity in February 1958, a policy which was perceived by the Syrian political leadership at the time as a way out of many of the dangers facing the country. This unity only lasted three-and-a-half years for internal and external reasons that space does not allow us to go into here.
Following the secession of Syria from the unity with Egypt in September 1961, the country continued to be central to a number of regional developments, including the tripartite unity talks between Egypt, Iraq, and Syria in 1963 and then the political rivalry between the Egyptian and Syrian political leaderships following the coup d’etat in Syria in 1966. This contributed to the Arab defeat in the June 1967 War. Soon afterwards, Syrian-Egyptian-Saudi cooperation was instrumental in leading the Arabs to the breakthrough achieved in the October 1973 War.
Over the past half century since the 1973 War, many developments have taken place in Syrian domestic, regional, and international affairs. These have gone hand-in-hand with the development of scenarios designed by regional and international actors with a view to influencing the Syrian scene, whether internally, regionally, or internationally.
The Middle East has also seen many significant developments over the past five decades, and developments in Syria have had implications for regional and international actors.
Developments in the wider Middle East have included the Middle East Peace Process since the 1973 War, the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), the Israeli invasions of Lebanon starting with the partial invasion in 1978 and the fully fledged invasion in 1982, the various developments in Lebanon itself, the Iranian Revolution in February 1979, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988), the Palestinian uprisings starting with the first in 1987, the rising influence of Political Islamist tendencies of various kinds, the move towards a final settlement between Syria and Israel in the mid-1990s and the collapse and reversal of this move, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and its regional repercussions, the uprisings that took place in many Arab countries starting in December 2010, labelled by the media as the “Arab Spring,” and the most recent escalation, particularly over the last couple of years, of the direct and indirect confrontation between Iran and Israel.
All of the above developments have had serious implications for the Syrian political scene.
They have also led regional and international actors to focus on Syria, contributing to the events there that started a couple of weeks ago. The issue now is not a “struggle for Syria,” but something more since in reality the regional and international actors have now taken several steps further and consider the “struggle for Syria” to be the “struggle for the Middle East.”
This struggle has never stopped since the end of World War I, but it seems to be approaching a new and qualitative transformation today that will have serious implications for the future. The repercussions of what is taking place today in Syria will not be limited to Syria alone, but instead will influence the future of the Arab world and the Middle East over the coming months, years, and decades.
The writer is a diplomat and commentator.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 December, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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