Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free

Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world

“Assad has to go,” Barack Obama said in 2013. More than a decade later, the Syrian dictator is gone. But the mood in the US and Europe is more cautious than celebratory.

Recent history in the Middle East gives cause for caution. The fall of other dictators such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammer Gaddafi in Libya was followed by violent chaos rather than peace and stability. The fact that the force that defeated Assad, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), is designated a terrorist group by the United States, the United Nations and a number of European countries further increases concerns. Memories of the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2014 are also still fresh.

Although they would not say it out loud, the US and Europeans would probably have preferred the devil they know, Assad, to the uncertainties of a new order in Syria in which HTS is the most powerful force. “Reformed jihadists sound like an oxymoron to me,” says a European leader.

The United Arab Emirates explicitly came out in support of Assad last week. Even Israel – which contributed significantly to Assad’s problems by decimating his Hezbollah allies in Lebanon – would have preferred the old regime to the new arrangement. Yoram Hazony, an Israeli academic close to Benjamin Netanyahu, calls HTS “al-Qaeda-affiliated monsters” and says its success is a “disaster.” In fact, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government in Turkey is the only powerful regional actor firmly behind HTS.

But for both humanitarian and geopolitical reasons, it is wrong for Western outsiders to regret the fall of the Assad regime. It was perhaps the most brutal government in a region full of terrible regimes. More than 500,000 people have died in Syria since the civil war erupted in 2011 – and over 90 percent of the victims were killed by the Syrian government and its foreign allies.

The thousands of political prisoners in Assad’s prisons, where torture and murder were commonplace, are now being released and their stories will be horrific. The civil war launched by Assad led to millions of Syrians fleeing the country, creating a refugee crisis that destabilized the EU and led to severe tensions in Turkey. Syria also became a center of cross-border crime and drug trafficking under Assad.

The fall of Assad is also a serious blow for Russia and Iran. Vladimir Putin’s successful military intervention in Syria in 2015 was a sign that Russia is once again a global power. Putin’s unchallenged show of force and ruthlessness in Syria helped embolden him for the subsequent all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By contrast, Moscow’s withdrawal and failure in Syria underscore how the war in Ukraine has strained Russia’s resources – and undermines the idea that the tide of international affairs is flowing in Putin’s direction.

The setback for Iran is even more serious. Over the past few decades, the Iranian regime has built a powerful and vicious network of proxy forces across the Middle East. But Iran’s proxies are now being destroyed one by one. Hamas has been devastated by the Israeli army in Gaza – albeit at a terrible humanitarian cost. Hezbollah is faltering in Lebanon and is no longer able to fight in Syria. The Iranian missile attacks on Israel failed. If Iran loses its position of power in Syria now, Iran’s regional power will have virtually collapsed within a few months.

Of course, there are many reasons to be concerned about what happens next. If the Iranian regime loses its shield of regional proxies, it may look for other ways to protect itself, such as an accelerated push to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Renewed fighting could turn Syria into a failed state and trigger new flows of refugees. HTS could turn parts of the country into a safe haven for terrorism.

But some Western NGOs that have looked at HTS in the parts of Syria it already controls have found it to be well-organized, pragmatic, and willing and able to engage with the outside world. They warn against the assumption that HTS will turn out to be Al-Qaeda in a new guise.

The West’s cautious reaction to Assad’s fall reflects the dashed hopes of the 2011 Arab Spring. Syria’s descent into a brutal civil war remains a cautionary tale cited by those warning against naive optimism about the fall of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East.

But there is also such a thing as naive pessimism. To believe that Assad was firmly in power and that Syrians and the entire region could expect nothing better than constant brutal repression was not only cynical but also analytically wrong. Saudi Arabia, which reopened an embassy in Damascus earlier this year, was a prominent example of a government choosing to reach an agreement with Assad when his power was on the verge of collapse. Only the repercussions of the war in Lebanon showed how fragile the Assad regime’s grip on power was.

Amid all the understandable concern about the future of post-Assad Syria, it is easy to lose sight of a simple truth. The overthrow of a brutal regime that is allied with other brutal regimes is a good thing.

[email protected]