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The Assad family no longer rules Syria. How did a brutally repressive regime rule with an iron fist for five decades only to collapse in two weeks? And after 14 years of bloody civil war, why was now the moment that a frozen conflict exploded into the global spotlight? The cost Syrians have already paid is greater than any nation could reasonably be expected to bear. Since 2011, more than 500,000 Syrians have died, including 200,000 civilians, and nearly six million refugees flooded neighboring Arab States and some European nations, most notably Germany.
But there’s no guarantee that the suffering will end just because the Assad regime has. To help make sense of these shocking past few weeks and the potential power vacuum to come is Kim Ghattas, a contributing editor at the Financial Times and author of Black Wave. “There was a decrepitude that installed itself within the regime's ranks and just a general exhaustion, life was not getting better for those who stood by the regime. And so I think there was a feeling that it was time to abandon him.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
The last time Syrians sought to oust the Bashar Assad regime, the ensuing crackdown sparked a 14-year-long civil war, killing over 500,000 Syrians and creating nearly six million refugees. So why did things change this time? Ian Bremmer explains.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations, shares his perspective on European politics from San Francisco, United States.
with all of the millions of Syrian refugees that you find in Europe, what's got to be the consequences for them of the fall of the Assad regime?
Well, the first thing that's happened is that European countries have imposed new asylum applications from Syria. That's fairly logical. But the bigger question is, of course, to which is that it will be possible for these people to return. Very many of them want to. There have been a huge number of people who've already returned, primarily from Turkey. But that's going to be dependent upon stability in the governance of Syria. That's still an open question for that. And secondly, economic reconstruction. That is both humanitarian aid and then lifting eventually the economic sanctions so that there is the possibility of bringing the country back again and people having the possibility to go back. Let's see, let's hope, and let's work on that.
What's the nature of the big agreement that is now being concluded with the European Union and the Mercosur countries of South America?
It's been negotiated for a very long time. It's a free trade agreement. It's a partnership agreement. It is going to be the biggest such in the world. It's two huge economies. Significant benefits in reducing trade and opening up for more of trade to the benefit of the European economy, to the benefit of the economies of the Latin American countries. There's still opposition to it in some European countries, notably France. That has to do with the French farmers fearing competition from more competitive Brazilian perhaps beef or whatever it is. That, has to be said, is something that is good for the European consumers. So slight battle ahead inside the European Union, but hopefully it will go through. And as I said, the biggest such deal that the world has seen so far.
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week on World In :60.
Why did you originally think Assad would be able to resist being overthrown?
I am absolutely surprised at the sudden regime change after 50 years of the Assads being in charge. A couple of reasons for it. First is because despite HTS wanting to engage in strikes, the Turkish government, which has been supporting them militarily, had been saying, "No, no, no." And even when they supported them, it was a flashing yellow light. It was take local territory, let the Syrians have more control over their border region. It was not going after Assad. Also, because the Russians and the Iranians, though they were significantly stretched, were providing military support in the early days. So that's the reason I thought that they were likely to be able to resist, but the fact is that they imploded very, very quickly.
What led you to believe Yoon's martial law declaration would fail in South Korea?
Well, here felt a lot like January 6th in the United States, January 8th in Brazil. You had a besieged individual leader, in this case not about an election, but facing 20% approval rates and massive corruption scandals and all sorts of impeachments against members of his cabinet, just getting desperate and deciding to pull the trigger on emergency martial law illegally and without talking even to leadership of his own party. So it seemed pretty clear that there wasn't going to be support. The South Korean people, the judiciary, the parliament, and rank and file, and the military were clearly not going to be supportive. So I mean, I expected that to last very, very briefly, and it fell apart very quickly indeed. He should be out of power in short order. And I expect he's going to resign, by the way, as opposed to being impeached, but it could go either way.
What's another major geopolitical assessment you've made that played out differently than expected, and what does it reveal about the complexities of global politics?
One of the biggest ones is probably the role of technology in geopolitics. Back in the '90s, if you think about the coloured revolutions in the former Soviet republics, you think about the Arab Spring after that, technology was really the communications revolution. It was decentralizing. It gave individuals access to more information and power. It undermined authoritarian regimes, and it promoted democracy. And today, just 20 years, 25 years later, technology has completely changed geopolitically. It's much more top-down. It's much more centralizing. It's about the data revolution, the surveillance revolution. It increasingly empowers authoritarian states that know how to use it, and it undermines democracies. And that is maybe one of the biggest geopolitical changes that's happened in my political lifetime, certainly the biggest since the Soviet Union imploded back in 1989 to '91. And it just goes to show that no matter what you think about the world, if you're not constantly updating your views, you're going to be wrong at some point.
President-elect Donald Trump has made no secret of his love of tariffs, vowing steep import taxes on China, Mexico, Canada, and almost every product that crosses the US border on his first day in office. Will they boost US jobs and manufacturing, as Trump promises, or lead to rising inflation, as many economists warn? On GZERO World, Oren Cass, founder and chief economist at conservative think tank American Compass, joins Ian Bremmer for an in-depth discussion about Trump’s tariff plan and the future of US-China trade policy. Cass believes that tariffs are a way to level the playing field with China, which he says “flouts international rules and any concept of a free market.” He says tariffs can help correct global trade imbalances and doesn’t believe they’ll lead to a dramatic spike in consumer prices.
“When you raise money through a tariff, you don’t set that money on fire. It’s also tax revenue,” Cass explains, “We have a $2 trillion deficit. If I told you that there was some other tax that was going to help reduce the deficit, you’d probably say that would help reign inflation in.”
Watch full episode: The case for Trump's tariffs
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
What will President-Elect Donald Trump’s election win mean for the US economy? After years of inflation and stagnating wage growth, millions of voters elected Trump off the back of his promise to usher in a “golden age of America.” Trump has vowed to raise tariffs, slash business regulation, and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, policies he says will put Americans first. But what will that mean practically for workers and consumers? On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer is joined by Oren Cass, the founder and chief economist of the conservative think tank American Compass, who thinks Trump’s tariff plan will be a step in the right direction. Many economists argue that Trump's tariff plans will raise consumer prices and spark a global trade war, but Cass argues they're a necessary correction that will incentivize domestic manufacturing, reduce the deficit, and counter China’s unfair trade practices.
“If you actually believe that making things in America matters, then we are going to have to find a way to put a thumb on the scale for getting more of that investment back here,” Cass explains, “And I think that's what a tariff can help do.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
A Quick Take over the weekend. Yet again, because there is entirely too much blowing up around the world. Here, I want to focus on Syria where just a few hours ago Bashar Assad, the dictator, forced out, overthrown by a large number of militarily strong opposition forces led by the radical Islamist group HTS.
A lot to talk about here. This whole thing lasted less than two weeks, and initially the Russians and the Iranians provided military support for Assad, but his complete inability of his army to fight and offer resistance, and the distraction that the Russians have, they're stretched-thin from their fighting in Ukraine, from the Iranians providing support to resistance forces that are doing very badly against Israel, particularly Hezbollah and Lebanon, meant there wasn't all that much capacity, or even that much political will, to provide support. And so, Assad has been overthrown.
By itself that's good news, in the sense that this has been an incredibly repressive regime fighting initially a war against their own people. The pro-democracy movement that came out of the Arab Spring and has led to over 500,000 Syrians dead over the last decade, over 200,000 of them civilians, and some 6 million refugees, both fleeing into neighboring Arab states but also into Europe, into Turkey, and of course in Germany, which is part of the reason that Merkel ended up leaving her terms in ignominy. That is the initial background.
And there has been a lot of support for various opposition groups in Syria, from Turkey, most notably from the UAE, from Saudi Arabia, and from the United States, while the Assad government was being supported principally by the Russians in terms of air support, some intelligence, some cyber capabilities, and from the Iranians on the ground, particularly the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. And that was largely enough through the majority of this war. The rebel groups by 2018 had retreated into the northwest, this Idlib region. And by that point, the rebels that were left were mostly led by ISIS, and that meant a common enemy on the part of the United States.
And Turkey had turned from Assad to the proximate Syrian part of the war on terror. And if that had failed, it had the potential to turn Syria and neighboring Iraq into a terrorist state. ISIS lost that battle. Assad consolidated most of Syria under his regime. And then about four years ago, Turkey and Russia brokered a ceasefire in Idlib, which was at that point under opposition control.
That brings us to today, and to HTS, which stands for Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham. It's a former Al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria that has since formally cut their ties with the terrorists, but they're still called a terrorist organization, labeled one by the United States and its allies in NATO. And they are the de facto leader of the armed opposition and led the now ouster of Assad. Now, they've become kind of Hezbollah-like in the sense that they're providing a lot of Syrian citizens with government services. They've managed to coordinate rebels and eliminate infighting underneath that, and they've also promised to protect Syrian Christians and Muslim Alawites and have gotten the tacit support of the Turkish Erdoğan government, who basically gave them at least a blinking yellow if not a green light to go ahead and launch this war against Assad two weeks ago.
Now, having said all of that, the likelihood that they're going to run as a secular government, Syria, seems unlikely to me. This is, we're going from Assad to what is probably going to be a radical Islamist government that'll be repressive and that'll be deeply challenging. And so I don't think that is in any way, at least at this point, something that we can call a transition that's good news or that we shouldn't feel anxiety about. But what is clear is that the Iranians and Russians have lost. So the axis of resistance is not looking like much of an axis and it's not putting up very much resistance. The Russians, Putin has said nothing about this. He's not made a public statement, and that's not surprising. Frequently when he is surprised and he faces sudden embarrassing losses, he doesn't say anything about it to his people. And if you look at Russian state media, they've been talking about France, and South Korea, and Trump, and all those things, but almost no coverage of Syria, where the Russians have lost an ally and they've lost a military base that's important to them in Tartus and they've not been able to put up much of a fight.
Now, the good news there is that if you're Putin, you should be more cognizant of the fact that there are major costs of continuing to fight an incredibly bloody war in Ukraine where you're making some gains, territorially, but you're losing huge numbers of Russian citizens. And so if Trump is coming in and says he wants to cut a deal, Putin should be more incented to do that. There's also good news on the Iranian front in the sense that Syria falling means that they no longer have a corridor to provide military support for Hezbollah. And that means that the two-month ceasefire, which has been announced by the Israelis and by the Lebanese government, is more likely to hold.
Now, if you put those two things together, kind of interesting. Looks more likely that Trump gets inaugurated, and he is indeed able to announce that the temporary ceasefire becomes a permanent end of the war between Israel and Hezbollah, and that he's able to negotiate a ceasefire between the Russians and Ukrainians that does not give up the store to Putin. The former is an easier bet than the latter, but both of them certainly look more likely on the back of Assad being ousted.
The bad news? More challenges, more humanitarian degradation for the Syrian people on the ground. Could easily see another million refugees on the back of the fighting that we've had, depending on what happens with governance going forward. There are very few hospitals that are presently functioning. There is very limited humanitarian aid on the ground, that's necessary in very short order. And it's hard to say that fighting isn't going to break out amongst the various factions that have held together in fighting a common enemy, if that's going to lead to coherent governance going forward, it depends so much on what happens when HTS becomes not the leader of a rebel group but suddenly is responsible for governance on the ground in Syria. And your guess is as good as anyone as to what is going to happen there.
So, that is the best I can tell where we are right now. It's a fascinating issue and a temporary expansion of the war in the Middle East, but hopefully one that we can see bringing a little bit of stability to some other conflicts that are happening in the region and more broadly. That's it for me, and I'll talk to you all real soon.
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- The Graphic Truth: How a decade of war has crushed Syria ›
- Tragedy upon tragedy in war-torn Syria ›