Entering the weekend, Syria President Bashar al-Assad showed no signs of yielding.
As armed rebels closed in Saturday on Damascus, Assad ordered his forces to defend the Syrian capital, seemingly confident the military would come to his rescue, according to Syrian officials familiar with the matter.
By late Saturday, Assad had vanished. He didn’t show up for a prepared address to the nation, and his cabinet had no idea where he was. They learned with the rest of the world that Assad had escaped the country hours ahead of the rebels’ arrival.
The toppling of Assad’s regime, ending 50 years of his family’s rule, revealed how badly Syria’s army had been hollowed out by years of corruption, defections to the rebellion and the country’s economic crisis. Recruitment had declined, and Syrian men dodged conscription.
The military since early in the civil war had depended heavily on outside forces to reinforce its lines. Iran and the Syrian regime brought in militias from Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia had provided warplanes, air defenses and military advisers.
Yet, as Assad dialed for help from foreign governments in his last hours as Syria’s leader, he found he had run out of allies and military allegiance. The swift fall of Damascus confirmed how the regime was “in worse shape than we thought,” said Aron Lund, a security analyst with the Swedish Defense Research Agency, a government think tank. The Syrian government received “a knockout blow early on,” he said, and never recovered.
The rebels in 11 days accomplished what had appeared impossible after 13 years of brutal combat with Assad’s forces.
Owen Matthews on Putin’s collapsing control in the Middle East.
The fall of Assad is, doubtless, a blow to Putin’s prestige. But the swiftness of the regime’s collapse, the fact that Russian forces on the ground reportedly did so little to resist the rebel advance and the fact that Moscow has already offered asylum to several members of the Assad family and possibly to the fallen president himself, suggests that the Kremlin was willing to sacrifice Assad for the sake of bigger diplomatic games.
Russia’s relationship with Turkey, the major supporter of the victorious HTS rebels in Syria and the big geopolitical winner of regime change in Damascus, has always been far more important for the Kremlin than anything the Assad regime can offer. Turkey is a vital customer of Russian natural gas and an indirect exporter to southern Europe. It’s a major sanctions-busting hub for commerce and passenger transit. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has remained effectively neutral in the Ukraine war and played a key role in brokering attempted peace talks in 2022, and a grain export corridor in the Black Sea for Ukraine which also allowed Russian grain to flow freely. Erdogan is also likely to resume his role as honest broker in future peace talks in 2025.
In return for this economic and diplomatic support, the Kremlin has been all too willing to betray its smaller allies to please Ankara. Earlier this year Russian peacemakers stood aside as Turkish ally Azerbaijan rolled into and ethically cleansed the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. And now Russia has helped ensure that rather than being protracted and bloody, the end of its ally Assad was swift and relatively painless.
With its Syrian bases gone, Russia will now face difficulties in projecting power in Libya, the Central African Republic and other countries where its semiofficial mercenary forces are deployed. But on the other hand the cruise missiles of the Tartus fleet and the aircraft of the Hmemim base will now be freed for deployment in Ukraine.
For nine years, Putin successfully cosplayed a leader able to project power across continents. But in Syria that power has proved fragile as a house of cards — and Putin’s word, lest anyone doubted it, utterly fickle.
Donald Trump’s response is here. You have to watch this Jake Sullivan interview where he manages to claim credit for the Biden Administration for the fall of Assad, as if this would’ve happened without Benjamin Netanyahu ignoring the very same administration’s attempts to disrupt Israel’s response. Despite all their failures, they’re no less audacious.
Related
Abu Muhammad al-Julani assures Syria’s minorities they have nothing to fear.
The House of Assad’s bloody fortune.
Israel strikes chemical weapons depots in Syria.
Syrian rebels may be removed from U.K. terrorist list.
How Russia’s war in Ukraine and Iran’s October 7th support doomed Assad.
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Is Trump Already President?
Biden noticeably absent from Washington conversation.
Some Biden aides acknowledge the president’s absence from the broader discussions about how to address Trump’s coming presidency and the future of the party. They say that reticence is rooted in two factors: Biden’s own recognition that few are eager to hear from him, and his own lingering personal belief that he doesn’t owe much more to a party that unceremoniously pushed him aside. Some aides have also said Biden believes he has to take a more measured approach in how he talks about Trump given his focus on facilitating a peaceful transfer of power.
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates defended Biden, saying the president “is making every day of this term count” and is “leading by example for the sake of American democracy, honoring his campaign promise to respect the will of the voters and provide an orderly transition.”
Still, the void at the top has alarmed Democratic officials who worry and the country is heading toward next year without a concrete plan for combating Trump — or even tangible motivation to put up much of a fight. POLITICO spoke to almost two dozen party officials, lawmakers, current and former White House aides and other Democratic staffers for this story, some of whom were granted anonymity in order to offer their candid assessment.
“Elections have consequences — It’s a new sheriff in town,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said.
While Biden has offered little in the way of leadership, officials say there’s also not much demand from the party’s rank and file — including lawmakers and aides — to hear from a president they still blame for relegating them back into the minority. Biden, at 82, is at the end of a political career tarnished by his refusal to step aside earlier and a last-minute pardon of his son Hunter. Few are now clamoring for him to return.
“In conversations that I’m having, they don’t even mention the president. It’s kind of sad,” said the Democrat close to senior lawmakers. “It feels like Trump is president already.”
Many party officials and staffers no longer track Biden’s daily activities or are even aware that he’s spent much of the last month out of the country. In the last week, the dominant conversation among them tied to the president has been about Hunter’s pardon, who got invitations to the White House holiday party and whether current and former White House staffers would get to take the traditional departure photo with the president.
“Democrats in Washington just want to get him and the people around him out the door,” said the former White House official. “All he’s done in the last year has hurt the party every step of the way.”
Related: Poll finds Democratic Hill staffers blame Biden for loss.
We Can’t Forget About Covid
Before bowing out, Joe Biden was on the back foot regarding the Afghanistan withdrawal, illegal immigration and inflation (too rarely blamed on excess government spending in compensation for a suffocated economy). Yet his coercive Covid policies — big on school closures, lockdowns and vaccine mandates — never surfaced as a top-ten electoral concern. Donald Trump’s patchy pandemic record didn’t matter either. Once Democrats were scrambling for a Biden sub, the Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer appeared on every pundit’s shortlist. Yet no one dismissed Whitmer as a viable replacement because she’d imposed some of the most vicious and long-lasting pandemic oppression in the country. Presumably even Michiganians have forgotten all about it.
How to explain this mysterious amnesia? Firstly, while some claimed to find that period of enforced leisure eerily enjoyable, it hasn’t aged well. I got lots of work done, but in my mind’s eye that era is blank and static, as if time had stopped — though it hadn’t, which is what made the paralysis so awful. Not Covid but Covid policies carved a substantial chunk from this decade of our lives and binned it like so much gristle. Well-adjusted people don’t dwell on bad life, much less disappeared life. We repress the unpleasant, and we all seem to have tacitly agreed that in retrospect Covid was so unspeakably horrid that it’s no longer a respectable subject for the dinner table.
Secondly, back when it took bottle, what politicians advocated sanity, rationality, evidence-based science and a sense of proportion? In the US, a few governors such as Florida’s Ron DeSantis held out for common sense and kept their economies ticking over. But which members of parliament in the UK could truthfully claim that in 2020 they defended civil rights? So rare were politicians with a spine at the time that most voters couldn’t have supported candidates with a courageous record on Covid. Often, there weren’t any.
Thirdly, the public were complicit. The dumbest of regulations enjoyed widespread popular support. With a few primitive searches, anyone can learn the utter epidemiological futility of all that “Rule of Six” foolishness, but most people are under-motivated to “do the work,” as “anti-racists” would say. No one wants to have been wrong. No one wants to have been duped. And no one wants to have missed saying goodbye to their late father for no good reason.
Lastly, officialdom has never set the record straight. Excess death figures demonstrate conclusively that states and countries with heavy-handed Covid policies had no better outcomes than those with light or negligible controls. Yet most people still believe that lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates and other scientifically unsupported interventions saved millions of lives. Both the authorities and their media poodles have no interest in disabusing the public of this impression. Britain’s Covid Inquiry seems to have been convened solely to justify all those regulations, to deplore lockdowns only for being installed too late and to castigate politicians for breaking their own stupid rules. In his interview with Spectator TV last week, Boris Johnson dared to question his administration’s ever-changing pandemic decrees — they were too “complicated” — but he kept well shy of renouncing the whole control-freaking shebang as a catastrophic mistake.
Notre Dame Proves The West Can Still Build
So how was it possible to restore Notre Dame in five years, when new nuclear plants, bridge crossings, canals, and railway lines seem paralysed across the West by bureaucratic executive dysfunction? The answer is that it’s not the actual construction which is the problem. Builders and tradesmen are, generally speaking, paid per job and hence good at getting on with things once the brief is agreed. What causes paralysis is agreeing on a plan for the work.
There are two linked reasons for this: one aesthetic and one political. Firstly, the artistic sensibility that commands high status among the type of information-class elites usually tasked with creating such plans is repugnant to the general public. Thus buildings and infrastructure in this style — think glass and steel, hostile boxes, weird lines and so on — tend to be unpopular, and have to be imposed de haut en bas.
And this triggers the second difficulty. Imposing unpopular buildings takes political will, and this is largely absent in the information class, which prefers abstraction and proceduralism and lives in morbid fear of personal accountability. Branding and finance is their fluid and ambiguous happy place; but project plans with clear, irreversible material dependencies trigger vast sheaves of anxious paperwork that often comes to replace doing the actual project. Add in hostile groups weaponising the same system to obstruct the final product, and you get the morass of buck-passing, strategic ambiguity, spurious bureaucratic procrastination and other symptoms of terminal paralysis that characterises a typical Western infrastructure project.
Notre Dame escaped that trap by having the plan already in place, in the collective memory of the people of France. The brief was simple: put it back the way it was. So — apart from among a few snooty modernist architects who wanted to “modernise” the ruin in various preposterous ways — public support for restoration was genuine and widespread. And thus the project escaped the usual executive-dysfunction traps, despite some bureaucratic rearguard action in the form of hand-wringing about lead pollution: the French government managed this by the simple expedient of passing a special law exempting the project from all the usual red tape. Voila!
There is a lesson here. Bureaucratic paralysis is a political choice. It’s often also a proxy for other battles, as in the Elon Musk haters who use environmental regulations to obstruct SpaceX. The only remedy for this paralysis is projects that command sufficiently broad public support that everyone agrees the clutter can be swept aside. Notre Dame illustrates that if the idea of a building is already present in the collective cultural consciousness, and everyone wants it to happen, doing the actual work is relatively easy.
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
Jake Sullivan heads to Israel to meet Netanyahu.
Ukraine’s battle for the skies in winter.
Net Zero drive will leave British Army in ruin.
Kemi Badenoch reconnects with J.D. Vance.
South Korea’s president survives impeachment vote.
Domestic
Has The Squad’s era passed? Weigel interviews Rojas.
Jenkins: Why the media fears Kash Patel.
Trump appoints Habba, Landau, Needham, Anton to key positions.
Lara Trump resigns as RNC co-chair, eyes Florida Senate bid.
Cory Gardner to chair Senate Leadership Fund.
Tulsi Gabbard heads to Capitol Hill to lobby her case.
Kevin McCarthy stomps on Matt Gaetz over failed nomination.
Lowry: A disturbing outpouring of pro-terrorist sentiment.
Media
Ana Kasparian blasts media over migrant crisis in Beck interview.
Health
United Healthcare and the Obamacare con.
Trump’s cabinet loves supplements.
Cancer treatments jump among young adults.
Ephemera
Juan Soto’s jaw-dropping contract.
Oscars 2025 predictions and Best Picture odds.
Jay Z fires back at accusations, claiming he’s being blackmailed.
Yellowstone’s closing act is all about Taylor Sheridan’s self-indulgence.
Michael Mann talks about the Heat 2 script.
Mexico’s soap opera tycoons and Trump.
Timothee Chalamet stuns college football fans as ESPN guest picker.
Quote
“You always own the option of having no opinion. There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can't control. These things are not asking to be judged by you. Leave them alone.”