Tom Nichols writes:

Dictatorships seem stable and almost invulnerable, until the day they fall. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime crumbled in days in the face of an offensive led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, a group that the United States considers a terrorist organization. But the Syrian civil war is, for now, mostly over. Hundreds of thousands are dead.

I wrote more than a decade ago in favor of Western intervention in Syria, back when the butcher’s bill was still in the tens of thousands, and finally gave up when Assad repeatedly used chemical weapons and got away with it. I predicted at the time that President Barack Obama’s decision against military action would undermine America’s position in the Middle East, embolden Iran, and give Russia its first major outpost in the region. Some of my worst fears, sadly, came true, while bodies piled up in the Syrian rubble for the next decade. (Obama’s defenders point to congressional opposition, but he claimed that he had the authority to act alone, and I think he was right. His last-minute reversal, a case study I used to teach at the Naval War College, stunned his national-security team, and it’s not, in my view, a pretty story.)

I would not even begin to predict Syria’s future, but I can identify one of the biggest losers (besides Assad, of course) now that this nightmare is over: Vladimir Putin.

That is, unless Donald Trump rides to his rescue. [Continue reading…]