Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: What Assad’s collapse means for the Middle East and beyond, signs of progress for a Gaza cease-fire and hostage deal, and China flexes its muscles in the Taiwan Strait .
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report. We start with the biggest personnel news in Washington this week: Our new staff reporter, John Haltiwanger, will be joining Amy as co-anchor of SitRep. Prior to joining FP, John covered U.S. politics and foreign affairs for GZERO Media, Business Insider, and Newsweek, and like Amy, he is an alum of the University of Glasgow—making their takeover of this newsletter complete.
Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report. We start with the biggest personnel news in Washington this week: Our new staff reporter, John Haltiwanger, will be joining Amy as co-anchor of SitRep. Prior to joining FP, John covered U.S. politics and foreign affairs for GZERO Media, Business Insider, and Newsweek, and like Amy, he is an alum of the University of Glasgow—making their takeover of this newsletter complete.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: What Assad’s collapse means for the Middle East and beyond, signs of progress for a Gaza cease-fire and hostage deal, and China flexes its muscles in the Taiwan Strait.
Testament to where the international community’s thinking was on Syria until very recently, a discussion on the conflict slated to take place at the Doha Forum in Qatar last weekend—planned weeks in advance—was titled “A Multilateral Approach to Resolving a Frozen Conflict.”
By the time delegates descended on Doha, Syrian rebel groups were closing in on Damascus, and more than half a dozen foreign ministers from Arab states as well as Iran, Turkey, and Russia huddled on the sidelines of the conference as Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad fled his country for Moscow.
The Assad regime’s rapid and unexpected collapse came after a turbulent 14 months for the Middle East, ushered in by the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which set off a chain of events that have upended the region’s balance of power. The fall of Assad, whose family ruled Syria with an iron fist for more than 50 years, will fuel changes underway in the region. Writing in FP this week, Chatham House’s Lina Khatib likened it to the fall of the Berlin Wall, describing it as an “earthquake in the regional order.”
How exactly the weeks and months ahead will unfold remains deeply unclear. For now, here’s a look at some of the biggest questions looming over Syria and the broader Middle East.
Why did the Assad regime fall so quickly? No one had Assad’s ouster on their bingo card in the waning days of 2024. The front lines of the war had remained largely fixed since 2020, following a Russian and Turkish cease-fire deal.
But in the interim, developments were happening within the country that set the stage for the regime’s collapse. Syria’s economic and humanitarian crisis was deepening, while industrial levels of drug production and smuggling further corrupted state structures. “[O]rganized crime and warlordism have torn away at what little cohesiveness remained within the Syrian security state,” the Middle East Institute’s Charles Lister writes for FP.
With Russia bogged down in Ukraine and Iran and its proxies bloodied by Israel, Syrian rebel groups led by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) saw an opening. Syria’s conscript army, demoralized and hollowed out by corruption and brutality, largely evaporated in the face of the HTS-led advance.
What do we know about HTS leader Abu Mohammad al-Jolani? The rebel offensive was spearheaded by HTS and its leader, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, who fought alongside al Qaeda in Iraq before returning to Syria to set up what was effectively a branch of the Islamic State. Over the past decade, though, Jolani has sought to rebrand himself and the group, severing ties with the Islamic State and al Qaeda and working with more moderate rebel groups in Syria.
“He has portrayed himself as just another boy who was infuriated by the American invasion of Iraq, leading him astray, toward the Islamic State and al Qaeda, until he found his way back.” FP’s Anchal Vohra writes. But as HTS remains listed as a terrorist group by the United Nations, European Union, and United States, among others, Jolani will need to work to persuade the international community—as well as many Syrians—that he has truly left behind his extremist views in the weeks and months ahead.
John spoke to Aaron Zelin, a terrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who literally wrote the book on HTS, to get his read on how real Jolani and his group’s transformation has been. “There’s some genuineness,” Zelin said. “They’ve taken out every single Islamic State cell in the area that they’ve been controlling. They also dismantled al Qaeda’s attempt to create another branch in Syria. But [HTS] is still extreme compared to most people because al Qaeda and the Islamic State are the extreme of the extreme.”
What does this mean for the region—and Russia? Iran, Turkey, and Russia were the most consequential foreign actors to intervene in the Syrian civil war, although they often found themselves at odds. The regime’s collapse has profound consequences for all three countries and their role in the region. It also has major ramifications for Israel.
Starting with Iran. Assad’s fall is a major blow for Iran and its strategy of “forward defense” in the region. It also deprives Tehran of its principal overground smuggling route to its most significant proxy, Hezbollah in Lebanon. With Iran’s economy deeply strained, the country’s leaders will now struggle to justify decades of investment in Syria, which evaporated in a matter of days, Khatib writes. “This poses a serious risk to the survival of the Islamic Republic—potentially the biggest fallout of last week’s events.”
Russia. Moscow’s entry into the Syrian civil war in 2015 in the form of punishing airstrikes on rebel-held territory marked Russia’s return to the Middle East. In the eyes of the Kremlin, that intervention conferred multiple benefits: the appearance of great-power status, an opportunity to check what it saw as U.S.-backed efforts at regime change in Damascus, and an expanded military footprint from which to project power throughout the Middle East and into Africa.
Russia, which has given the Assad family asylum, will now look for new avenues to exert leverage where it can in the new Syrian reality. Moscow has already been in contact with the Syrian opposition in a bid to secure its air and naval base in the country. Notably, Russian state TV, which can be a barometer of Kremlin thinking, switched from calling Syrian rebel groups “terrorists” to “opposition” almost immediately after Assad’s collapse.
Turkey. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan could barely conceal his schadenfreude over Assad’s plight at a press conference in Doha on Sunday. Although Turkey formally considers HTS to be a terrorist organization, the country has indirectly provided assistance to the group, while Turkey’s military presence in northwestern Syria, where HTS operated, helped protect the group from being attacked by Assad’s forces. And Turkey is widely believed to have greenlit the group’s offensive—though it officially denies involvement—having become frustrated with Assad’s refusal to engage with Ankara. The broader consequence of the regime’s fall is “a change in the balance of power between Turkey and everyone else,” Vali Nasr wrote in FP this week.
Assad’s removal could allow Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to check a number of things off his to-do list, including returning millions of Syrian refugees, and it could even help him secure Kurdish backing at home as he seeks to consolidate his autocratic rule. It could also offer an opening for reconciling ties with Washington, which have been strained by U.S. backing for Kurdish-led forces in Syria that Ankara views as terrorists.
But will it last? Assad’s collapse has given Erdogan his “leader of the Muslim world” moment, FP’s Steven A. Cook and Sinan Ciddi write, but “[o]ver and over again, the Turks have overestimated their ability to manage and shape crises in the region.”
Israel. Israel has been quite busy in Syria in recent days. After Assad’s ouster, Israeli ground forces swiftly seized control of a demilitarized U.N.-controlled buffer zone inside Syria along the Golan Heights, entering Syrian territory for the first time in roughly half a century.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said his country’s forces would remain in the area until Israel’s security can be guaranteed. “The collapse of the Syrian regime created a vacuum on Israel’s border and in the buffer zone,” Netanyahu said. “Israel will not permit jihadi groups to fill that vacuum and threaten Israeli communities.” Israel’s recent actions in the buffer zone have been criticized by the United Nations and France, among others.
The Israeli military has also conducted hundreds of strikes in Syria since Assad’s downfall aimed at neutralizing the remaining military assets of the toppled regime. Israel this week announced that it had destroyed Syria’s navy while also striking chemical weapons sites and facilities housing missiles and rockets, among other targets such as fighter jets and drones. Gideon Saar, Israel’s top diplomat, said the strikes on Syrian military assets are designed to prevent weapons from falling “into the hands of extremists.”
• Leandro Rizzuto, ambassador to the Organization of American States
• Jacob Helberg, undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment
• Michael Rigas, deputy secretary of state for management and resources
• Ed Martin, chief of staff at the Office of Management and Budget
• Dan Bishop, deputy budget director at the Office of Management and Budget
Matt Gaetz, who withdrew himself from consideration for the post of attorney general, is set to join One America News Network, a right-wing, pro-Trump cable channel, as an anchor.
Florida Rep. Brian Mast has been nominated by the House Republican Steering Committee to serve as the next chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced this week that he plans to step down before Trump takes office, clearing the way for the president-elect’s nominee, Kash Patel, to lead the bureau, pending confirmation.
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
Israel-Hamas cease-fire progress. Hamas has reportedly softened its stance on Israeli troops remaining in Gaza as part of a cease-fire deal and handed over a list of hostages who could be released, cautiously raising hopes that a deal proposed by Egypt and backed by the United States could be gaining momentum.
Hamas is now open to a deal that would see Israeli forces temporarily remain in the Philadelphi Corridor, a narrow buffer zone along the Gaza-Egypt border, as well as the Netzarim Corridor, which stretches from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean Sea and bisects Gaza, per the Wall Street Journal.
U.S. House passes defense policy bill. The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday passed an $895 billion defense policy bill that includes a 14.5 percent pay raise for junior enlisted service members and a 4.5 percent increase for all other service members.
The annual must-pass U.S. national security policy and funding legislation, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, generally passes with strong bipartisan support. This year, the bill was roiled by a pitched partisan debate over measures introduced by Republicans to prohibit the military’s health care system from providing gender-affirming care to transgender children of service members under the age of 18, prompting droves of Democrats to vote against the bill.
China flexes its muscles in the Taiwan Strait. On Tuesday, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said China had launched its largest naval exercises since 1996 around Taiwan. The drills, which were unannounced, took place across the East and South China Seas and included nearly 90 ships. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) also set up seven reserved areas of airspace until Wednesday, including off Fujian’s coast in the Taiwan Strait, and the Taiwanese defense ministry reported 53 PLA aircraft operating around the island, as of Wednesday.
The drills come right after Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s visits to Hawaii and the U.S. territory of Guam last week. However, a spokesperson at the de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan said the United States didn’t see the drills as a response to Lai’s visit and that the scale was on par with other recent exercises. As of Thursday, Taiwan signaled that the drills were ending.—Lili Pike
Saturday, Dec. 14: South Korea holds a second vote on impeaching President Yoon Suk-yeol over his decision to impose martial law.
Local and national lawmakers in the country of Georgia vote to elect a new president.
• Why Assad’s Regime Is Collapsing So Quickly by Charles Lister
• The Battle for Ukraine Is a War of Demography by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes
• Assad Has Fallen. What’s Next for Syria and the Middle East? by Amy Mackinnon and John Haltiwanger
Few voices in the global tech governance landscape have been as prominent or influential as Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former minister of digital affairs, who stepped down this year.
Tang spoke to FP’s Rishi Iyengar this week about the state of U.S.-China tech competition, and she offered some interesting insights into how democracies such as the United States and Taiwan view tech regulation versus how autocracies such as China do. Here’s what she said:
“This is really a difference in the vision of how technology interacts with society. And both sides use very similar terms—for example, ‘transparency’—but when you look at how it’s operationalized, we make the state transparent to the private sector and citizens and civil society, whereas authoritarian regimes are increasingly making their citizens and private sector and journalists transparent to the state,” Tang said.