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A guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
A soft voice helps. The same goes for a weak chin and awkward height. Add to that a medical training in London and a marriage to a polite local, and it’s no wonder people were disarmed. Bashar al-Assad is not anyone’s idea of a dictator. In 2000, when he released some Syrian political prisoners, developments in the West were no longer just “shocks.” France soon awarded him the Legion of Honor.
In retrospect, the best that can be said about courting Assad is that it was not the West’s worst miscalculation of the dictator at the dawn of the new millennium. Vladimir Putin is another “person with whom we can do business.” The same goes for Muammar Gaddafi, despite being once synonymous with tyranny in the Western imagination, with Arsenal players referring to their stern coach as “Gaddafi”. In all three cases, the free world trusted a leader for reasons that seemed tenuous at the time. All three ended up at war with them, either directly or indirectly.
Why does this keep happening? Why does the trope of the rational strongman fool the West so often? (Saddam Hussein is another example of a friend turned mortal enemy.) First, let’s stipulate that this is a world of terrible choices. Free societies survived by supporting lesser evils against greater evils: the Soviets against the Nazis, the mujahideen against the Soviets, the Baathists against the jihadists. But that doesn’t explain the recent level of gullibility. European governments thought Putin was too wise to invade Ukraine, even though he stationed troops on the border three winters ago. Assad has indulged himself long after the tentative reforms that killed off the Damascus Spring in 2001.
Part of the reason for naivety is that it is passed down from generation to generation. In the formative years of their careers, pro-Assad leaders had seen Mikhail Gorbachev and later de Klerk abandon their authoritarian rule and turn toward the West, or at least outwards. We now recognize this as a remarkable, almost monstrous, act of statesmanship. A group of Western policymakers see it as a transferable template. The idea of a self-euthanizing authoritarian regime that will give up the fight if you cajole it has taken hold. A future crop of Western politicians, diplomats and spies will not be so innocent in their disappointment, especially in the dashed hopes of the Arab Spring.
Another reason the West is in trouble is that autocrats tend to get tougher over time. As power intoxicates them, courtiers intensify their praise, access to reliable information dries up, and it becomes increasingly likely that senior executives will overstep their authority. A long-serving tyrant also has many enemies and therefore has no choice but to remain in office without incurring death. (Or exile, which brings its own insecurities.) In other words, the West was About Assad and Putin, until it turns out otherwise. Now is the right time to groom Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It doesn’t get much more pragmatic than this. But what about 2030?
Every strongman who has fought the free world since the end of the Cold War has ruled for a decade or more: Saddam in 1991, Gaddafi in 2011, Assad in 2017, Putin, as well, depending on how we date his first direct confrontation with the West, might even have been Slobodan Milosevic in 1999. .
The fall of dictators over time: Once we recognize this pattern, even some of the initial attempts at appeasement between the two world wars begin to make sense, not to mention Assad’s adulation in the early 2000s . Churchill praised the “gentle” Mussolini in 1927, but blaming him for it was tantamount to assuming that the leader at that time was the same person as he was in 1940 – that there was someone’s essential character. As you can imagine, no. On the eve of the millennium, part of Assad was indeed the timid ophthalmologist with whom he had business dealings. The mistake is not in trying, but in burying your head in the sand when all hope is lost.
If Assad’s life has taught the West anything, it is that personal exposure to the free world does not necessarily make someone like it. There are too many hopes for his links to Britain, just as there are too many hopes for Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg, Russia’s gateway to democratic Europe and where he chose to host Tony Blair in 2000. For a civilization often accused of self-doubt, if not self-loathing, the West has a touching belief that it can attract and destroy potential enemies simply by being in contact with it. This confidence persists despite the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini lived near Paris, Lenin was a resident of Switzerland before subverting Russia, and every prankster since Marx seems to have worked in London. If anything, contact heightened the sense of difference.
Ultimately, if Abu Mohammad al-Jolani takes charge of Syria, will the West break the cycle of leaders’ initial overconfidence, later disappointment, and ultimately conflict? Or is a certain degree of naiveté just part of liberalism? The core claim of liberalism is that if human nature is limited by a few rules and institutions, this is enough to produce a functioning society without constant coercion. From that point on, it’s not a leap to view almost anyone as redeemable, even if bad. The question is not why the West is obsessed with Assad, Putin, and perhaps Jolani, but why it doesn’t.
janan.ganesh@ft.com
