Professor Raymond Hinnebusch
Syria’s Geopolitics
I. Introduction
Syria has one of the world’s longest recorded
histories and was the centre of a mighty Arab
empire, the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750), in
medieval times; but the modern state was cre-
ated only in 1920 by Western imperialism on
a truncated part of historic Syria. This trun-
cated state became a battleground on which
regional geo-political struggles were played
out; Syria only became an actor rather than a
pawn of regional politics after 1970 when the
state was consolidated under Hafiz al-Asad.
Since then, Syria has achieved a geopolitical
importance out of all proportion to its relatively
small population, area, and economy because
of its military power, independent foreign pol-
icy, and a location that gives it a central role in
the Middle East. In the 2000s, Syria was con-
tiguous to and involved in three major Middle
East conflicts, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq.
However, the 2011 Uprising made the country
once again a battleground for rival regional
and global powers.
II. The Durable Determinants Of Syrian
Geopolitics
II.1 History and Identity
The frustration of Syria’s identity through its
state formation has had enduring conse-
quences. Historic Syria (bilad ash-sham)
might, despite having no history of independ-
ent statehood, have become the focus of a
Syrian identity after the fall of the Ottoman
empire; however, the country’s dismember-
ment by Western imperialism fostered an ir-
redentist dissatisfaction with its borders. The
small state that remained after the separation
of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan from the
Damascus-centred Syrian rump was re-
garded as an artificial creation by many of its
citizens. Pan-Arab and Pan-Syrian national-
ism were natural reactions to this fragmenta-
tion, each seeking to make little Syria a part of
a greater Arab nation and/or inspiring Syrian
assertion of a sphere of influence in the lost
parts of historic Syria, above all in Lebanon.
Syria has been the most consistent center of
Arabist sentiment and actually surrendered its
sovereignty – in the 1958 union with Egypt –
in the name of Pan-Arabism. Regimes legit-
imized by Arab nationalism must, to retain
1
Moshe Ma’oz, ‘Attempts at Creating a Political Community in Modern Syria,’ Middle East Journal, v. 26, n. 4., 1972, pp.
389-404; A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria. London: Macmillan, 1969, 241-378.
8 ORIENT III / 2012
credibility, be seen to succeed or at least at-
tempt to defend Arab causes, above all Pales-
tine.1 By the late 1960s, Syrian Arab
nationalism was focused on the struggle for
Palestine; this climaxed in the effort of the rad-
ical wing of the Ba’th Party (1966-1970) to
make Damascus the bastion of a war of liber-
ation in Palestine. The consequent 1967 loss
of the Syrian Golan Heights to Israel gave a
specifically Syrian territorial dimension to
Syria’s Arabism. The recovery of the Golan
became the single most important objective in
Syrian foreign policy, a matter of honor and
regime legitimacy that was non-negotiable.
This intensified Syria’s Arab nationalism, yet,
in also focusing it on the recovery of Syrian
land, at the expense of the pursuit of Arab
unity and the Palestine cause, it also made it
more Syria-centric. Syrian Arabism was now
expressed in the claim that the Arab states
made up a nation with an overriding national
interest in the struggle with Israel, and that
Syria as the most steadfast of the frontline
states, was entitled to Pan-Arab support. Its
military and security needs in this struggle
even justified its violation of conventional Pan-
Arab norms, such as Syria’s alliance with Iran
against Arab Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war (1980-
1988) and its late-1970s conflicts with the
Palestinians in Lebanon. By the 1990s, a fur-
ther transition toward a more distinctly Syrian
identity had been driven by the gap between
the Pan-Arab ideal and reality: the failure of
Pan-Arab unity projects and sixty years of
separate statehood. The persisting dilemma
for Syria, however, was that the idea of an ex-
clusively Syrian nation-state, not essentially
Arab, still held little credibility and the content
of Syrian identity therefore remained Arab.
II.2 Location
Syria’s geopolitical location dictated an ex-
ceptional vulnerability and the country nor-
mally faced an unfavorable regional power
balance that necessarily tempered its wish to
act on irredentist grievances. Syria’s relatively
small size and population provided a limited
manpower base and strategic depth; it was
largely unprotected by natural boundaries and
exposed on all sides to countries that, at one
time or another, constituted threats. Iraq and
Jordan had irredentist designs on Syria and
the country is vulnerable to Turkey’s control of

the flow of Euphrates water. But Israel has
been Syria’s main enemy, manifest in a
chronic border conflict until 1967 when the
loss of the Golan Heights further locked Syria
into a struggle to recover this territory, first in
the 1973 war and, when this failed, in an on-
going proxy war in Lebanon meant to
strengthen Syria’s hand for a negotiated re-
covery of the lost territory. Additionally, Israel’s
permanent military superiority made it a se-
curity threat against which Syria sought a bal-
ancing deterrent.
Yet, because of Syria’s ‘swing’ position be-
tween conservative and revisionist camps (as
in the case of the Baghdad Pact or the Gulf
war) and its pivotal position in the Arab-Israel
conflict and peace process, international and
regional powers seek influence in Damascus.2
While this has destabilized weak govern-
ments, a strong Syrian regime can use this
status to strike alliances and acquire material
resources, allowing Syria a balance against
the threats it faces and evade the isolation or
submission its enemies frequently seek to im-
pose. Faced with multiple threats, Syria has
always had to seek protective alliances. After
independence, President Shukri al-Quwatly
(1947-49) aligned with Egypt and Saudi Ara-
bia to balance Hashemite ambitions to absorb
Syria in the Greater Syria and Fertile Crescent
schemes. From the mid-fifties, nationalist gov-
ernments aligned with Nasser’s Egypt and/or
with the USSR for arms and protection from
Western and Israeli threats and conservative
Arab subversion. Under President Hafiz al-
Asad (1970-2000), Syria attempted to make
historic Syria its sphere of influence. In strug-
gles for control of Lebanon and the PLO, it
aimed to bolster its standing against Israel, its
US backer, and Arab rivals. He also main-
tained parallel alliances with ‘moderate’ states
such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt (with their
links to the US), and also with Islamic Iran and
Lebanon’s Hizbollah. Under Bashar al-Asad
(since 1970), a US drive to isolate Syria and
its alienation from its former “moderate” allies
increased its dependence on the Iranian al-
liance and Bashar compensated by pursuing
a new alliance with Turkey.
II.3 State Formation
If identity and geopolitics shaped a fairly con-
stant agenda for Syrian policy makers, their
2
Alasdair Drysdale and Raymond Hinnebusch, Syria and the Middle East Peace Process, New York: Council on For-
eign Relations Press, 1991, pp. 1-9.
3
Andrew Rathmell, (1995). Secret War in the Middle East: The Covert Struggle for Syria, 1949-61. London: I.B. Taurus.
4
Patrick Seale (1965) The Struggle for Syria, London: Oxford University Press.
5
Avner Yaniv (1986) “Syria and Israel: The Politics of Escalation,’‘ in Ma’oz, Moshe and Yaniv, Avner, Syria under Assad:
Domestic Constraints and Regional Risks, London: Croom Helm.
ORIENT III / 2012
Syria’s Geopolitics
capacity to pursue it varied according to
Syria’s level of state formation. The weak
newly independent Syrian state’s permeable
artificial borders and Pan-Arab sentiment in-
vited penetration by rival external powers,
each seeking to shape its alignment, which
was seen as pivotal for the regional balance
of power. Thus, the refusal of the beleaguered
government of al-Quwatly, constrained by a
nationally aroused public, to either sign a
peace treaty with Israel or agree to the con-
struction of a US-sponsored oil pipeline from
Saudi Arabia, inspired US intrigue in the army,
producing the country’s first military coup.3 In
the fifties, Syrians were deeply divided be-
tween supporters of pro-Western Iraq, which
advocated security through membership in
the Western-sponsored Baghdad Pact, and
followers of Egypt’s Nasser, who opposed the
pact in the name of a non-aligned Arab col-
lective security. Since the fate of the Baghdad
Pact was believed to turn on Syria’s choice, a
regional and international “struggle for Syria”
took place (1954-1958). The mobilization of
Syria’s nationalist middle class swung the bal-
ance in favor of Egypt while Nasser’s rising
stature as a Pan-Arab hero, especially after
the Suez war, weakened conservative pro-
Western and pro-Iraqi politicians and
strengthened those – above all, the Ba’th
party – aligned with Cairo, who in 1956
formed an anti-imperialist National Front gov-
ernment. The West’s sponsorship of several
abortive conservative coups against it and a
1957 attempt to quarantine Syrian radicalism
under the Eisenhower Doctrine, backed by
Iraqi-sponsored subversion and Turkish
threats, precipitated Soviet counter-threats
against Turkey and a backlash of pro-Com-
munist feeling inside Syria. External siege and
internal polarization, plus widespread union-
ist sentiment, swept Syrian elites into a brief
union with Egypt, the United Arab Republic.4
The coup that brought the Ba’th Party to
power in 1963 ushered in a new era of insta-
bility. Driven by ideological militancy and a
search for nationalist legitimation, the radical
Ba’th regime supported Palestinian fedayeen
raids into Israel, which, ignoring the unfavor-
able balance of power with Israel, brought on
the 1967 defeat and the Israeli occupation of
Syria’s Golan Heights.5 With a wing of the
Ba’th also in power in Iraq, the two regimes
tried to outbid the other in militancy toward Is-
9
 Professor Raymond Hinnebusch
rael and Western imperialism. In 1970 De-
fense Minister Hafiz al-Asad ousted the ideo-
logical radicals and set Syria on a new, more
realist foreign-policy course that took account
of Israel’s military superiority. Syrian elites had
learned the realist rules of the state system
the hard way.
The consolidation of the Ba’thist regime under
Asad was, in many ways, a product of Syria’s
beleaguered position in its external environ-
ment. The Ba’th state, the product of a
nationalist party and an army radicalized by
the conflict with Israel, developed, under
Asad, into a huge national-security apparatus
designed to confront Israel. Concentration of
power in Asad’s hands was accepted within
the political elite as necessary to deal with the
1967 defeat and occupation brought on by a
factionalized regime. At the same time, Asad’s
state building depended on external
resources: the Soviet arms with which he re-
built the army and the Arab oil money by
which the bureaucracy was expanded and the
bourgeoisie co-opted, both accessed via
Syria’s role as a key front line state con-
fronting Israel.
It was only as the state was stabilized and the
regime attained relative internal cohesion that
foreign policymakers achieved sufficient au-
tonomy of domestic constraints to effectively
adapt foreign policy to the changing geopolit-
ical power balance. They were also now en-
abled to mobilize the capabilities needed to
make Syria a player rather than a victim in the
regional environment.
II. Syria’s Power Base
Hafiz al-Asad parlayed limited means into a
greater capacity to shape outcomes than
would be expected from Syria’s base of na-
tional power. But however adept Syria’s diplo-
macy, what the country can do is constrained
by its limited power base and by external de-
pendencies which the Ba’th regime has per-
sistently sought to overcome. Syria’s turn to
statist “socialism” from the late 1950s was, in
good part, driven by the belief that a national-
ist foreign policy required diluting economic
dependency on the West. State control over
the economy allowed the regime to harness it
to foreign policy and security goals. Socialism
realigned economic dependency toward the
Soviet bloc and helped win Soviet aid and
protection. By the 1970s, Syria, with oil, food
6
Clawson, Patrick, Unaffordable Ambitions: Syria’s Military Buildup and Economic Crisis, Washington, D.C.: Washing-
ton Institute for Near East Policy, 1989.
7
Yair Evron, War and Intervention in Lebanon: The Syrian-Israeli Deterrence Dialogue, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, 1987.
10 ORIENT III / 2012
self-sufficiency, no dependence on foreign in-
vestment and no significant debt to the West,
had attained relative economic sovereignty,
which explained its exceptional ability, in con-
trast to other Arab states, to sustain a nation-
alist foreign policy.
Syrian military power steadily expanded
under Asad’s rule. The 1967 defeat stimulated
a massive rebuilding and professionalization
of the armed forces, which paid off in im-
proved performance during the 1973 war.
Thereafter, Egypt’s separate peace, leaving
Syria facing Israel alone, and Israel’s 1982 in-
vasion of Lebanon set off further rounds of
military buildup aimed at enough parity with
Israel to constitute a deterrent and give back-
ing to Syrian diplomacy. During Syria’s (even-
tually failed) drive for parity with Israel
(1976-86), as much as half of public expendi-
ture was devoted to defense. 20 percent of
manpower served in the armed forces at its
height in the 1980s. If one includes the value
of arms imported on credit, Syria’s military
spending climbed to 30 percent of its gross
domestic product.6 By 1986, Syria had an
enormous armed force for a state of its size:
5,000 tanks, 650 combat aircraft, 102 missile
batteries, and over 500,000 men under arms.
Although Syria lacked a credible offensive ca-
pability, the Syrian buildup produced mutual
deterrence that relatively stabilized the Syr-
ian-Israeli military confrontation.7 Syrian-Is-
raeli rivalry was thereby largely diverted into
political struggle over the conditions of a
peace settlement. In these struggles, Syria’s
deterrent meant that Asad did not have to bar-
gain from weakness and could apply limited
military pressure on Israel in southern
Lebanon (via Hizbollah) at reasonable risk.
But Syria’s slim economic base and feeble tax
extraction capability could not, alone, sustain
its enormous military burden and overdevel-
oped state, which contributed to a permanent
resource gap. Hafiz used foreign policy to ac-
cess enormous levels of external aid and
loans largely from the USSR and Arab oil pro-
ducing states. The struggle with Israel legit-
imized his claim on Arab aid, and much Soviet
weaponry was delivered gratis or on cheap
credit terms. The potential constraints on for-
eign policy from this economic dependency
were eased by the diversification of Syria’s
donors. Although Asad did occasionally ex-
ploit foreign policy to win economic relief, he
had no record of taking decisions for eco-

nomic reasons that would not otherwise have
been taken on strategic grounds.
In the late 1980s, however, the heavy burden
of military spending from the reach for parity
with Israel helped bringing economic growth
to a halt, forcing a leveling off of Syria’s mili-
tary buildup. Parallel with growing economic
constraints, Syria had to scramble, after the
1990s collapse of its Soviet arms supplier, to
prevent the degradation of its deterrent. The
army’s combat strength deteriorated dramati-
cally during the 1990s, its Soviet equipment
increasingly obsolescent and Soviet/Russian
demand for payment in hard currency deny-
ing it enough ammunition and spare parts;
moreover, the United States threatened sanc-
tions against Russian companies that sold
Syria arms. Part of Syria’s armor and artillery
was put in storage and manpower fell to
215,000. The army proved incapable of
mounting a serious deployment on the Turkish
border at the time of the 1998 war scare with
that country. Although Syria did eventually ob-
tain new infusions of advanced Russian tanks
and anti-tank missiles, the growing techno-
logical and airpower gap with Israel, and the
constraints (financing, supply sources) on
Syria’s prospects of sustaining the conven-
tional military balance, shifted its defense ef-
fort in non-conventional directions. Hizbollah’s
capacity to fire rockets deep into Israel and to
engage Israeli forces in asymmetric warfare
became the first line of Syria’s new deterrent.
Syria’s 1990 Gulf war aid windfall was in-
vested in a second line missile deterrent in
hardened sites with chemical warheads tar-
geting all of Israel.
The national-security state had enhanced
Syria’s military capacity but ultimately helped
enervate its weak economic base which
sharply constrained its overall power. From
the mid-1980s Syria began to suffer from pe-
riodic economic crises, symptoms of the ex-
haustion of statist import substitute
industrialization and the inability of the public
sector to mobilize the capital to sustain a state
oversized in relation to its economic base.
Hence securing the economic resources to
support the state became a constant preoc-
cupation and a matter of regime security. Aus-
terity in the late 1980s was paralleled by
economic liberalization that revived a state-
dependent private sector. In the half decade
(1990-95) following Syria’s receipt of rent for
its stand in the Gulf war and the influx of in-
8
Moshe Maoz, Asad, the Sphinx of Damascus: A Political Biography, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988; Patrick Seale,
Asad: the Struggle for the Middle East, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
ORIENT III / 2012
Syria’s Geopolitics
vestment stimulated by its 1991 liberalization
of investment laws, the economy boomed but
when these inflows were exhausted, GNP
growth fell to -1.5% in 1998; stagnant growth,
combined with a burgeoning population re-
sulted in dangerously high youth unemploy-
ment rates. Half the budget came to depend
on oil exports, but these were set to decline
in the 2000s. While the regime built up short-
term financial reserves from oil and rent wind-
falls, in the long term, only an influx of
expatriate and Arab investment could sustain
the regime’s economic base. No such eco-
nomic revival seemed likely without a peace
settlement with Israel that would give in-
vestors confidence, and allow the reduction of
the national security state and re-integration
of Syria into the world capitalist economy. In-
deed, in the late nineties, Syria, in anticipation
of a peace settlement, was gearing up for
major economic reforms needed to facilitate
an investment influx. But with the failure of the
peace process, parallel with the succession of
the new President, Bashar al-Asad, Syria had
to look elsewhere for resources. Bashar found
them in an opening to Iraq, which sold oil to
Syria at subsidized prices, providing a billion
dollar yearly windfall to the treasury while Syr-
ian businessmen prospered on access to the
Iraqi market. When this lifeline was shut down
by the US invasion, accompanied by a major
influx of Iraqi refugees, the regime acceler-
ated its economic liberalization in a bid to get
a cut of the wealth accruing to the Arab oil pro-
ducers from the new post-2003 oil price
boom. In spite of a fraught regional and inter-
national environment, the regime did enjoy an
influx of Arab investment in the mid-2000s that
stabilized the economy and fuelled the crony-
capitalist network supportive of the regime.
Very much in doubt, however, was how far
Syria’s integration into the world market was
compatible with a foreign policy that brought
recurrent conflict with the US hegemon,
whose sanctions sought to economically iso-
late it, and even with good relations with Eu-
rope, which obstructed its bid for an
association agreement as a result of the
power struggle over Lebanon. As a result, in
the second half of the 2000s, Syria started
shifting its economic relations eastward to
Asia and especially toward China.
III. Agency: Syria’s Operational Code8
Syria’s geo-political weight has also been a
matter of agency, the acumen or lack thereof
11
 Professor Raymond Hinnebusch
of its leadership. Under Hafiz al-Asad Syria
was widely seen to “punch above it weight” in
regional politics. This reflected the realist
worldview and modus operandi that Asad de-
veloped out of his many years of experience
dealing with stronger hostile powers and
which has largely persisted under his son; it
also involves ways of coping with the gap be-
tween Syria’s identity aspirations and its lim-
ited resources and vulnerable position.
Asad was a quintessential realist. He scaled
down the highly revisionist goals deriving from
Syria’s identity to fit the constraints of geopol-
itics. Pre-Ba’th governments were too weak to
contemplate either war or peace with Israel,
and the Ba’th radicals were driven by a dan-
gerous ideology of confronting Israel irre-
spective of the unfavorable balance of power.
Asad’s more realistic goal was recovering the
occupied lands, above all the Golan, and
achieving Palestinian rights, notably a state in
the West Bank and Gaza, as part of a com-
prehensive peace under UN Resolution 242.
The limited nature of Syria’s aims was evident
in the 1973 war when Syrian forces attacking
the Golan made no attempt to advance into
Israel itself.9 No Pan-Arab revolutionary,
Asad’s realist aims were the recovery of terri-
torial losses, maintenance of a sphere of in-
fluence and a deterrent against threats. Yet
the impact of Arab identity could be seen in
his eschewal for a quarter-century of a sepa-
rate settlement with Israel at the expense of
the Palestinians.
From much disillusioning experience, Asad
viewed the world as a realist struggle for
power, where the strong do as they will and
the weak accept what they must. He and
those socialized with or under him had a jaun-
diced view of contemporary international
order, which they see as replete with double
standards. Syrians observe that international
law is selectively enforced, typically against
Arab or Muslim states while Israel is routinely
exempted from the standards expected of
other states (notably, the prohibition of the ac-
quisition, settlement and ethnic cleansing of
territory by force). Syria sees itself as sys-
tematically treated unfairly, e.g. Syria’s chem-
ical deterrent force was made an issue by the
West while Israel’s nuclear one is accepted.
As Damascus sees it, it is a Machiavellian
world: whether a state’s interests are re-
9
Charles Wakebridge, “The Syrian Side of the Hill,” Military Review, v. 56, February, 1976, pp. 20-30
10
Helena Cobban, The Superpowers and the Syrian-Israeli Conflict, New York: Praeger, The Washington Papers, no
149, 1991.
12 ORIENT III / 2012
spected depends on having the power to de-
fend them. A Syrian leader must play by the
rules of such a world, combining enough of
the coercive power of the ‘lion’ with the guile
of the ‘fox,’ as the Florentine writer advised.
As such, great power-engineered demands,
advanced in the name of the ‘international
community,’ enjoy no moral high ground or
normative legitimacy in Syria. A very durable
Syrian behavior has long been its rejection of
external demands and evasion of the dictates
of great powers. What this means is that
those who want something from Syria have to
negotiate for it.
The enhanced autonomy of Hafiz’s national
security state permitted him to pursue his
goals amidst this fraught environment, with re-
markable consistency over the decades, while
carefully adapting his strategies to the chang-
ing external power balance. His modus op-
erendi, which continues to shape Syrian
strategy and tactics included:
(1) Diversification of defensive alliances to
avoid isolation and acquire the financial
and military resources to conduct coer-
cive diplomacy; because, the regime can-
not extract enough resources from the
Syrian economy to fund its large mili-
tary/security, patronage and welfare re-
sponsibilities, a constant preoccupation is
to secure external economic resources;
thus, Hafiz al-Asad simultaneously sus-
tained alliances with the conservative
Arab oil states and the Soviet Union, later
supplemented by Iran.
(2) Balancing the great powers: Given US
backing of Israel, a close Soviet align-
ment was natural in a bipolar world. So-
viet arms deliveries were key to Syria’s
relative success in the 1973 war and
thereafter in the drive for parity with Israel.
The Soviet Union’s role as patron-protec-
tor had a crucial deterrent effect on Is-
rael’s freedom of action against Syria.10
While the United States was the main
backer of Syria’s enemy, Asad neverthe-
less sought to engage with it; he aimed to
exploit US fears of Middle East instability
to get the US to restrain Israel, notably
during several confrontations in Lebanon.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union,
non-Arab but anti-imperialist Iran became
Syria’s strategic partner. In the post-Cold

War unipolar world, Syria sought to con-
vey the message that it could help or hin-
der US interests in the Middle East
depending on whether Washington re-
spected its interests and was willing to re-
strain and broker an honorable peace
settlement with Israel.
(3) Rationality of matching means and ends:
even as Asad scaled down Syria’s goals,
he upgraded its capabilities. A recognition
that how Syria dealt with enemies, above
all Israel, had to depend on the balance
of power made Asad cautious since it was
usually unfavorable; when the balance of
forces was negative, rather than concede
principle, Asad preferred to wait until it
improved, while actively obstructing
schemes to draw other Arab parties into
partial, separate settlements with Israel:
thus he took great risks to obstruct the
1983 Lebanese-Israeli accord in defiance
of US and Israeli power.
(4) Coercive Diplomacy: although extremely
wary of the pitfalls of negotiating with Is-
rael, Asad realized he could not avoid
diplomacy to recover the Golan and
seized at opportunities to do so. However,
he believed one should only negotiate if
one had enough bargaining “cards” to
give the stronger opponent an incentive
to make an acceptable deal; such cards
included the use of asymmetric warfare
which was seen as best pursued via prox-
ies and required a military deterrent so
that the enemy did not bring his full retal-
iatory superiority to bear on Syria. Need-
less to say such a modus operandi
entailed a delicate balancing act and the
balancer was always liable to fall off the
tightrope.
Syria’s operational code could have been
transformed after Bashar al-Asad’s succes-
sion to power.11 His political socialization took
11
Flynt Leverett, Inheriting Syria: Bashar’s Trial by Fire. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2005.
ORIENT III / 2012
Syria’s Geopolitics
place in a different environment from that of
his father and the regime “old guard.” While
the latter were socialized in the era of Arab
nationalism, war with Israel, and non-align-
ment, their sons came of age in an era in
which state-centric identities were fragment-
ing the Arabs, peace with Israel was accepted
in Arab thinking and American hegemony had
become a fact of life in the region. Bashar had
acquired education in the liberal environment
of the UK, married a British citizen of Syrian
descent and, as president, traveled widely in
Europe. To be sure, the father-son relation, a
presumably powerful socialization mecha-
nism, would have committed him to the
preservation of his father’s Arab nationalist
legacy while the apprenticeship he served
under his father, including time within the mil-
itary, would have socialized him into the code
of operation of the establishment. And the le-
gitimacy of Bashar’s presidency was contin-
gent on faithfulness to the standard of national
honor defended by his father, namely the full
recovery of the Golan from Israel.
Bashar came to power pulled between con-
trary tendencies. The modernizing aims of his
new generation and awareness that regime
survival depended on transition to a market
economy dictated good relations with Europe
and the US, hence conformity with their de-
mands and norms; but the Arab nationalism
Bashar transmitted from his father brought
him in conflict with the West, thereby keeping
alive Hafiz’s realpolitik tradition. Had a peace
settlement been reached with Israel, the mod-
ernizing West-leaning side of Bashar’s so-
cialization would likely have become the
driver of his behavior; as it was, the main ex-
ternal threats Syria faced from the time of his
succession put a premium on realpolitik and
the son fell back on the operational code of
the father. In dealing with the uprising that
began in 2011, his regime has continued to
display a Machiavellian determination to do
whatever it takes to survive.
13