The fall of the Assads and the Ba’ath party in Syria is a seminal moment that outweighs the collapse of Saddam’s rule in Iraq, Gaddafi’s in Libya, and Mubarak’s in Egypt. Syria is the original birthplace of the Arab socialist and nationalist revolutionary politics that popularized the Baathist slogan, ‘One Arab Nation With An Eternal Message’.

Syria under the Assads popularized radical Arab nationalism, creating lasting tensions with Gulf Arab states.

The revolutionary rhetoric under the Assads directly clashed with the Egyptians and the Jordanians who shared the Arab nationalist credentials but with a tinge of moderation and avoided the kneejerk anti-Western disposition of the Syrians. Even the Ba’athists in Iraq compromised a little, opening to the West when prudent and improving ties with moderate Arab countries. But not the Assads. And nowhere did this hardline Syrian Arab nationalism and socialism under the Assads collide more than with the Gulf Arabs. And this probably is the entanglement that eventually hurt the Assads the most.

This is why, despite recent Gulf attempts to rehabilitate Bashar Assad, there is a distinct collective sigh of relief among Gulf Arabs, where the end of the Assads is seen as the final defeat of extreme Arab nationalist and populist politics and the triumph of the Gulf Arab model of moderate policies and worldview.

The Assad-Gulf history is dark. The intelligence files of Gulf Arab states are likely filled with stacks of paperwork on Syrian attempts to overthrow Arab ruling families and create social unrest. Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia have been in Hafez Assad’s crosshairs up until 1990 [Imad Mughniyeh, the chief Hezbollah suspect in the assassination attempt on the Emir of Kuwait in 1985 was hiding in Damascus until his mysterious death in a car explosion in 2008].

The last decade of Hafez Assad’s life before his death in 2000 saw improvement in ties with the Gulf due to the shared loathing for Saddam’s Iraq. By then, Gulf states had established strong military alliances with the West and no longer felt threatened by the Syrian pan-Arabist ideology.

The Assads’ alignment with Iran’s Khomeinist agenda isolated Syria from the Arab mainstream.

The 1990s also saw a shift in the Arab world, where the power center began to slowly transition from the large populist Arab states to the smaller, calmer, and more moderate Gulf Arabs.

But for as long as Hafez lived, his name was enough to evoke fear across the Arab region. He retained an aura of invincibility even as Syria lagged economically and militarily. That ended when Bashar took over in 2000. In the twenty-four years that followed, Syria was a shadow of its former self, unable to influence Arab politics and culture the way it used to.

The Assad regime had already distanced itself from the Arab mainstream with its radical Arab populist nationalism, but it made a further misstep by entangling itself with Shia jihadism, driven by Iran’s Khomeinist agenda—just as the Arab world was beginning to curb Sunni jihadism.

A moderate Arab consensus had developed by the end of the 2010s that Islamist radicalism and extremism of all hues need to be contained or eliminated for Arab states and societies to restore stability, achieve economic prosperity, and join the global civilization as positive contributors and not as negative rejectionists and isolationists at war with the rest of the world.

A new Arab consensus emerged to curb Islamist radicalism and extreme Arab nationalism by the 2010s.

For this purpose, a narrative emerged in states such as Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE that called for ridding Arab societies of both Islamism and radical leftist Arab nationalism. And there was a growing realization that the future of the Arab region was threatened not by Israel, as radical Arabists and Islamists insisted for decades, but by the threat of the convergence of Extreme Sunni Islam and Extreme Shia Islam, with groups such as the Ikhwanists (Hamas) and Khomeinists (Hezbollah) becoming allies [Ikhwanist comes from the Arabic word for Muslim Brotherhood movement, ‘Ikhwan Al-Muslimeen’; Khomeinist refers to the political group of ruling clerics in Iran after 1979 who are aligned to Imam Khomeini’s worldview. The term helps distinguish ruling Iranian clergy from mainstream Shia Muslims of Iran and the Muslim world who may not share Khomeinist ideas, policies, and loyalties.].

Assad might have survived had he expedited his clean break from Iran, which apparently started in recent months but remained painfully slow and launched some form of political process to reconcile with his nation. Starting in 2021, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Kuwait, and Oman launched a process of cautiously rehabilitating Assad [minus Qatar, which maintained a staunchly anti-Assad view, more aligned with Turkey’s].

The other Gulf states believed curbing Sunni and Shia jihadism was more important than fighting Assad and were also concerned by non-Arab states slicing up Syrian territories and using them as a springboard to destabilize the region.

Gulf Arabs cautiously rehabilitated Assad, but geopolitical shifts and Israel’s actions reshaped Syria’s power dynamics.

Cairo had been laying the groundwork to formally restore the Assad regime’s seat in the Arab League, and Riyadh had even invited Assad to a joint Arab-Islamic summit just last month. Things seemed to be looking up for Assad. But Israel’s decisive strikes against Hezbollah and Iranian militias created a vacuum in Syria—one quickly filled by opposition groups backed by Turkey and the West. The rest, as they say, is history.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not represent the views, beliefs, or policies of the Stratheia.