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The soft voice helped. So did the weak chin and awkward height. Add to this medical training in London, as well as marriage to a civilized local, and it is no wonder that people were disarmed. Bashar al-Assad was never a tyrant. When some political prisoners were released in Syria in 2000, the West had more than just “feelings.” France awarded him the Legion of Honor shortly after.
In retrospect, the best that can be said about Assad's courtship is that it was not the West's worst misjudgment of a dictator at the turn of the millennium. Vladimir Putin was “another guy we could do business with.” So was Muammar Gaddafi, although he was so synonymous with tyranny in the Western imagination that Arsenal players referred to their strict coach as “Gaddafi”. In all three of these cases, the free world trusted a leader for reasons that seemed even at the time flimsy. In all three, it ended in direct or indirect war with them.
Why does this keep happening? How does the trope of the rational strongman so often fool the West? (Saddam Hussein is another example of a friend turned bitter enemy.) First, let's assume that this is a world full of dire choices. Liberal societies have survived by supporting lesser evils against greater evils: the Soviets against the Nazis, the mujahideen against the Soviets, the Baathists against the jihadists. But this cannot explain the depth of the recent naivety. European governments thought Putin was too rational to invade Ukraine, even when he was lining the border with troops three winters ago. Assad was overlooked for a long time after he stifled the temporary reforms of the Damascus Spring in 2001.
Part of the naivety is generational. At a formative stage of their careers, leaders who fell in love with Assad saw Mikhail Gorbachev and then F.D. De Klerk gets rid of their own authoritarian regimes and faces the West, or at least abroad. We now realize that this represents extraordinary, almost bizarre, statesmanship. A group of Western decision-makers saw it as a transferable model. The idea of a euthanasia dictatorship has taken hold, a regime that will give up the fight if you only convince it. Forged in disappointment, especially dashed hopes Arab SpringThe next batch of Western politicians, diplomats and spies will not be so innocent.
Another reason the West gets involved is that autocrats tend to harden over time. As they become poisoned by power, courtiers increase praise, access to reliable information ceases, and executive overreach becomes ever more likely. A tyrant who has ruled a country for a long time is also someone who has many enemies, and therefore there is no alternative to holding a position that does not invite death. (Or exile, which brings with it insecurity). In other words, the West He was It was true regarding Assad and Putin, until that was not the case. It is now appropriate to patronize Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Nothing could be more real. But in 2030?
Since the end of the Cold War, each of the strongmen with whom the free world has fought has been in power for a decade or more: Saddam in 1991, Gaddafi in 2011, Assad in 2017, and Putin since 2022, depending on how we date. His first direct confrontation with the West, and perhaps even with Slobodan Milosevic, was in 1999. As a cheerful birthday idea, Xi Jinping has led China for 12 years.
Decline of autocrats over time: Once we recognize this pattern, even some of the initial attempts at interwar appeasement begin to seem understandable, let alone the adulation of Assad in the early 2000s. Churchill praised “Nice” Mussolini in 1927, but to blame him for that assumes that the Duce was the same man then as he was in 1940 – and that there is such a thing as someone's essential personality. There probably isn't. Part of the lion on the eve of the millennium was a shy ophthalmologist who was doable to work with. The mistake was not in trying, but in putting one's head in the sand when all hope was gone.
If Assad's life teaches the West anything, it is that personal exposure to the free world should not make anyone like him. There was a lot of hope in his relationship with Britain, just as we read a lot about Putin's birthplace of St. Petersburg, Russia's gateway to a democratic Europe, where he chose to host Tony Blair in 2000. For a civilization often accused of self-doubt and despite its hatred of the West For his own sake, he has a poignant belief that mere contact will attract and destroy potential enemies. This confidence has persisted even with the fact that Ayatollah Khomeini lived near Paris, that Lenin was based in Switzerland before turning Russia upside down, and that every spoiler from Marx onwards seems to have carried out a mission in London. If anything, contact intensifies the feeling of difference.
In the end, if so Abu Muhammad Al-Julani Who runs Syria? Will the West break the cycle of initially overconfidence in the leader, later disillusionment and ultimately conflict? Or is a certain amount of naivete just part of what it means to be a liberal? At its core, liberalism claims that human nature, if bound by certain rules and institutions, is good enough to produce a functioning society without constant coercion. Hence, it is not easy to see almost any individual as, if not good, then redeemable. The question is not why the West falls in love with the likes of Assad, Putin, and perhaps over time, Jolani, but how it could do otherwise.
