Like many who follow the Middle East, a lot has been going through my head since the civil war there suddenly reignited and Bashar al-Assad’s regime even more suddenly fell. Will the victims of his persecution now get justice? Will this weaken Russia and Iran in the region? Is the Islamist group that’s now in charge, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, as moderate as they claim? Will this make things worse for the Middle East’s already beleaguered Christians?

One question that keeps coming to the fore for me, however, has to do with US foreign policy discussions about ten years ago. The civil war was still raging, and it seemed possible that Assad would fall. The United States, and the broader international community, decided to take a restrained approach, however. Given how quickly his regime fell apart, could the last ten years of suffering have been avoided?

The Obama-era debates

When the series of protests sometimes known as the Arab Spring broke out, I was still in graduate school. Some of my classmates, whose dissertations were predicated on the assumption of authoritarian survival in the Middle East, suddenly felt their projects falling apart. Besides that anxiety, however, there was elation. It really seemed like everything had changed, including in Syria where protests broke out in March of 2011. Middle East studies even began to revisit some of its “common knowledge” on the reality of authoritarian robustness and pointing to issues in their approach to the region.

As we all know, Syria’s protests broke apart into a civil war in the face of government violence. Rebel groups fought with the regime and each other for control of territory. Syria’s Kurds gained some autonomy. This was complicated by the emergence of the Islamic State, which had shifted from its Iraqi focus and soon captured large swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, Assad persisted, with some Middle East experts noting the importance of persistence of the military’s loyalty to family regimes like Assad’s and other pointing to broader authoritarian learning.

US foreign policy struggled to catch up.

If Assad fell so quickly now, after having 10 years to recover from the initial shock of the protests, would he have fallen equally quickly back then? And if so, were skeptics of intervention wrong?

As Marc Lynch wrote in his book on the early stages of the Arab Spring, the United States signaled both condemnation of violence against protesters and hesitation to intervene in the conflict. President Obama finally called for Assad to step down in August, but it was unclear what the United States would do about it. Russian support for Syria precluded a UN-sanctioned intervention. Obama famously established a “red line” in government chemical attacks on civilians that, if crossed, would prompt a US attack. When the Assad regime conducted such an attack, the United States backed down in favor of a negotiated deal via Russia. US military involvement ended up focusing primarily on combating ISIS.

Many supported this move. Shibley Telhami criticized the logic behind calls for military action against Syria. And as I discussed in my latest book, Pope Francis organized peace vigils to protest military action.

But some in the United States called for more direct action. Kimberley Kagan, of the Institute for the Study of War, criticized Obama for ignoring Iran’s influence in Syria and not attempting to directly remove Assad from power. Michele Dunne of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace argued US restraint allowed Assad to survive. And the late John McCain famously pressed for more support for the rebels and air strikes on the regime.

I remember being torn. I was skeptical of the Libya intervention and as that country broke apart into civil war I worried what would happen to Syria. But I also realized that Syria was trapped in a horrendous civil war even without international intervention. I ultimately became stuck on the lack of good options from either side. Sanctions and weak rhetoric from Obama did nothing, but air strikes and support for rebels we knew little about would accomplish not accomplish much.

I ended up believing that the Syrian civil war was horrible, but there was no way to stop it. The Assad regime had the loyalty of the military, and eventually had Iranian and Russian support. And even if his forces could have been disrupted through an international intervention, none of the rebels were able to stabilize the country.

In the end, it was another tragedy of the sort that characterizes international relations. My views on Syria fit those of many experts, resigning themselves that Assad would stay in power but calling on the international community to not let him off the hook.

Revisiting the debate

But then, suddenly, everything changed. Tahrir al-Sham reinitiated its offensive against the government. I thought at first that we’d see an expansion of rebel-controlled areas that Assad would leave alone. But the group kept pushing.

So that brings us to the question I raised in the beginning of this post. If Assad fell so quickly now, after having 10 years to recover from the initial shock of the protests, would he have fallen equally quickly back then? And if so, were skeptics of intervention wrong?

There are reasons to think we were too pessimistic in the early stages of the war. Russia only intervened in 2015, so an earlier anti-Assad intervention may have worked. And as we saw with Russia’s quick abandonment of Assad this week, they may have been unwilling to commit significant ground forces to holding off an incursion. Moreover, the Syrian military may not have been as loyal to Assad as many assumed, especially when they felt the tide turning against them. The resilience of the Syrian regime, then, may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I do not see any way Assad could have fallen earlier without making things much worse.

But there are reasons to question this revisionist history. Iran was supporting Syria from the beginning of the civil war, so any intervention would have had to deal with Iranian forces, possibly sparking a broader conflict. And the key factor in the Syrian military collapse may be the withdrawal of their Russian and Iranian patrons. Russia’s move could be connected to its grinding war in Ukraine, as it does not have the capabilities to expand support to Syria. Also, according to Carnegie’s Nicole Grajewski, both Iran and Russia have become frustrated with some of Assad’s recent policies, seeing him as a less reliable client. And Iran’s position in the region has been significantly weakened thanks to Israel’s war against Hizballah.

It is very likely, then, that the fall of Assad is something that emerged out of this particular moment in time and is not a condemnation of Obama’s earlier refusal to take action. That is not to say US foreign policy or the broader international community has been blameless. Obama’s foreign policy was a mess, lacking any clear direction. Trump and then Biden seemed to operate on unreflective autopilot, except for Trump’s shameful betrayal of the US’ Kurdish allies in Syria (something that may be happening again, and which we need to prevent). The United Nations did little to help, while the European Union fixated on their concerns about refugees.

Mistakes were made, and the world could have helped the Syrian people more than we did. But I do not see any way Assad could have fallen earlier without making things much worse.