Jean-Francois Revel (with the assistance of Branko Lazitch): How Democracies Perish. William Byron translation. Garden City: Doubleday, 1984.

Originally published in The Intercollegiate Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Spring/Summer 1985. Republished with permission.

 

In 1970 the literary succès de scandale in Paris was a polemics entitled Ni Marx, Ni Jésus. Written by socialist pamphleteer Jean-Francois Revel, it owed its scandalousness to one remarkable thing: it was pro-American. Throughout the previous decade, anti-Americanism had numbered among the few sentiments uniting most of the French elites—whether the ‘Right’ of Algérie Française, the Gaullist center, or the various elements on the ‘Left.’ Dismissing all these elements as reactionary, Revel buoyantly asserted that in the 1960s “the only revolutionary stirrings in the world have had their origins in the United States,” and the question of whether or not “the revolution of the twentieth century” will spread “to the rest of the world depends on whether or not it first succeeds in America.” Without Marx or Jesus appeared in America a year later, supplemented by a properly friendly and skeptical “afterword” by Mary McCarthy and an “author’s note” in which Revel generously observed that “in the United States if the classical Left [as represented by Miss McCarthy) does not believe the new revolution is serious, at least it does not try, as in Europe, to stop it in order to be right.”

Americans today who remember the book remember it vaguely They remember Revel as a friend in a bad time, the time when anti-Americanism had become fashionable in America itself. They seldom remember Revel’s argument, and in some ways that is just as well. He made some sensible, astringent criticisms of those who imagined that the Soviet Union, Maoist China, the ‘Third World,’ or Scandinavia could bear a democratic revolution to the oppressed victims of capitalism. But he suffered delusions of his own, calling for “the abolition of international relations” by the establishment of a world government. This government would enable humanity to equalize economic and social conditions, stabilize the birth rate, preserve the environment without ending material progress, and free everyone from “sexual repression” (the latter program being “undoubtedly one of the surest signs of an authentic revolutionary struggle”). If this “total affirmation of liberty for all in the place of archaic prohibitions” sounds rather more like anarchism than anything that could establish a government, it must be said that Revel almost saw this: “We do not need a political revolution so much as an antipolitical revolution.” Even the American “hippies” were not sufficiently egalitarian and libertarian for Revel’s world. He fretted that they disliked technology, which brings material abundance to the masses; worse still, they tended toward religiosity. But at least the American ‘Right’ posed little serious threat. After Goldwater’s defeat, conservatism was surely dead.

A decade and a half later, Revel has abandoned many of his leftist illusions and most of his optimism. How Democracies Perish begins, “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” The contemporary world has become an “implacable democracy-killing machine” with components within both democracy and totalitarianism. Revel describes four of these components.

First, modern democracy directs energies inward, whereas totalitarianism directs energies outward. Democracy “tend to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them.” Democracy succeeds in the pleasant task of improving its own material life. It fears the consequences of opposing its enemies because it would thereby risk souring its own agreeable existence. It even finds that “it is easier to win concessions from yourself than from the enemy.” Totalitarianism fails to improve its own material life and must therefor turn its attention elsewhere. “War is central to [the Soviet Union’s] ideological system,” as well as to its economic and political structure.

Second, modern democracy “treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its own principles,” notably that of toleration. Modern democracy tends to blame itself for its own enemies, internal and external, and generates “an industry of blame.” With not a single ideology but dozens contending inside it, modern democracy expends much of its energy on contestation as it were with itself. It has difficulty defending itself against real enemies. “Even conservatives seldom risk naming the threat of totalitarianism as the greatest menace of our time, for fear of seeming fanatical” and thus offending the modern ethos. As a consequence of this, democratic politicians, “whose influence depends, happily, on their persuasiveness, expend so much energy trying to show their undertakings in the best possible light that they eventually lose the habit of thinking about the issues’ substance”—that it, about reality itself. While looking hard at its own current faults, modern democracy often minimizes the faults of leftist totalitarianism, dismissing them as mere ‘stages’ of progress. This suggests that modern democrats often accept the premises of progressivist historicism underlying totalitarian belief and practice. Indeed, “the socialist cause was forged within the democracies themselves in the nineteenth century.” Totalitarianism treats its opponents as enemies, subversives. It never blames itself fundamentally or comprehensively, but limits “self-criticism” to the sort of corruption-baiting one finds in Pravda letters-to-the-editor. It generates an industry of propaganda governed by a single, all-encompassing ideology. But it firmly subordinates propaganda to political calculation, also governed by ideology; any mistakes of perception occur only insofar as the ideology fails to explain reality. But because its ideology encourages power-worship, it often perceives political reality quite acutely—as devotees will. While judging its enemies by their current faults, totalitarianism judges itself by its own alleged future. It can judge its enemies most severely because, according to leftist totalitarianism, its enemies have no future.

Third, contemporary democratic government no longer governs. “The democratic state has stuffed itself with more responsibilities than powers,” a weakness that causes political and social fragmentation. One might say that America retains Madisonian faction while trying to act like a welfare state. Our enemies need not divide us in order to conquer, for our divisions are already here to exploit. In their foreign relations, modern democracies also accept “responsibility”—that is, blame—without sufficient power to govern, or at least channel, the course of events. Democratic politicians vacillate and react; time is rarely on their side. Totalitarian government does not merely govern but tyrannizes. It exercises power without “responsibility” and imposes unity upon its subjects. Democrats falsely imagine that this repression and the misery it causes must eventually halt a totalitarian regime’s expansion. But “the notion that whoever holds power must clear out because his subjects are discontented or dying of hunger or distress is a bit of whimsy that history has tolerated wondrously few times.” It is a notion that “can only occur to a democrat,” who earnestly desires the world to be other than it is (no harm in that) but then confuses his desire with reason. Totalitarians plan, decide, and act; they “can afford to wait,” convinced that time is on their side.

Fourth, modern democracy is at most a neo-imperialism, that is, an economic imperialism. The gains it makes can therefore be threatened by totalitarian insurgents, without their violating “international law.” Totalitarianism is a true imperialism, seizing territory and direct political power along with economic power. Its gains cannot be threatened militarily without violating ‘international law.’ This is true even if those gains were made ‘illegally,’ as “sooner or later de facto power is accepted as rightful power.” ‘International law,’ then, is more than a bit of a fraud, a more useful fraud to totalitarians than to modern democrats.

Revel uses imagery, rhetoric, some facts, and clear deductive logic to show how these four components function. Deductive logic proves especially useful because democrats “eagerly believe the Communists’ pure propaganda, reserving their skepticism for the genuinely revealing doctrinal statements,” which “they dismiss as mere talk.” (He recalls that the French ambassador in Berlin yattered about “détente” with Hitler in 1937, and that the ambassador’s hapless successor excitedly supposed the existence of “hawks” and “doves” among the Nazi elite). In fact, totalitarian doctrine, ‘Right’ or ‘Left,’ has been the only consistently reliable guide to totalitarian action. Because totalitarianism attempts to unify theory and practice (but does not unify either with its rhetoric) its doctrine and the (often unstated) logical deductions therefrom tell us more than pages of data. For example, given the propensity of Communist subjects to flee their countries, “the only way to convince oneself and the rest of humanity that the socialist system is best is to see to it that there are no other systems.” Totalitarian imperialism serves first of all to convince; this is what it means to claim (as Leninists do) that there is a logic of history. It is a ‘logic’ that only real logic can expose—in both senses of that word. The ‘logic’ of history has military consequences. The Soviets’ alleged fear of encirclement, “the greatest strategic farce of modern times,” is inexplicable strategically. But not politically. “Let’s be logical: the only way for the Soviet Union to make certain its borders are not threatened, that they are fully secure, is to have no borders at all or, if you prefer, borders that coincide with the entire world.” One can call this paranoia, but it must be said it is a most purposeful paranoia, consistent with the allegedly dialectical progress of ‘History.’

To counter totalitarian imperialism, modern democracies have constructed the edifice of ‘détente,’ an attempt to elevate a condition between states (the word means relaxation of tensions) to the status of a principle, a ruling idea. Its purpose is clear enough: peace. But the means of obtaining genuine peace by the means of ‘détente’ elude democrats’ eager grasp. The “principle that inspired the first massive transfusion of Western aid to the Soviet Union after 1922” prefigured the economic principle of “détente”: “East-West trade will civilize Communism.” In the 1920s, “after several years of Western liberality, what really happened was the forced collectivization of the land, extermination of the peasants, purges and the Great Terror of the 1930s.” The results of similar Western liberality in the 1970s were less spectacular but far more damaging to the world as a whole. They included a massive Soviet arms buildup, domination of large sections of Asia and Africa, increased use of espionage and terrorism—all accompanied by a reversal of Khruschev’s ‘de-Stalinization’ at home. Faced with this contemptuous exploitation of their hopes, the democracies find it impossible to reduce trade with the Soviet Union for more than the briefest periods. They tell themselves that such a punitive action might only anger the Soviets. Once again, Revelian logic clears the artificial fog that makes these movie-set props believable. “Either Western economic cooperation is negligible to the U. S. S. R., which makes the whole theory of détente absurd, or it’s important to the U. S. S. R. and suspending it would be an effective sanction.” Not a supremely effective sanction, to be sure: grain embargoes cannot extract Soviet divisions from Afghanistan. But sanctions can at least make our own economic system, for whose health many democrats care more than anything else less dependent upon the actions of enemies who care neither for democrats’ comfort nor for that of their own subjects.

Given all this, Revel has earned his pessimism. His suggested policy changes, stated in necessarily general terms, seem rather weak. Two are negative: do not fear war because the Soviets avoid it when they see the possibility of losing; make no concessions without “manifest, equivalent and palpable counter-concessions.” Centrally, he suggests “mainly” economic reprisals against “any Soviet encroachment.” He would supplement this with espionage and some propaganda. Perhaps these suggestions might turn out to be more effective than they appear; up to a point, one might even say, “the more Soviet conquests, the more burdens for them and the more targets for us.”

But the problem remains. Democrats prefer not to target their enemies at all. The democratic character itself finds tyranny seductive and deadly. Plato’s Socrates describes the scion of democracy, his appetites sated, driven by the “sting of longing” to be “the leader of the idle desires that insists on all available resources being distributed to them”: “this leader of the soul takes madness for its armed guard and is stung to frenzy. And if it finds in the man any opinions or desires accounted good and still admitting of shame, it slays them and pushes them out of him until it purges him of moderation and fills him with madness brought in from abroad” (Republic IX, 537b). The problem of educating the young democrat to defend himself against those who would use his desires to serve tyranny remains the problem for those who cherish liberty. It is an increasingly formidable problem. Modern tyranny, totalitarianism, distinguishes itself from ancient tyranny in part because it is not so innocent of philosophy. So far as a polemicist may educate, the pessimistic Revel guards modern democrats from the tyrannical sting of longing, making amends for the earlier, dreaming Revel who let himself unguarded.

Don Cook: Charles de Gaulle. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1984.

Originally published in Chronicles of Culture, Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1985. Republished with permission.

 

“The head rules the belly through the chest,” C. S. Lewis writes. Reason cannot rule appetites directly; it needs what the Greeks called thumos, the soul’s “spirited element,” to rule the appetites so that reason can go free. Spiritedness cares for itself oneself and for those like oneself. Refined, it animates patriotism, courage, honor; at its best it animates magnanimity, “greatness of soul.” Unrefined, it animates warlikeness, rage, egoism; at its worst it causes madness. Lewis describes modern democratic ‘intellectuals’ as “men without chests.” Their heads, however well-trained, remain ineffectual. Our intellectuals lack “heart”—not only the compassion they feebly praise but the courage they ridicule, nervously, as machismo.

Few political men have opposed this dispiritedness. Charles de Gaulle was among the greatest to do so. His latest biographer, an American journalist, describes a man of thumos caught in but also defying, sometimes exploiting, the entropic forces of the modern age. On the force commonly taken to symbolize late modernity, Cook writes that de Gaulle “had not the slightest interest in the question of the control of nuclear weapons, in nuclear disarmament, in a test-ban treaty, in the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, or in any of the treaties that were spawned in Geneva…. He had no interest in think-tank theories about the use of nuclear weapons or the risks of one country triggering another into holocaust. He had only one theory and that was nuclear retaliation.” During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, de Gaulle met American and Soviet representatives. To Kennedy’s envoy, Dean Acheson, he said, “You may tell the President that if there is a war, France will be with you. But there will be no war.” He added, characteristically, “I must note that I have been advised, but not consulted.” With Serge Vinogradov, the Soviet ambassador to France, de Gaulle deployed fewer words but greater irony. As was customary, he opened the meeting by saying, “Well, Mr. Ambassador, I am listening.” Vinogradov ran on about the possibility of the annihilation of France; de Gaulle remained silent. The ambassador continued, and de Gaulle’s silence continued. “At last the Soviet ambassador ran out of things to say. De Gaulle then rose from behind his desk with heavy and ponderous motion, stretched out his hand in farewell to Vinogradove and said: ‘Hélas, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, nous mourirons ensemble! Au revoir, Monseur l’Ambassadeur.'” [“Alas, Mr. Ambassador, we will die together! Goodbye, Mr. Ambassador.”)

Thumos serves reason here in two ways: It defends reason against tyranny, including the psychological tyranny totalitarians seek to impose; more subtly, it defends the mind from excessive fear, allowing de Gaulle to see that the Soviets are not likely to risk Moscow for the sake of missile bases in the Caribbean. The complementary insight is de Gaulle’s famous suspicion that the United States might not risk its existence for the sake of France. He told Eisenhower, “I know, as you yourself know, what a nation is. It can help another but it cannot identify itself with another.” De Gaulle accordingly ordered the construction of France’s own nuclear arsenal, forcing any would-be attackers to consider how much they want to risk for the sake of conquering France. Thus thumos and practical reason allied themselves in the service of moderation—or, at least, restraint.

Thumos defends its own. Even when the schoolboy de Gaulle played with toy soldiers he insisted, “France is mine!” Wounded and captured by the Germans during the Great War, he used his enforced confinement to study the enemy’s language, “return[ing] home from thirty-two months as a POW with a suitcase full of materials for future writings and lectures”—many of which would warn against German military resurgence. In 1919 he saw action in Poland, participating in “the miracle of the Vistula” when Polish troops and foreign volunteers unexpectedly defeated the Red Army and saved Poland from foreign domination. Decorated by the Polish government, de Gaulle evidently regarded Poland as an exception to the perfidious general run of foreign countries. He condemned the Yalta settlement from the beginning and, as late as 1967, visited Gdansk and said, “The obstacles that you think are insurmountable today, you will without any doubt surmount them. You know what I mean.” Poland too had become “his,” and there can be little doubt that he also viewed it as a potential buffer against Russian and German ambitions in France’s neighborhood.

No tyrant, de Gaulle admired thumos in others. In the interwar period he saw the French colonies in the Middle East and wrote, “My impression is that we haven’t really made much impact here, and that the people are as alien to us—and we to them—as they ever were.” The French must therefore either compel obedience or “get out.” His disband France’s colonial empire, decades later, followed from this recognition of both the strength and the limits of thumos.

“A statesman is needed.” De Gaulle wrote that on May 3, 1940 to the Third Republic’s last prime minister, Paul Reynaud, who proved unequal to the need. As the Nazis conquered France and his mentor, Marshall Pétain, capitulated, de Gaulle reacted simply to France’s “men without chests.” “I saw treason before m eyes, and my heart refused in disgust to recognize it as victorious.” Not only military and political timeservers but many intellectual luminaries endorsed Pétain; these included Gide, Mauriac, and Claudel. “In those days,” Cook writes, “it was not men of experience or leadership, it was not the intellectuals or politicians or administrators or serving officers who were the first Gaullists and rallied to the Cross of Lorraine. They did not come from the châteaux or the cathedrals, but from the parish churches and the synagogues,, the French of the Paris Métro, the fishing villages, the factories, for whom all was clear and simple.” When de Gaulle founded Free France in London, less than one-sixth of the French then on British soil joined him; those likely to be on foreign soil—businessmen, diplomatic personnel—were unlikely to respond to a simple call to honor.

By 1941, de Gaulle “had made up his mind that the war would be long, that Britain and the Allies would win, and that his priority from then on would be to claw back everything he could for a victory for France.” The clawing among de Gaulle and Churchill, Roosevelt, and the anti-Gaullist French elements drew blood. Although Churchill quarreled angrily with him (going so far as to threaten, “If you obstruct me, I shall liquidate you!”) de Gaulle found Roosevelt and the French elites more consistently hostile. The American president dreamed of a new, postwar state, “Wallonia,” to be fabricated from “the Walloon parts of Belgium with Luxembourg, Alsace-Lorraine and part of northern France.” Considering various explanations of Roosevelt’s allergy to de Gaulle, Cook finally decides that “there can be no rationale or explanation of what amounted to a personal obsession.” It is surely true that Roosevelt distrusted de Gaulle’s military background, recalling such adventurers as Napoleon Bonaparte and Boulanger; it is also possible that Roosevelt, exemplifying the American liberal’s ambivalence toward thumos, resent a man ‘of one piece,’ a man who at once the liberal’s ambitions but who did not share the liberal’s moral reservations concerning ambition.

As for the French, during the war de Gaulle contended with the old right (the Vichyites condemned him to death in absentia); after the liberation “it was a struggle between the Communists and the Gaullists,” a struggle de Gaulle won by the spirited expedient of ordering the Communists to the front lines. It was the postwar exhaustion of thumos that caused de Gaulle to resign as prime minister. “Although de Gaulle could be master of any parliamentary debate he chose to enter, he was never cut out for the maneuvers and cut-and-thrust of parliamentary democracy…. It was not his idea of how to run a government.” The French viewed his departure with relief and did not expect him to return. When he did, in 1958, it was of course on his own terms. Foremost among these was a new constitution, a presidential regime that ended parliamentarism while retaining parliament as a separate branch of government. The men without chests, talkers who confused action with the force of inertia, found themselves once more defeated by the man of thumos.

In previous books, Cook has written extensively on World War II, and sixty percent of this book concerns the war and its aftermath. The chapters on de Gaulle’s founding and defense of the Fifth Republic are well supplemented by Bernard Ledwidge’s recent biography (De Gaulle, New York: St. Martin’s Press), by two excellent chapters in Stanley Hoffman’s Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), and by Malraux’s Le Miroir des Limbes, parts of which were translated into English as Anti-Memoirs and Felled Oaks (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston). De Gaulle’s constant theme during those years, la grandeur, inspired fear and hatred, admiration and ridicule. Cook does not quite understand de Gaulle’s intention, but he does present the words and actions of a statesman attempting to bring a thoroughly modernized, democratized populace to the unmodern virtues of courage and moderation, a statesman forced to use modern tools for unmodern ends.

Cook gives the two customary explanations of de Gaulle’s failure to complete his second term as president: from 1958 to 1968, French university enrollments tripled and de Gaulle did not sufficiently anticipate the resulting tensions; in 1968, the Soviets crushed Czechoslovakia’s experiment with civil liberties, thus refuting de Gaulle’s claim that Soviet ideology mattered less than Russian nationality. In both instances, the man of thumos underestimated the power of ideologies. (The French university students were not only numerous; a significant fraction of them had put on ideological costumes, stitching together patches of anarchism, pop psychology, and the teachings of Mao Zedong). De Gaulle rightly considered these ideologies absurd. He wrongly dismissed them as irrelevant to modern politics. That is, he underestimated the power of intellectual absurdity in human life, a power that never lasts at its peak but reappears with the persistence of dandelions. If allied with reason, thumos can rule the appetites. But in late modernity the appetites have themselves made alliance with reason, using reason to build ideologies, distinguished from religions and philosophies by their egalitarianism. And thumos also makes alliance with reason, but now as the dominant partner, serving ambition or ‘the will to power.’

Statesmen are still needed.

 

Christopher Phillips: The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.

 

From the jihadi organizations Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, Middle-East politics has seen struggles over regimes, state forms, and geopolitics for more than a century. Syria’s civil war has combined all of these kinds of conflict in one cauldron. Civil wars are often the worst kind, as our own civil war demonstrated, inflicting more deaths on Americans that World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined. In Syria, estimates are that as of the beginning of 2017, 470,000 had been killed, approximately five million exiled, and nearly seven million displaced within their country—a nation of 21 million before the war began. As I write this review in July 2017, no respite from this suffering can be seen, or anticipated.

The ancient Greeks called the Assyrians the Syrioi, and the name became attached to their place, although they were neither the first nor the last to occupy it. The long list of its conquerors comprises most of the nations of the Bible: Amorites, Hittites, Canaanites, Phoenicians, Arameans, Egyptians, Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans—all have ruled it. The Israelites got as far as the port city of Tyre, now in Lebanon. Most famously for us, Saul of Tarsus met God on the road to Damascus, regaining his sight when he finally arrived there. Damascus has been called the oldest inhabited city in the world, with its origins in ‘pre-history’: its violent past and present suggest that human beings progress technologically but not so much morally or politically. Saul’s new-found inner light found some who attended to it, but not enough to bring peace to Syria. And even if he had found more converts there, men being what they are, they would have been just as likely to make war with one another over the legacy of the Prince of Peace.

The map tells why men always fight over Syria. Not only does it form the northwest corner of the Fertile Crescent, but its coastline along the Mediterranean afforded access to one of the richest trading networks in the ancient world. Syria has much to love, but love is exclusive and the jealousy of rival lovers fosters hatred. And because each new band of loving and hating conquerors has left a remnant in this place, Syria encompasses dozens of tribal, ethnic, and religious groups—a kaleidoscope of factions some centuries old, many inclined to tear at one another. We need therefore to think about what it takes humanly to govern such a place, to make peace in it.

To govern its factions, a community needs some overarching understanding of right; it also needs ruling institutions which derive their authority from that standard of right. This is to say that enemy factions need to find some common sphere of moral agreement. The United States of America (for example) has in it far more ethnic and religious groups than Syria does. It has lived in relative peace with itself for more than two centuries by acknowledging the laws of nature and of nature’s God as its overarching understanding of right. When too many Americans denied those laws, our one civil war resulted. This understanding has been instantiated in a set of ruling institutions approved by the American people—again, denied by a critical mass among us only that once. The American regime of federal and commercial republicanism was founded upon a source of right that does not require its citizens to adhere to any particular religious confession, or to belong to any particular ethnic group, in order to enjoy the rights of citizens.

Another, and historically more common solution to the problem of factionalism has been (and to some degree remains) monarchic empire. Paul the Apostle’s mission was much helped by his status as a subject within the Roman Empire, wherein Syria stood as an important province. A monarch-emperor stations himself above the erstwhile warring factions and rules them by keeping them divided but balanced among themselves. He takes care to redress any imbalances that arise, rather like a parent governs a set of unruly children. And like such a parent, he also takes care that his subjects do not find common cause to unite against him. And so, traditionally, such monarchs have allowed each ethnic and religious community within their empires a substantial degree of self-governance in exchange for tribute and for loyalty in war.

When in 640 A.D. Muslims arrived in Syria, they found a set of peoples that had found peace, when they found it, under imperial rule. The Muslim rulers changed nothing in that respect, and Damascus became the capital of the caliphate ruled by the Umayyid Dynasty, the largest empire in history to that point, spanning 5.8 million square miles from today’s Spain to today’s Pakistan. Enforcing the principle of dhimmitude or subordination, the caliph allowed the various religious groups to manage their own affairs insofar as these did not impinge upon tax collection and other activities reserved to the emperor. Among those subject to dhimmitude were the Alawite Muslims, a Shi’ite Muslim sect, founded in the 9th century. The Alawites are “Twelver” Muslims who especially revere Ali, whom they believe to have been the first of the Twelve Imams. Today, they number approximately three million, half of them in Syria, clustered along the coastline, but also in Lebanon (200,000), Turkey (500,000), and Germany (70,000).

Syria’s longest time of peace in recent centuries came under the empire of the Ottoman Turks, who expelled the Egyptian empire of the Mamluks in 1516 and stayed for the next four centuries, making Damascus part of the pilgrimage route to Mecca. France replaced the Ottomans in the wake of the First World War, withdrawing finally in 1946. While there, the French had allied with the minority Allawites, using them as a counter to the majority Sunnis. The borders of Syria set by France in the 1920s had no regard for pre-existing social-political patterns; emperors, whether monarchic or republican, want to rule by dividing, and national unity in their provinces is anathema to them. Although France made some efforts to bring its mission civilisitrice to Syria, a young army officer named Charles de Gaulle was unimpressed; “I don’t think we are making much of an impression here,” he wrote in a letter to his wife, in the early 1930s.

Thus, when finally independent, more than 70 years ago, Syria became a sovereign state without having a real nation—the peoples of the region never having existed as a single ethnic or religious entity. What kind of regime could hold it together, let alone bring Syrians some modicum of justice?

For a brief time Syrians attempted republicanism. That regime collapsed after it and its allies failed to destroy Israel in the 1948 war. In their ‘civilizing mission,’ French imperial rulers had proved better at training the Syrian military officers than at preparing Syrians for self-government. A series of military dictatorships followed, with eight successful coups between 1949 and 1970. After aligning with the Soviet bloc in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Canal War, Syrians soon found themselves more and more at the mercy of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, which was funded and advised by Moscow. In neighboring Iraq, the Ba’ath Party was headed by Saddam Hussein; after another defeat by Israel in 1967, in which it lost the Golan Heights, Syrian was ripe for yet another strongman. The Assad family, long prominent among the Alawites, took charge of the Syrian Ba’athists and the government in 1970. Hafez al-Assad ruled until his death in 2000, providing some stability along with much tyranny. He was succeeded by his son, Bashar al-Assad, who continues to rule the Alawite ‘rump state’ to this day.

Syria as a nation-state reproduced (on a smaller scale) the sort of regime it had under imperialism—a monarchy—but without the advantages that imperial monarchs had enjoyed: military and economic power with resources drawn from beyond the borders of Syria itself. The Assads have attempted to rule like imperialists, taking the already-divided groups in the country and keep them both divided from one another and dependent upon the regime. This works, except when it doesn’t: the current civil war isn’t the first one. In the 1970s, thousands of Syrians died in a revolt organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, the international Sunni Islamist organization that now rules in Turkey and also, briefly, in Egypt. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad had 10,000 of them slaughtered when they tried to seize the city of Hama.

Syria is Iraq in reverse. In Iraq, Ba’athists who were Sunni Muslims ruled a much larger group of Shi’as and Sunni Kurds. In Syria, Alawite Ba’athists who are Shi’a Muslims constitute a minority who rule a majority of Sunni Muslims, including Kurds (who are about 10% of the population), among numerous other ethnic groups. To complicate matters still further, unlike Iraq there is a substantial Christian population (also about 10%, before the war), themselves divided into several sects and ethnicities.

Whenever a state ruling such a heterogeneous population weakens, foreign states start circling, looking for advantage, and usually finding one or more factions eager for foreign backing. In the Middle East this is especially true in any conflict involving Sunnis and Shi’ites. Iran has close political and financial ties to the Syrian Alawites in addition to their other regional allies—Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. As U. S. troops began to withdraw from Iran’s eastern border, Afghanistan, and its western border, Iraq, the Iranian regime saw an opportunity to build an arc of influence throughout the region, encircling the great prizes of Mecca and the Arabian oil fields. This alarmed the region’s Sunnis, including the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the Turks—the latter two longtime imperial rulers of Syria. What is more, the Russians have retained their interests in the region and their ties to the Ba’athist Party, their Cold-War ally. Israel, with its concerns about Hezbollah, its interest in the Golan Heights, and its own worries about the Iranians, remains vigilant. Also regarding Iran, it is important to remark that the Iranian economy is heavily dependent upon Russia and China, to the point where it is regarded by those greater powers as a source of military support for their interests in dominating the ‘World Island’ described by Halford Mackinder, more than a hundred years ago.

The League of Nations and then the United Nations were designed to control such interventions by providing a non-imperial, even commercial-republican, force in world politics. In the Middle East, this mean that the defunct Ottoman Empire would be divided into colonies controlled by the remaining commercial-republic European empires, which were to prepare the populations there for independence as responsible sovereign states in the dreamed-of ‘world community.’ As we know, the League of Nations collapsed under the pressure of political regimes whose moral principles were antithetical to those of President Wilson and his colleagues at Versailles. The United Nations has survived the regime incoherence of its members, but can rarely summon the firepower to do much. The exception was the First Gulf War in the early 1990s, when the United States stood dominant in a world newly free of the Soviet empire. President George H. W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ didn’t survive that decade, and both Russia and China have blocked U.N. military action throughout the course of the Syrian war. Although a smaller, regional organization might in principle act where the U.N. cannot, and although the Arab League has sanctioned Syria, its main action has been to send weapons to its Sunna Arab allies in the country. Members states also have happily allowed their home-grown jihadis to join the fight; after all, if the jihadis win the Sunnis will be rid of a Shi’a regime, to the disadvantage of Iran, and if they lose many will not live to return to their homelands to disturb the peace there.

Had the Alawite/Ba’athist regime collapsed, we might have seen removal of many elements of Syrian military personnel and some equipment to their brother Shi’a in Lebanon, Hezbollah. That is, Shi’a power in the region would have regrouped, re-concentrated nearer Israel, but it would not have disappeared. Both Israel and Iran would have regarded their circumstances as diminished, a point that would not have improved the temper of either of these antagonists, although the Sunnis would have been content.

But that’s not what happened. The Alawites hung on, and the war took a different direction. Why?

After taking over from his late father, Bashar al-Assad did what new tyrants very often do: he moved to consolidate his power. He narrowed his support base to those he knew to be loyal. In doing so, he excluded some tribal networks he didn’t fully trust. Among those he didn’t fully trust were the Kurds, who have ties with Kurdish populations in Turkey and in Iraq, where they had achieved a substantial degree of self-government following the Second Gulf War. This exclusion understandably led to feelings of estrangement among these elements, making the newly-excluded groups more inclined to rebel, if the opportunity arose.

It did, thanks to several converging factors. Between 1950 and 2010, the Syrian population increased six-fold. This brought urbanization, as young men sought jobs. But they weren’t finding them. High unemployment of military-age men is seldom wholesome in a religious culture which valorizes war. A severe drought in the years 2006-10 brought discontent to the countryside, as well. Added to corruption and increased nepotism in the regime (part of that regime-purging strategy of Assad), along the perennially factitious character of Syrian society itself, a volatile mixture was ready for a spark. That was the 2011 Arab Spring, which raised hopes of overthrowing tyrannical regimes throughout Muslim North Africa and the Arab Peninsula.

Assad’s consolidation of power turned out to be the proverbial double-edged sword. It did give excluded groups incentive to abandon the regime. But it also made the core of that regime stronger. Tyrannies and oligarchies typically collapse when the ruling group or groups themselves start to factionalize, as seen in the Syria of the Fifties and Sixties, with its succession of coups. But Assad had (in Phillips’s word) ‘coup-proofed’ his regime. It was, in Lenin’s famous phrase when he purged the Bolshevik Party, “smaller but better”—better for the tyrant. Although some army units deserted early in the conflict, most stood firm, including the army officers and the Mukhabarat—the intelligence agencies which had been set up by the East German Stasi during the Cold War. The Stasi were the most feared (because the most ruthlessly efficient) of all the Soviet-era intelligence and security services, superior even to the KGB itself. No Syrian tyrant would want to be without an intelligence agency trained by them.

As a result, during the Arab Spring, as other, less tightly-controlled tyrannical state apparatuses in northern Africa collapsed, the Syrian regime survived. Once Russia’s premier, Vladimir Putin, decided to increase his support for the regime in 2014, three years after the war began, he could tip the balance of forces in favor of Assad’s survival.

Looking at the geopolitical dimension of the struggle, Phillips emphasizes that no one in or outside of the Middle East adequately understood Syria; no one had adequate ‘intel.’ Not the Americans or the Russians, but also not the Turks, the Saudis, or the Iranians. (Evidently also not the Assad regime or its enemies, for that matter, all of whom miscalculated when assessing the others). At the same time, ‘everyone’ wanted to jump in, perceiving risks if they did not and opportunities if they did. This ignorance was understandable. The tyrannical character of the Syrian regime made it hard to understand the conditions prevailing in the country; to this day, for example, estimates of the Alawite population are just that: estimates. Also, the foreign regimes had been preoccupied with other crises: the Chinese naval buildup in the South China Sea; the war in Iraq; a series of crises in Eastern Europe; the Iranian nuclear weapons program. The list was long, and no government has the ability to concentrate effectively on more than a few ‘issues’ at once.

Begin with the United States. The Obama Administration assumed that Syria would be another flower to bloom in the Arab Spring. This assumption prevailed especially among those called the ‘idealist’ members of the administration—human-rights advocates like UN delegate Samantha Powers and National Security Adviser Susan Rice, who argued with the ‘realists,’ including Defense Secretary William Gates and, yes, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who took a somewhat less optimistic view of any proposed American intervention. In Phillips’s account, only our ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, saw that Assad’s fall was not imminent, but his on-the-ground counsel was dismissed. Therefore, when Obama called for Assad’s ouster in August 2011, his administration embarked on a policy without a strategy. Just as the Bush Administration had intervened in Iraq in 2003 without a serious strategy for guiding the regime change it had begun, so the Obama Administration officials supposed that the political side of things would take care of themselves, and that the result would be democracy, or at least some more benevolent thing than Ba’athism. Phillips does praise Obama for rejecting any major military involvement, unlike Bush.

Meanwhile, almost all of the regional forces, from the Syrian rebel groups to the Qataris to the Turks to the Saudis, overestimated U. S. power in the region and also overestimated President Obama’s willingness to use it, once the 2012 elections were out of the way. They had been profoundly impressed by the Americans’ capacity to overthrow that other Ba’athist, Saddam Hussein, while cynically underestimated Obama’s reluctance to repeat such an action in Syria. When no intervention materialized, they charged Obama with ‘betrayal,’ even if they only thing he betrayed was their own wishful thinking.

Turning next to America’s regional allies, Saudi Arabia had viewed the U. S. intervention in Iraq as a setback. It had increased the power of the Shi’a in Iraq, and therefore the power of Iran in the region. Further, the Ba’athist Party is secular-socialist, whereas the Saudis are neither, and the Alawites are Shi’as; the two intertwined elements of the Assad regime are the enemies of the Saudi regime, in principle. When Assad’s regime seemed strong, in 200-10, the Saudis had sought détente with it. But when the civil war began they backed non-jihadi Sunni rebels, including the surviving remnant of the Muslim Brotherhood. In this, they sought to prevent yet another Iranian advance in the region.

On the northern border of Syria, Turkey was by now itself a Muslim Brotherhood regime, thus aligned with that section of the Syrian population and the interests of the Saudis. On the other hand, no Turkish-Saudi alliance will ever be strong and lasting, inasmuch as the Saudis recall the Ottomans’ 400-year rule over their territory. The post-Ottoman Turkish regime of Mustafa Kemal had been secularist and Western-oriented, but the Muslim Brotherhood regime under Erdogan wanted to be more ‘Muslim,’ and consequently to redirect its geopolitical attention to the Middle East. They also wanted to keep a tight clamp on the Syrian Kurds, given the restive Kurdish population in their own country, and further to oppose the jihadi elements on the Syrian battlefield, including al-Qaeda. But the Turks had the same disadvantage as the Western countries and Russia: very few diplomats or other ‘operatives’ spoke Arab, and they generally had little knowledge of the country. Although the Arab Spring had on balance improved Turkey’s position in the region by eliminating secularist regimes, Turkish ability to exploit that position was limited by the same assumption shared by the U. S.—namely, that Assad was about to go away.

The first foreign country to send substantial financial aid to the Syrian opposition groups was Qatar. It sent more aid in the first two years of the war than any other foreign country, and they also established a training base on their soil for the rebel soldiers to be trained by Americans, who have a military base there. Although very small, Qatar is also very rich, and its rulers are ambitious for regional influence. It has the advantage of being less factionalized than many of the other states in the region, so it can pursue coherent policies over a long period of time. Being a Sunni country which nonetheless has ties with Iran (they share a huge natural gas field), they try to maintain their independence from all other countries in the region—much to the displeasure of their fellow Gulf-state Sunnis. Because Saudi Arabia eventually eclipsed them as the principal Sunni backer of the rebels, and because the Saudis take strong exception to Qatar’s dealings with the Iranians, the Syrian opposition groups worry that they will be whipsawed between the two. With two different countries backing different rebel groups, fighting among the rebels—already damaging—may intensify.

The two main foreign countries backing the Assad regime are Iran and Russia. Iran’s alliance with Hezbollah in Lebanon links them to the most effective Arab fighting force in the region. Iran sends money and weapons; Hezbollah fights. In the five years prior to the war, Syrian-Iranian trade grew four times. That level of economic benefit may never return, but they will continue to make serious sacrifices to keep Assad afloat, if only for sectarian and geopolitical reasons. Also, Syria was the conduit for Iranian supplies to Hezbollah, which aims at destroying Israel and getting rid of American and other Western powers in the Middle East—prime Iranian goals. In 2013-14, Phillips reports, the top Iranian military adviser, Hussein Suleiman of the Republican Guards, reorganized Syrian army forces, which he regarded as substandard. This accounts in part for the army’s improved battlefield performance in the last couple of years.

Getting the Western powers out of the Middle East would make Mr. Putin happy, as well. You will recall that the first term of the Obama Administration, through 2012, was the period of the attempted ‘reset’ of U. S.-Russian relations. The Russians adroitly took advantage of such wishful thinking, stringing the Americans along with empty negotiations over Assad’s removal, something they never intended to agree to.

Putin took the Arab Spring to be an Islamist, not a nationalist or democratic, phenomenon. As such, he disliked it, thinking of the 14% of the Russian population that is Muslim. He also rejected regime change as a policy, considering it impractical in the Middle East and potentially threatening to his own regime. Putin also saw that Assad and the Alawites were more unified than any other major group in Syria, whereas the opposition groups were not only torn by personal rivalries but lacking in political experience. Assad’s problem wasn’t that the Alawites were disunited in principle but that in ‘coup-proofing’ his government he had split up the military and security forces into several pieces, so as to prevent them from getting together to overthrow him. Nonetheless, Putin calculated that Assad was the better bet than any other group or combination of groups in the country; even in the worst case, the Alawites would likely retain control of the coast, where the Russians have a small but useful naval station. Finally, Putin correctly saw that the Western alliance was irresolute; unlike the Arabs, he took Obama’s reluctance to engage there to be real. He and the Iranian mullahs wanted victory more intensely.

Among the opposition groups themselves, the jihadis were the most effective: more committed, better trained, less easy to buy off. As mentioned various foreign countries backed different groups, exacerbating the already-existing factionalism among them. ISIS (Islamic State in Syria) began as an extension of ISIL (the Iraqi-based Islamic State in the Levant), itself formerly called AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq). The group split from al-Qaeda over a strategic dispute. The late Osama bin Laden had argued that modern states are much too powerful to permit the founding of a new caliphate. The modern states first need to be critically weakened and discouraged by a relentless campaign of terrorism and guerilla warfare. Islamic State leaders disagreed, claiming that the Iraqi state was sufficiently weak to enable the founding of the caliphate, which they proceeded to do with some initial success. Civil-war-torn Syria looked like another excellent opportunity for expanding the caliphate into another chaotic landscape.

As a result of all these forces and events, by summer 2014 the war was stalemated. It was a year later, in summer 2015, that Putin ordered a substantial Russian troop buildup in Syria, effectively mimicking the U. S. ‘surge’ in Iraq, a few years earlier. The Russian ‘surge’ successfully reinforced Assad’s regime, blocking any possibility of American-backed regime change while discouraging jihadist forces in Russia and boosting Russia’s drive for equal status with the United States (which he had signaled by his 2014 invasion of Ukraine. Not incidentally, he could now use his enhanced position in Syria as a bargaining chip with the West in Eastern Europe.

What does the future look like?

First, with the decline of ISIS, the al-Qaeda strategy stands as vindicated. The terror-and-guerilla-warfare approach will continue, not the caliphate strategy.

Second, the destruction of civil society gives young men nothing much to do but fight. According to the geopolitical analyst David Goldman, who writes under the pseudonym of “Spengler,” in intractable conflicts like the one in Syria, this typically continues until about 30% of the military-age men in the society are dead.

Third, Syria as we knew it may be gone, permanently. There is no single, legitimate authority there, none visible on the horizon, and hence no security. This means that the state will likely break up, with new borders. One estimate claims that to reconstitute the old Syria a force of 450,000 security personnel, probably under the prolonged supervision of about 150,000 foreigners, would be needed. That doesn’t seem likely. Woodrow Wilson had envisioned the League of Nations as enforcing peace with a military entity drawn from many nations representing “the major force of mankind.” The successor to the League, the UN, can’t muster that kind of force any more than the League did. Wilson supposed that the League would work because humanity had progressed, learning the horrifying lessons of the Great War. Evidently not. The several Muslim states and paramilitary organizations have supposed that Allah would side with them, reuniting the region. That hasn’t happened, either.