While global attention remains mesmerised by the winds of war in the Gulf and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a deafening silence covers the true Copernican revolution that is unfolding in Syria, which since early 2011 has been the epicentre of chaos and the laboratory of the worst regional tragedies. That country is undergoing a political evolution that is destined to overturn the entire Middle East quadrant, transforming itself, in spite of the gloomy prophecies of the right and left that prefigured an Afghan-style sheikhdom or a safe haven for terrorists of all kinds, into the unexpected point of equilibrium of an area in flames. This paradox is not a historical accident, but the inevitable result of a strategic realignment that forces regional and global powers to redraw their plans on maps that are becoming unrecognisable day by day.

What led to the fall of Assad

The fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 was not the miraculous triumph of a democratic ideology, but the brutal outcome of a structural insolvency of its masters: on the one hand an exhausted Russia humiliated by the imperialist adventure in Ukraine, and on the other an Iranian theocratic regime in agony, strangled by suffocating sanctions, internal revolts and a proxy model in irreversible decay. This collapse has opened a window of transition that forces a rewriting of any balance of power in the Levant, placing Damascus no longer as a victim or pawn, but as a conscious arbiter of its sovereignty.

For decades, Syria was not just one actor among many, but the pivot around which the region’s ambitions and fears revolved. In the 1950s and 1960s, Damascus embodied the beating heart of Nasser’s pan-Arabism: a hotbed of Baathist radicalism that alternated between military coups and ephemeral unions such as the United Arab Republic with Egypt (1958-1961), acting as an incubator for Palestinian movements and anti-Israeli proxies in a Cold War context. Henry Kissinger, in his Diplomacy, described it as the ‘unstable pivot’ of the Levant: a country that, thanks to its geopolitical position between Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, could tip any balance with the mere support of militias or reckless alliances.

Under Hafez al-Assad in the 1970s and 1980s, this centrality crystallised into a logic of systemic blackmail: Damascus sponsored international terrorism, intervened in Lebanon during the civil war (1975-1990) as a corridor for Soviet and Iranian influence, and became the indispensable hub for any regional dynamic. With Bashar, in the 2000s, Syria turned into the operational pivot of the axis of Iranian resistance and proxy war, becoming the backwater of Iraqi Shia militias, an indispensable partner of Hezbollah in Lebanon and a central segment of the growing Shia movement from Tehran to Beirut and the Mediterranean coast.

The Kissingerian maxim ‘In the Middle East you cannot make war without Egypt, and you cannot make peace without Syria’ remains valid

Today, the new Syrian course recovers this centrality no longer through threat and sabotage, but through a strict neutrality that puts national sovereignty before the interests of foreign powers, redrawing regional and global balances.

Under the leadership of President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the strongest signal came with the explicit declaration that Syria will remain out of the conflicts between the United States, Israel and Iran, barring direct attacks on Syrian soil. This doctrine is not mere defensive rhetoric, but a strategic weapon that profoundly alters the calculations of neighbouring powers: Syrian territory ceases to be a springboard for foreign militias, forcing Tehran, Moscow and their proxies to rethink their entire regional architecture. In a Middle East where every alliance is fluid and every border porous, this neutrality transforms Damascus from a vulnerable hinge into a non-aligned actor, capable of negotiating from a position of strength.

One less pawn in the ‘tentacles of evil’

The reconfiguration of alliances reflects a pragmatic balance with historical rivals and allies, but it is above all the dismantling of Iran’s economic and military occupation that marks the real point of no return. For decades, the theocratic regime in Tehran used Syria as a vital logistical corridor for Hezbollah, pumping billions in weapons, fighters and logistics through Damascus. After the fall of Assad, relations remained frozen: the new government systematically expelled Iranian militias from Syrian villages and towns, accusing them of illegal occupation, systematic rape and forced deportations of Sunni populations. Al-Sharaa explicitly condemned this Persian colonialism, declaring: ‘We do not have a problem with Iran in Tehran, but with Iran in Damascus, which has supported the tyrant Assad against his own people’.

This rupture dismantled the Iranian corridor to Lebanon, isolating Hezbollah from vital supplies and dealing a mortal blow to the Pasdaran’s proxy model, exposing the structural weakness of an ideological hegemony that rested on Syrian blood. With regard to Hezbollah, the distancing was categorical and irreversible. Damascus decreed the immediate expulsion of all foreign armed groups, including the cadres and logistical cells of the ‘Party of God’, cutting off the flow of weapons, funding and recruits passing through Syria. It also put an end to the industrial production of captagon – the synthetic drug that Hezbollah handled in massive quantities in Syrian laboratories, turning the country into an open-air narco-state. The government publicly condemned Hezbollah as “terrorists who supported the genocidal Assad regime”, ordering the confiscation of warehouses, the closure of factories and the handing over of local leaders to the authorities, marking the end of an alliance that for years had made Damascus complicit in Tehran’s Lebanese adventures.

The (increasingly marginal) role of Moscow

The relationship with Russia has been transformed from asymmetrical dependence to a forced and humiliating coexistence for Moscow. Clinging to scraps of military presence in Khmeimim – the only fully operational Russian base after the partial withdrawal – and a marginal use of Tartus, Russia is now reduced to a beggar for concessions, tolerated only for reasons of convenience. Damascus has turned those facilities into training centres for the Syrian National Army, revoking Russian operational autonomy and imposing sovereignty clauses in new agreements. Cooperation with Russia is limited to the 25-year energy agreement with Soyuzneftegaz for offshore deposits, a sop to Putin who is trying to preserve a prestige buried by Ukraine, with no real control on the ground anymore. Russian troops are confined, guarded and subordinated to Syrian commands, a humiliation that erodes the myth of Moscow’s invincibility.

With Israel, despite past tensions – culminating in the Israeli occupation of the Golan since 1967 and recent advances in buffer zones after the fall of Assad – the Syrian neutrality doctrine is drastically reducing military friction along the border. Damascus is now offering a Golan Line that is less volatile and permeable to incursions, in exchange for a de facto ceasefire, opening the way for tacit non-aggression agreements that avoid uncontrolled escalations. Looking ahead, Tel Aviv evaluates a gradual withdrawal from occupied territories post-2024, while Damascus prepares concessions on the Golan for normalisation within the Abrahamic Accords, transforming a historical border of war into an axis of regional stability.

The stabilised Syria that pleases the Gulf

The Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the lead, once fierce rivals financing opposing factions in the Syrian civil war, now see a stable Syria as a strategic embankment against Khomeinist expansionism and jihadist chaos. This metamorphosis is symbolised by the reopening of the al-Tanf-al-Waleed border crossing with Iraq, which, as of 1 April 2026, has already unblocked Iraqi fuel convoys and trade flows estimated at billions of dollars annually, vital for bypassing tensions over the Strait of Hormuz and rebuilding regional logistics. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are probing massive investments in infrastructure, telecommunications and energy, coordinated by the new Saudi-Syrian Business Council: an anti-Tehran axis linking economic reconstruction to shared security, transforming Damascus from an ideological enemy into a partner against Iran.

Against this backdrop, Europe’s role over the past fifteen years emerges in all its drama: a diplomatic cowardice that has seen Brussels outsource the security of its continent to Vladimir Putin in a suicidal blank delegation. Convinced that entrusting Moscow with the management of Syria was a convenient shortcut, we have handed over the keys to our Mediterranean stability to a hostile and unreliable actor, reducing ourselves to inert spectators of a massacre that we have chosen to ignore. European citizens paid the price for that servility in the form of massive migration flows, jihadist attacks and energy blackmail, while the EU limited itself to symbolic sanctions and humanitarian rhetoric.

Returning to invest politically and economically in Syria

Today, geopolitical realism calls for a radical and urgent change of course: active support for the Syrian accountability process, validating the reintegration of Damascus into the architecture of global responsibility – including the certified elimination of the remnants of Assad’s chemical programme – to clear the new regime’s name; a strategic partnership for Syria’s rebirth; and a vision of Syria as a top priority for Mediterranean security, transforming it from a bureaucratic EU dossier into a pillar of European strategic autonomy.

Investing in post-Assad Syria is not philanthropy, but a global chess move: it means inflicting a definitive strategic defeat on Russia and Iran, burying their regimes under the weight of their own imperialist arrogance. Syria in 2026 offers a window of stability that Europe cannot afford to ignore. It is up to Brussels to decide whether it is serious about becoming a global political player, making Damascus a strategic partner in jointly designing a Mediterranean as a space of European sovereignty and defining a strategic autonomy for the continent, or condemning itself to eternal political and strategic subalternity in the wider Levant.