Julian G. Waller
Dictatorship is not going anywhere anytime soon, contrary to the hopes and dreams of policymakers in the West. Yet the shocking collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has become the latest temptation to make analytic leaps about the impending collapse of authoritarian regimes worldwide. Indeed, the fall of the Syrian regime has sparked a new round of discussion over the stability and fragility of authoritarian regimes writ large. As Assad’s military, his coterie of repressive security forces, and its bevy of pro-regime militias melted into thin air and the dictator himself fled to Moscow, some have suggested that this course was a reminder of an ever-present “autocratic fragility.” And more importantly, that such events could quickly transpire in other wartime dictatorships—not least of all, in Russia.
As a particularly public example, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy connected the two regimes directly, rhetorically asking where Putin will “run away” to when his time came. Others have made similar claims for Iran’s imminent demise. And one CNN article stated baldly: “Assad’s fall is huge blow for Putin, highlighting fragility of his own rule.” But is that true?
The presumed pervasiveness of autocratic fragility should not be the primary takeaway from the surprising Syrian case, although it is a reasonable stretch for observers who conceive of all authoritarian regimes as one single type of polity. When autocracies collapse in succession, they sometimes do so in grand waves undergirded by shared, permissive conditions of regime delegitimation, government indecision, mass elite defection, and ideological optimism for alternatives. This gives us an understandable feeling that autocratic collapse is just around the corner for every single adversary regime in the world.
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