Post-Assad Syria: National Security Strategy under al-Sharaa

When Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell on December 8, 2024, the moment initially appeared as a complete rupture with everything that had preceded it. Fifty years of single-family rule ended in a matter of days, culminating in a rapid military collapse that few had anticipated. However, the more profound question worth asking is not how the regime fell, but rather what governed its grand strategy over five decades, and why? This question remains highly pertinent today as the country navigates its current transitional phase.

Conventional wisdom has often reduced Syrian national security to a simplistic equation: a state balancing its power against external threats, most notably Israel. Yet, this reading obscures a deeper truth that dictated Syrian behavior from the 1970 “Corrective Movement” until the regime’s ultimate demise: historically, “regime security” entirely subsumed “state security.” Decisions regarding wars, alliances, and territorial concessions were rarely responses to the international balance of power; instead, they were meticulously calculated maneuvers designed solely to ensure the survival of the ruling elite.

To understand this behavior, traditional international relations paradigms fall short. Kenneth Waltz’s structural realism explains state behavior through abstract power calculations within an anarchic international system, while Stephen Walt refined this with his “balance of threat” theory. However, both frameworks assume a cohesive state primarily concerned with external affairs—an assumption thoroughly refuted by the Syrian experience, where the domestic arena was the true existential battleground.

Consequently, this article adopts a third, more precise framework: Steven David’s theory of “Omnibalancing.” This approach flips the central question on its head: rather than asking, “How does this policy affect the power of the state?” the operative question becomes, “How does it affect the probability of my survival in power?” Leaders in the developing world often face internal threats that are far more perilous than external ones. As a result, they resort to appeasing secondary threats to confront primary ones—forging temporary alliances that are swiftly abandoned once the core danger subsides.

This underlying logic will guide our analysis through the respective eras of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, before ultimately testing its applicability to the ongoing transitional phase.

Hafez al-Assad: Establishing the Paradigm

The Ba’ath Party’s doctrine carried the promise of a unified, secular Arab society transcending sectarian and tribal loyalties—a promise that attracted religious minorities, foremost among them the Alawites, as an opportunity for emancipation from their historically marginalized status. Yet, its implementation ran entirely counter to the theory. Following the 1963 coup, Hafez al-Assad and his comrades, led by Salah Jadid, realized that their survival necessitated an absolute monopoly on the instruments of violence. Consequently, they orchestrated successive purges within the military, targeting Sunni, Druze, and Ismaili officers, while systematically sidelining Nasserists and independents. Ultimately, sensitive positions were heavily concentrated in the hands of the Alawite sect. The military was thus transformed into an “ideological army”—a partisan and sectarian shield whose primary function was safeguarding the regime from internal threats, rather than guarding the nation’s borders.

Two historical milestones provide direct evidence of this logic. The first is the defeat of June 1967. Preoccupied with internal power struggles, Jadid’s leadership weaponized radical rhetoric against Israel to manufacture revolutionary legitimacy, dragging the country into a war for which it was entirely unprepared. The loss of the Golan Heights was the direct price paid for exploiting foreign policy for domestic political gains. The second milestone is the Jordan crisis of September 1970 (Black September). Assad, then Minister of Defense, refused to provide air cover for Syrian armored units deployed to back the Palestinian fedayeen. His rationale was rooted in a fear of depleting his air force—his strategic backbone in the looming internal showdown against Jadid—before decisively securing domestic control. The failure of this intervention paved the way for Assad’s complete seizure of power in November 1970 (the Corrective Movement).

Post-1970, Assad established what could be termed a “presidential monarchy”: an absolute executive power to which the party, government, and military institutions were equally subordinated, all confined within a narrow familial and sectarian framework. Consequently, the boundaries between state security and the president’s personal survival completely dissolved. Assad outwardly leveraged the conflict with Israel as a pretext to build a massive security apparatus; however, its actual function was strictly domestic: to deter any potential popular rebellion. This instrumentalization peaked during the brutal suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982, where the bloody crackdown was conveniently framed as a battle to protect the “homeland” from foreign conspiracies.

Externally, Assad faced a deep strategic and military alliance between Turkey and Israel during the 1990s, which included joint naval and air exercises and intense intelligence sharing between Ankara and Tel Aviv. Damascus viewed this alliance as a genuine geopolitical pincer encircling it from both the north and the south, rather than a distant theoretical threat. The crisis peaked in 1998 when Turkey mobilized its forces, threatening direct military action over Damascus’s support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Consequently, Assad was forced into full capitulation: expelling Abdullah Öcalan and signing the Adana Agreement—a painful strategic concession made to avoid a confrontation he lacked the capacity to wage.

Conversely, the alliance with Iran served as a parallel card that compensated for this vulnerability. It was an alliance built on the intersection of threats, as Saddam Hussein and Israel were shared enemies for both Damascus and Tehran. Assad deployed this alliance with dual precision—containing Iraq to the east and balancing against Israel to the west. In other words, he utilized Iran as an external leverage tool that fundamentally served the stability of his domestic rule, rather than abstract “state interests.” Here, the logic of “Omnibalancing” materializes in its clearest form: pursuing external alliances and making strategic concessions in opposing directions, yet all governed by a single overriding calculus—securing the regime’s survival, not protecting the state’s borders.

Bashar al-Assad: From Overreach to Disintegration

Inheriting power in 2000 without the historical legitimacy his father enjoyed, Bashar al-Assad resorted to the path of least resistance: the hyper-expansion of four distinct intelligence agencies. The ratio of intelligence personnel eventually reached an astonishing one for every 153 citizens, completely usurping the authority of formal state institutions. This hyper-securitization bled directly into foreign policy. In Lebanon, relations were managed by intelligence operatives rather than diplomats, ultimately culminating in Damascus’s humiliating withdrawal in 2005 following the assassination of Rafik Hariri, which cost Syria its most crucial regional card. Domestically, the brief “Damascus Spring” was ruthlessly crushed, cementing his father’s foundational equation: national security is synonymous with the security of the throne.

With the outbreak of the 2011 uprising, the regime deployed four simultaneous survival tactics: absolute military and diplomatic subjugation to Iran and Russia (leveraging Russian UN vetoes and Iranian Quds Force advisors); the voluntary relinquishment of Kurdish-majority areas in the north and east to activate the PKK card against Turkey; the deliberate release of Islamist extremists from Sednaya prison to frame the revolution as a jihadist project necessitating international backing; and the systematic sabotage of every international diplomatic initiative (such as the Annan Plan) through calculated security escalations prior to the arrival of observers. 

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas interprets this shift from “selective violence” to “indiscriminate violence” as a deliberate deterrence strategy designed to sever the popular base from the opposition. Meanwhile, the collapse of centralization birthed an environment characterized by the “commodification of violence“. Regime forces and allied militias jointly managed checkpoints, smuggling rings, and siege economies. Consequently, state security morphed into a fluid militia architecture serving the survival of multiple warlords rather than a unified sovereign state.

Regionally, the Damascus-Ankara relationship inverted entirely. The “zero problems with neighbors” rapprochement of the 2000s devolved into a complete diplomatic rupture post-2011. Conversely, Israel preferred maintaining a weak, drained regime—the “devil they knew”—over the uncertainty of an unknown alternative, limiting its engagement to selective airstrikes rather than direct confrontation. Iran, on the other hand, transitioned from a tactical ally to a de facto occupying force, deploying multinational sectarian militias to protect the ruling elite at the direct expense of what remained of Syrian sovereignty.

Regarding the Palestinian cause, the regime gradually downgraded the issue from an ideological partnership to a compensatory tool meant to plug its legitimacy deficit. It replaced the politically and militarily costly objective of reclaiming the Golan Heights with the low-cost slogan of “proxy resistance.” Upon the regime’s collapse in late 2024, Israel swiftly exploited the ensuing vacuum, effectively nullifying the 1974 Disengagement Agreement and imposing new security buffer zones in the south—a direct consequence of decades spent prioritizing regime survival over state cohesion.

Ahmad al-Sharaa: Testing Omnibalancing

If the preceding analysis diagnoses five decades during which regime security subsumed state security, the question posed by the transitional phase is not “what should be done?” but rather a more precise analytical question: Are we witnessing an actual rupture of this paradigm, or its reproduction using new tools? Testing this question requires examining three simultaneous fronts.

The First Front: The Monopoly on Violence

The dossier of Ahmad al-Ouda, the last of the reluctant southern factions, was settled on February 22, 2026, when he placed himself under the authority of al-Sharaa and the Minister of Defense following an assassination attempt, departing Busra al-Sham escorted by military police. However, the method of resolution itself reveals the nature of the paradigm: the issue was not resolved through an institutional negotiating track or a declared legal framework, but rather through the personalized neutralization of a rival power center under direct security pressure. This pattern aligns closer with Hafez al-Assad’s logic of subduing internal opponents one by one than it does with building a unified military institution governed by established rules.

The foreign fighters’ dossier offers an even more telling test. According to a June 2026 study by the Arab Center for Contemporary Syrian Studies, approximately 3,500 foreign fighters were integrated into the newly established 84th Division by the spring of 2025. This occurred without transparent vetting criteria, without systematic background checks for involvement in international crimes, and without resolving their citizenship status. Consequently, an entire class of “non-citizen military personnel” emerged within a sovereign apparatus, their legal status remaining undefined to this day. More perilously, this integration occurred in tandem with the persistence of other foreign militant factions (such as the “Ghuraba Division,” which clashed with government forces in October 2025) operating outside any regulatory framework.

In other words, if a narrow sectarian/security loyalty network secured Hafez al-Assad’s monopoly on violence without transparent legal institutions, then a military loyalty network of foreign fighters personally indebted to al-Sharaa’s leadership—operating outside any accountability mechanism or defined citizenship—performs a similar structural function today. It secures a core force directly loyal to the leader, isolated from formal state institutions, and deployable as a tool for internal monopolization rather than acting as a fully realized national army.

The Second Front: Doctrine Toward Israel

The security negotiations with Israel, resumed under U.S. auspices since January 2026, precisely reveal the mechanism of “appeasing a primary threat to protect the domestic front” described by Steven David. Al-Sharaa himself stated in April 2026 that the negotiations “have not reached a dead end but face significant difficulties” due to Israel’s insistence on remaining within Syrian territory.

The paradox, as researchers note, is that Israel is not compelled to offer any concessions; it is already achieving its strategic objectives (tactical control in the south, airstrikes, and an air corridor toward Iran) at virtually no cost, so long as Damascus remains committed to self-restraint. This implies that “deterrence through stability” is not necessarily a novel military doctrine, but rather a continuation of the same logic Hafez al-Assad employed regarding the Golan Heights: freezing the external confrontation because any entanglement threatens the leadership’s survival during its fragile foundational phase, not because the balance of power has fundamentally shifted.

The Economy as a New Balancing Tool

Here, the most distinct shift emerges. Following Washington’s lifting of most sanctions and Syria’s removal from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list, international legitimacy and investment (with pledges exceeding $28 billion and a projected growth rate near 10% in 2026) have transformed into Damascus’s primary leverage tool to demonstrate “good behavior” to both Washington and Tel Aviv.

In other words, if the two Assads distributed “security rent” internally to buy the loyalty of military and sectarian elites, the new leadership today manages a parallel form of “international rent”—an economic opening conditioned on political and security commitments to the outside world. Both models are governed by a singular logic: deploying a resource (whether security or economic) to consolidate the leadership’s domestic legitimacy in the face of a fragile environment.

Syria’s New Equilibrium

From Hafez al-Assad to Bashar, and now through the current transitional phase, the Syrian experience unequivocally demonstrates that national security is not a static given. Rather, it is the product of a continuous interplay between domestic configurations and external balances of power. Every major decision in Syrian foreign policy—from strategic alliances to painful concessions—has fundamentally been a calculation for the survival of the leadership, not a pursuit of the abstract interests of the state.

The current phase represents neither a complete rupture nor a literal continuation of the old paradigm. Rather, it is a transitional state where the premise of “Omnibalancing” itself is being tested, and the verdict so far is mixed: real institutional capacity has been built, yet the mechanisms securing it remain personalized rather than fully codified.

Three concrete thresholds will determine which reading ultimately prevails. First, on the monopoly of violence: whether the foreign fighters currently serving without defined legal status are brought under a transparent framework of citizenship, vetting, and accountability—or whether their integration continues to rest on personal loyalty to the leadership alone.

Second, on Israel: whether the ongoing negotiations yield an actual Israeli withdrawal to the 1974 lines—or whether “deterrence through stability” hardens into indefinite deferral, functionally resembling Hafez al-Assad’s decades-long freeze on the Golan front.

Third, on the economy: whether the current investment pledges translate into institutions insulated from executive discretion—or whether “international rent” simply replaces “security rent” as a new instrument for buying the leadership’s legitimacy, without altering the underlying logic of regime-first governance.

Until these thresholds are crossed, Syria’s national security will remain what it has been for over five decades: not a fixed condition, but an open question, answered anew by whoever holds power.