Is the New Syrian State Revolutionary?

Post-Assad Syria was, in theory, a blank canvas for revolutionary transformation—in reality, its leaders inherited conditions that narrowed the horizon of possibility before the first stroke was made.

Less than forty-eight hours after Bashar al-Assad’s ouster in December, the interim Syrian government, led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, announced plans to transition to a free-market economy. It was a peculiar and seemingly premature declaration; there was scarcely a functioning state, let alone an economy, to speak of. Under Assad, Syria endured decades of crippling economic sanctions but was able to manage a crony state through its strategic alliances, primarily with Russia and Iran. The new leadership effectively inherited these sanctions without the state apparatus or international partnerships that had long sustained Assad. With their swift takeover of multiple cities and towns on the path to the presidential palace in Damascus, the new Syrian leaders had not simply captured the state but effectively ended whatever remained of it. This reality was thrown into sharp relief by the Israeli invasion and bombing of Syria which began immediately after Assad’s departure. As Israel expanded its occupation in the southwestern part of the country and escalated its aerial campaign against hundreds of military targets—including air bases, munitions depots, research facilities, and other sites containing sensitive equipment and data—the al-Sharaa government could offer no response and had no allies upon whom to call. Even localized sectarian clashes have proven difficult to regulate and contain, including the recent attack on the Mar Elias Church in Damascus.¹

In the immediate aftermath of Assad’s ouster and Israel’s belligerence in Syria, what the new leaders effectively possessed was a proto-state with minimal military resources, no clear international partnerships, and a heavily sanctioned economy, all while facing various domestic and foreign threats. A statement of allegiance to the free market may have seemed bizarre and misplaced under these conditions, but it was likely the opening move in a calculated campaign to secure international legitimacy and new lifelines. To build the Syrian state anew, the fledgling post-Assad government needed access to global capital, trade routes, and the support of diplomatic recognition. And to gain such access and support, al-Sharaa, as Syria’s new leader, had to become acceptable to the very powers that once branded him a terrorist—they held the keys he now needed to drive his country forward. In pursuit of these objectives, the new regime emphasized shared security interests with the West and its international partners by identifying Iran as the region’s greatest threat, remaining rhetorically reserved about Israel’s bombardment of Syria and Gaza, and even signaling a willingness to become a signatory to the Abraham Accords.² This shift is particularly apparent in al-Sharaa himself, who, under his former identity and nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, once claimed Palestine as the wellspring of his political consciousness and denounced the Gulf monarchies as servile, decadent rentier states. Upon becoming president, however, he has remained fairly muted about the Gaza genocide and warmly embraced the very rulers he previously condemned.³ In one especially obsequious moment, al-Sharaa publicly welcomed the prospect of building a Trump Tower in Damascus. The very next day, Donald Trump announced that U.S. sanctions on Syria—decades old and once seen as immovable—would be lifted.

In theory, post-Assad Syria was a blank canvas upon which the revolutionary movement could realize its vision for a new kind of state. In reality, the political and economic conditions in which Syria’s emergent leaders found themselves sharply delimited the horizon of revolutionary possibility. As many continue to hail the success of the Syrian revolution, it is increasingly clear that what is materializing is not a revolutionary state, but a political order shaped by the same structural pressures and conditions that have historically defined state formation in the post-colonial Middle East. Among these pressures and conditions is the imperative to prioritize capital investment to satisfy what Fred Block calls “business confidence,”⁴ which is bound up with the viability of statehood in the contemporary global economy. In this context, the rhetoric of economic “reform” and “openness” expressed by the new Syrian government is less a reflection of ideological orientation than a currency of survival in a world shaped by asymmetric flows of capital and power. Accordingly, the new regime’s calculated flirtation with the Abraham Accords and its overtures to the Gulf investors and Western developers it once sharply criticized are also not mere “smart policy choices,” but incentivized rituals of compliance pursued in exchange for access to the material conditions that permit state-building.

Syria’s new leaders thus find themselves in a position emblematic of what Immanuel Wallerstein describes as the double bind of the weak. For the weak, the “gift” of being politically and economically welcomed into the international system by the powerful confers a dilemma: “to refuse the gift is to lose; to accept the gift is to lose.”⁵ Incorporation into the international system is never a no-strings-attached affair, least of all for states emerging from the rubble. Accepting the “gift” demands serious concessions, while refusing it often means forfeiting even the most basic conditions for long-term survival. This is not to suggest that al-Sharaa’s government lacks agency, but that its agency is circumscribed by structural pressures so deeply ingrained that necessary political compromises often appear as shrewd or pragmatic choices. What may look like political savviness or moderation is in effect submission by other means and an embrace of neoliberal⁶ logics that secures short-term survival at the cost of long-term autonomy.

Debating the Day After the Revolution

Writing for Al-Jumhuriya, Yasin al-Haj Saleh describes the collapse of the Assad regime as a “monumental event” and a “tectonic shift,” but argues that it does not represent the successful culmination of the Syrian revolution that began in 2011. As he puts it: “The enormity of [Assad’s fall] is one thing; claiming the revolution has triumphed is another. Toppling the regime was a core objective of the Syrian revolution—but as a means to greater ends, not an end in itself.” For Saleh (as for many Syrians), the revolution had already failed by the mid-2010s when it became entangled in various regional and sectarian conflicts “and was ultimately recast as a ‘war on terror’ that, in effect, rehabilitated Assad’s rule.” These regional and sectarian dynamics persist today and, ironically, played a greater role in the regime’s downfall than the popular movement that defined and animated the uprising’s early years.

But even if Assad’s ouster was less a delayed flowering of the Arab Spring than a sudden winter power grab by a faction that, in Saleh’s words, “played no role in the early stages of the Syrian revolution,” it is not clear that this is the most important measure of the revolution’s failure. Nor, for that matter, would resolving the ongoing violence, sectarianism, or absence of democracy that (rightly) preoccupy Saleh necessarily constitute its complete success. Saleh does well to address the developments and realities that hampered the revolution’s full fruition, but he appears to sidestep a number of more pertinent questions in the process. Even if the revolution had succeeded on his desired terms (by producing a democratic, pluralistic, and non-sectarian regime), what would that success amount to if the new government still had to submit to the imperatives of international capital and the interests of the dominant powers to which Syria is presently beholden? Why should we assume that a “democratic” regime would not have, like the current one, taken the exact same path in response to the exact same pressures? And even if an “authentically” revolutionary government had refused the same path, given the conditions Syria faced after Assad’s fall, would it not simply have encountered the other side of Wallerstein’s double bind: isolation, economic collapse, and political failure? The seemingly inescapable constraints that any post-Assad government would likely have faced should invite some renewed consideration of how we evaluate the success or failure of the revolution itself. If Syria’s conditions post-Assad would have steered any new leadership into the same corner, then the exclusive focus on ideology or individual figures becomes a distraction from the deeper forces shaping the post-revolutionary state.

This neglect of sustained structural critique extends well beyond Saleh. It also appears in the broader discourse surrounding Syria’s leadership after Assad. The debate over al-Sharaa, in particular, has become a misplaced site of contestation over the revolution’s legacy and generally falls into two reductive camps. The first camp asserts that al-Sharaa has always been a duplicitous agent of the West and is now merely revealing his true allegiances. The second camp maintains that he remains ideologically consistent and is simply playing the long game by yielding to external pressures temporarily with the intention of returning to the commitments he appears to have set aside (like Palestine) once conditions permit.⁷ Both positions are ultimately feeble, not only because they rely on unverifiable or even absurd speculation about al-Sharaa’s inner convictions, but because they reduce his political conduct to a form of calculated deceit—malicious in the eyes of his critics, virtuous in the eyes of his defenders. The second camp, specifically, romanticizes the idea that al-Sharaa can accumulate power from within a system fundamentally hostile to his project, and eventually redirect that power toward revolutionary ends. But this view fails to apprehend the structural realities of state dependency and the disciplinary force of global capital. It may well be the case that al-Sharaa retains the beliefs he once articulated, but the more salient fact is that he no longer operates in conditions that allow him to act on them, even if he wished to. His overtures to the Gulf monarchies and Western powers are not simply “tactical performances,” they are the imposed terms of political survival. There is no compelling evidence to suggest these concessions are temporary or even presently reversible. This is why fixating on whether al-Sharaa has “really changed” is both analytically unproductive and politically distracting.

The point here is that even if al-Sharaa does not envision the current orientation of the Syrian state as permanent, the long-term intentions of a dependent leader matter far less than the systemic logics within which he is embedded. Syria will not be rebuilt without embracing free-market reform, aligning with powerful financiers, and presenting itself as a cooperative node within an existing capitalist order. This is not simply al-Sharaa’s personal trajectory but, increasingly, the condition of possibility for state-building itself. On some level, then, the question is not, per Saleh, whether Syria has betrayed its revolutionary ideals; it is whether any incipient revolutionary state facing comparable conditions can reconstruct itself from complete collapse without treading the same path. Can a newly born state thrive under different conditions? Or is freedom won through revolution ultimately consigned to the fate imposed by capital and its dictates?

Of course, some will insist that Syria’s current path was not inevitable and that its new leaders did, in fact, have the option of refusing to genuflect before international power and capital (thereby preserving a “pure” revolutionary stance). But this framing misrepresents and misunderstands the nature of the dilemma that Wallerstein presents. It is not a real choice, in any meaningful sense, to suggest that the alternative to eating carrion is to starve, when carrion is the only “food item” on the menu. The more relevant question is not why the new Syrian leadership chose to eat carrion, but why that was seemingly the only “dining option” available in the first place. Who provides the carrion and under what terms—indeed, to what end? Is there even a feasible point of exit from this dependency? More to the point, if a political faction that built its reputation railing against the terms of the international order now finds itself forced to operate entirely within them, what does that portend for the trajectory of the state it now leads? These are the questions the al-Sharaa government’s more strident defenders and critics often avoid, preferring narratives of conspiracy, strategy, or resilience over structural evaluation. It is entirely possible to welcome the end of sanctions and the prospect of improved material conditions for Syrians while still grappling with the deeper implications of the country’s double bind, in which the gift of inclusion by powerful actors (à la Wallerstein) ensured varying degrees of loss whether accepted or refused.

Wither Islam(ism)?

In addition to raising fundamental questions about the fate of the Syrian revolution, the post-Assad government’s rapid acquiescence to international capital bears wider implications for the trajectory of political Islam itself. If the Syrian revolution was once hailed as an arena in which Islamism could reassert itself as an emancipatory force capable of offering an alternative to Western hegemony, then the subsequent path taken by the country’s new leadership compels a reevaluation not only of the revolution’s prospects but of Islamism’s capacity to meaningfully resist incorporation into the dominant global order. Generally seen as a counterhegemonic response to Eurocentrism and Western supremacy, Islamism has long derived part of its normative appeal from its perceived potential to contribute to the unfinished project of decolonization. Whether framed as a rejection of Kemalist secularism or as a call to revive the moral economy of the Umma, the promise of Islamism rests largely on its claim to an authentic and structurally distinct alternative to the prevailing order.

This promise has been under sustained critique in the wake of the Arab Spring, as multiple Islamist movements have either collapsed under external pressure or been subsumed into existing power arrangements. While some observers rushed to declare the arrival of a post-Islamist era following the Arab Spring, others rightly warned that such proclamations were premature. Yet the recent trajectories of several Islamist movements suggest that these warnings underestimated the depth of the ideological and structural transformations already underway. In Tunisia, for example, the leadership of the veteran Ennahda movement returned after more than two decades in exile in London and dominated the post-revolutionary political landscape, only to then engage in a series of calculated compromises with the country’s entrenched secularist establishment. Eventually, Ennahda’s leadership moved to rebrand the party as a secular organization of “Muslim democrats,” essentially distancing itself from its foundational Islamist identity in a bid to broaden its electoral appeal. Yet this reorientation completely backfired. It not only alienated the group’s core supporters while failing to attract new ones, but also precipitated both its own electoral decline as well as President Kais Saied’s authoritarian consolidation during the 2021 coup. What began as ideological accommodation ended in political failure and irrelevance.

In Egypt, the lesson of the Muslim Brotherhood is even starker. Long before the 2011 uprising, the Brotherhood had already begun enthusiastically embracing neoliberal policies and practices, which were later formalized as official economic policy during its brief time in power under President Mohamed Morsi. More than any other factor, it was this—along with its overly pragmatic (if not outrightly cynical) relationship with the military establishment—that damaged the movement’s credibility. Rather than positioning itself as a clear alternative to either neoliberal economics or military authoritarianism (both hallmarks of the Mubarak era), the Brotherhood attempted to negotiate its place within both. Ironically, these “pragmatic” moves were intended to shield the Brotherhood from the system’s disciplinary mechanisms, yet ultimately rendered the group more susceptible to them.

Even in Afghanistan, where the Taliban succeeded in expelling a major imperial power through a twenty-year insurgency, the post-occupation reality reveals a paradox of continued dependency. Despite the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan’s presumed independence from the Western order—evident in its burgeoning relations with Central and East Asia, most notably China—it remains entangled in that order’s gravitational pull in several key respects. This entanglement is not merely geopolitical but institutional and symbolic as well. The terms of the negotiated U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, though publicly framed as a clean break, remain murky and suggest ongoing security cooperation from some elements within the new government. There are, additionally, serious indications of direct financial support from the U.S. government, ranging from millions to billions of dollars. The endurance of this American inheritance can even be seen in the aesthetic ideals internalized and adopted by the Islamic Emirate’s special forces, which in turn reflect a deeper material legacy of the U.S. occupation. More consequential, however, are the Taliban’s increasingly vocal calls to forge deeper relations with Western powers, reflecting an apparent acceptance of market dependency and a growing reliance on foreign aid driven by the structural realities of global power. There is no “autonomous Islamic path” visible in Afghanistan; the Islamic Emirate remains tethered to and reliant upon the order it ostensibly rejects.

Compared to these examples, the case of the new Syrian government is particularly acute because it represents perhaps the sharpest and fastest shift from resistance to alignment with the very political and economic order it once opposed. Might this simply mean that Islamism has lost the ability to signify a genuine political alternative in the world? Perhaps more cynically: did it ever possess that ability? If, as the above examples suggest, every principle is subject to compromise, and if the only surviving commitments are rhetorical or aesthetic invocations of Islam devoid of structural consequence, then what really remains of the project of political Islam? What is the content of an Islamism that finds no contradiction in capitalist integration and political subservience to the prevailing order? Syria—like Egypt, Tunisia, and Afghanistan—seems to demonstrate the narrowing of ideological horizons under global neoliberal hegemony. That all of the aforementioned regimes arose from revolutionary upheaval or resistance to military occupation only magnifies the scale of this consideration. If even movements born of political and military resistance are ultimately reabsorbed into the dominant order, then merely focusing on ideology—rather than critically examining the global conditions that make ideological absorption inevitable—seems to miss the forest for the trees.

Is There No Way Out?

What we are witnessing transpire in Syria is a predictable consequence of the material conditions under which modern proto-states are compelled to develop and operate. The same conditions and dynamics impacting Syria are increasingly shaping the trajectories of contemporary Islamist movements across North Africa, Central Asia, and beyond. Syria’s new state-building efforts have been largely subsumed into an order where legitimacy is conferred through adherence to market discipline, investor confidence, and the policy frameworks favored by the international actors that govern access to power. Rosa Luxemburg’s assertion that “political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process”⁸ echoes with particular clarity here. The contours (and, indeed, imperatives) of international capital are clearly impacting Syria’s state-building efforts and will continue to mold the possibilities of its political reconstruction. The apparent success of the Syrian revolution did not exempt the country’s new leaders from bowing to the rules of the global capitalist system; if anything, their rise to power just rendered them more vulnerable to its disciplinary pressures and effects through a kind of structural capture. The recent economic, diplomatic, and political decisions of Syria’s new state-builders are dictated by the same constraints that shape virtually all modern statecraft projects, even ones that are far better positioned than Syria.

When the African National Congress (ANC) came to power in post-apartheid South Africa, for example, it did so on the promise of a socialist mandate. But in just a few years, and under various pressures from global markets and institutional investors, the ANC government pivoted to a neoliberal model that embraced market liberalization and austerity. Similarly, in Greece, the SYRIZA government rose to power for its anti-austerity platform but eventually capitulated to the terms of international creditors when it faced the reality of imminent financial collapse and expulsion from the eurozone.

While not neat one-to-one analogies, these cases nonetheless show that the adoption of capitalist norms is not always “one choice among many” but rather the precondition for political legitimacy and survival. International recognition, foreign aid, infrastructural investment, and diplomatic credibility are extended primarily to those who conform to the game of the international system. This is, for better or worse, the terrain upon which modern political legitimacy is made. And, perhaps, it helps situate Hannah Arendt’s more perennial insight that “the most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.”⁹ Once power is won, the stakes shift. The imperative is no longer transformation, but preservation. In Syria’s case, ideology yielded to survival, and in the neoliberal world order, survival begins with submission to capital.

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Notes

1. While those lamenting the fall of the Assad regime were quick to portray the attack as occurring with the assent of the new government (given its jihadi pedigree), this reading superficially papers over deep ideological fault lines among jihadi groups. More to the point, such attacks are clearly intended to destabilize the new government, not signal alignment with it.

2. Equally striking is the smoothness with which Western establishment figures have welcomed the new Syrian government in from the cold. This is perhaps best reflected in the interviews conducted with President Ahmed al-Sharaa by veteran British politicians Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell, as well as in the interview with Foreign Minister Asaad Hasan Al-Shaibani at Davos in January 2025, conducted by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. These interviews appear to corroborate claims made by former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford regarding the role of a British non-governmental organization in rehabilitating al-Sharaa. These overtures were then later famously echoed by Trump in his praise for al-Sharaa and his “very strong past.”

3. A counterpoint worth noting is that, in recent months, the Syrian government’s public rhetoric toward Israel has grown markedly more critical. Yet, during this same period, reports indicate that Syrian and Israeli officials have engaged in quiet, direct talks, with both sides reportedly open to eventual normalization. As part of these negotiations, Syrian leaders have expressed a willingness to accept Israeli control over the Golan Heights. The head of Israel’s National Security Council has publicly acknowledged the existence of these contacts and terms, suggesting that diplomatic engagement is ongoing despite the increasingly adversarial tone in Syria’s official statements.

4. Fred Block, “The Ruling Class Does Not Rule: Notes on the Marxist Theory of the State,” Socialist Revolution no. 33 (May–June 1977): 16.

5. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays in the Changing World-System (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 217.

6. By the terms neoliberal and neoliberalism, which we use throughout this article, we mean the extension of the competitive market and its imperatives into all spheres of human activity, including the economy, politics, society, and even the values governing individual notions of wellbeing and self-worth. Its characteristic policies include trade liberalization, the privatization of social services, and the prioritization of fiscal consolidation. See Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 14; and Wael Gamal, “Lost Capital: The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood's Neoliberal Transformation,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 1, 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2019/02/lost-capital-the-egyptian-muslim-brotherhoods-neoliberal-transformation.

7. Though we recognize the temptation to reduce those who hold these opposing positions to unflattering caricatures, we wish to stress that the motivations behind them are often varied and contradictory. The first camp includes principled but myopic old fashioned leftists and third worldists (mostly westerners), outright Assadists (mostly Syrians in and out of diaspora), and Axis supporters (more varied and international, including Iranians and Arabs), as well as some neotraditionalist Muslims whose main attachment is to ancien régime Islamic scholars like Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Buti (1929–2013) and Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun. The second camp is not restricted to a narrow circle of jihadis, HTS-supporters, or even Syrian revolution diehards, but rather encompasses a very broad spectrum of Islamist activists and passive sympathizers, including average Muslims who are easily taken in by the good will of the current leaders’ past stances, pious rhetoric, and perceived purity of intentions. It also includes many Arabs and Muslims primed to accept any glimmer of optimism as a palliative against lifetimes of crushing humiliation and defeat.

8. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, trans. Agnes Schwarzschild (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 433.

9. Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1972), 78.