Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World

by Anne Applebaum

Syria was an active war zone, convulsed by violence since 2011. In that year the Syrian dictator had turned against peaceful demonstrators who were hoping to end his brutal regime. Assad might well have lost the civil war that followed, had the Iranian government not sent fighters, advisers, intelligence, and weapons and had the Russian military, in 2015, not entered the conflict on the side of the Syrian regime. If the dictators of Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Belarus have been propped up by propaganda, surveillance technology, and economic aid from the autocratic world, Assad was saved in a less subtle manner, by Russian and Iranian bullets. The two armies had different motives. Iran needed access to Syrian territory because Iran sends weapons and fighters to Iranian proxies nearby, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and other small groups in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria itself. Syria’s hostility to Israel suited the Iranians too. Even if he wasn’t completely aligned with the Islamic Republic’s religious war, Assad was an extra lever, an extra threat, and an extra ally in the region. Putin’s logic was surely broader. He probably intervened because the Arab Spring that preceded the Syrian uprising scared him, because it looked too much like the “color revolution” he fears in Russia, and because he wanted to show Russians that political mobilization and political protest will end in bloody tragedy. He also wanted to preserve Russia’s long-standing ties to Syria and prove that he could ...