Pascal Lottaz of the YouTube channel Neutrality Studies interviewed Ambassador Chas Freeman on December 8, 2024.

Pascal Lottaz: It is now official. Damascus is completely in the hands of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, also known as Al Nusra. Ambassador Freeman, can you share your initial thoughts when you heard about developments in Syria?

Chas Freeman: Well, I think it’s still too early to tell exactly what the full implications of this are, particularly for Syria, but the implications, geopolitically, in the region are enormous.

Basically, the big winner from this is Israel and the Netanyahu government. They have successfully pounded Hamas into the ground in Gaza, where they have not destroyed it, but it is on life support. They have decapitated Hezbollah and decimated its ranks. They show no regard whatsoever for the so-called ceasefire that they concluded with the Lebanese government. And now they have removed the logistical support for Hezbollah from Iran because the bridge to Lebanon has been closed. This is a big loss for Iran. It means that its forward-deployed deterrent forces, meaning Hezbollah and Hamas in particular, and the Houthis in Yemen, are still active, of course, but have been basically eliminated.

Now, Iran faces Israel directly with no capacity in Israel’s immediate neighborhood to respond. This, in turn, raises some serious long-term questions, because if Iran no longer has a conventional deterrent to attack Israel or to counter Israeli efforts at regional hegemony, it is very likely that the voices which have been ever louder in Iran calling for the development of nuclear weapons will now overcome the religious scruples of the regime and achieve that.

So this is a very dangerous moment in terms of nuclear proliferation, even though I haven’t really seen that discussed publicly. It’s not clear at this point exactly what the role of various foreign forces was in this stunning conquest of Syria by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Al Qaeda representative in Syria earlier.

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The other notable aspect, among many, is that the forces that advanced against the Syrian National Army were very well-trained, well-led. They had a full panoply of modern weapons, including tanks and drones from Ukraine, suggesting that Ukraine saw an opening in Syria to hit back at Russian influence, since the Russians had been the prime supporters—other than the Iranians—of the Assad government. This was not a guerrilla force so much as an organized conventional army, and their training and their equipment showed.

On the other side, it is pretty clear that the internal divisions of the Assad government helped to bring about the rapid collapse of its resistance to this attack. I think it’s important to note that the announcement that the regime had fallen, that the Assad family had fled the country, came from the chief of the Syrian armed forces.

The background here is that both Turkey and Russia had been pressing Assad, on numerous recent occasions, to make his peace with the jihadis, to try to bring some sense of unity to Syria. And he had refused. It, therefore, is not implausible that both Turkey and Russia basically wrote him off. The Syrian army was basically commanded by its officers to lay down its arms and change into civilian clothing and not resist.

So the final point is that it is a remarkable development that Syria is remarkably free of mass bloodshed. It was relatively blood-free because the resistance was so ineffectual or nonexistent. This, in turn, reflects bad judgments by Bashar al-Assad in recent years. When he came into office in 2003, he promised reform and a different regime than that of his father, Hafez al-Assad. But he didn’t deliver. Instead, he became increasingly ruthless in his use of the security forces to prop up his government. I think he forgot that the reason he was able to survive was not because the people of Syria loved him or favored him, but that many of them thought that he was better than all the alternatives.

Mr. al-Julani, the head of the now-triumphant resistance movement to Assad, who’s about 42 years old—young, still vigorous—has apparently learned some important lessons. He’s separated himself to some extent from the violent Islamist past that he represented. He has been considerate of Christians, among other things. He has been less inclined to slaughter Shia, but he is a Salafi Muslim. We will now see whether, since he is basically in charge—although he has said he will defer to the choice of the Syrian people—in terms of who governs Syria, presenting himself as a liberation movement, which is indeed what Hayat Tahrir al-Sham means: the Organization for the Liberation of Syria.

It is not clear whether he has changed color, whether he has, in fact, become what Western propaganda—which is gleeful about the fall of Assad—is saying about him, namely that he’s a democratic liberal. But this is hardly unexpected, given the amazing ability of the Western media to present distorted views of reality when it comes to anything that goes on in West Asia.

PL: What do you think about just this point—that now we see again how the West is actually, at least rhetorically, supporting an Islamist group, even an offspring of Al Qaeda, the very group that is responsible for attacking the United States in 2001? Now, there’s a lot of talk that they received this support from Turkey, but even if so, some of it would at least have to have come through NATO channels from the West. Does this make sense to you in the strategic game in the region?

CF: Well, you have to remember that, of course, Syria and Lebanon were created as separate countries by France in the colonial era. The French have a strong interest in what happens in Syria. I note that President Macron has expressed great delight at the overthrow of the Assad government. One has to assume that the French were somehow involved in this.

Certainly, the CIA must have been involved. The first CIA effort at regime change in Syria was in 1947, at the very moment of its inception. And there were multiple efforts to change the regime. They all failed. There were efforts, of course—Hillary Clinton and others famously advocated that the CIA spend about $5 billion in training of various groups, including this one, to overthrow the regime. Presumably, these efforts were on behalf of Israeli security interests. The Biden administration, and certainly the incoming Trump administration, promises nothing if not more of the same, and maybe more.

So, as I said, there are many foreign hands in this—precisely what role was played by whom is still a little bit murky. Finally, the effort to engineer regime change in Syria has been achieved.

Let me just make another couple of comments. What we do not know is what the future of Syria will look like. The objectives of the various parties have been achieved. The objective of the United States in the 1950s was to prevent communism from taking over—in other words, Soviet influence in Syria. The US has been against the Russian presence in Syria more recently. The Israeli objective has been to fragment Syria into its component ethnic and linguistic parts, so that it would not pose a threat. This would be a classic divide-and-rule strategy.

The current Turkish interests, which have been at play in this dramatic set of events, include not only the elimination of the Syrian Kurdish factions that are allied with the terrorist PKK in Turkey and the removal of them from the Turkish border, but the return to Syria of the roughly 5 million Syrian refugees who are in Turkey. I think Mr. Erdoğan tried very hard to make peace with Mr. Assad, mostly in the interest of removing the refugees from Turkish soil. But when Assad balked, he unleashed this force that his troops had been training.

But one thing is clear, as I said at the outset: This is a major victory for the Israeli government of Netanyahu in terms of eliminating regional rivals and opening a path directly to an attack on Iran. The Iranians must now devise a new method of deterrence. This strategy accords with the Biden administration’s objectives, which have been very much supportive of Israel—even in its genocide in Gaza, in its lack of effective reaction to the pogroms and ethnic cleansing efforts in the West Bank, and its support for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

I can say the biggest winner of this election has been the Netanyahu government in a military sense. We should also remember that that government has done so many hateful things that it has made Israel the most hated society and country on the planet. And it has also sacrificed international law—every last shred of it—with the cooperation of Western powers, and it has destroyed the reputation of the West in the rest of the world for any kind of principled approach to humanitarian issues. So the costs to Israel in the long run are huge, but the military advantages that it has gained are quite substantial.

PL: How is it possible that this has happened? That an ultra-Islamist group is taking over parts of Syria that were actually cooperating with Iran and Hezbollah in order to oppose the genocide that’s going on in Gaza? There was an element of pan-Muslim solidarity, though not from all parts, and we see that now. And there’s a very particular kind of Islam that obviously doesn’t actually care—not only doesn’t care, but uses a strategic opportunity in order to fall into the back. And I think this is what shocks the Iranians the most—that at this moment, it is, like, through Turkey, through an Islamist group, that the support for Hezbollah and so on is being cut off, who were really, together with Yemen, the only ones who tried militarily to assist the Palestinians. How do you make sense of this—that it is Islamists who are now trying to find an accord with Israel?

CF: Well, I should have mentioned when I spoke earlier of the CIA assistance to this group—I should have mentioned that it’s very ironic that there’s a $10 million CIA bounty on the head of Mr. al-Julani. So one assumes that this is now going to be the subject of bargaining with him—that the United States will offer to take this bounty off his head. But in return for what? For a removal of the Russian presence, perhaps? I don’t know. I mean, the Russians are now in bargaining, as you mentioned, with the new authorities about their base, particularly the naval base, and we don’t know what will happen. But that has been important to Russia in its diplomacy in West Asia—it is the only warm-water port in the world that Russia really possesses. So this is important to the Russians.

It’s true that Hezbollah and others were backing the Palestinians in Gaza, but basically Assad did nothing. In fact, he tolerated repeated Israeli air strikes on supply lines going through Syria to Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley and elsewhere. So I think there are a huge number of questions now, and I know that Israel has reacted opportunistically to the chaos in Syria by seizing the demilitarized zone that the UN was managing between Syrian forces and its own in the Golan Heights.

So, it has taken the opportunity to take more Arab land, in effect. I don’t know—the UN is so sidelined that I haven’t heard anything from Secretary General Guterres about this. And yet, basically, Israel has once again thumbed its nose at the United Nations and resolutions, including the resolution that created the demilitarized zone—supposedly binding on all members.

So there are a lot of loose ends here, and it will take some time for them to be untied or unraveled.

PL: What will happen on the humanitarian side?

CF: I mean, there’s always been a great deal of nonsense spoken about Hezbollah and Hamas and so on. These are independent-minded organizations that reflect the views of the populations they represent. In the case of Hezbollah, it is demonstrably independent of Iran. Iran has historically been more of a restraining force on Hezbollah than anything else.

But, of course, now Hezbollah is on its own. So, we don’t know what will happen there. Iran now faces a Trump administration coming into power in Washington, which is the second coming of the regime that overrode the Security Council–approved JCPOA, or nuclear deal with Iran.

Iran probably will increase the likelihood of trying a nuclear breakout soon. And, of course, we’re in an interregnum in the United States. We have a president who falls asleep at meetings with African leaders in Rwanda, thus demonstrating that he is quite as senile, as many people have thought, and incompetent. And we have Donald Trump, who is full of ignorant prejudices, I should say, rather than deep knowledge about foreign affairs—who has just threatened almost the entire world with a tariff war, and whose main interest in West Asia seems to be to have the Israelis wind up the whole thing. So I don’t know what happens now.

But if I were Iranian, I would be rethinking everything. And the irony there, of course, is that Pazeshkin, the new Iranian president, is a moderate who wanted to reach out to the West and was looking for compromise. And he’s now been put in a position where compromise is utterly impossible.

PL: If you look at the picks for the incoming Trump administration, despite that he promised not to put in the same people who led him to belligerent acts in the past, it seems to me that the new administration will probably repeat those acts. Most of the new cabinet is actually just as much hawks or neocons as before—just not hawks in relation to Ukraine. The consensus seems to be that they want to write down the UKR war. The other people coming in seem to be people who want to either have a war with Iran or a war with China. So it seems you exchange one theater for another. What’s your impression?

CF: I don’t think that’s a wrong analysis at all. The people who are coming in are belligerent, bellicose—they’re proponents of the use of force, except in Ukraine. I think they have a concept of trying to turn Russia against China, which is something I don’t think is going to happen.

I don’t think they have thought through the endgame in Ukraine. The meeting in Paris last week between President-elect Trump and Mr. Zelensky apparently was accompanied by some fairly tough language about negotiating a ceasefire. But I don’t think the Russians want a ceasefire. I don’t think they want a demilitarized zone in Ukraine. I think they want peace in Europe, and they want peace with Ukraine.

My own guess—and I’ve said this elsewhere—is that we are in for a Korean conflict scenario in which, as the Chinese say, the fighting goes on while the negotiations attempt to arrange an armistice. But I don’t think the Russians want an armistice. I don’t think they want a kind of DMZ, which would leave Europe in a position of constant tension and potential warfare, and not provide for their security in a way that they demanded almost three years ago when they issued an ultimatum demanding negotiation of a European security architecture that would reassure them as well as the West.

I think we’re in for something in Ukraine that probably resembles nothing so much as the Peace of Westphalia, which took, I think, three years and was conducted in multiple forums. And there are different issues. I mean, Ukrainians and Russians have to work out a border between themselves. Nobody else can do that for them. We can offer advice. We can complicate the process, but, in the end, Moscow and Kyiv need to work that out.

There’s also the question of minority rights in Ukraine, which touches on the OECD rules and guarantees of linguistic and cultural autonomy for minorities—along the lines of the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. I think the OECD, the EU, major countries in Europe have an interest in that. Certainly, the Russians have an interest, the Hungarians, the Romanians, who have minorities in Ukraine who’ve been oppressed, have an interest in that. So that’s yet another forum. And then there’s finally the issue of the United States and Russia, NATO, major European powers sitting down to try to work out some broader framework for peace in Europe.

All of this is extremely difficult. Just last week, Trump reiterated his willingness to withdraw from NATO—if he doesn’t think the balance of payments connected with NATO is sufficiently generous.

I think he has a point. We’re coming up on 80 years after the end of World War II. Why is it that Europeans are incapable of defending themselves? Why is it that Europeans defer to a power across the Atlantic for every important decision?

Well, of course, it’s easy to do that. But I can understand the reason that the right wing in the United States says, “Why should we be carrying this burden?” Of course, from the European point of view, we’ve not just been carrying the burden, but we’ve been getting Europe into trouble by the leadership that we have displayed.

Anyway, I think there we are at a moment in which multiple things in West Asia, the Middle East if you will, in Eurasia, and in Europe are all in flux. And it will be very interesting—that’s too mild a word—to see how this all plays out.

A final note: My sense is that the Chinese have cleared the decks for an operation against Taiwan. I don’t think they’ve made a decision to do that, but I know that they’ve made peace with India, in a sense. They’ve removed the danger of a diversionary attack on their southwestern border in Tibet. They have consolidated their relationship with Russia. They have increased cooperation with Russia on both technology and military operations, as well as intelligence.

And they have just basically answered American economic warfare with their own economic warfare. They had previously not responded to sanctions in kind. Now, they are. So, it looks to me as though they’re ready, politically, if not yet militarily, to take on this issue of bringing the Chinese civil war to an end and reuniting China.

Every country in the region is looking for an accommodation with China and would like American backing for that, but they don’t want to make a choice between China and the United States. Japan may be an exception in that regard. So this is a very fluid moment, both in Europe and in Pacific Asia, and now in West Asia.

And I won’t talk about Latin America, but I could make the case that it is also in a state of flux… I’ve never seen such flux in my lifetime.

This is an excerpt of a longer interview originally recorded for Neutrality Studies.