So let's look at alternatives. Syria was already held together by a secular Arab nationalism. So that's where you take, basically you take the Sunnis and you take the Alawites and you take the Christians and you say, we all speak Arabic. We are all Arabs and we are building a state that's not anti-religious, you know, mosques, churches, all of this. This is fine. We should be close to God. We believe in God, but we're an Arab state first. And this type of Arab nationalism in theory could be compatible with democracy, but in the cold war and after we usually saw it evolve into some sort of hybrid autocratic system. And for a variety of reasons, the Christian minorities in most the Arab countries where the Christian minorities significantly supported, because again, the alternative is Islamism. Under political Islamist government, let's say, I don't know, if the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt were to govern, or if ISIS, more extreme version of ISIS, were to win, hypothetically, in a country like Iraq or Syria, you would have a truly awful time as a non-Muslim minority. That group has been demographically shrinking for the last few decades, right? So the Christian minorities of the Middle East have been becoming smaller. Every time there's a major war and minorities tend to flee. Their demographic reserves reduced, making their position more precarious. even in Latin America, much more easily than the Sunni refugees. So fewer of them would even consider returning. Like if your life is better, you don't feel endangered. In a sense, you're no longer a religious minority, or at least you're not unique in being a religious minority. And you're much richer. Sort of the argument for going back to Syria, to Lebanon or to Iraq or minor. That's right. There's sort of very much aspects of sentimental attachment. demographic. Also, on-net Christians tend to be secularized in places like Lebanon and Syria, and tend to have lower fertility than the majority. Now, we have discussed radically falling birth rates around the world. And it is true that these are falling in a lot of the Middle East. However, since Syria has been so by the civil war, it was not very rich to begin with. Again, similar to Iraq and similar to Libya, these places still do have a pretty high fertility. So the fertility differentials matter immensely and change the composition, the demographic composition of a country for the decades. In a way, these demographic factions, it's not like automatically just because you're Christian, you tend to support the more nationalist government, or just because you're Sunni Muslim, you're going to side with a force like ISIS. It's just that there is a demographic maximum as to what fraction of the population can be recruited or integrated politically. Right? So in a way, what I'm describing here is almost a demographic and political and ideological jigsaw puzzle. How do you piece together Humpty Dumpty? I think the answer is you just can't. I think Syria cannot quite exist as a fully unified state. it's going to be in this very crippled situation. I mean, over time, and this is kind of unfortunate for the minorities like the Druze or the Alawites or the Christians in Syria, probably it'll just be Sunni Arab. over time, the longer the violence lasts, the more that violence is, the more they experience political violence. themselves, even with militias, being a fighting force that's worth protecting and dealing with, I think you might result in just like most in Arab and Sunni population in the West and a self sortition between the regions where Kurds live and the regions where Arabs live. So that is a phenomenon similar to what happened in the breakup of Yugoslavia, right? Where because people are fleeing danger and because people are pursuing the few spots that are peaceful, that have economic activity, you might see the sort of self-circuition into different regions of populations who were previously living side by side to now live in different parts of the country. I think that foreign support has proven unable to sustain the Assad government. So what do I mean by this? It was opposed by the West. It was modestly supported by Russia. So fall of the Assad government is a loss for the Russian government. It was supported by Iran. This is a loss for Iran. Hezbollah has already been sort of crippled immensely in its fight with Israel. So I think Israel on net, assuming Syria is not destabilized, let's say it's a modest win, but it's a very complicated win. I don't know if you heard Israel move to secure the Golan Heights. So that's, yeah, it's a fairly important position. And they've moved into like a few other border Syria positions to basically secure what they perceive as potentially an endangered territory. But to be realistic, it also is perhaps a desire to hold that territory in the long run. I also think Turkey might have some territorial aspirations towards Syria as well. Now, this is usually probably done just through like an occupation of a small part of the country or region. It's not going to immediately be like annexation because in international law, that's just very tricky. But this likely means that whatever government becomes, the dominant government in Syria after, you know, and I do kind of expect these deals to break down. Like the deal I mentioned between the various factions in the aftermath of Assad's ousting from power. They will be in a conflict. They will be stuck between Turkey and Israel. That's sort of the best case. So the country is going to have a hard time developing anyway. Now, under those conditions, under those conditions, I just, you know, what exactly is the government can offer? It can't quite offer development. It can't quite protect its borders. Perhaps it has to lean on some sort of ideological thing, ideological backbone. So I think the default is some sort of, let's call it moderate Islamism, which might be compatible with democracy in the West, that has constant geopolitical tensions and foreign entanglements, and then some sort of autonomous Kurdish territory in the East, where even if Turkey tries to intervene, I think the Kurds will fight quite strongly. There are still forces and countries that would oppose Syria just becoming a de facto Turkish puppet state. You could, you know, you could, for example, have Turkey support most moderate form of Islamism as long as it was a pro-Turkish government and allowed this continued stationing of Turkish troops inside of Syria. Erdogan does have some ambitions for sort of neo-Ottomanist policy where they have a near abroad where they can intervene and secure their interests. Now, of course, this goes against Israel's interests. That's why I sort of say that, you know, Israel and Turkey are not actually in good terms, even though, you know, they're both notionally in some way, Western allies, though in each of them, each of their cases, they have strong independent interests, right? Turkey is technically a NATO member. They don't think it's, I think it's fair to say that the least reliable NATO member, and like the least likely to follow the policy of the other countries, right? And, you know, Israel is not a NATO member, but it's a close ally of the United States. However, you know, would Israel pursue a foreign policy in the Middle East that was detrimental to the U.S.? Of course it would. Right. Of course it would. It has like imminent security concerns. It also has there, in fact, is also an Israeli national ideology. right? This whole point of the country is a national self-determination as well. And, you know, that's part of why in a way, you know, Israel is a strong Western style country. I think Turkey for Middle Eastern standards is a relatively strong Western style country because people have basically a nationalist ideology as well, which is why accepting, say, Kurdish autonomy is so difficult. Like from a Western pluralistic perspective within Turkey, say, accepting minority status of the language of Kurds, we don't even realize this opens the can of worms for all other minority groups that officially basically don't exist in Turkey, right? And then it asks the question, so what is Turkey about? If it's not about the Turkish language, culture, and development, well, you know, maybe the answer is Islamism, or maybe the answer is it's us great power. Or the answer is, oh, it's a spiritual economic zone or something. I'm kidding a little bit. I think economic growth tends to not be the thing that builds state capacity. Economic growth can come later, can buttress an already working state and support it, right? And offer political alternatives. And I think economic growth is a prerequisite for functioning democracy, because I think in a low growth economic situation, you have, well, it becomes a zero sum game. It's just a game of collecting enough votes to expropriate inside it's not voting. Only with economic growth do you make it be a positive game, and then you can vote for things that the whole population wins on, rather than just redistributing correctly or indirectly between various groups. Like, for example, in a multi-ethnic but slow-growing, underdeveloped country, lavish funding of the military or infrastructure funding that's focused on one part or the other part of the country, these are things that will be seen as redistribution, even if they're not, right? might be a richer region of the country that says, you know, so nominally the same laws apply across the country, but only one region is sort of rich enough to hit particular tax brackets in practice. So in practice, there's one region that pays most of the taxes. These kinds of problems are tricky and thorny to solve without simple legitimizing political formulas? And, you know, for better or worse, nationalism remains a simple, legitimizing political formula. It's an interesting question why Arab nationalism has never quite worked. And I think one of the big reasons is that none of the individual Arab states can really represent what they argue that they represent this full Arab nation. That honestly is like always a hypothetical exercise, right? Just as Germany was a hypothetical exercise before the unification of most of the German states. You can talk about cultural affinity, but no individual state receives the full legitimacy that a unified Arab state would. Now, of course, a unified Arab state has this big geopolitical problem where you wanted to unify North Africa in the middle and the Arab peninsula, the Fertile Crescent region. Well, first off, a few countries in the way. Israel exists and will continue to exist. Geopolitically, that's kind of awkward. And if it continued to exist, it would have to be some sort of client state to what would amount to a very big regional superpower, even if it was still a very poor and underdeveloped one on net, it wouldn't even be that poor, right? If you imagine the oil wealth is integrated there. Big gap in wealth between Arab countries is also a big reason that they have difficulty unifying. However, from the Saudi or the UAE perspective, unification with a place like Syria or Iraq just means massive expenditures to try to develop them, right? And there were several attempts for some of these peripheral states to unify during the Cold War, temporary mergers between Egypt and Syria or Syria and Iraq. And these tended to last for a few years at a time before they broke down for basic reasons, like they couldn't agree where the new capital should be. Should the capital be in Damascus? Should it be in Cairo? There's been just such a long history of failure of pan-Arab nationalism that it is withered as a political force. And that sort of is why Islamism has arisen as an alternative, which is sort of like our unifying factor now is that we are all Sunni and this is a religious duty. And it doesn't matter how strong Islamic state is. I'm supposed to support it, right? It's not a pragmatic decision of do I believe the Assad family will reunify all the Arab people or do I believe Saddam Hussein will unify all the other people? It's more, oh, you know, I'm following this government. It's the religious duty of other Sunnis. I will remind them peacefully at first and then militarily, right? And I'm going to exert myself as an individual, as a military unit in service of this. So there is definitely the case that political projects over time can become discredited just by repeated failure. And in fact, one of the strongest forces against Islamism was the defeat of ISIS. The defeat of ISIS in the early 2010s dealt it a massive blow, a blow that has been significantly undone by the collapse of the democratic government in Afghanistan. Now, Afghanistan is not part of the Arab world, but almost everything I've said about the Arab world, demographic fragmentation, difficulty of, you know, difficulty of crafting a secular ideology for an impoverished country that actually has a reason for a country like Syria or Afghanistan in particular to exist and be legitimate, rather than say, I don't know, maybe there should be a Pashtunistan, there should be a state for the Pashtun people only in Afghanistan, right? Or maybe the Khmer people in Afghanistan want to break away, et cetera, et cetera, right? It's harder to come up with a story for why that secular government should exist. The Taliban have a pretty simple story. We are the Islamic rightful government, our lands, right? And, and that, that, you know, why should it stay unified? Ah, because there are no other Islamic governments around us that are Islamic in the right way. We only have those Shia heretics and their, their, their bad, fake Islamic Republic over there in Iran. And these other governments are secular, godless governments. We're not going to go away toward with them. We're seeking to develop here. We're the only ones with legitimacy to govern these territories. So in a way, the Taliban just had easier job establishing their legitimacy because you can say that, oh, but isn't it automatically legitimate? Democracy is, in fact, a strong ideology of legitimacy. Most people voted for the government. Well, you know, the Taliban can have elections, too. And, you know, they might have laws, constitutional limits on who can run in elections, but that's not unique. And Iran is a very interesting example, actually, of a hybrid system of legitimacy, where it's both theocratic and democratic. Even women can vote, even stand to be elected into parliament in Iran. And this is something I think in the West we don't think about. We assume Western-style democracies, liberal democracies have like a monopoly on using, in a purely realpolitik sort of way, legitimizing and stabilizing power of elections. But hybrid systems, non-democratic and honestly Islamic democratic systems can use it just as well. Because if those ideologies are popular, you know, I'm not even sure the Taliban would need to cheat if they threw a fair election in Afghanistan. Like I think they just win it. Yeah. Yeah. So we talked about this in a lot of detail. I didn't leave a lot of room for questions, but I'd love to dive in whatever part you think is most interesting.

It is fascinating. If you were advising, you know, sort of U.S. foreign policy, whether it comes to Afghanistan or it comes to Iraq or sort of the, you know, whatever powers were sort of enabling sort of the Arab Spring, like based on what we know now, you know, a couple of decades into the future, what advice might you have given or what sort of insight was missing? No,

I think that for a variety of reasons, maybe the British were at a good point in preferring Arab monarchies, Arab republics. For a variety of reasons, they seem to be more stable and work better. You have basically completely secularized countries where you have a constitutional monarchy. For example, places like Morocco work fairly well and are relatively stable. You want to support such governments if possible. Now you want to, of course, encourage democratic reform since the British were, after decolonization, they were supporting things like, you know, the Iraqi monarchy, the Egyptian monarchy. And those didn't really withstand the modernizing pressures and the ideologies, such as the very socialist ideologies that were popping up and nationalist ideologies that were popping up there. The monarchy has this interesting feature where they only claim rule over particular lands. It's like, okay, my dynasty, my family, we have been ruling Morocco for 300 years, or my dynasty has been ruling this part of the Arab Peninsula for like 400 years. We've been the protectors of Mecca and Medina for this whole time. It's a much harder claim to say, oh, and we are now seizing Syria. Historically speaking, legitimizing reasons were found for a variety of reasons. I think internationally, the U.S. has played its role in stabilizing these borders. So you kind of want governments that can legitimize rule over like fairly limited pieces of territory, even if there's no inherent logical reason to only rule that small piece of territory rather than a larger, more geographically, ethnically, religiously, ideologically coherent or complete whole, right? So I think that this sort of subtlety there might be that supporting rebel groups because they promise democracy does not mean that they will be capable of it. Supporting a political family that has something like, for example, a royal style claim power, conditioning your support on them introducing more and more democratic elements. I think that could work really well. There are limits here. You can't actually make such a deal with a family where it's sort of a semi-hereditary dictatorship, right? In Libya, Gaddafi was said to be succeeded by his son. In Syria, of course, Saad's father was already present to Syria. It was almost this kind of a hereditary-ish dictatorship because they derive their power from notionally the democratic element. So it's sort of like, if you're asking someone who bases their power on the pretense of democracy to introduce democratic elements, those will directly undermine and move their role in society, leaving them with no source of power whatsoever. It's not even clear their property. Like could the Assad family have been, hey, we're just going to let the Islamists be in charge and we're going to be private citizens and we're going to keep our wealth. The rule of law is not strong enough, even if you gave them amnesty for whatever corruption charges. Like you could easily in a more developed country have a deal where, okay, we're actually not going to touch these properties and we're going to transition into a democracy and certain properties will be respected and will remain family property. And we're not going to try to argue that they were stolen and so on. In the transition from Francoist regime in Spain, the democracy, of this type were honored, right? Including like, you know, in the Spanish monarchy, the Franco family kept titles that they were given by the king of Spain. So Spain evolved towards a constitutional monarchy out of the Francoist regime. And that was basically on the initiative of the monarch because the monarch was like uninterested in running, we could call it a fascism adjacent government, right? And it felt it would be much better for the royal family to just be sort of like, you know, a pampered, not like purposeless kind of elite family influence, right? They wanted, in other words, to have a cushy position like that of the royal family in the UK. You know, at the end of the day, if you could credibly internationally offer to the House of Saud that, hey, what if you just relaxed? What if you didn't have to worry about being murdered? You don't get to chop anyone up with bones. You don't get to saw their bones. You don't get to kill them. They don't get to kill you. You still have the most prestige in the country. Business of running the country will now be relying on the civil service and a functional movement. Looking from the perspective of a royal family, that kind of slow abdication of power, it's not even a bad deal, right? At least if the alternative is instability. But to make a deal with an influential family, and I do mean families here more just than individuals, because even in the Western world, it's often the case that matters. In the Arab world, it remains much more central to life. And the concrete tribes that are associated with the family still matter. Like Saddam Hussein, his last loyal supporters were often people from his home tribe, from the extended tribe that his family was a part of. And those were some of the last strong supporters of the previous regime. So all of this is to say, identifying centers of non-democratic power, but not those who merely have an authoritarian state that claims to be democratic but isn't. So don't take those who have based their legitimacy on a false or sometimes true claim democracy to introduce more democratic elements. Approach others. Let's put it this way. Identify 50 of the most influential and respected clerics in Syria. Bring them together. Bring them in a Congress, ask them to declare certain Islamic factions illegitimate and un-Islamic, promise to physically protect them, promise to physically protect their property, promise them some special carve-outs for how Islam will be practiced in the new Syria, and ask them to say it's a religious duty to support the legitimate government that you've picked. Bam. Okay. Their basis of power individually is not democratic. They lose nothing of their religious power. In fact, they might gain power. A cleric might gain power because they're not a military commander of an extreme ISIS-like faction, right? They just kind of have a congregation, basically. So they might be thinking to themselves already, it's like, okay, I will be allowed to tell people how they should vote. That's very basic. You might promise them a favorable and prominent position in the religious, in democratic politics of the new system. Or you might seek out wealthy business owners, right? Or you might seek out the royal families of these countries. And I guess what I'm saying is pretty much you should actually be pursuing, if you're trying to change the politics of the countries to over time come to resemble Western parliamentary democracy, you should be pursuing an elitist path to reform, not a populist one, because the populist one will easily be redirected into either extreme nationalism or extreme religious movements. And those will tend to undermine the integrity of those states, the territorial integrity, and leave the door open to war. Truly, like for Syria, the civil war has been absolutely devastating. The country's population is vastly lower by many millions of people than it was when the war began. Many refugees who currently are living in Turkey, many more who also live in Europe. And many of those will never return. Some of them will. But Syria was on track to become like a demographic giant, maybe with 70 or 80 million people. And then the civil war has sort of like resulted in a Syria that I think will be likely, will be lucky if it has 40 million people by the end of the century.

And is the dysfunction that we've alluded to in this podcast, is this unique to the Middle East? Like, is this what happened to sort of what you were saying about, you know, autocratic governments doing the best? Is that also true in, let's say, Africa or something? Or how do we compare what happens in Middle East governance wise to other places? I think it's I

think that in

Africa, actually, there are parts

of Africa where something similar is true.