We’ve reached the three-year mark of Putin’s three-day lightning strike to seize Ukraine. Evidently, Russia is hardly the superpower that we thought it was. What’s more interesting is that it’s not just Russia: over the past few years, a number of anti-democratic regimes have revealed that the West overestimated its strength. It’s worth understanding why our enemies seem in decline, not to justify complacency, but to determine if we’re prioritizing the right threats.
Syria
Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical reign, and his nation’s horrific civil war, have finally ended. Despite the still-uncertain future of Syria’s population, this overthrow is, on its face, in our interests. While the Syrian regime was often deemed a lower priority than other threats, it was decisively an enemy of the West. This government has armed, harbored, and fought alongside terrorist groups, primarily Hezbollah, who’ve killed American soldiers. It killed Turkish troops, who were deployed to stabilize the border as their neighbor’s civil war raised security concerns. It waged multiple wars against Israel and refused to recognize its sovereignty. It butchered its own population with indiscriminate bombing, chemical weapons, starvation, mass imprisonment, and torture (this brutality was both morally and politically egregious, as it also drove millions of refugees into Europe, where intense social friction ensued).
Over the past few years, a number of anti-democratic regimes have revealed that the West overestimated its strength.
While these grievances are ample reason to celebrate Assad’s ousting, the ripple effects are even more important. Bashar survived 13 years of war by leaning on support from several external actors who benefited from keeping him in power. These are not factions to root for: Hezbollah, Iran, and Russia. Unfortunately for the Assad dictatorship, these factions are getting their teeth kicked in by U.S. allies. With this foreign support distracted, Syrian rebels began to push, and many of the regime’s forces simply fled instead of fighting. Accordingly, the abrupt toppling of Assad signifies more than justice in Syria — it has dire implications for his allies.
Iran will heavily struggle to send weapons to Hezbollah, which is now geographically isolated. The Iranians are also far more vulnerable to Israeli airpower, which is no longer contained by Syrian air defense. The consequences are even more pronounced for Russia, which risks possibly losing its most pivotal strategic international footholds: the Tartus naval base and Khmeimim air base.
These facilities were the foundation for all of Moscow’s intervention in both the Middle East and Africa. Tartus was Russia’s only permanent naval base on foreign soil, and their only port on the Mediterranean — without it, Russia’s navy cannot threaten NATO’s Southern flank. Likewise, Khmeimim was a crucial refueling point for cargo planes moving equipment to Africa, where Russia projects power through Wagner mercenary operations. Sustaining this presence at scale relied on Khmeimim, as fully loaded aircraft can’t reach Russia’s next closest air base (in Libya), and transporting material to Africa by sea is much slower than flying. The Kremlin has used its mercenaries to extract vast quantities of Africa’s gold and other resources — now Wagner’s future is up in the air. Overall, the seachange in Syria deepened the wound for sides that intervened on Assad’s behalf. This brings us to a group that was already having a particularly bad year: Hezbollah.
Hezbollah
Less than three months after the escalating tensions with Israel reached their breaking point, Hezbollah had been weakened so severely that they agreed to a ceasefire. In that time, they lost tens of thousands of unfired rockets and every single senior commander, including their president, Nasrallah. For all of this, fewer than 100 IDF troops were killed in Lebanon, and the anticipated mass salvo of rockets unleashed on Israeli civilians never came. It’s hard to overstate how unexpected this was.
Even Tel Aviv’s most unconditionally loyal advocates thought Hezbollah would be far stronger: AIPAC warned that a full-scale war would “be devastating for both Israel and Lebanon”; Jared Kushner Tweeted “there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible.” Clearly, the overestimation of Hezbollah was hardly limited to Iranian-aligned propaganda. The consensus was so robust that I confidently wrote an article this fall about the supposedly-guaranteed mayhem that a full-scale war would bring. All the speculation was wrong.
Why were the predictions so far off? To start, this can be explained by underestimating the effectiveness of a pre-emptive strike. Unlike with Hamas last fall, Israel didn’t wait for Hezbollah to initiate the full-scale war. With hindsight, it now seems like the unprecedented death toll on October 7 may have resulted more from the element of surprise than the tactics themselves — Israel learned from this mistake.
This time, Tel Aviv took a highly calculated approach. First, Israel crippled Hezbollah’s communication capacity by detonating their pagers and radios (the organization had turned to these as alternatives to more modern technology, which was more vulnerable to surveillance). This effectively paralyzed Hezbollah just before the IDF followed up with the aforementioned “decapitation strikes,” which left Hezbollah without leadership. Accordingly, their disconnected pockets of fighters had no clear plan for how to react as incoming airstrikes escalated. Hezbollah was hit hard, and without Assad to usher Iranian meddling, they seem unlikely to rebuild quickly.
Iran
It should already be evident that Iran’s power is slipping away. The nation’s two most strategically valuable allies (Hezbollah and Assad) are defeated, undercutting Tehran’s leverage and severing its access to the Mediterranean Sea. This only scratches the surface of Iran’s problems. To start, all of their other proxies have been degraded: Hamas lost all of its leadership; after interfering with shipping, the Houthis invited airstrikes on a scale that the U.S. previously had no political appetite for; American airpower has successfully contained their Iraqi militias, namely the Popular Mobilization Forces.
Further signs of weakness come from within Iran’s borders. Last January, ISIS carried out the deadliest terrorist attack against Iran to date, killing at least 95 people. In May, the Iranian president died in a helicopter crash, and his citizens celebrated with fireworks. Later that summer, their primary adversary, Israel, performed a high-profile assassination in Iran’s capital city. This fall, the IDF wiped out Iran’s air defense capacity.
Iran looks more fragile than it has been since its revolution nearly half a century ago.
Along with these defensive security failures, Tehran has undermined its threat of offensive power: in April and October, Iran directly attacked Israel with hundreds of missiles and kamikaze drones, but these barrages only killed a single person — a Palestinian civilian in the West Bank. According to The Wall Street Journal, “Roughly 50% of the ballistic missiles fired by Iran failed to launch or crashed before reaching their target.” Nearly all properly-working munitions were intercepted by Israeli and allied air defense.
Iran looks more fragile than it has been since its revolution nearly half a century ago. Despite this, concluding that they aren’t a threat would still be reckless. For example, their attempted strikes on Israel might misrepresent the quality of their equipment — they announced the attack beforehand, and they chose to fire from Iran proper and Yemen rather than Lebanon, allowing for more preparation to render the attack symbolic. If Tehran wanted their missiles intercepted, it would only make sense to save their most accurate, modern, reliable, and well-maintained missiles for future attacks. A similar conclusion applies to a nation that’s completely different ideologically, but has recently drawn numerous parallels with Iran: North Korea.
North Korea
Before developing an anemic arsenal of nuclear weapons, North Korea’s illusion of power rested on an unparalleled network of artillery batteries. For decades, they promised that this artillery could turn their neighbor’s capital into “A Sea Of Fire.” Estimates predicted that shelling Seoul at full intensity would cause an unthinkable 130,000 casualties per hour. However, a new data point raises another question to consider: what if the ammunition doesn’t work?
Russia received millions of artillery shells from North Korea to use against Ukraine, but a full half of the shells are too low quality to fire. Of course, this does not mean South Korea has nothing to worry about — even half of the Sea Of Fire figures would be unacceptable. Further, Kim Jong Un likely sent Russia his worst and oldest munitions while keeping his more functional batches, similar to Iran’s presumed selection of missiles. Still, it’s worth noting this indication that North Korea might be even less militarily capable than assumed.
“Smaller Fish”
It’s hard to think of an enemy of the West that’s stronger than it was a year ago. Terrorist organizations like ISIS, which once focused on the U.S. and Western Europe, have chosen other targets for their deadliest attacks in recent years. Venezuela’s brutal socialist dictatorship is less popular than ever, and shouldn’t expect any relief from the international stage: its primary backer (Russia) is no more capable of helping than it was with Assad, and Trump recently cancelled Venezuela’s permit to export oil to the U.S. Serbia’s population is demanding democracy with the largest protests in the nation’s history. In Sudan, the once seemingly unstoppable Russia-backed RSF has lost momentum. Myanmar’s China-backed junta is hanging by a thread. Cuba can’t keep the lights on. Only one of the West’s noteworthy adversaries sharply defies this trend of deterioration.
It’s hard to think of an enemy of the West that’s stronger than it was a year ago.
The Exception to the Rule
The People’s Republic of China is the elephant in the room. While Russia has proven that it’s not a superpower worth losing sleep over, China is a different situation. The U.S. is on track to hold its military edge over Beijing for years, but the gap is decisively narrowing. As China repeatedly doubles-down on its stated desire to build up its power and retake Taiwan, the U.S. needs to prioritize keeping the CCP under control. The stakes are too high for complacency.
Alex Lee ‘25 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. He can be reached at alex.b.lee@wustl.edu.