Syria Spectrum Podcast

Syria has spent the past eighteen months dismantling the foreign policy architecture of the Assad era and replacing it with something new. Sanctions have been lifted, Arab ties restored, and a foreign minister with no career diplomatic background has become the public face of Syria's re-emergence on the world stage. The pace has been remarkable. Whether it reflects a coherent strategic vision, or...

Syrian–Israeli relations have never been symmetrical. For decades, Damascus treated Israel as a defining strategic adversary—while Israel largely handled Syria as a “secondary file.” That old hierarchy is gone. Since the fall of Assad on 8 December 2024, the Syria file has become impossible to ignore: Israeli forces moved into the UN-monitored separation area, launched a sweeping strike campaign,...

One year after the fall of the Assad regime, Syria’s transition has moved beyond the initial political moment and into the far more demanding phase of consolidating state authority. At the center of this process lies security sector reform. In this episode, Gregory Waters, Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Program, analyzes Syria’s fragmented security landscape, the institutional...

China’s long bet on Assad collapsed overnight, forcing Beijing to confront a Syria reshaped by new leadership, shifting alliances, and rising regional competition. As Damascus recalibrates its foreign policy, China now finds itself weighing security threats, economic opportunity, and geopolitical risk in a rapidly evolving landscape. In this episode, we examine what China wants in post-Assad Syria...

Syria’s October 2025 parliamentary elections were presented as a milestone in the country’s political transition, the first to take place since the fall of Bashar al-Assad. Yet beneath the language of reform, the process remained tightly managed, reflecting familiar patterns of control and limited participation. The elections ultimately raised a fundamental question: were they a genuine exercise o...