Assad’s Fall Should Be a Teachable Moment for China
Beijing’s fondness for fellow autocracies has one big downside: They can be much more fragile than it wants to believe.
Bad bet.
Photographer: Ali Haj Suleiman/Getty Images
When Chinese President Xi Jinping announced a “strategic partnership” with recently deposed dictator Bashar al-Assad last year, he clearly believed the Syrian regime was worth betting on. Fourteen months later, Assad’s ignominious flight to Moscow has served as another embarrassing demonstration of how poorly China chooses its friends.
To be fair, almost no one foresaw how quickly Assad’s government would collapse. But China’s broader geopolitical strategy rests on sustaining a network of autocratic regimes such as Syria, Iran, and Venezuela that share its opposition to a US-led world order. The implosion of one of them calls into question Beijing’s underlying assumptions.