📝 Description
Nikolaos van Dam—career diplomat and Syria specialist—offers a concise, piercing analysis of how Syria slid into civil war and mass devastation. Avoiding polemic, he dissects the structure of power: security services, party apparatus, patronage networks, and the manipulation of communal identities. He situates domestic dynamics within the web of regional and international interests, showing how policies in capitals far from Damascus shaped options on the ground. The book’s discipline is diplomatic history: careful attention to documents, positions, and negotiations that either failed or were never tried. Van Dam is frank about missed opportunities and illusions harbored by outside actors; he is equally frank about the regime’s calculated choice to suppress, escalate, and fragment. The narrative is compact but densely referenced, making it a practical briefing for students and officials alike. It does not promise solutions; it offers clarity about constraints, incentives, and the logic of survival that produced catastrophic outcomes. The value here is sober mapping: who held which levers, how they were pulled, and why the machine ground on despite the human cost. In a debate prone to slogans, van Dam restores proportion and evidence, making this a durable guide to understanding Syria’s wreckage.