After over a decade of brutal conflict, Syria's political model under Assad has devolved from a Soviet-inspired authoritarian system based on ideology and nationalism, to what is now effectively a feudal system where power is drawn from kinship, ethnicity and a carving up of the formal and informal economy by key Assad supporters. For Syria, the side effects of this shift have included a booming drug market, mass political violence, a vast outflow of refugees, and a government reliant on external states like Iran that want to use the country as a bastion of their influence rather than return it to its pre-war sovereignty. These are the very problems that Arab nations are hoping to address by restoring their ties with Syria and reducing its international isolation. But in doing so, they're also pressuring the Syrian government to undermine the very model that helped it survive the civil war, which...
