Bashar Al-Assad's 5 Cutthroat Lessons for Holding Onto Power
Anyone can become a better dictator if they have a supportive family, always practice deception, exploit fears of a common enemy, cherish the secret police, and are willing to do anything for power.
Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has been one of the most celebrated dictators of our time, skilled in deception, repression, and state terrorism, along with many other core competencies valued by all serious dictators.
Assad and his father before him ruled Syria for 53 years, spanning the terms of 10 American presidents. While so many other great dictators in the Middle East were ousted during the Arab Spring in 2011, Assad managed to hold onto power for 13 years longer than his dictator colleagues.
Assad’s ouster has been the most significant political event of the past month, so it is worth considering all the invaluable lessons on holding onto political power that we can learn from this highly accomplished despot.
1. A Loving Family Makes You a Better Dictator
Having political power is like having a mega-mansion — you’re much more likely to have it if your father had it before you. And Bashar al-Assad was fortunate to have a great father who left his son the Syria’s ruling regime as his inheritance. Such a path to power is even better in its simplicity than launching a successful military coup, which was the way that Bashar’s father came to power in 1971.
Loving parents, however, are valuable in many other ways besides just leaving you their political regime as your inheritance. If you grow up in a family that instills in you the traditional values like love and respect and mutual support and cutthroat pursuit of power, chances are much greater that you too will become great at cutthroat pursuit of power. After all, supportive parents will instill the proper Machiavellian mindset in their children and will teach them the most useful skills in life, such deception, manipulation, intimidation, and traditional family recipes for political repression.
Bashar al-Assad initially was not expected to follow in his father’s footsteps. That role was meant for his older brother, but the older brother died in a car accident in 1994. Bashar, who was then studying ophthalmology in London, was called back to Syria to step into his brother’s shoes and continue the family’s tradition of repressive dictatorship.
Over the next six years, Bashar was groomed to become the kind of dictator that would honor the Assad family name and would make his father proud. He was most likely taught the family secrets of various power plays and political repression tools, as his father himself was very skilled in state terrorism and other ways of maintaining his grip on power.
Assad’s example shows that even if you at first don’t think you’re destined to become a great dictator, you can easily become one if you have loving parents to guide you and teach you the necessary skills.
Parents are not the only useful members of the family. A loving, supporting wife at home who is good at money laundering is a real treasure to have.
Assad’s wife, Asma, was a UK-born Syrian-descent investment banker in London before she married Assad in 2000. So she was obviously perfectly suited to raising a family and, according to a 2022 US State Department report, maintaining “close patronage relationships with Syria’s largest economic players, using their companies to launder money from illicit activities and funnel funds to the regime.”
When you have such a great wife at home taking care of your family’s finances from war profiteering and other sources, you have greater peace of mind, so at work you can focus on being the best dictator you can be.
2. Always Practice Deception
If you want to become a ruthless and brutal dictator, the best way to start is by convincing people that you are not the kind of person who would ever want to be a ruthless and brutal dictator. For example, if you want to continue your family’s tradition of repressive rule, try to make everyone believe at first that you’ll be a reformer who will create a more moderate and progressive regime.
Before Bashar al-Assad took power in 2000, he was appointed to lead an anti-corruption campaign, to burnish his image as a modernizer. Of course, in such a role, you want to remove only lower-level corrupt officials while sparing important senior members of the regime.
The Western-born Asma, some observers argued, was also chosen as Bashar’s wife precisely to make him more appealing to the West and to bolster his progressive image, trafficking in false hopes of democratic and economic reforms.
In the art of authoritarian deception, to mislead others and gain some initial advantage, it may pay off if you don’t look like the archetypical, old-school cutthroat dictator. Instead, if you look like Bashar al-Assad — sort of a slightly autistic supervising accountant — you can get away with much more brutal stuff than you otherwise would, at least initially. “They just didn’t look the type” — this has been the common refrain that everyone in the media has been making about why they so badly misjudged Bashar al-Assad and his wife.
Finally, perhaps the best indication of how much Assad cherished deception is that he faithfully practiced it until his last hours in Syria. Just a few hours before he escaped to Moscow on December 8, he was lying to his military chiefs about Moscow sending military aid. Even as he was about to leave Syra for Moscow, he deceived not only to his closest aides and his cousins but even to his younger brother, Maher, who was a commander in the Syrian army. This kind of habitual deception is highly regarded not only among professional dictators but also within the broader Machiavellian community as well.
3. Exploit Fears of a Common Enemy
If you come from a minority group, it’s crucial to manipulate other groups into supporting you by tapping into their fears of a common enemy.
The Assad family, for example, is part of the Alawite minority, which makes up about 10% of Syria’s population. Despite this, they managed to rule Syria for over 50 years because they had the support of other minority groups, such as the Druze and Christians, as well as some Sunni Muslims, who represent the majority in Syria.
Assad maintained their support by positioning himself as the protector of all minority groups and a bulwark against Islamists, who were feared by both minority groups and secular moderates in Syria.
Any smart dictator in the Middle East should make this pitch to other groups: “We may torture and kill many of you, but it’s all for the greater good. If we don’t, those nasty Islamists will take over and they will torture and kill many of you, and you surely don’t want to be tortured and killed by the Islamists?!”
4. Bigger is Better When It Comes to Secret Police Apparatus
Do you know what’s better than a security directorate tasked with persecuting political enemies and torturing dissidents? Four different security directorates tasked with persecuting political enemies and torturing dissidents!
If Assad had only secret police agency, would he be able to torture and kill more than 100,000 detainees since 2013? Highly unlikely. 100,000 would probably be too many to handle for just one secret police agency, however good they were at torturing and murdering members of political opposition.
By the way, the number of people tortured and killed — more than 100,000 — means that Assad’s regime achieved one of the record-topping numbers since the Nazis. And speaking of the Nazis, Assad was again fortunate to inherit from his father one of the best secret police systems in the world, largely set up by former Nazi and East German Stasi officers, and German efficiency is appreciated worldwide in all sorts of endeavors.
If you have multiple secret police agencies tasked with persecution of your political enemies, you can rest easy knowing that if one secret police agency misses a political dissident, then another intelligence agency will notice them and torture them.
5. Be Willing to Give Up Anything to Hold onto Power
A key test of a great dictator is how much they are willing to sacrifice to hold onto power. And Assad had that one thing that separates truly great dictators from all the mediocre ones — willingness to sacrifice anything to retain power.
When your political power is threatened by some rival forces, and there seems to be nothing you can do, why not sell out your country’s sovereignty to foreign powers in exchange for their protection of your regime?
Any half-decent dictator can bomb and level entire neighborhoods of innocent civilians or kill hundreds of thousands of people who have crazy demands like more civil liberties and democratic reforms or even use chemical weapons to gas his own people, as Assad did. However, many weak-minded dictators would rather lose power than lose their country’s sovereignty.
Assad was not one of those mediocre dictators. When the situation became dire, he had no problem forfeiting Syria’s sovereignty, allowing Russian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces to take over significant portions of Syria and operate freely in his country in exchange for their protection of his regime.
It is thanks to these 5 factors that Assad was able to hold onto power far longer than his Middle Eastern dictator brethren could, and that any other smart dictator can emulate. Of course, this is not to say that Assad made no mistakes. He made several, and the next post will explore the three critical errors that led to his downfall from power, and that all smart dictators should avoid.