The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Syria and the Return of the March || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

Syria has been riddled with problems for ages, but will all that chaos boil up and spill over? The short answer is that it’s unlikely, but let’s unpack it.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/syria-and-the-return-of-the-march

Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Yosemite for the obligatory. I'm backpacking video, but I hurt myself so I'm in the tent for a few hours. My feet are messed up. Anyway, we're going to take a question from the Patreon crowd, and specifically, do I expect the chaos in Syria to spill over to other countries? Yes and no, just not in a traditional sense. Keep in mind that there's basically seven series. You've got the coastal zone, which is the Alawites, the mountain zone, which is Christians. You've got the interior cities of Ham, Hamas, and Aleppo, which are Sunni Muslim. You've got Damascus, which is basically a fortress city. You've got this thin line of people that live along the Euphrates, and then you've got

the desert. Right now, ISIS, or Islamic State, whatever you want to call it, has been banished to the desert, but in the past they have conquered large chunks of the territory. Anyway, the Alawites out on the coast were the ones who ruled Syria until recent. They were pretty much hated by everybody and now they have been overthrown. There is now a Sunni group that is attempting to cobble this country together. But the Assad, those are the al-Oites who were in charge, had the advantage of Hezbollah backing them up, and Iran backing them up, and Russia backing them up. And this new government doesn't have any of that.

And so it's already descended into basically the second phase of the Civil War. This one will probably in time be much, much, much, much worse than the first one. And remember the first one generated millions of refugees and hundreds of thousands of dead. Okay. What you have to remember about Syria is until we got to the after World War I decolonization effort, this was never really a country. This was a zone where because of all the differences in geography was basically a bunch of mini-states at best or was amalgamated into some other governments, like say the office.

Ottoman Empire or one of the caliphates of the past, which means you should never expect Syria to be a stable place like it was under the Assad dynasty. Instead, what we're seeing is a return of a concept that we in the West have pretty much forgotten about called marches. A march is a zone outside of civilization. You have your cities, you have your infrastructure, you have your military and economy, but there's a zone beyond you that is not owned by another country. It's stateless. And in zones like that, chaos reigns unless and until a superior power comes in and imposes their will on it.

And if you look at this region back through history, it has been a march for most of history. Marches basically take two firms. First form is this stateless zone when you can get some crazy group like the Islamic state that comes in. That only works when no one who has a country who is bordering the march has the ability to interfere. Alternatively, if anyone who is boarding the region does have the ability to interfere, they basically come in from time to time, burn everything down and then go home because they know there's nothing here that is worth building up themselves. So for Syria specifically, you have Israel, you have Turkey, you have Mesopotamia.

And if you look back 10 years ago when Israel was occupied with domestic issues and the Turks had taken vacation from history and Iraq was in civil war, well, then the Islamic state does pretty well. But that's not the situation right now. The Turks are on the role. The Israelis are being very aggressive against any potential challenger, and Iraq has managed to consolidate itself into a new nation state. We should get used to this sort of concept in lots of areas. As demographics decline, as de-globalization really kicks in and wrecks economies, there There's going to be a lot of states that just the center won't hold. And we're going to see a lot more of the world looking like Syria,

looking like a march than we've become used to in the last 75 years.