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Syria The battle of Aleppo a turning point in world relations

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that the recapture of Aleppo by Syrian loyalist forces in December 2016 represents a decisive turning point not merely in the Syrian civil war but in the entire structure of world relations. The central thesis is that the defeat of the US-backed insurgency in Aleppo exposed the irreversible decline of US imperialism as the guarantor of the global capitalist order. The US was unable to prevent the fall of its proxies despite having troops and aircraft in the immediate vicinity, because the underlying economic and political contradictions of American imperialism — relative economic decline, war-weary population, deepening class struggle, and institutional crisis — have reached a point where it can no longer impose its will in every region of the world. Russia, a weaker imperialist power, was able to step into the vacuum created by US paralysis and decisively shift the balance of forces, but for its own narrow imperialist interests, not out of solidarity with the Assad regime or the Syrian people.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis is grounded in the Marxist theory of imperialism, particularly Lenin's framework of inter-imperialist rivalry and the uneven development of capitalism. The article treats the Syrian conflict not as a civil war with external interference but as a theatre of competition between imperialist powers — the US, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia — each pursuing their own strategic and economic interests. The concept of the relative decline of US hegemony is deployed not as a moral judgment but as a material analysis: the US share of world GDP has halved since 1945, it has shifted from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor, and its military capacity is no longer commensurate with its global ambitions. The argument draws on the Marxist understanding that war and conflict are not aberrations but necessary expressions of the contradictions of capitalism in crisis. The article also applies a class analysis to the Kurdish movement, arguing that national liberation cannot be achieved through reliance on any imperialist power but only through a revolutionary class-based struggle that unites the working masses across national boundaries.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article was written in January 2017, immediately after the fall of Aleppo and just before Donald Trump's inauguration. It correctly anticipated several key developments: the marginalisation of Saudi Arabia as a regional power; the realignment of Turkey away from the US and towards Russia; the growing contradiction between Turkey and the Kurdish YPG; and the likelihood of a US-Russia deal that would sell out Kurdish interests. The analysis of Saudi Arabia's decline — falling oil prices, the US becoming a major oil producer itself, the kingdom's internal contradictions — proved prescient. The article's prediction that Russia would seek a "frozen conflict" rather than a total victory for Assad, precisely to balance Iran and Turkey against each other, has been borne out by subsequent events. The argument that Trump's isolationist foreign policy is not an accident but a reflection of the real position of US imperialism in world relations remains relevant to understanding the broader trajectory of American foreign policy under both Trump and Biden.

Where the Argument Continues

The article leaves several threads open. The question of how the Kurdish movement can build a revolutionary class-based strategy is gestured at but not developed — this connects to broader Marxist debates on the national question and the relationship between national liberation and socialist revolution. The analysis of the internal contradictions of the Saudi regime and the possibility of its collapse is stated but not elaborated. The article's claim that "world war is ruled out in the coming period" sits alongside its argument that "endless local wars and conflicts" will proliferate — the relationship between these two propositions deserves further theoretical development. These themes are taken up in subsequent IDOM articles on the Middle East, particularly those analysing the shifting alliances between Russia, Turkey, and Iran, and in broader Marxist texts on the law of uneven and combined development and the theory of permanent revolution as applied to the Middle East.

Connections

The article should be read alongside Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism" for the theoretical framework of inter-imperialist rivalry. Trotsky's writings on the national question and the theory of permanent revolution are directly relevant to the article's treatment of the Kurdish movement. For the analysis of US decline, the article connects to the broader Marxist literature on the relative decline of American hegemony, including works by David Harvey on the new imperialism and by Giovanni Arrighi on the long cycles of capitalist accumulation. Within the IDOM corpus, the article connects to analyses of the Ukraine conflict, which similarly treats the war as an expression of inter-imperialist rivalry driven by the crisis of capitalism. The article's treatment of Turkey's neo-Ottoman ambitions and the Erdogan regime's internal contradictions is developed further in IDOM's coverage of the Turkish economic crisis and the 2023 elections.

Key Quotes

  1. "More than anything the recapture of Aleppo signifies a complete humiliation for these countries and their imperialist project in Syria. Six years and tens of billions of dollars later, the insurgency backed by the US, the most powerful military power on the planet and the two richest and most influential powers in the region, has not reached single one of its aims."

  2. "The US has received a blow in Syria, but in relative terms it is Saudi Arabia which has come out of this as the biggest loser."

  3. "As the Marxists have always said, the Kurds are only seen as small change in the relationship of the major powers. They have no interest in Kurdish independence or autonomy which poses a threat to their own borders."

  4. "Herein lies the true imperialist face of Russia. Opposite to the wishes of Assad and Iran, and probably many Syrians, Putin does not want to push out the opposing forces."

  5. "Like any empire, the US has peaked and has entered a period of decline. The post-war capitalist world order was built by the US, so it is no surprise that the crisis of capitalism is also a crisis of US imperialism and its world order."

  6. "The decline of US imperialism has been taking place over a long period of decades, but now we see an acceleration in the process which leaves the superpower no longer able to guarantee the world order which it had built up in the past."