When one hears the great interpreters of geopolitical realism censure the internationalist naivety of a West captive to the dream of exporting democracy and eradicating autocracy in the Middle East – from Iraq to Libya – one should immediately interrupt their prosopopoeia with a simple: “So what about Syria?“

The realpolitical thesis according to which the West, by sabotaging from outside the old regimes inherited from the Soviet-Arabist season of the 1970s, would have jeopardised the only possible form of Middle Eastern stability and left room for tribal disorder, Islamist fanaticism and the Mediterranean incursions of the West’s enemies, clashes against a sunny evidence that is therefore denied.

All this has also happened in Syria, where for thirteen years Western countries have been careful not to stick their fingers into the wheels of a bloody and contagious civil war, allowing Assad (son of Saddam and Gaddafi‘s old ideological cronies), the Russians and the Iranians to pork any semblance of humanity – including chemical weapons – and leaving as the only alternative available that of the Salafist cutthroats, supported by Turkey and back in the limelight after a defeat that seemed definitive.

The West has not set foot in Syria, yet it has only enemies, except for the Kurds who control the areas north of the Euphrates and whom Donald Trump, during his first presidency, had brutally dumped by saying they cost too much and had done nothing for the US during the Second World War.

That the free Middle East slaughterhouse, the killing off of each other, could reproduce a spontaneous order preferable to the costs of any Western intervention, direct or indirect, military or otherwise, seemed so persuasive to everyone that it becomes difficult to point to a single Western government leader who in recent years has not so much proposed as hypothesised an alternative to the status quo of an endless war, destined to intertwine with all other wars and multiply its effects.

Half of all Syrians, as many as twelve million, are displaced abroad or within the country. At least six hundred and fifty thousand civilians are dead or missing. The scale and proportions of the Syrian humanitarian disaster are unparalleled in the world today.

In Syria, we tested how fallacious the so-called realist theorem was, according to which the post-Cold War geopolitical balances could remain those dictated by the ‘physics of violence‘ in crisis areas, which the very end of the bloc era made more dangerous and ungovernable.

The illusion – as cynical as it was stupid – was that Western non-interference would confine the consequences of the massacres outside the West, starting with the one mistakenly considered most fearsome, namely the migratory flood, particularly in Europe, which in the last two decades has feared Polish plumbers and Romanian bricklayers more than Russian soldiers – we have seen with what clairvoyance.

Now Western pacifism has in Syria its monument of shame and its exemplary catastrophe.