In Syria’s trouble: an embattled despot digs in

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. When West Germany and East Germany became just Germany in 1990, many were worried. Was the unified state too big for Europe? We take a look at how its role has shifted over 3 decades within Europe and in an even more turbulent wider world. And a century ago, a curious little man appeared in the work of a little-known author named Agatha Christie. We ask why Hercule Poirot, with his distinctive moustache and crime-solving little grey cells, remains so popular. In print and on screen. First up, though— It's approaching 10 years since the civil war in Syria began.

The signs of battle are all around.

And this in the middle of a residential area which both sides agreed they'd stay out of.

I love France! I love France!

With help from Iran and Russia, And by bombing and gassing his own people, Bashar al-Assad, the country's dictator, has all but won. But Mr. Assad's hopes of rebuilding the country's devastated economy are far from being realized. The currency is collapsing. America is continuing its sanctions. A financial crisis in neighboring Lebanon is adding to the pain. And COVID-19 is hitting the country hard. While support for Mr. Assad both abroad and within his own ranks is weakening, it seems unlikely that his grip on power will be loosened.

The humanitarian situation in Syria has never been worse, and economic desperation is gripping the country.

Nicholas Pelham is our Middle East correspondent.

You're hearing tales of women who are having to boil weed so that their children can eat. Men are scrambling over each other to get to bakeries. There are queues snaking across cities for fuel as that begins to run out. The currency has collapsed. Indeed, it's kind of so worthless now that people are using the notes to roll cigarettes. It's a really grim situation out there.

I mean, we've talked about the misery in Syria several times before. Is all of this still the ringing down of the civil war?

It's absolutely the case that although the fighting has subsided, the regime has not been able to reap the fruits of that. Military victory. You know, it was really hoping that this was going to be its year of recovery, and that just hasn't happened. And it thought that it was going to be able to take the last strongholds of rebel control in the north, but instead the Turks have consolidated their hold in the north, and the Kurds, with American support, are building up their authority in the northeast. And on top of that, you've had the Lebanese banking crisis. Beirut was the place which Syria used for its banking. The banks have very sharply limited withdrawals so people can't get dollars out. The kind of value of Lebanese pounds has plummeted, so that's had a knock-on effect in Syria. You've had American sanctions which have been tightening. There was a new raft of sanctions this summer. On top of that, you've got COVID-19, which is also exacerbating the pain.

How so? How has the pandemic played out in Syria?

Officially, the figures are about less than 200 deaths from COVID Nobody really believes those figures. Doctors are being ordered to report pneumonia as case of death, even when it's clear that it's COVID-19. The government doesn't have the means to provide basic protection. The population has been too brutalized by the war to really think much more about taking further precautions, even if they had the means. There are reports of anything up to 60% of businesses closing down in Damascus. You're having other independent surveys which show that anything up to 40% of the population there may have had the virus. And that kind of figures sort of out by maybe 80 times what officials are estimating. The hospitals can't cope. You need to have kind of great connections to be able to get into hospitals. So doctors have resorted to going around the streets with oxygen canisters offering a dose of oxygen to victims, and they're saying that they're inundated. So COVID is making an already dire situation far, far worse.

And the Syrian conflict has always been one with a lot of international players. I mean, what about the international allies that the regime would have turned to?

The regime still does have friends abroad, but those who still remain either can't come to the regime's aid or they won't. Both Russia and Iran, who are the regime's patrons, are facing American sanctions. That's limited, for instance, Iran's ability to get fuel to Syria, which is one of the contributing factors behind the fuel shortage there. Syrians gripe that the Russians could be doing an awful lot more than they are. In the past, they have helped supply wheat There are continuous complaints, for instance, that the Russians aren't providing fuel to anything other than their own military. So there's a sense that the kind of— the Russians could be doing more, but they almost relish the opportunity to let the regime squirm. The weaker it becomes, the more dependent it becomes, the more Moscow hopes that it might be in a position to dictate terms. And all in all, it seems that the regime is being ever more squeezed from without.

So where does that leave Mr. Assad then? What will he do? What can he do?

I mean, in many ways his regime has proved remarkably resilient. It still functions as a state. Its security forces are still able to suppress the population and keep them in check. You've had a few protests, but those are quickly snuffed out. And his regime in many ways is becoming ever more predatory. It used to prey on the rebels who rose up against it. It preyed on its opposition, and now it's preying on its own supporters. There are checkpoints across regime-held areas where, you know, if you want to bring trucks across, you're going to have to load it with cargo, you might have to pay bribes. Generals and warlords are turning ever more into tax farmers, raising taxes for the regime and taking a cut. So it's a kind of regime which is struggling to retain its patronage system, struggling to retain its control over the economy, and doing that by preying ever more on its own population.

Well, you say the regime is resilient. I mean, can it continue to be with all of these headwinds, do you think?

Certainly you can find businessmen in Damascus today who feel that the regime is kind of more under pressure than they can remember, and they really question whether the regime can survive. That said, the kind of consensus seems to be that this is a regime that will continue to fight for its own survival no matter what. Loyalists really have nowhere else to turn, no matter how disgruntled they are. Nobody else is going to pay what limited salaries they get. They don't trust any post-regime scenario. They think that they're going to be the victims of that. And the regime itself looks as if it's planning to continue in perpetuity. You've got presidential elections scheduled for the summer of next year. Those will give President Bashar al-Assad another 7 years. Together with his wife Asma, they look as if they're grooming their 18-year-old son, Hafez, to take over sometime in the future. So, I mean, this is a regime which is going to continue to fight for its survival no matter what the cost for its own population.

Nicholas, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Jason.

Tomorrow marks the 30th anniversary of German unification. On October 3rd, 1990, the East and West of Germany, divided in the aftermath of the Second World War, became one again. [APPLAUSE] It came less than a year after East Germany's peaceful revolution brought down the Berlin Wall and with it the East's strict communist regime.

In the 45 years since the end of the Second World War, these two parts of Germany had really grown apart very far. Families were divided, contacts were difficult and in some ways discouraged.

Anne McElvoy is a senior editor at The Economist.

I studied in and reported in the Old East in the late '80s, and it did feel very cut off. So when unification came around, it was a huge shift in the way that Germany perceived itself geopolitically, in terms of its economy, in terms of its culture and its identity. You had a kind of diplomatic Rubik's Cube that had to be put together for unification to happen at all. The mood was mixed, which has turned out to be quite prescient. There was a split between those largely on the left of the protest movement in East Germany who wanted longer to try an alternative to Western capitalism, which was doomed from the get-go. But in the population at large, there was relief to be rid of this oppressive East German state, and certainly there was economic optimism. And I think there was also a sense of resurgence of Germany as as a power on the world stage.

For Germany's European neighbors, that resurgence was a cause for concern.

Well, after the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, there were a lot of concerns across Europe about German reunification, perhaps most strongly in Britain, where Margaret Thatcher thought that a reunified Germany might actually threaten Europe's security.

Tom Nottle is our Berlin bureau chief.

And in most other countries in Europe, you had at least a degree of skepticism over whether this was wise, whether it was wise to proceed as quickly as Chancellor Helmut Kohl in West Germany then wanted to proceed. But ultimately they weren't able to block it.

But what were the fears?

Up until 1989, in what was then the European Community, you had 4 countries of roughly equal size: West Germany, France, Britain, and Italy. And there was a certain sort of balance of interest and balance of power. The concern was that Europe would become horribly unbalanced if Germany were to be allowed to reunify too quickly. And of course there were some long memories. Europe had never really been able to incorporate or to figure out a place for a unified German state.

But it would seem that the fears of a gross imbalance maybe were misplaced.

Yeah, I mean, fears that a unified Germany would upset European security have not come to pass. And if anything, in the intervening period, particularly in the last decade when we've had all of these endless crises in Europe, the concern amongst Germany's European partners, if anything, has been more about German reticence, a sort of unwillingness or an inability to provide leadership rather than too much German assertiveness. Germans themselves did seem to learn the lessons from 1989 very well. They weren't interested in throwing their weight around. And in fact, at the moment of reunification, you had a lot of German ministers who were saying things like German interests are identical to European ones, which is actually a very strange thing for a large country to say.

But what's the bigger picture there of how Germany saw its role in Europe at the time of reunification?

Helmut Kohl, who was very serious in his commitment to European unification, worked quite closely with President Mitterrand of France, first in agreeing to the important Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which set Europe on the road to the euro. The single currency. But he was also very keen to reassure countries in Central and Eastern Europe, ex-communist nations that had their own reason to fear an overmighty Germany. And that was one reason why he was committed to giving up the Deutsche Mark, which was, you know, next to God in the hearts of many Germans, to give it up in favor of the euro, to provide reassurance to Germany's neighbors that Germany genuinely was committed, in essence, to restricting its own sovereignty in the cause of a more unified and a more integrated Europe.

But giving up the Deutsche Mark and adopting the euro was surely key to putting Germany in the position it finds itself in today.

Yeah, in a way this is one of the ironies because the euro— this is certainly the French idea— the euro was meant to sort of bind Germany into European institutions in a way that would limit its power. But actually what ended up happening when the euro crisis erupted in 2010, by that point Germany was the undisputed economic leader of Europe. That meant that it was condemned to lead in that period, even though it didn't particularly want to. What it opted to do was was to impose a sort of German model on the rest of Europe. So countries that were in trouble with the markets— Greece most famously, first of all, but then several other countries in southern Europe— had to sign up to bailouts that obliged them to make drastic cuts to public spending, to sign up to all sorts of structural reform programs, and in essence to lose a lot of sovereignty over their ability to run their own governments. And so what ended up happening, at least in the eyes of some, was that a project, the euro, which was meant to bind Germany to Europe, ultimately ended up binding Europe to Germany, or at least binding parts of Europe to the German way of doing things.

But you say that Germany wasn't all that comfortable with that leadership role.

Yeah, so at the time there was a sort of debate that sprang up in think tank and journalistic circles over was Germany a hegemon in the way that sort of America had acted as a hegemon in the post-war era, establishing all sorts of institutions and arrangements that cemented its own power, but in a way that suited its long-term interest? Was Germany willing or able to do that? And the funny thing was, that debate didn't really take off in Germany itself, because Germans had no interest in thinking of themselves as a hegemon. They were very disappointed in what they perceived as the inability or the unwillingness of other countries to keep their budgets in order to reform their economies. But they certainly weren't interested in what you might see as enlightened self-interest, pushing forward long-term changes to the structure of the eurozone itself, or moving towards a fiscal union or a political union. That wasn't the sort of leadership role that Germans understood that they might want for themselves.

Do they want it now?

In a word, no. But I think Germans are slowly realizing that the world around them has changed, that some of the beliefs that they had after reunification, that history had ended and that the rest of the world was going to move towards liberal democracy and that multilateralism was going to be the order of the day, that some of those beliefs are no longer really credible when you're confronted by a troubled neighborhood all around Europe. You've got the growing menace of Chinese authoritarianism. You have Russia that presents an ongoing security threat. And of course, you have the unpredictability of the United States, whose security guarantee was a kind of condition for European unification. And so faced with all of these issues, the Germans, I think, are slowly beginning to realize that Europe does need to take more responsibility for itself. You have Emmanuel Macron in France who's been pushing this message very aggressively on Germans and others ever since he came to office a few years ago. And so this is starting to shift thinking in Germany a little bit.

In what way? How are German attitudes changing?

They're starting to realise that they have to spend more on defence, that they do need to have a more assertive foreign policy. They're also starting to realise that economics and trade has a geopolitical component, that if you build a gas pipeline to Russia, then you may be undermining the security and the interests of Eastern Europe, that if you allow China to build your telecoms networks, then you may be creating a security risk for yourself in the future and undermining the transatlantic relationship. These debates are just beginning in Germany. But of course, next year we have a general election. Angela Merkel is going to stand down. So we have an opportunity, if the Germans choose to take it, to really begin to have a much more serious fundamental debate about how Europe is going to reposition itself in a much more threatening world.

Tom, thank you very much for your time.

Great pleasure. Thanks, Jason.

A country manor, a wealthy widow, a mysterious suitor, and an untimely death. For such a troubling crime in such frightful circumstances, there's only one detective for the case. A funny little man obsessed with order, with a distinctive mustache.

So, Poirot first appeared 100 years ago this month in a book called The Mysterious Affair at Styles by an unknown author called Agatha Christie.

Lizzie Peat is a researcher at The Economist.

He is a retired Belgian policeman who has fled his war-torn home and has found himself washed up in a sleepy English village where he has quickly become embroiled in the murder of a wealthy, elderly, and recently widowed woman. Recently remarried lady. You've got all the classic ingredients for foul play, something dodgy going on. And pretty much straight away, we realize he's not your typical hero. He's quite sort of pompous, vain, and a bit annoying, to be honest. Has a lot of funny quirks. He's sort of obsessed with order. So if his boiled eggs come out unevenly sized, he complains. He'd grouch at the people that don't fold up their newspapers exactly symmetrically. So he's actually a bit of a pain, but over the course of the story and over the course of the next half century or so, the readers came to love him for it, really. His first rule going into any case is to avoid what he calls the red fish. Some of these involve false beard, a smashed coffee cup. One of his mantras is, "The simplest explanation is always the most likely." Often the most mundane details or clues are actually the most vital ones. Fire being laid on a hot summer's day, or a bath being run at a strange time, or a throwaway comment about a wasp sting. These small details that most of us would probably ignore, he often picks up on. And this case in particular as well, a strong knowledge of poison is essential, which Christie did also use quite often in her books because she had been a nurse during the war, so she had quite a good knowledge of chemicals and poisons. She did actually write several other detectives into her novels, probably most famously Miss Marple, who Poirot is often compared to, sort of the male version of. But I think Poirot connects with the reader a lot because they're both outsiders and they're both looking into a case, solving the same puzzles, having been given the same information. Miss Marple is similar. She's actually an older woman no one really expects anything of. She kind of uses her anonymity and slight sort of dull exterior to hide herself away and embed herself in a case. Whereas Poirot is much more of a showman. You'd probably prefer to hang out with him at a dinner party than Miss Marple. He also came to Britain at quite a strange time, as the country was rapidly urbanizing, rapidly modernizing, and there was a real sense of loss and disillusionment from the First World War. And so having a foreigner drop in and holding up a mirror to British society was just a really interesting, sort of quite new feature of any British novels. So I think readers at the time immediately connected with that and sort of noted it. He's also quite fun, like he's quite exotic, he has quite a fun life and has a lot of adventure. His journeys take him to the Nile in Egypt, and of course famously on the Orient Express. There's a real dose of glamour in a lot of the novels that he features in, which sort of provide an interesting contrast with the sort of quite dull, drab life in Britain at the time. And still to this day connects with people who always love a sense of adventure in the characters they follow. It's probably a dose of that glamour that Christie wrote into his life that did translate to screen so well. I mean, probably one of the most famous adaptations on screen was Albert Finney, who played him in Murder on the Orient Express in 1974.

I take a professional interest in crime.

I mean, it's a brilliant film. It's incredibly starry. It stars a cast including Lauren Bacall and Ingrid Bergman. But I mean, he's also by no means the only one that's played him. There's been Charles Laughton, Sir Peter Ustinov, but perhaps the yardstick actor who is most known for his portrayal is David Suchet, a British actor who played him on television between 1989 and 2013.

A little patience, mes amis, and Poirot, he will explain.

I mean, that normally goes down as the most accurate adaptation. Agatha Christie's own family chose him for the role. He continues to translate incredibly well onto screen and into film and television. Christie famously got very bored of him and killed him off in a novel written during the Second World War but published only in 1975 when she realized her own health was failing and she probably didn't have another book in her. The world was pretty devastated by this. The New York Times gave him a front-page obituary, which is almost unheard of. For a fictional character. But I mean, his books still fly off the shelves. There's a new film coming out this autumn directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh, Death on the Nile.

I am Detective Hercule Poirot, and I will deliver your killer.

And there's also a British novelist called Sophie Hannah who has resurrected him in a series of new stories. So I feel, despite Agatha Christie's best intentions, he seems to be going nowhere soon.

Lizzie Peat on Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot, who first appeared 100 years ago this month. That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating. On Apple Podcasts. And you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. See you back here on Monday.