Lots of people cheered. There’s little reason to.

On December 8, after almost 25 years of rule, and against all odds, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was deposed by a small army of Islamist rebels. Assad, a reportedly soft-spoken ophthalmologist, has taken refuge in Moscow.

Assad’s ouster brings to an end 54 years of dynastic, authoritarian, and exceptionally brutal rule. Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1971. Memories of his crackdown on grassroots opponents affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, back in February 1982, still linger on. As many as forty thousand people were massacred by Assad’s military in the central Syrian town of Hama. Bashar-the-son may have been more easy-going than dad, but Syrians are reportedly very happy to see him go.

As Assad’s tyranny fades (and the bodies of his opponents start to be dug up, reportedly in large numbers), far more powerful, arguably more brutal actors move in like wolves. The Turks, Russians, Saudis, French, British and, of course, the US and its conjoined twin, Israel, are now turning Assad’s downfall to maximum advantage.

Israel-USA and the Turks have been violating Syrian territory and airspace for years. With Assad ousted, Israel has now extended its unlawful seizure of Syrian Golan Heights land, and has announced an expansion of Jewish-only colonies, in flagrant breach of international law.

The nation with the most at stake as Syria’s ‘liberation’ is undermined — Israeli-colonized Palestine — has no leaders to stand up for its interests. All but annihilated in Gaza, and wherever else its leaders now shelter themselves, the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas — no friend of Bashir al-Assad — has applauded the dictator’s downfall.

The ultimate outcome of Bashar al-Assad’s downfall is anyone’s guess. Everyone’s got an informed hunch. One of them is Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs is an economist and public policy analyst, and the Director of Columbia’s Center for Sustainable Development. He’s the author of numerous books and articles about COVID, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s war on the Palestinian people, and the unconscionable and incompetent state of US public policy.

Read here and here and here.

Sachs’ most recent writing focuses on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grand strategy to depose regimes across the Middle East, North Africa and wider Southwest Asia — a strategy well received in the halls of neoliberal, permanently war-fighting power, over in Washington. The GPM reached Jeffrey Sachs in NYC.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Watch or complete conversation here:

In the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, and the decimation of Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Benjamin Netanyahu sets his sights on the last and biggest enemy state on this hit-list Jeffrey Sachs and others speak about – Iran.

Pressured by Netanyahu and deep-pocketed Zionists in Washington, the incoming Trump administration may well green-light a full scale assault on the Islamic Republic, perhaps even with nuclear weapons.

Israel, of course, is the only nuclear-armed state in the region.

A small player, by global standards. There are over 12,000 nuclear warheads on the planet, poised to be fired off at a moment’s notice, most of them in the possession of the Americans and the Russians. Once upon a time, back in the eighties, this was a subject of intense public and media debate. It isn’t anymore.

The global nuclear arsenal is a matter of huge concern for Ivana Nikolic Hughes.

Hughes is the Director of Frontiers of Science and Senior Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, in NYC. She’s also the President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and has carried out research on the long-term radiological contamination of the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific, where the US carried out 67 atomic and H-bomb tests between 1946 and 1958.

The GPM sat down with Ivana Nikolic Hughes in her office at Columbia University – a challenging campus to get into if you’re not a student or faculty member, in the wake of protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza. Our conversation went on for about an hour and a half. The first part will be posted in an upcoming GPM podcast.

Here’s the last half hour of our conversation with Ivana Nikolic Hughes, focusing on the long proposed but likely never-to-be-achieved Middle East Nuclear Free Zone, the Frontiers in Science program that Dr. Hughes teaches, the state of science awareness among her students, and the future of science-based policy under a Trump administration.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.