A ceasefire finally silences the guns in Lebanon, as Syria's frozen war suddenly thaws

For the second time this year, this paper is watching an entrenched power that looked permanent crumble with astonishing speed. In the summer it was Bangladesh, where a government of fifteen years fell in weeks. This fortnight it is Syria, where a regime that had survived a decade of civil war, that had seemed, however brutally, to have won, suddenly lost its second city in days to an offensive nobody saw coming. And the two collapses, superficially unrelated, share a structure that is worth understanding, because it recurs throughout history and applies far beyond the fall of governments, to any power, any institution, any system that appears solid right up until the moment it does not.

Here is the pattern. A structure that looks strong, a regime, a company, a market position, is often not strong in the way it appears; it is propped, held up not by its own internal soundness but by external supports, alliances, dependencies, the distraction or the will of others. Assad's regime did not survive on its own strength; it survived because Russia and Iran propped it up, and it looked permanent only as long as they could and would keep doing so. This fortnight they could not, Russia bogged down in Ukraine, Iran reeling from Israel's blows to Hezbollah, and the moment the props weakened, the structure that had seemed solid for a decade turned out to be hollow, and it fell in a week. The strength was never in the thing itself. It was in the supports, and supports can be pulled away, suddenly, by events far from the thing they were holding up.

This is why these collapses are so fast and so surprising, and why the surprise is built into the situation. From the outside, and often from the inside, a propped structure is indistinguishable from a sound one; both look stable, both persist, both command the deference that stability earns. You cannot see, from the surface, whether a thing is standing on its own foundations or leaning on supports that could vanish, and so the collapse, when the supports go, appears to come from nowhere, a sudden implosion of something that seemed eternal the week before. But it did not come from nowhere. It came from the hollowness that was always there, hidden beneath a stability that was borrowed rather than owned, and that became visible only when the loan was called. The regime was rotting inside its propped shell the whole time; the world just could not see it until the props were pulled.

The lesson generalises to anything that looks solid, and it is one I apply constantly in my own domain of judging whether a system, a company, a technology position is as strong as it appears. Ask not whether it looks stable, because propped things look stable, but what is actually holding it up, and whether those supports are its own or borrowed, durable or contingent on someone else's continued will and capacity. A market leader propped by a temporary monopoly, a company propped by cheap money, a regime propped by foreign patrons, a technology propped by hype rather than profit, all look permanent, and all are one withdrawal of support away from the Syrian week. The most dangerous kind of strength is the borrowed kind that looks like the real kind, because it commands the same confidence and none of the same durability, and it fails not gradually but all at once, in the week the props are pulled, to the astonishment of everyone who mistook the shell for the structure.