The fall of former President Bashar Assad’s tyranny in Syria is a strategic victory for the United States and a defeat for the U.S.’s main enemies in the region, Iran and Russia. It was not a victory authored by President Joe Biden’s foreign policy but the direct result of Israel’s brave and legitimate response to Iran’s proxy war against the Middle East’s only democracy. Biden’s weak and clumsy policy in the region undermined Israel rather than supporting it as it should have.

Principal credit for Assad’s overthrow belongs to Syrians. In the end, it was an armed popular uprising of Syrian militias that captured cities and forced Assad to flee to his masters in Moscow. But the Syrian civil war has been raging for over a decade, and it wasn’t until Israel’s recent military actions that new conditions made it possible for the rebels to win.