US's recent weakness does not mean the end of US hegemony in the world. The US will  remain a global superpower economically, militarily, and politically for tens of decades to come. However, it is no more an absolute power, which means a qualitative decline in its position and role in the global arena. Post-Crimea Russia also took an important step towards elimination of a unipolar system.  

 

Syria's will go down in history as a place of a major shift from one global system to another. It will be in the same historical rank as Korea and Yugoslavia. Korean war in 1950 was a turning point from the “alliance against fascism” to a bipolar system split by the Cold War and wars that depicted it: in Vietnam, Cuba and the Middle East. Later the Yugoslav crisis in the 1990s caused a shift from a bipolar to a unipolar system, where the US became the absolute world power, dominating the globe to such extent as destroying Iraq in 2013, and later expanding “NATO” collective defense from Nuremberg in Germany to a line close to Russia at the eastern borders of three Baltic states — Poland, Romania and Bulgaria.

 

Situation in Syria creates another historical precedent for a global power shift. There is a fundamental difference between the current Syrian crisis and Korean war, and later Yugoslav wars of the last century.  In order to correctly evaluate and understand the real players of the new system, one needs to apply comparative method. 

 

In the both cases of Korea and Yugoslavia, the state collapsed from the very beginning; hence the two nations in their different wars became victims of balance between super powers, where as a result Korea split up and Yugoslavia's constituent republics broke up – all that at the expense of two nations. Syrian state, unlike Korea and Yugoslavia, endured with of all of its institutions, especially the most important ones in the time of war – the military and the armed forces, and support of its people. Therefore, Syria is the key to formulating the implications of the collapse of an old regime and creation of a new system in the region.

 

Syria becomes a strategic place, where the foundation of new world order was laid out by Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile Syrian struggle will not be on its own expense, but is the price it has to pay for a long term and strategic victory.