In 2011, amid heightened anti-government protests in Libya, a Western intelligence official delivered a message to Moussa Koussa—a key security advisor to then-president Muammar Gaddafi: your leader must leave power if he wants to spare his country from further violence. Gaddafi chose to fight and ended up being savagely tortured and executed.
That same year, a very similar scenario played out in Syria. As anti-government protests swept the country, a Western official also met secretly in a European capital with an envoy of Bashar al-Assad, conveying an offer of resignation to initiate a political transition that would address protesters’ demands while preserving state institutions. Like Gaddafi, Assad similarly rejected the ultimatum.
At the end of 2013, further counsel arrived, this time from Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Assad was urged to surrender chemical weapons to stave off US strikes intended to accelerate the collapse of his regime. He agreed to trade his chemical arsenal for survival.
Unlike Gaddafi, Assad managed to endure due to the external help he received from Russia and Iran. And even when his regime fell in December 2024, Putin intervened again to spare him from a death akin to Gaddafi's. He is now living in exile in Russia, where Putin has promised to keep his word and protect him.
In Venezuela, Trump offered Nicolás Maduro to step down from power, and be exiled to Türkiye. Maduro also declined, and now the Venezuelan president sits in an American prison after he was snatched from his Caracas residence in a US military operation at the beginning of the year.
