Once again the international community has been stunned and surprised by the events in Syria that deposed and sent former President Bashar Assad and his family fleeing to Moscow. But what is new?

Consider how frequently geopolitics have surprised us — most notably the extraordinary dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Six months before Japan’s destruction of American battleships at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Hitler’s Blitzkrieg had roared into the Soviet Union. Stalin was reportedly so surprised that he was catatonic for days.

Years later, in 1979, former CIA Director Admiral Stansfield Turner asked how could anyone have predicted that an aged, exiled mullah living in Paris could return to Iran. Who predicted that after the U.S. and coalition withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 — an invasion itself provoked by the September 11th surprise attacks on the U.S. — the Afghan government would instantly collapse?

The unintended consequences of the Abraham Accords of rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia provoked Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 surprise attack catching the vaunted Israeli intelligence apparatus completely unaware, not unlike in the 1973 October War.

The latest surprise is the Syrian opposition’s offensive that........

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