The lacuna in the Levant is not necessarily good news for peace. Things tend to stop and go off the public radar for a bit when the largest wheels are turning. There was an odd silence between events in Sarajevo and the beginning of hostilities in ww1. I read a Whitehall memoir once that talked about how even foreign office civil servants thought that the lull meant that peace had a chance.
The democracy putting highly mercurial people in charge in order to make a political point would seem to raise a fundamental problem for democratic republics. #notexpert #wiseacring