The editors of MERIP, an online academic Middle East journal, believe the Syrian revolt caused an irrevocable regional transformation:
[T]he season of Arab revolt, including its Syrian phase, marks the end of an era. It is surely not authoritarianism per se that is disappearing in the Arab world, considering the Saudi quashing of the Bahraini rebellion, for example, or the worrisome signs coming from Egypt under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces there. But no longer is mass social mobilization against injustice absent from the regional stage. No longer can the will of the people be so blithely ignored. There will be no more hereditary transfers of presidential power in republics, and the notion of uncontested executive authority has been shaken to its core. Even monarchies now want to appear to be on the side of the people, as the Saudi, Kuwaiti and Bahraini royal families clearly do when they recall their envoys to Damascus (their ulterior motives notwithstanding). In Syria, no matter what the outcome of the uprising, there will be new checks and balances on the regime and its coercive apparatus, not because regime insiders will have become democrats, but because they will now fear the street. …. Politics, in short, has returned to the Arab world.
Shlomo Ben-Ami observes that the Syrian protest movement has already blown apart Turkey's attempt at rapprochement with Iran.
The Dish 