As news began to spread Sunday of Bashar al-Assad’s fall from power, Syrian exiles began rejoicing all over the world.

On Augusta’s Sand Hill, where Muslim families have been relocating in recent years, pickup trucks and cars gathered in a parking lot sporting rebel flags on the roof, with fist-waving young men chanting joyfully.

A caravan of vehicles, lights flashing and horns honking, drove slowly up Northern Avenue, stopping where families gathered on second-floor porches to wave and shout in response.

It was a sight rarely seen in America, and probably never before in Maine. One who quickly saw the international significance was President Biden, who called it “a fundamental act of justice.”

Bashar al-Assad, like his father Hafez al-Assad, who took power through a military coup in 1971, had been tormenting and suppressing his own people for decades, much like tyrants around the Middle East and in Asia and Africa, producing turmoil and suffering throughout their lands.

The crackdown became particularly brutal in 2011, when the “Arab spring” inspired uprisings that in Syria led to civil war. Everyone assumed that the 13-year war would continue indefinitely until, 10 days earlier, a rebel offensive swept the country, with Assad’s soldiers abandoning their posts in droves and the dictator fleeing to Moscow.

Biden correctly observed that during his four years in office three U.S. adversaries — Syria and its historic patrons, Russian and Iran — have been dramatically weakened. Israel’s military juggernaut that followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack, however ruthless and needlessly destructive, has degraded the military capacity of Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Syria’s reprieve, which will see thousands and eventually millions of exiles returning from neighboring countries, is a moment to celebrate — for Americans and all those who aspire to freedom from tyranny.

That is not, of course, how these events were greeted in the established media. Rather than pause and savor the wonder of the moment, we were immediately ushered into clouds of uncertainty and doubt — as if anyone, including the Syrian opposition, could predict what will happen next.

It’s as if we’ve forgotten that this nation, too, was created through revolution, as 13 ill-organized colonies of Britain attempted to wrest themselves free of what was then the greatest empire of the day.

Authoritarian rhetoric of the recent presidential campaign and the lionizing of leaders like Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi seems to have blinded us to the reality that all people, all families and communities, want to live in peace, raise their children without fear, and create lives for themselves without excessive oversight by the State.

False gods like “illiberal democracy” and “state capitalism” are perceived to be ascendant, but the Syrian revolution suggests this may be overstated.

It was, after all, the Syrian civil war that drove millions out of the country and toward Europe, where Angela Merkel’s laudable but miscalculated pledge to accept a million migrants in Germany helped right-wing nationalist parties to power in Central Europe, Italy, and perhaps now France and Germany too.

Mass migration and the resistance to it have risen quickly but can subside where war and extreme violence diminish.

For the U.S., which has had many bad moments in this part of the world, including the unwarranted invasion of Iraq in 2003 and a two-decades-long, ultimately futile intervention in Afghanistan, Syria represents an opportunity.

That Assad fell so quickly does owe something to the “distraction” of Russia through the quagmire it created by invading Ukraine, and the multiple assaults by Israel on Iran and its allies — but the deeper cause was a dictator’s dependence on foreign troops to survive.

Former President Obama had no answers, unfortunately, when he declared at the outset of civil war that “Assad must go,” then established a “red line” against the gassing of civilians that, embarrassingly, Vladimir Putin offered to mediate after Assad ignored it.

Biden’s policies have redeemed that blunder and put the U.S. in a more favorable position, should the incoming administration chose to, or be capable of building on it.

Despite the complexities so insistently detailed in the news feeds, there’s also a simplicity to dilemmas like Syria’s. However necessary national governments are to contemporary life, they are only legitimate when they have the consent — willing or at least grudging — of the governed.

By that standard, in the U.S. consent remains and the rule of law, though shaken, persists.

Let’s remember the Syrian flags and the joy of those who waved them as we navigate what lies ahead — for their struggle is our own.