THE DEATH OF SYRIAN president Hafiz al-Asad last June was the fourth death in sixteen months of an Arab head of state. This compact upheaval in the Middle Eastern political landscape has brought about a new crop of leaders, including King Mohammed VI in Morocco, King Abdullah in Jordan, and President Bashar al-Asad in Syria. Forecasters of regional chaos were proven wrong as these successors negotiated smooth transitions. All three were Western-schooled and young enough, unsullied enough, to be sworn in under the banner of reform: Freedom of press, countenance of political opposition, economic liberalization, and crackdowns on corruption were themes trumpeted from Rabat to Damascus. Some of these policies were initiated by the previous regime, but succession has changed the atmosphere. In the last year, democratic reforms have quietly taken root in these countries, and, particularly in Syria, they've already rearranged the landscape of Middle East political alliances.

Even in the Arab world, such restructuring has many precedents -- in Syria, for instance, it harks back to the so-called Corrective Movement of 1970 -- but today it's being pursued with a new seriousness. The first six months of Bashar al-Asad's rule in Syria have seen a breathless flurry of edicts and reforms. The command economy, in which forty percent of the budget goes to military spending, has been loosened by several decrees giving more scope to the private sector. The state's four-year monopoly on the banking system was ended in December, and three Lebanese banks have already set up shop in Damascus; the mining sector has been opened to private investors, and the creation of a stock exchange has been approved by the Ba'th Party.

In other cases, the new leniency is a matter of omission rather than fiat: When the committee of Friends of Civil Society, a salon of Syria's intellectual elite, openly criticized the state's one party system, its stifling of civil institutions, and censorship of the press, the government confined itself to a cautionary response in the official newspaper. The Committee's members have continued to give lectures and host debates unmolested. Since 1963, Syrian political life has been dominated by the Ba'th Party, which outlawed opposition groups and imposed an emergency martial law that has not been lifted in thirty-seven years. But this month, Riad Seif, a prominent MP, announced his intention to establish the Social Peace Party in anticipation of a law sanctioning the creation of new parties. In November, Bashar announced the release of six hundred political prisoners, the majority of them members of the Muslim Brotherhood (a group targeted by Hafiz in 1982 for mass slaughter) and less than a month later released fifty-four political prisoners to Lebanese authorities. The Syrian military presence in Lebanon has been openly debated in the Lebanese parliament, an argument unthinkable during Asad's rule. These are so many small steps, implemented in a spirit of experiment rather than complete conviction: If the al-Aqsa intifada were to escalate, or if there were a flare-up in the Shebaa Farms region, they would vanish without much trace.

Since the Geneva summit last March, when Bill Clinton failed to persuade Hafez al-Asad to give up claims on the Golan Heights's Lake Tiberius, Washington has washed its hands of Syria. Bashar al-Asad has made it clear that, whatever internal reforms he intends, he will not alter his father's policy on the Golan Heights. So the new American administration's Middle East policy has been confined to stock phrases about Israel and Palestine, and a commitment to re-energized sanctions and covert interventions in Iraq -- a strategy almost as farcical as it is tragic. But while the United States dithers between these anachronistic policies, the slowly liberalizing Arab states have been adapting to new political realities. In January, Damascus and Baghdad, historically suspicious of one another, agreed to the building of a new oil pipeline running from northern Iraq to the Syrian coast; they also announced the signing of a free-trade agreement. American isolationist hardball may yet drive these countries closer together, even as their political philosophies move father apart.