A Clash of Foreign Policy Visions over Syria

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

 

The Trump administration is said to be riven by an internal debate over how the United States should approach the post-Assad regime in Syria. As the London-based, Saudi-owned outlet Al Majalla reported, the administration’s principals are divided into roughly two camps on the issue. One favors optimistic engagement with the new government. The other is more inclined to keep Damascus at arm’s length.

 

“Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and Director of Counter-terrorism Sebastian Gorka are members of the latter, which rejects any engagement with the new Syrian administration,” the magazine’s report read. “In the other camp are US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Central Intelligence Agency.” Both factions have ample evidence to support their conclusions, and neither should be entirely confident in its assessment of the nascent regime. It’s a thorny question that deserves and must receive due consideration.

 

Those in the Gabbard/Gorka camp are right to note that, on paper, the regime in Syria is a project of Sunni terrorists. The outfit that made the biggest contributions to the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime late last year, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), has been designated a foreign terrorist group both by the U.S. State Department and the United Nations. It is the successor to the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate with a history of horrific atrocities and a stated desire to export terrorism to the West.

 

Ten years before he was installed as Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa (aka Abu Mohammad al-Jolani) called for replacing the Baathist regime in Damascus with Islamic law and appeared hostile to the presence of ethnic and creedal minorities in his country. But the new Syrian leader has undergone a reputational makeover in recent years, even before the fall of the Assad regime. At least, that’s the version of himself he’s presenting to the West.

 

Talk is cheap, of course, and the new Syrian regime has been in place long enough for us to judge it by its actions. When it comes to the debate over Syria in Washington, both sides can support their respective conclusions.

 

For those in the pro-engagement camp, there are indications that the HTS-led regime is preferable to its Iran-aligned predecessor and that courting it might advance U.S. interests in the region. During the Assad years and under Hezbollah’s supervision, the Syria-Lebanon border became a major corridor for the transit of weapons and drugs, such as the stimulant Captagon, to Islamist militants. From the outset, the new regime cracked down on these networks, leading to violent clashes along the border between Iran-backed forces and the provisional government’s.

 

Last week, the HTS regime arrested two senior members of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad — a move that, the New York Times notes, was timed to coincide with Republican Congressman Cory Mills’s visit with Sharaa in Damascus. This might have been a display for the benefit of Western eyes, but it’s one Washington should welcome. After all, if Damascus is only “eager to get relief from the sanctions imposed on the ousted Assad dictatorship,” that would be a welcome behavioral shift. Indeed, compelling policy shifts like that are what sanctions are for.

 

In some ways, the regime seems to be willing to walk the walk. The new Syrian government is mounting a diplomatic offensive aimed at attracting foreign direct investment from both its Arab neighbors and Western interests. “We need an inclusive transition leading to a new constitution, free and fair elections, in a Syrian-led and Syrian-owned political process that will restore Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” the country’s U.N. envoy said in January.

 

That comment comports with some of the regime’s actions, including Sharaa’s high-profile visit to a Christian cathedral in the central Syrian city of Aleppo (which wasn’t the first time Syria’s new leader had courted Christians). The interim president and his government have made welcome noises signaling their openness to an egalitarian covenant with the country’s minorities, easing religious restrictions on women, and to the centrality of the rule of law following the ratification of a new constitution.

 

Maybe the new Syrian government is merely trying to lull the West into a false sense of security only to establish itself. Or perhaps the regime wants to lull the West into a real sense of security. Time will tell, but those in Washington who are skeptical of the Syrian government’s pivot have reason to doubt Damascus’s newfound commitment to Western values.

 

Perhaps it is too much to expect that a postrevolutionary regime in the Middle East will eschew sectarian violence and revenge killings, but the new Syrian government has presided over events that could only be described as atrocities. According to the Times, in March, militants and “foreign fighters linked to the government but not yet integrated into it” executed attacks in Assad regime strongholds along the Mediterranean coast in which “hundreds of civilians were killed in just several days.” The reprisals were reportedly a misdirected response to an ambush of government forces by Assad regime loyalists, but not all sectarian violence can be attributed to counterrevolutionary activity.

 

That same month, as part of the regime’s effort to pacify areas dominated by Assad’s Alawite minority, a fight between security forces and pro-Assad holdouts produced hundreds of casualties and allegedly claimed the lives of nearly 750 civilians. “The victims included women and children from the Alawite minority,” read a Reuters report, citing, but not independently verifying, a report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Nor are the country’s Christians satisfied with the regime’s conciliatory rhetoric. “We are entering a dangerous new phase,” one Assyrian Christian activist told Newsweek. He warned of “an escalating push toward hardline Islamic rule with crackdowns on alcohol sales and gender mixing.” Lurid tales of reprisals against Christians — in particular, the Kurdish Christians who so preoccupy the minds of HTS’s Turkish sponsors — abound.

 

The debate in Washington over whether to engage with or isolate the new Syria has high stakes. The Levant is home to some of the most fought-over soil in human history. U.S. forces have maintained a presence in Syria’s oil-rich west for ten years following the emergence of the ISIS caliphate. The strategic imperative to prevent Syria from once again becoming an Iranian vassal state and a network for terrorist activity is an Israeli objective as much as an American one. The U.S. does not want to see Syria become a host to terrorist elements, but nor can it cede that geography to Russian or Chinese interests — both of which are struggling to gain or maintain their presence in Syria.

 

So, who is winning the debate in D.C.? For now, the Trump administration seems to be leaning tentatively toward engagement. In a communiqué to the Syrian government in recent weeks, the administration threatened to take a “hard line” with the government if it did not crack down on extremists and take steps to verifiably secure Assad-era chemical weapons stockpiles. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the Trump administration’s failure to object to the continued presence of Russian naval assets at Syria’s ports does not suggest that the administration sees a potential to supplant an American adversary’s influence over Damascus. But the note could be interpreted as an olive branch so long as Damascus is willing to meet Washington’s demands. At least when it comes to the arrest of Palestinian terrorists, for example, it did just that.

 

The jury is out on whether Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff is right that Syria’s leader is “a different person than he once was.” Those who bank on engagement hope to guide the new regime toward a pro-Western orientation, which would no doubt be an improvement over a regime that aligned with Iran and sponsored terrorist attacks on the United States. Those who object to that course believe it’s a fool’s errand. America would only be squandering influence and capital on a lost cause, they fear. The faction that prevails could set the course of U.S. foreign policy in the region for decades.