Trump’s Stunning Syria Overture

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 14, 2025

 

Donald Trump’s first major trip abroad since retaking the oath of office may be remembered as a hinge moment and a seismic shift in Middle Eastern regional politics.

 

In a surprise announcement during a Tuesday speech in Saudi Arabia, the president revealed his intention to provide the post–Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria “a chance at greatness.” Toward that end, he would do what he could to withdraw all U.S. sanctions levied against the Assad regime in Damascus, some of which have been in place since 1979.

 

“There is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace,” Trump said to the applause of the delegates and business interests assembled in Riyadh. With that, Syria’s interim president, Ahmad al-Sharaa (formerly Abu Mohammad al-Jolani), himself made an appearance in Riyadh. There, the Syrian leader met with Trump and posed for a photograph alongside the president and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

 

The withdrawal of U.S. sanctions is a gift to the revolutionary regime in Syria, which has been lobbying the West for relief and foreign direct investment almost from the very moment Assad fled Damascus for exile in Russia. It will provide the new custodians of Syria’s future with breathing space to consolidate power. But the Trump administration has its demands. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, they are as follows:

 

1.      Sign onto the Abraham Accords with Israel.

 

2.      Tell all foreign terrorists to leave Syria.

 

3.      Deport Palestinian terrorists.

 

4.      Help the United States to prevent the resurgence of ISIS.

 

5.      Assume responsibility for ISIS detention centers in Northeast Syria.

 

These are all desirable objectives. Some items on this agenda, like deporting terrorist actors, Syria can and should do with relative alacrity. Normalizing relations with Israel and regaining military control over Syria’s ungoverned Eastern provinces will, however, require more time, resources, and a new political covenant in Damascus. Still, there is reason to hope that the new regime may soon become a genuine steward of Western interests.

 

There is still plenty of sectarian violence in the post-Assad Syria, but Sharaa’s interim government has made more than cosmetic efforts to ingratiate itself with Syria’s minorities — including its persecuted Christians and even the Alawite sect, from which the Assad clan hailed. His Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) militants and their Turkish sponsors have been reliably hostile toward the Iranian assets that took root in Syria under Assad’s patronage. As they sacked city after city, HTS also rolled up the Iranian networks that smuggled weapons into Lebanon for use against Israelis. Sharaa’s envoys to the West have been making all the right noises about the desirability of “a new constitution” and “free and fair elections.” And there have been confidence-building measures between the U.S. and the Syrian regime, including in Damascus’s acquiescence to a U.S. demand that the regime arrest two senior members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad ahead of Republican Representative Cory Mills’s sojourn to Syria’s capital city in April.

 

The new regime’s gestures justify the Trump administration’s cautious optimism, but not every Republican shares the president’s confidence. Senator Lindsey Graham, for example, urged the president to take a slower approach to engineering a thaw in relations with the new Syria. Only Congress can fully repeal the U.S. sanctions imposed on Damascus, he added, and lawmakers won’t do that absent proof that the Syrian regime no longer sponsors terrorism.

 

Graham’s concerns are likely to be shared by members of the Trump administration who are skeptical that HTS — a militant group sponsored by America’s unreliable allies in Ankara and which owes its origins to a hostile takeover of the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front — can ever be a true partner in peace. Indeed, even if Sharaa’s regime is sincere in its overtures to the West, the whole project may still come a cropper. After all, this is still Syria we’re talking about.

 

The problems of post-revolutionary governance in Syria are not going away. Indeed, as The Economist recently noted, they are becoming more acute:

 

In Homs and in Alawite-majority coastal areas, vigilante justice persists, driven in part by Sunnis frustrated by the government’s reluctance to prosecute figures from the Assad era. Efforts to weld Syria’s myriad militias into a national army have foundered. The issuance of ID documents has stalled. Civil registries outside Idlib have not reported births, deaths, or marriages since Mr Assad’s fall. The government seems loath to recruit minorities, particularly Alawites, into its new security institutions. Power is held tightly by a few men in Damascus; perhaps half a dozen people are making any big decisions.

 

As this report also observed, the “religious zealots” and “hardliners” in HTS are complicating matters for Syria’s interim president. When he called himself al-Jolani, he shared HTS’s official support for replacing the Assad regime’s Ba’athist ideology with a form of Sharia law — a goal Sharaa’s deputies haven’t abandoned. The harassment of Christians and Druze continues, and there have been reports of atrocities against women alleged to have violated Islamic modesty codes. This sort of thing has reportedly led skeptics of the new regime in Trump’s orbit — figures like National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard and Counterterrorism Director Sebastian Gorka — to recommend that the U.S. keep up the pressure on Damascus.

 

Their concerns are not unfounded. And yet, the president’s decision to side with those in his administration who counsel tentative engagement with the Syrian regime is a praiseworthy enterprise. If it succeeds, the benefits to the United States and the West would be immense.

 

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention — an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated the Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

 

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America — indeed, if it follows through with its democratic reforms, it may evolve from a “regime” into a “government.” If Damascus is willing to execute America’s security priorities in the region in exchange for commercial investment and cultural ties to the West, Washington should welcome and guide that transition.

 

Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.