Regime Change Has Its Perks

By Noah Rothman

Friday, May 08, 2026

 

Just 18 months ago, Syria, under the thumb of Bashar al-Assad’s despotic regime, represented an outsize threat to American national interests in the Middle East.

 

Assad’s criminal regime’s use of chemical weapons against civilians necessitated U.S. military intervention, if only to preserve the vital norm prohibiting the battlefield use of weapons of mass destruction. It incubated the Islamic State in a bid to present the West with a binary choice when contemplating intervention in the Syrian civil war: Assad or the Islamists. It was allied with America’s enemies: Russia, which maintained a naval presence at the Mediterranean port of Tartus, and Iran, whose terrorist proxies moved freely about the country and used Syria as a transit node for weapons and rockets bound for Hezbollah in Lebanon.

 

What a difference regime change makes.

 

Some in the West have wondered why those who reluctantly supported the deployment of U.S. troops to Eastern Syria under Barack Obama didn’t register their objections when the Trump administration announced its intention to withdraw those forces earlier this year. After all, the prospect of withdrawal (and the abandonment of the Kurdish forces in the region, who served as ground forces in the war against ISIS) yielded profound consternation during the first Trump administration and led Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to resign in protest.

 

The relative quiet is attributable to the dramatic change in the regional security environment precipitated by the collapse of the Assad regime. Not only has Ahmed al-Sharaa’s transitional government demonstrated the willingness and capability to prevent ISIS’s revivification, but it has also engaged in a normalization process with Syria’s Kurdish minority (among other minority groups), including “arrangements for civil and educational rights for the Kurdish community and guarantees the return of displaced persons to their homes,” one regional analyst observed.

 

That’s not the only way in which the al-Sharaa regime is demonstrating its support for Western security objectives.

 

This week, the Syrian government thwarted what was reportedly a sophisticated and advanced plot by elements of Iran-backed Hezbollah to throw the country back into chaos:

 

 

“Preliminary investigations revealed that the cell was planning ‘targeted assassinations against high-level government officials,’ the ministry statement said, adding that they seized military equipment, including explosive devices and RPG launchers,” Al Jazeera reported. This was, according to the astute Syria watcher Charles Lister, the “third serious Hezbollah plot foiled by Syria in recent weeks.” In a world in which Syria remained an Iranian satrap, Operation Epic Fury would have been a far more complicated affair.

 

Beyond American security imperatives, the new regime in Damascus is demonstrating how serious it is about reintegrating itself commercially with the West. It is shifting away from Ba’athist socialism to an open, market-oriented economy. It is inking major foreign direct investment deals with Gulf states and the regime’s Turkish sponsors. And Syria’s successes speak for themselves. After 15 years, for example, Mastercard — one of the world’s largest payment networks — is taking steps to allow international bank card transactions in Syria.

 

Progress does not follow a straight-line trajectory. Syria’s political evolution will come in fits and starts, and there is still plenty of sectarian violence inside the country that threatens to derail its transformation. But even though Syria is no liberal democracy, it is a far more pliant partner for the West than Bashar al-Assad ever was.