Trump Makes the Right Move on Syria

The Trump administration bandwagoning on Israel’s strikes against Iran appears to have had the entirely predictable effect of making Iran less diplomatically cooperative, which is not an altogether welcome development for people who would like to achieve some kind of quick, inexpensive, and relatively stable configuration in the Middle East. Hopefully it’s a passing phase; the U.S.–Iran talks in Oslo next week will begin to tell the tale.

More promising, however, is the White House’s termination of sanctions and related economic punishments on Syria, which was announced Monday. The sanctions were targeted at the government of Bashar al-Assad; that government was kicked to the curb in December, and the “reformed” Al Qaeda commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani—excuse me, Ahmed al-Sharaa—is leading a new state that, we are assured, will be very respectful of the rights of individual persons and minority populations. The Trump administration has accordingly lifted the sanctions.

This is a welcome change of pace; the American government usually doesn’t really understand how sanctions work. Sanctions are a diplomatic tool among others; ideally, they are acute and levied in response to a discrete behavior, and lifted when the behavior stops. In the U.S., they’re usually used as a gesture of “doing something” about people and places the American people—or at least, the folks at the State Department—are riled up about but where we don’t want to intervene militarily. The result is badly targeted sanctions that tend to become permanent. These do not actually change a discrete behavior, but they do give the target country’s political class an easy way to rally their people against the U.S., which is, after all, making them poorer. And sanctions long applied become part of the economic framework of a given state; indeed, in Iran, there is an entire parasite industry of sanctions-avoidance whose wealthy practitioners would be discomfited by a wholesale loosening of American sanctions. (One is reminded of how financial lawyers are incentivized to oppose deregulation in our own system.)

Sharaa has refashioned himself into a sort of Arabic Obama (down to the basketball), which would be more convincing if the militias under his notional control weren’t still slaughtering ethnic and religious minorities in sickening numbers. (As always in that part of the world, it is complicated—these groups include a large number of Assad dead-enders who have had an understandably hostile relationship with the new management. Violence and suspicion feed on themselves.) The new Syria is still not a terribly nice place, but giving it a chance to become something like a normal country is probably the best gamble.

Not least because it isn’t only about Syria. Sharaa came to power by strength of Turkish arms; at the same time, he’s playing a tricky game with Israel, which is not necessarily thrilled with the prospect of a consolidated Syrian state and is occupying territory deeper within Syrian borders than the usual Golan Heights campout. Sharaa seems willing to avoid antagonizing Israel—for example, by letting them use Syrian airspace for last month’s strikes on Iran, which did after all support the Assads he just chased out of the country. Nevertheless, he remains largely beholden to Turkey, which has already begun devoting resources to improving Syrian infrastructure. 

A workable arrangement in which Turkey and Israel share a client—much like their tacit cooperation in Azerbaijan, where both countries give material support to the admittedly heinous Aliyev regime to balance other regional rivals—seems a lot like a step toward regional peace. Turkey is understandably concerned about Israel’s regional aggression, and has preexisting security concerns in Syria because of the strength of that country’s PKK affiliates. Just as Mongolia served as a stabilizing buffer between the Soviet Union and China, Syria may be the key to stability in the northern Levant.

Stability is perhaps the preeminent American priority in the region. Open conflict between Turkey—an American treaty ally—and Israel would be an uncomfortable situation. We are, on paper, still attempting the ever-out-of-reach pivot to Asia, where our economic and hard-power interests and rivals lie. There is little reason for the U.S. in 2025 to maintain deployments in Syria; they are useful only for the interests of other countries, whether as functional hostages to hostile actors or to do the hard groundwork for our notional friends. (Really, what American interest is conceivably served by policing a Syria–Israel buffer zone?) 

Stepping away from Syria and giving normality a chance to break out is a long overdue step, and comes at a moment when the U.S. has rediscovered its appetite for messing around in the sandbox. But better late than never. Let’s hope it starts a trend.