President Donald Trump landed in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday with a singular goal in mind: sign big, beautiful, bountiful deals with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) and entice business heavyweights in the Gulf region to invest billions in the United States. Even his own aides acknowledged that security issues wouldn’t be central to the president’s agenda.
According to the Trump administration, this is precisely what occurred during Trump’s four-day trip to the Middle East. A summary from the White House stated that the Saudis committed $600 billion in investments on everything from purchasing Boeing aircraft to funding AI data centers on U.S. soil. Qatar, meanwhile, agreed to strike economic deals worth more than $243 billion, with future pacts pending.
The roughly 30-minute sit-down, facilitated by MBS, went so well that Trump boasted about Sharaa to the press pool on Air Force One.
It turns out that was the boring part of the trip. Numbers can’t compete with photographs and grand pronouncements from the president at the podium — particularly if those moments have the potential to completely overhaul U.S. foreign policy.
Speaking to a roomful of Arab dignitaries, Trump proclaimed that long-standing U.S. sanctions on Syria, a U.S. adversary in the Middle East since the beginning of the Cold War, would be lifted. “I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump said, adding that the decision was made after consulting with MBS and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s their time to shine. We’re taking them all off.” The crowd was reportedly ecstatic at the news, and Trump basked in the approval.
The next day, Trump shook hands with Ahmad al-Sharaa, who spent his younger days fighting U.S. troops in Iraq during the U.S. occupation as a member of Al-Qaeda (he was jailed by the U.S. military for years). Now in a suit and tie, he spends time jetting across the region and meeting foreign dignitaries as Syria’s interim president after his militant group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, overthrow five decades of Assad family dictatorship last December.
The roughly 30-minute sit-down, facilitated by MBS, went so well that Trump boasted about Sharaa to the press pool on Air Force One, calling the Syrian rebel-turned-politician a tough guy and “a real leader” who had the ability to turn Syria around. And if that wasn’t enough news for the day, Trump later told a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council that Washington was exploring the possibility of normalizing relations with the new Syrian government. Such a shift in approach would overrule the administration’s more hard-line advisers who continue to doubt the sincerity of Sharaa’s personal transformation and have instead recommended a continuation of U.S. sanctions until Washington has a reason to relax them.
On the whole, the U.S. move wasn’t out of the ordinary. After Bashar al-Assad was deposed, the Biden administration quickly came around to the idea that U.S. policy became antiquated the moment there was a change of government in Damascus. The Biden State Department’s top official responsible for the Middle East met with Sharaa in the Syrian capital weeks later, and as a good will gesture dropped the $10 million U.S. bounty on his head. In January, the Biden administration issued a limited six-month wavier to the U.S. sanctions regime, with the goal of speeding up the provision of humanitarian assistance into Syria and facilitating payments related to energy transactions.
Even so, there was always a question of how the Trump administration would act once it inherited Biden’s Syria policy. During the first few months, the Trump administration essentially viewed the entire Syria portfolio with suspicion. Trump himself was never particularly enthralled with the country; in his first term, he described Syria as a land of sand and death and flirted with a full U.S. troop withdrawal multiple times. In the end, those withdrawals never happened. The Trump White House was also skeptical about the new Syrian authorities, and the list of demands the Americans handed over to the Syrians — arrest Palestinian militants on Syrian soil; expel foreign fighters; cooperate with international inspectors to eliminate Assad-era chemical weapons; distance itself fully from Iran; and allow the United States to continue striking terrorists there — was so long that it appeared Washington was just pressuring Sharaa to roll over.
Yet somewhere along the way, Trump had a change of heart. A full and complete lifting of U.S. sanctions, purportedly without any commitments made by the Syrian government, will cause plenty of consternation among national security hawks in Washington as well as in Israel, where Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views the post-Assad administration as no better, and maybe even worse, than Assad’s.
The Israel Defense Forces have bombed Syrian territory so many times since December that’s it difficult to keep an accurate tally; on May 1, Israeli planes struck close to the Syrian presidential palace in what was categorized as a warning to Sharaa about cracking down on the Druse in southern Syria. Netanyahu won’t be happy with Trump’s talk about normalizing relations with Sharaa — and depending on how hard Trump presses the issue, U.S.-Syria normalization could make future Israeli military strikes on Syrian soil difficult to sustain.
U.S.-Syria relations have historically been dominated by mutual antagonism and enmity.
Trump, however, isn’t the prime minister of Israel. He’s the president of the United States, which means U.S. interests are front-and-center. Israel can and likely will register its objections to the White House, but Trump has found an opportunity to wipe the slate clean.
U.S.-Syria relations have historically been dominated by mutual antagonism and enmity. During the Cold War, the Syrians were solidly in the Soviet camp and fought multiple wars against Israel, who turned to Washington for military, political and economic support. After the Cold War, Syria was a forward outpost for Iran, which turned the Arab country into a central node in its strategy to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon and increase Tehran’s deterrent power against Israel. Today, the picture couldn’t be more different; the Iranians are begging the new powers-that-be in Damascus for a working relationship, and the Russians, who supported Assad for a decade by leveling Syrian cities from the air, are trying to keep control of their military assets there.
Regardless of whether Trump decides to normalize ties with Syria, he would be wise to return to his core position: In the grand scheme, Syria means very little to the United States. While a successful and profitable Syria would be nice on a humanitarian level, it’s not necessary to defend core U.S. interests in the Middle East: ensure stable oil markets for the American consumer, defend itself against anti-U.S terrorists and maintain a balance of power between the region’s major states. Washington’s interests in the region were narrow when Syria wasn’t in America’s corner, and they will remain narrow if or when U.S.-Syria relations improve. Yet for Trump, bringing Syria into the U.S. column — or at least trying to — is too good of an opportunity to pass up. And if the effort proves successful, it could be downright historic.
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