With the shock overthrow of the Assad dynastic dictatorship that ruled Syria since 1971, new diplomatic opportunities are opening for the incoming administration. If President-elect Donald Trump is serious about his “ending forever wars” rhetoric, Syria offers him a chance to grab a low-hanging fruit.
Encouragingly, Trump himself seems to realize that. Commenting on Syria, he suggested that the events unfolding there are “not our fight”. He said that the “U.S. should have nothing to do with it (the situation in Syria). Let it play out. Do not get involved”.
The Vice-President-elect JD Vance echoed this sentiment. When the neoconservative Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin categorically declared that in Syria “Freedom won[;] Russia, Iran, Hezbollah and Assad lost,” Vance admitted that such comments “made him nervous because the last time this guy was celebrating events in Syria, we saw the mass slaughter of Christians and a refugee crisis that destabilized Europe”.
Trump-Vance’s prudence, as opposed to the wildly optimistic hawkish takes, is well advised. As Stimson Center’s Emma Ashford warned, “the track record of Arab Spring revolutions suggests a healthy amount of caution is warranted on where this is headed”.
That certainly applies to Syria. Assad’s regime was an odious tyranny even by Middle Eastern standards, and its collapse is unlamented. The leader of the Islamist terrorist opposition Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—formerly associated with Al-Qaeda—and the de facto new ruler of Syria is Ahmed al-Sharaa, more widely known as Mohammed al-Jolani, who is considered a terrorist by the U.S. and has a bounty of $10 million on his head. Since seizing power, he has embarked on a charm offensive promising an inclusive governance respectful of Syria’s ethnic and confessional diversity. Yet gruesome details of the extrajudicial executions of former regime officials and members of the Alawite religious group (to which the Assad clan happens to belong) are already emerging.
Hellbound and Down 