U.S. plans for Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa are coming into view as he visits the White House on Monday. The United Nations and Britain have lifted sanctions against the former jihadi, and reports are swirling across the region about Syrian plans to offer an air base outside Damascus to the United States and a Trump Tower in the capital, showing Sharaa’s understanding of today’s Washington game. All signs point toward a U.S. vision of integrating the new Syria firmly into the Washington-led regional order—if he can deliver on consolidating a stable, and likely autocratic, regime and if Israel can be prevented from wrecking the entire gambit.
A jihadi-turned-statesman entering the White House as an honored guest is one of the most astounding recent developments anywhere in the world. Despite his sharply cut suits and savvy public relations campaign, Sharaa is still the same man who fought alongside Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq, stewed in the United States’ notorious Camp Bucca prison, and fashioned one of the most effective and deadly Syrian jihadi groups, Jubhat al-Nusra. To be sure, the experience of governing Idlib province for seven years clearly changed his approach to politics. He has surrounded himself with pragmatic technocrats, and he relentlessly keeps on message about the need for foreign investment and economic development. But it’s still worth acknowledging the surreal nature of Monday’s visit.
U.S. plans for Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa are coming into view as he visits the White House on Monday. The United Nations and Britain have lifted sanctions against the former jihadi, and reports are swirling across the region about Syrian plans to offer an air base outside Damascus to the United States and a Trump Tower in the capital, showing Sharaa’s understanding of today’s Washington game. All signs point toward a U.S. vision of integrating the new Syria firmly into the Washington-led regional order—if he can deliver on consolidating a stable, and likely autocratic, regime and if Israel can be prevented from wrecking the entire gambit.
A jihadi-turned-statesman entering the White House as an honored guest is one of the most astounding recent developments anywhere in the world. Despite his sharply cut suits and savvy public relations campaign, Sharaa is still the same man who fought alongside Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Iraq, stewed in the United States’ notorious Camp Bucca prison, and fashioned one of the most effective and deadly Syrian jihadi groups, Jubhat al-Nusra. To be sure, the experience of governing Idlib province for seven years clearly changed his approach to politics. He has surrounded himself with pragmatic technocrats, and he relentlessly keeps on message about the need for foreign investment and economic development. But it’s still worth acknowledging the surreal nature of Monday’s visit.
It’s the culmination of a yearlong process of global acceptance for Sharaa. He was feted in New York at the U.N. in September, where he addressed the General Assembly; shared a stage with retired Gen. David Petraeus, who led U.S. forces in Iraq; and met with a wide range of Trump administration officials. He enjoys strong support from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose forces protected the Idlib administration of Nusra successor Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and who provides significant support to the new Syrian leader. Jordan, to the south, is on board, if wary. Perhaps most interesting, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who introduced him to Trump in Riyadh in May, supports him despite Sharaa’s seemingly natural orientation toward the Qatar-Turkish side of regional politics. (The fiercely anti-Islamist United Arab Emirates is not a fan; nor is the Shiite leadership of Iraq, which has neither forgotten nor forgiven his role in the insurgency.)
Why so much regional and international support for the former jihadi? In part, regional leaders are simply weary of the long years of wars in Syria and want to see stability return to the Levant by any means possible. Syria’s neighbors such as Lebanon and Jordan want large numbers of refugees to return home to ease the economic burdens and appease local anti-immigrant sentiment. They need at least the semblance of stability to justify pressuring refugees to leave. Ideally, these displaced Syrians would feel confident and enthusiastic about a post-Assad Syria and would not need much urging to go home. More widely, Sharaa’s close ties to Erdogan—and his evident ability to win over Mohammed bin Salman—seem to have reassured most skeptics. And if Washington will co-sign, most see the benefits as worth the risks.
But there’s a larger vision than just stabilization in play. Washington and its regional allies see an opportunity to lock in place a favorable revision of the regional order by embedding post-Assad Syria firmly in their camp. For decades, Syria represented a key node in the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. It was more than the so-called land bridge for Iran to provide weapons and funds to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Along with Iranian-dominated Iraq and Houthi-dominated Yemen, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria made up Iran’s core regional alliance network. Moving Syria firmly into the pro-American camp, under any leadership, would thus be a major shift in the regional balance of power— depriving Iran of an ally while cementing U.S. alliances through the heart of the region. Opposing Iran will not be a stretch for Sharaa, given the anti-Shiite sectarianism prevalent in Sunni jihadi circles and his long years fighting against Iranian proxies in Iraq and Syria. Sharaa seems set to be given the chance that Egypt’s Mohamed Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, never really received after his election in 2012 to prove that an Islamist figure could be comfortably integrated into the U.S. order.
While there has been some enthusiasm for the idea that this realignment could entail bringing Syria into the Abraham Accords, at the moment that seems unlikely. Formally normalizing relations with Israel would be deeply unpopular with a Syrian public that is already grumbling about the new regime. And Sharaa’s key regional backers—Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia—have nothing invested in that Emirati-led process. But while Sharaa has little love for Israel and deep ideological grounds for hostility, he has signaled in every way he can that confrontation is not a priority. He needs investment and external support of all kinds and seems quite willing to play the time-honored Arab game of tacitly getting on with Israel.
This vision all rests on two assumptions, which will be severely tested in the coming months. First, it assumes that Sharaa can actually consolidate a functional state and a resilient regime. With these backers, the new Syria seems less likely to be either a jihadi haven or a democratic republic than to consolidate into a depressingly typical Arab authoritarian regime. That process is already fairly advanced. Syrians who cheered HTS for overthrowing Assad have watched over the last year as the new administration has centralized power. Many are troubled by the decision to limit transitional justice processes to former Assad regime officials rather than to seek justice for all (including their own) who committed war crimes. Others worry about the limited and carefully controlled nature of the recent elections and about the reported trajectory of constitutional reforms.
By far the greatest source of concern about the new administration has been this summer’s outbreak of extreme sectarian violence in Suweida, where local tension rapidly escalated into violent clashes and national trauma. Tribal forces supported by the new state streamed into Druze-dominated areas, resulting in mass bloodshed widely documented on social media. Extremist voices on both sides fanned the flames, with Druze figures calling for Israeli intervention and even secession to the outrage of many pro-regime and pro-unity Syrians. While the violence eventually calmed down, it left many Syrians on all sides deeply suspicious of the intentions of Sharaa’s government and critical of its methods.
Second, the vision of a stable if autocratic Syria assumes that Israel is on board, despite the strategy it has pursued over the last year. Israel has stood defiantly outside this U.S.-led support for Sharaa’s state-building efforts. Instead, Israel has taken advantage of the transitional moment to expand its territorial reach inside Syria, bombing alleged hostile targets at will and warning the Syrian government not to send troops into the south of the country. Extreme Israeli voices even called for humanitarian intervention to protect against a “genocide” of the Druze, a thinly veiled and deeply cynical pretext for Israeli permanent occupation or annexation of Syrian territory beyond the Golan Heights.
Israel’s ambitions in Syria and Lebanon—where it continues to threaten war if Hezbollah does not disarm, even as U.S. officials publicly back away from that goal—sharply clash with U.S. preferences. The Trump administration has worked closely with Israel on Gaza and Iran and remains broadly supportive of Israel. But in Syria, as with the reckless strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar, the country is racing toward open confrontation with its primary international backer. If the United States really does establish an air base in Damascus, it would quickly be forced to grapple with the fact that the most dangerous and destabilizing external threat to Syria currently is Israel. That makes Syria the unexpected leading edge of the little-noticed emerging divide in priorities between the United States and Israel, which could have wide-ranging implications for the regional order.
This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.
