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Yahoo
30-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's Syrian Outreach Turns an Enemy Into a Friend
Six months ago, U.S.-Syrian enmity seemed locked in for good. Congress was set to renew the Caesar Civilian Protection Act, a set of economic sanctions designed to weaken the government of Bashar al-Assad by preventing postwar reconstruction. And it was only the latest in a set of economic sanctions imposed in 1979, when the U.S. State Department declared Syria a state sponsor of terrorism. Even the revolution that overthrew Assad in December 2024 did not seem to change the trajectory. As rebels led by Ahmad al-Sharaa, then nicknamed Abu Mohammad al-Golani, advanced on Damascus, the Biden administration insisted that Golani and his men were also terrorists. Congress went ahead with the Caesar Act renewal, and hawkish factions in Washington prepared to put impossible conditions on sanctions relief. This week, however, the Trump administration seems to have let bygones be bygones. On Friday, the U.S. Department of the Treasury issued a three-page waiver lifting almost all economic sanctions on Syria unconditionally. On Wednesday, an American flag flew over Damascus for the first time in a decade as the Syrian government handed back the old U.S. ambassador's residence to Thomas Barrack, who serves as both U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Syria. Barrack said that President Donald Trump would soon be taking Syria off of the terrorism sponsors list, and claimed that the long-running Syrian-Israeli conflict is a "solvable problem," Reuters reported. "America's intent and the president's vision is that we have to give this young government a chance by not interfering, not demanding, by not giving conditions, by not imposing our culture on your culture," Barrack told the crowd at the residence. Later on his trip, Barrack followed up on the symbolism by signing off on a huge concrete investment: a $7 billion deal for a consortium of American, Turkish, and Qatari companies to build up Syrian electrical infrastructure. "Syria is OPEN FOR BUSINESS," Barrack declared on X. "Commerce not chaos!" It was the same tone Trump himself struck in Saudi Arabia earlier this month, where he denounced "so-called nation builders" who tried to impose their visions by force, bragged that "some of the closest friends of the United States of America are nations we fought wars against in generations past," and shook hands with Sharaa himself. Of course, a waiver isn't a permanent end to sanctions. The sanctions imposed by Congress have to be lifted by Congress. Earlier this month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that it should do exactly that. The administration could have taken a different approach. Sharaa had fought for Al Qaeda in the past, and Syria still has active territorial disputes with Israel, which captured the Golan Heights in a 1967 war and seized additional land after Assad fell. Some figures in the administration wanted to slow-roll sanctions relief as a way to keep the new Syrian government on its toes. But Rubio argued to Congress that keeping post-revolutionary Syria economically isolated could cause dangerous instability. By lifting almost all sanctions at once, the Trump administration demonstrated another foreign policy principle: You can just do things. Despite the bureaucratic tangle of sanctions, which some officials hinted would be a complicated process to undo, Trump simply waived them all with a short, simple declaration. And unlike the former Biden administration, which often complained that its hands were tied by hawkish Senate Democrats on foreign policy, Trump doesn't seem to be paying any political price for his outreach to Syria. A bigger test will be whether Trump can pull off the same maneuver with Iran, whose nuclear program he is currently negotiating to restrict. Sharaa won Syria a fresh start by overthrowing Assad. Iran, on the other hand, has a whole collection of ongoing, high-stakes disagreements with the U.S. And the U.S.-Iranian rivalry—which includes the 1979 embassy takeover and Iranian intervention in Iraq—has always been more emotionally charged than any U.S.-Syrian rivalry. Still, many of the same factors that led to "commerce not chaos" with Syria are aligned in favor of a deal with Iran. The Arab states now investing in Syria also want to do business with Iran without fear of U.S. sanctions, and have been reportedly lobbying Trump to deescalate that conflict. Trump himself seems pretty confident that a deal is around the corner—confident enough that he warned Israel not to attack Iran in the meantime. "I think we're going to see something very sensible," he told reporters at the White House on Wednesday. "That could change at any moment. It could change with a phone call. But right now, I think they want to make a deal, and if we make a deal, it would save a lot of lives." The post Trump's Syrian Outreach Turns an Enemy Into a Friend appeared first on
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Will Trump's Order To Lift U.S. Sanctions on Syria Be Followed?
President Donald Trump ordered something last week that previously seemed impossible: lifting U.S. economic sanctions. At a U.S.-Saudi investment forum in Riyadh, he declared that he was "ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness." Then he shook hands with Ahmad al-Sharaa, the new Syrian president, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Golani. As Trump alluded to in his speech, U.S. sanctions were imposed to put pressure on the previous government of Bashar Assad. When Sharaa overthrew Assad late last year, the embargo outlived its policy purpose. But the devil is in the details. Sanctions are a complicated bureaucratic knot to untangle. Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned on X that "people in [Trump's] own administration are trying to stop it or slow it down severely." And a Syrian government minister tells Reason that a U.S. delegation has come with a set of "requests" for Syria to fulfill. The Caesar Civilian Protection Act, passed after Assad had fought a civil war against rebels to a standstill, punishes foreign investment in reconstructing areas under the Syrian government's control. There is also a general U.S. trade embargo on Syria passed by executive order. And Sharaa himself is a designated terrorist because of his past fighting for Al Qaeda, which he later violently turned against. Turkey and the oil-rich Arab monarchies are keen to invest in Syria's postwar reconstruction without incurring U.S. sanctions. After Trump's announcement, a company in the United Arab Emirates signed an $800 million deal to develop Syrian ports. On Tuesday, the European Union lifted all remaining sanctions on Syria. Later that day, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified in favor of sanctions relief to Congress. Syria's neighbors "want to start helping them, and they can't, because they're afraid of our sanctions," he said. Rubio added that the administration can only issue temporary waivers, so permanent sanctions relief would require Congress to repeal the Caesar Act. As Rubio was speaking, Syrian Information Minister Hamza al-Mustafa was giving a speech at Oxford University about his lofty hopes for Syria's revolution. (One of them was abolishing his own job: "In a democratic country, you don't need a ministry of information.") In his speech, Mustafa alluded to "requests" recently brought to Syria by a U.S. delegation. "They sent their requests, 10 requests, for the Syrian government, especially about counterterrorism, how the Syrian government deals with minorities, and also the military existence [sic] in Syria," he explained to Reason after the event. "We sent our response. It's an ongoing process." On the military question, Mustafa clarified that the U.S. and Syria were discussing matters such as intelligence sharing and interactions with U.S. troops currently on the ground, but not a permanent U.S. military presence. He was ambiguous on whether these requests would get in the way of sanctions relief: "It's not 100 percent conditional." The U.S. State Department has not responded to a request for comment. After the Trump-Sharaa handshake, the White House stated that Trump had asked Sharaa to join the Abraham Accords, a U.S.-sponsored alliance between Israel and Arab states. Mustafa told the audience at Oxford, however, that the Abraham Accords were off the table for now. "Normalizing with Israel is not a part of the American requests sent to the Syrian government. Different delegations from the U.S., from Western countries, came to Syria and asked if you can join the Abraham Accords. The [Syrian] governmental response was also clear. The Abraham Accords are between [sic] a state, Israel, that doesn't occupy their countries," he said. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during a 1967 war and seized an additional buffer zone after Assad fell. The Israeli government has promised to stay for an "unlimited time" and threatened to push further in response to attacks on Syria's Druze minority, a religious community that has political sway within Israel. In indirect talks with Israel, the Syrian government is not demanding the Golan back, only a return to the pre-2024 front lines. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly asked Trump not to lift sanctions on Syria. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee argues that any change to the sanctions "must be based on a sustained demonstration of positive behavior from the new Syrian government." Factions within Washington itself have also tried to push Trump away from sanctions relief. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch (R–Idaho) said during a hearing last week that Trump lifted sanctions "a little more robustly than we had in mind. Nonetheless we're still in a wait and see, and those sanctions that were taken off, they can be put back on." Within the Trump administration itself, the loudest voices against engagement with the new Syria have reportedly been Sebastian Gorka, who runs counterterrorism at the White House's National Security Council, and Joel Rayburn, who has been appointed assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs. (Risch was speaking at Rayburn's confirmation hearing.) Rayburn has denounced Sharaa as "delusional" and a would-be "dictator," while Gorka has focused on Sharaa's past fighting for Al Qaeda. "Jihadis very rarely moderate, especially after they win," Gorka told an audience at the Politico Security Summit last week, adding that Trump's engagement with Sharaa is "not unconditional." Rubio, however, insists that integrating Syria back into the world economy is urgent to stabilize the country—and that the risks of isolation are greater than the risks of engagement. "The transitional authority figures, they didn't pass their background check with the FBI. They've got a tough history and one that we understand. But on the flip side of it is, if we engage them, it may work out, it may not work out. If we did not engage them, it was guaranteed not to work out," Rubio told Congress. "In fact, it is our assessment that frankly, the transitional authorities, given the challenges they are facing, are maybe weeks—not many months—away from potential collapse and a full-scale civil war of epic proportions." The post Will Trump's Order To Lift U.S. Sanctions on Syria Be Followed? appeared first on
