The swift collapse of the Assad family’s 54-year dictatorship in Syria is a seminal moment in the country’s history and one of the biggest changes in the Middle East’s political architecture since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Bashar al-Assad, who inherited the Syrian presidency from his equally ruthless father, Hafez, in 2000, has fled to Moscow. But the country remains in a tug-of-war between competing foreign powers who have every intent of defending their respective interests, with Russia and Iran seeking to recover their losses while Turkey presses its advantage.
The United States, meanwhile, is taking a wait-and-see approach. Though American policymakers aren’t shedding any tears over Assad’s downfall, nobody is exactly jumping for joy, either. The Biden administration has pledged to help Syria rebuild its politics and unify its society, even as it insists that the nearly 1,000 U.S. troops deployed in the east will remain put. President-elect Donald Trump has taken a far more detached view of the situation: “In any event, Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
This isn’t the first time Trump has expressed his desire to minimize American involvement in Syria.
Some will inevitably jump on the president-elect’s remarks as naive or even coldhearted. New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, for example, argued that Assad’s fall gives the U.S. a golden opportunity to rewrite the Middle East’s security order to Washington’s advantage. Trump, however, is right to be extremely skeptical about America’s capacity to change things in Syria. Whether Trump’s administration will maintain that skepticism is another matter.
This isn’t the first time Trump has expressed his desire to minimize American involvement in Syria. While it’s true that Trump took military action against the Syrian government in 2017 and 2018 after the Assad regime used chemical weapons against its own people, it’s also true that Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of the country on multiple occasions. In December 2018, over the objections of his national security advisers, Trump announced on social media that Washington was finally getting out because the job of destroying the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate was complete. Nearly a year later, in October 2019, Trump declared his intention to leave yet again. “The United States was supposed to be in Syria for 30 days, that was many years ago,” he wrote on social media at the time. “We stayed and got deeper and deeper into battle with no aim in sight. ... We are 7000 miles away and will crush ISIS again if they come anywhere near us.”
And yet in both instances, the U.S. military stayed put after Trump’s advisers persuaded him to alter his plans. The first time, John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, dragged out the interagency review process, providing more time for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other administration officials to make their case about why Washington needed to remain involved in Syria. Much of it centered on preventing Iran from establishing transport corridors through Syria into Lebanon, which Tehran would use to bolster its proxy Hezbollah. Trump, whose maximum-pressure policy on Iran was in full swing at the time, was amenable to the argument. Bolton and Pompeo also got valuable assistance from Capitol Hill; in February 2019, the Senate passed an amendment to a broader Middle East policy bill that warned a “precipitous withdrawal” would undermine U.S. security.
In October 2019, Trump’s so-called withdrawal was really a redeployment to other areas of the country. About two weeks after declaring his intention to bring U.S. forces home, Trump reversed course yet again after talking with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and retired Gen. Jack Keane. Fighting ISIS, the original mission for the U.S. deployment in the first place, suddenly became a mission to, in Trump’s words, “secure the oil.” Four days later, Defense Secretary Mark Esper confirmed that U.S. forces were relocating from Syria’s northeastern border with Turkey to oil fields farther south in Deir ez-Zor. When Trump vacated the White House in January 2021, about 900 U.S. troops were still on the ground.
With Trump re-entering the White House in about six weeks, he gets a second bite of the apple. If he’s genuine about withdrawing U.S. forces from Syria and adopting a policy guided by realism rather than idealism, he needs to follow his instincts.
Syria isn’t all that important to U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East anyway.
Those instincts are sound for several reasons. First, the U.S. has very little leverage in Syria. Yes, there are still the hundreds of U.S. troops stationed in the east, but effective control of the country’s oil fields never moderated Assad’s behavior; instead, he was brutal and stubborn until the very end.
Second, a post-Assad Syria will be determined by the victors, not by an outside power with narrow interests. In Iraq, Libya and even Venezuela, the U.S. has demonstrated time and time again that its record in forging democracy in foreign countries is at best a costly wash and at worst counterproductive, generating more problems than it solves. It’s difficult to see how Washington would be any more successful in Syria, with multiple armed factions vying for their share of power.
Finally, it must be said that Syria isn’t all that important to U.S. grand strategy in the Middle East anyway. Core U.S. interests are limited in the region: prevent anti-U.S. terrorists from metastasizing to the point where the U.S. is directly threatened and ensure the free flow of oil on the global marketplace. Syria wasn’t a big producer of crude oil in the first place — at least relative to other Arab powers in the Persian Gulf — and any market turbulence produced after Assad’s fall was quickly contained. With respect to fighting terrorism, the U.S. doesn’t need endless ground deployments to do it. The U.S. counterterrorism community has shown that it can strike terrorist targets from afar when necessary. It’s also worth noting that despite their considerable differences, Syria’s other players all have reasons to prevent a resurgence of ISIS, a scenario that would compromise their own power.
Over the weeks and months to come, there will be a desire in Washington to meddle in Syria with the aim of crafting a new political order to our liking. Instead, Trump should follow his own advice.