Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa met with President Donald Trump for nearly two hours in the Oval Office Monday, marking the first ever White House visit by a Syrian leader.
The only concrete change expected to emerge from the meeting will be Syria’s joining the Western coalition to fight ISIS. In a statement, Sharaa’s office said simply that he and Trump discussed ways to bolster U.S.-Syria relations and deal with regional and international problems. Trump, for his part, told reporters later in the day that the U.S. will “do everything we can to make Syria successful,” noting that he gets along well with Sharaa. “I have confidence that he’ll be able to do the job,” Trump added.
But perhaps more important than the details of the meeting was the fact that it happened at all — and that Trump was joined by nearly all of his top foreign policy aides, including Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine. Last week, Sharaa was still a designated terrorist in the eyes of the U.S. government. Now, Trump is hosting him in the White House as a legitimate national leader and a legitimate partner in the fight against terrorism.
For many analysts in Washington, this progress has been somewhat head-spinning. “This is the fastest normalization process that I’ve ever seen,” said Adam Weinstein, the deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, which publishes RS. “The embrace of Sharaa by the U.S. and the Europeans is sort of unprecedented, especially given his personal history.”
Last week, Trump officially removed Sharaa from a list of designated terrorists, and the U.S. led an effort at the United Nations Security Council to lift U.N. sanctions on Sharaa, making him a legally legitimate actor in the eyes of the West. But, even amid all of this progress, serious challenges still stand in the way of Sharaa’s efforts to reorient Syrian foreign policy and rebuild his shattered country.
The largest remaining obstacle in U.S.-Syria relations are the Caesar sanctions, a brutal set of economic restrictions that has stayed in place despite the fall of the Assad regime. Trump suspended these sanctions in May and reupped that suspension for an additional 180 days on Monday. But the Caesar Act remains on the books, meaning that a future president could theoretically reimpose the sanctions at a moment’s notice.
This looming threat has left many companies unwilling to invest in Syria, handicapping the country’s reconstruction during a fragile moment of transition, as RS detailed last month following a trip to the country. “If you really want to give the new government the best chance of success, remove all the sanctions,” Weinstein said.
Trump will have to prove that he and his envoy to Syria, Tom Barrack, can persuade a Republican-led Congress to give Sharaa a chance despite lawmakers’ concerns about the former al-Qaeda fighter. The Senate relented last month, passing a bill that would largely repeal the Caesar Act. But the House continues to hold out.
In this sense, Trump’s decision to host Sharaa has already started to pay off. Late Sunday night, the Syrian president met with Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and a vocal proponent of keeping sanctions in place. One analyst with direct knowledge of the conversation described it as “positive and constructive.”
Mast has yet to indicate a change in his view on sanctions, but he did signal a less combative view of Syria’s president. In a statement after the meeting, the lawmaker said he told Sharaa that they were “two former soldiers and two former enemies” and asked why he should reconcile with the new Syrian leader. According to Mast, Sharaa responded that he hopes to “liberate from the past and have a noble pursuit for his people and his country and to be a great ally to the United States of America.”
Perhaps helping Mast along is the fact that, under Sharaa, Syria’s interests have begun to overlap more closely with those of the U.S. Damascus is determined to defeat ISIS, which has attempted to assassinate Sharaa at least twice in recent months, Syrian officials told Reuters last week. To facilitate the anti-ISIS fight, the new Syrian leader is apparently willing to accept a continued U.S. military presence in the country, possibly including a new deployment of American forces to an airbase in Damascus.
Sharaa also aligns closely with the Trump administration on Iran, once a key supporter of the now-defunct Assad regime. In fact, Syria even shares this interest with Israel, which is determined to prevent Syria from returning to its previous role as a key meeting point and transport corridor between Iran and Hezbollah. “We have, as I mentioned, converging interests, as relates to Iran and the Iranian axis, and that provides a good platform for cooperation,” said Michael Herzog, who served as Israeli ambassador to the U.S. until earlier this year.
Unfortunately for Sharaa, the list of shared interests between Syria and Israel doesn’t extend far beyond the issue of Iran. Since the fall of Assad, Israeli forces have occupied parts of southern Syria and carried out a bombing campaign against military sites throughout the country. The new Syrian leader has made clear that he has no intention of attacking Israel, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remains unconvinced.
Still, Israeli officials have held direct talks with Sharaa’s government, and some pro-Israel analysts see a possibility of a U.S.-brokered security deal between the neighboring countries. “The U.S. is a key actor here, and it could bridge the gaps between the parties and basically provide the guarantees,” Herzog said during a panel discussion hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Herzog, who remains close to the Israeli security establishment, hopes that such a deal would mirror last year’s ceasefire with Lebanon, under which Israel formally agreed to end the war but informally agreed with the U.S. to retain “freedom of action” to carry out airstrikes against emerging threats. (One analyst called this approach a “lessfire.”)
Such an agreement would likely draw scrutiny within Syria, where many people remain skeptical of any dealings with Israel. But it could still prove attractive to Sharaa, who has no shortage of problems to solve as he attempts to hold his country together after 14 years of brutal war. Simply put, the Syrian leader has a strong incentive to continue building trust with the Trump administration, which can play a crucial role in fixing many of these problems.
Take, for example, Damascus' relationship with the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, which continue to hold much of Syria’s northeast despite the end of the civil war. The SDF has long held significant sway in the U.S., due in no small part to its strong relationships with members of Congress. And it remains skeptical of Sharaa’s government, particularly following massacres of minorities in coastal regions and the south. Some reports indicate that SDF leaders are simply hoping to wait for the government in Damascus to fall apart before reaching any final agreement with it.
But Barrack’s strong relationship with Sharaa’s government has limited the SDF’s influence over U.S. policy, and the Syrian government has every reason to ensure that these ties continue to blossom. And the SDF’s power could wane further if the U.S. moves some of its troops from northeast Syria to Damascus, a plan that may already be in motion, according to Reuters.
“The history of the U.S.-Kurdish partnership is leaving the Kurds out to dry periodically,” said Weinstein, adding that the SDF doesn’t appear to have “that much cache with Barrack.”
In this sense, Sharaa scored a major victory by simply meeting with Trump. The American leader is known to put a premium on personal relationships in his conduct of foreign policy. Sharaa and his team “know the importance of him coming to the U.S. and showing up at Trump’s door,” Weinstein said. “It has a lot of power.”
