Syria at a Crossroads
Syria’s location at the heart of the Levant and the Fertile Crescent has long made it a focal point of regional and international rivalries. This position has profoundly shaped its modern history and culminated in Assad’s fall on December 8, 2024, which triggered a regional recalibration. Iran repositioned itself after the decline of the Resistance Axis, while shifts in deterrence with Israel following the Twelve-Day War in June 2025 altered the regional balance. These shifts set the stage for new international approaches toward Damascus, linking Syria’s geopolitical weight to decisions on its future reintegration.
Against this backdrop, the U.S. announced the partial lifting of sanctions on Syria, brokered by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, marking the end of a sanctions regime that spanned more than four decades. Simultaneously, the European Union lifted nearly all economic sanctions in May 2025 while maintaining arms embargoes until mid-2026. The timing aligns with a pivotal shift in power within Damascus. It appears intended to open a new chapter with a country ravaged by Assad's legacy and weighed down by isolation.
To many observers, this moment signals the possible rebirth of Syria’s regional standing, a chance to reclaim centrality. Yet while poetry evokes nostalgia and aspiration, it cannot substitute for tangible institutional strength. Amid this opening, the stakes are numerous: economic, political, and symbolic. Syria, once a dynamic regional power in the Arab world, today faces a heavy legacy of institutional collapse, societal division, and a complex position under foreign influence.
Rebuilding Syria is not just about reconstruction; it is about forging a new regional role in an environment of escalating challenges and diminishing opportunities for independent positioning. This leads us to the critical question: “Can Syria translate the partial lifting of sanctions into a genuine recovery of regional influence, or will it remain constrained by external powers and internal authoritarianism?”
Syria’s Regional Re-entry
The process of reintegrating Syria into the regional order goes beyond a formal dimension to become a complex and multilayered matter, in which politics, economy, and strategy interconnect within an integrated framework of mutual influences. The stability of the state and its capacity to engage with its external environment have remained closely linked to the nature of its internal system – the post‑Assad regime – and to the major transformations continuously reshaping the region and the world, particularly in West Asia.
Pragmatism of America First
The American decision to lift sanctions on Syria comes at a critical juncture in international politics, revealing Washington’s desire to recalibrate its strategic priorities through a more realistic approach centered on "interest management." The return of Donald Trump to the White House has reaffirmed the “America First” doctrine, albeit in a more pragmatic form that prioritizes economic and strategic considerations over an excessive focus on values.
In this context, Trump's visit to Riyadh on May 13, 2025, was not merely ceremonial but represented a vision that sees the Gulf states as investment partners, not security burdens. His statements during the visit clearly reflect this perspective, especially in light of announced Saudi investments in the U.S. economy.
Syria is no longer seen as a direct threat to vital American interests but as a potential opportunity for re-engagement, aligned with Washington's interests in the region.
The rise of a new Syrian leadership, represented by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham leader/President Ahmed al-Sharaa, under the principle of “who liberates, decides,” provided a convenient justification for this shift. With Trump meeting al-Sharaa in Riyadh on May 14, 2025, it became clear that the U.S. administration seeks to redefine its relationship with Syria, attempting to reintegrate a shattered country into the regional stability equation. This is part of a broader deal aimed at capitalizing on the decline of Iranian influence and expanding the scope of the Abraham Accords.
Regional Pragmatism and the decline of Iran's proxies
Recent regional transformations have played a decisive role in reshaping the approaches of influential regional capitals toward the Syrian issue. This dynamic became most evident after the gradual erosion and eventual structural decline of what was once known as the “Axis of Resistance.” It unfolded through the weakening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Assad’s fall in December 2024, and the war with Iran.
These developments compelled Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha, and Ankara to reassess their strategic calculations and adopt a more pragmatic approach toward Damascus. Confronted with transnational threats and the risk of a dangerous geopolitical vacuum, it was no longer feasible to treat Syria as an “exceptional case” standing outside the Arab order.
Driven by a mixture of security imperatives and self-interest, these capitals engineered a diplomatic track designed to pressure Washington. The rationale was straightforward: maintaining sanctions would not lead to a settlement. Still, it would instead prolong Syria’s limbo as a “non-state,” while simultaneously granting Tehran renewed opportunities to rebuild influence through the Syrian gateway.The push to lift sanctions is therefore not simply a political preference but a security and strategic necessity, aimed at creating a more stable – if paradoxical – regional order.
A) Limits of the U.S. Sanctions Shift
This calculation soon translated into concrete measures in Washington. On June 30, 2025, President Donald Trump issued Executive Order No. 14312, “Providing for the Revocation of Syria Sanctions.” The order terminated the national emergency with respect to Syria and revoked six previous executive orders that had formed the backbone of U.S. sanctions policy. Yet this revocation did not lift individual sanctions on Bashar al-Assad, his close associates, or those accused of gross human rights violations and Captagon smuggling.
These moves built on earlier preparatory steps. On May 23, 2025, the State Department issued a 180-day general license easing parts of the Caesar Act’s secondary sanctions, followed by General License No. 25 authorizing numerous previously prohibited economic transactions.
The most prominent initiative so far is the Syria Sanctions Accountability Act of 2025, which aims to modernize the sanctions framework by adding compliance and anti-money-laundering reviews, while also setting behavioral benchmarks for the Syrian government as prerequisites. Though promising, the bill remains at an early stage in Congress and requires further deliberations before any final passage.
The tension between external shifts and Syria’s internal reality exposes the fragility of the current moment. While Washington frames its temporary economic opening as a path to stability, Syria’s deep-rooted crises persist. Recurrent violence in marginalized provinces highlights the state’s limited control and the enduring volatility of its social fabric, even as external actors promote normalization.
B) Authoritarian Continuity and Strategic Tutelage
Ahmed al-Sharaa's rise to power reinforced a fundamental contradiction between internal repression and external dependency. His ascent was not a balanced transition from armed action to political leadership but the consolidation of a power structure shaped overwhelmingly by external demands.
Domestically, al-Sharaa moved swiftly to entrench an authoritarian framework. This began with the Syrian Constitutional Declaration, which institutionalized unchecked presidential powers. This legal consolidation was immediately followed by a campaign of strategic violence designed to fragment Syrian society and suppress dissent.
The sequence of events reveals a deliberate pattern: first in the March 2025 coastal massacre; then the June 2025 bombing of St. Elias Church in Damascus; and culminating in the July 2025 Sweida massacres.
At this juncture, even international observers began to register concern over al-Sharaa’s trajectory. In its August 2025 leader, The Economist described his rule as marked by “creeping authoritarianism,” with power increasingly concentrated in the hands of a narrow Sunni loyalist circle and minorities sidelined. The magazine argued that his failure to prevent atrocities in Latakia and Sweida, coupled with his unwillingness to open genuine constitutional reform, risks turning Syria’s fragile transition into yet another cycle of repression. Notably, it presented the emergence of a coordinated civil opposition not as a destabilizing force but as a potential stabilizer capable of preventing renewed descent into civil war.
Parallel to this political repression is a systematic centralization of economic power. On July 9, 2025, a decree established the “Sovereign Fund,” a state fund reporting solely to the Presidency. While presented as a tool for efficient resource management, in practice, it centralized economic authority in the hands of the presidency, bypassing legislative and ministerial oversight and mirroring long-standing patterns of resource capture.
A World Bank report issued just days earlier contextualized this move, highlighting that 77% of Syria's population lives under the control of the new regime dominated by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and its allies, who command 64% of economic activity and 11% of oil production – figures remarkably similar to those during Assad’s era. The fund's lack of transparency reinforced fears of exploitation, undermining the principle of public ownership over national resources and demonstrating that continuity, rather than transformation, defines the economic sphere.
It was from this position of internal control and socioeconomic fragility that al-Sharaa navigated the external landscape. His meeting with Trump, where he was pressed to normalize ties with Israel, expel foreign fighters, deport Palestinians labeled as terrorists, and take full responsibility for ISIS detention centers, epitomized this dynamic. This situation precisely embodies the structural realist analysis of theorists like John Mearsheimer, where the autonomy of weaker states is subordinated to the strategic imperatives of great powers. The American pressure to meet Israeli demands does not reflect a pursuit of regional stability but rather serves what Mearsheimer identifies as Israel's core strategy: ensuring its security by weakening and fracturing its neighbors.
A web of competing regional agendas compounded this external pressure as the initial “honeymoon phase” of alignment gave way to a struggle among patrons: France sponsoring Kurdish and Druze decentralization tracks, Turkey blocking them, and Israel advancing its own security demands in the south. Damascus's renewed outreach to Moscow, signaled by high-level visits to the Kremlin, was less a return of sovereign agency than a search for an eastern counterweight to the intense Western pressure that followed the massacres.
This interplay between internal fragility and external maneuvering has pushed Syria into a model of strategic tutelage. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio's May 2025 remarks, noting Damascus's request for American support in “achieving stability,” can be read as a sign of this entry. Under this model, sovereignty is redefined from beyond Syria's borders through soft but binding conditions. Secret talks on normalization with Israel, confirmed by National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi, further illustratethis, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framing the recent war with Iran as an opportunity to expand “peace agreements.” Proposals include transforming the occupied Golan Heights into a “peace park,” while Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar insists it must remain “in our hands.”
The post-sanctions opening in Syria masks its deeper fragility: institutions remain weak, legal frameworks are dysfunctional, and reforms remain mostly symbolic. While ports, agriculture, industry, and energy hold potential, realizing it requires transparency and political conditions that do not yet exist. Reconstruction benefits are likely to favor external actors like Gulf states, aligning with Washington, while Russia retains military influence but limited economic capacity. This is not unprecedented: Cuba’s partial U.S. embargo lift and Myanmar’s reimposed sanctions after a coup demonstrate how fragile openings remain amid political uncertainty.
The partial lifting of sanctions on Syria does not signal a true return to regional influence but highlights a fragile balance between a troubled domestic reality and external pressures. A regime built on repression and violence cannot transform into a credible partner without repeating authoritarian patterns. Even post-Assad, figures like Ahmed al-Sharaa risk perpetuating the system. Genuine reintegration depends on the Syrian people overcoming authoritarian legacies, linking reconstruction with reconciliation and democratic opening. Without this, Syria remains trapped between the ruins of its violent past and a stagnant present.