In a recent interview, President Donald Trump once again raised the idea of allowing Syria to intervene in Lebanon. He suggested that Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa might do a better job of managing the threat from Hezbollah than the Israelis, who currently occupy southern Lebanon: “He would go in and take care of Hezbollah and he’d do it in a different way. He wouldn’t knock down buildings, I hated to see buildings knocked down.” Trump later added: “I think he would be more precise [than Israel], yeah, and I can tell you, I know he’d like to do it.”
When Al-Sharaa was asked about the same issue at the recent NATO Summit in Turkey, however, he gave an unequivocal answer: “We are looking for economic channels between Lebanon and Syria, not military ones.” The divergence between the two views exposed a larger problem in Washington’s approach to post-Assad Syria. The United States is increasingly treating Damascus as though it has already become a stable regional power capable of helping solve its neighbors’ security crises. In reality, Syria is still struggling to become a functioning state.
Trump’s own Secretary of State seems to agree. On Wednesday, Marco Rubio struck a skeptical note on the idea of Syrian intervention against Hezbollah, saying Washington is encouraging Syria “to focus on its own internal challenges that it has.”
A Different Syria
Assad is gone, but Syria remains in transition. The prisons have opened, the statues have fallen, and a new government has taken office. Yet Syrian state institutions remain fragile –nowhere more so than in the military. “The Syrian military is quite chaotic,” says Dr. Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. “It was patched together by scores of different militias that helped overturn Assad, and its command and control is very weak.” That weakness has already shown itself in the central government’s response to rising regional violence. The army failed to contain militia massacres of Alawite and Druze civilians earlier this year, and it has struggled to fold Kurdish-led forces in the northeast into a unified command.
Lebanon, which is struggling to contain Iranian influence via its proxy Hezbollah, doesn’t need more outsiders barging in. And, crucially, Damascus has to first establish authority at home before it could even think of projecting power abroad.
This is the force President Trump suggested sending into Lebanon, a country where memories of the last Syrian deployment are still raw. In 1976. Syria under Hafez al-Assad sent troops to back Christian factions against the Palestine Liberation Organization and its allies, swelling to some 40,000 troops over nearly three decades. The Syrians withdrew in 2005 amid mass protests following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, a killing widely blamed on Syrian intelligence. Neither Syrians nor Lebanese are keen to repeat the experience. Lebanon, which is struggling to contain Iranian influence via its proxy Hezbollah, doesn’t need more outsiders barging in. And, crucially, Damascus has to first establish authority at home before it could even think of projecting power abroad.
That reality hasn’t been lost on Al-Sharaa, who – unlike Hafez al-Assad – has approached Lebanon from a fundamentally different premise. Al-Sharaa’s government has disrupted cross-border smuggling and publicly supported efforts to weaken Hezbollah’s military position, but those actions should not be mistaken for a willingness to wage Lebanon’s security battles. Al-Sharaa has consistently framed Syria’s role as diplomatic and economic, not military. Washington’s proposal confuses shared interests with state capacity.
“Syria has its hands full,” says Ambassador James Jeffrey, who coordinated State Department policy on the Syrian civil war. He notes that Al-Sharaa’s government is currently fighting remnants of ISIS, blocking Iranian weapons shipments bound for Hezbollah, and managing internal divisions while working out its policies toward powerful international players with their own inter. A government still rebuilding its own institutions cannot simultaneously become the guarantor of another country’s security, he notes. That argument points to what Syria’s primary task looks like right now. Its greatest challenge is not projecting power beyond its borders, but rebuilding a country devastated by more than a decade of war.
Transition Pains
Whether that transition succeeds will depend on whether the new government can revive the economy while avoiding the corruption that hollowed out the Syrian state under Assad. Economic recovery is inseparable from governance: Investors are unlikely to commit to Syria if they believe corruption will simply replace one form of authoritarianism with another.
Landis points to a familiar pattern: Al-Sharaa has elevated a small circle of longtime associates from his own rebel faction during the war into leading roles across state-linked business and reconstruction deals, with little independent scrutiny of how the money moves. “That’s going to be the big challenge for him – to get economic growth and not let corruption strangle him,” Landis says. “He has to win the confidence of foreign investors that they can invest with some kind of security, and that they can get their money out of the country without getting fleeced by these whales, the big business people who are close to the Sharaa regime.”
That same question –whether to extend trust without guarantees – now applies to Washington’s policy choices. President Trump’s recent decision to remove Syria from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list has important implications for reconstruction. Jeffrey draws a parallel, echoing Washington’s approach to Ukraine: setting maximalist asks to encourage progress. The real test, he argues, is whether Washington ties any single demand to consequences. By delisting Syria without conditions attached, he says, Washington chose to trust rather than pressure.
The question now is how the United States should use the leverage that decision created. Al-Sharaa wants Western engagement, sanctions relief, and international legitimacy. This gives Washington room to shape how Syria’s transition unfolds. Jeffrey points to concrete steps that the U.S. could take: opening an embassy in Damascus; offering intelligence sharing and military training; giving Syria a formal role in the international coalition against ISIS; and backing Damascus diplomatically in its disputes with Israel, Russia, and Turkey over their continued troop presence in the country. Each would strengthen the central government’s capacity without asking it to take on fights beyond its reach.
But such assistance matters only if Syria’s own institutions can absorb it. The country has taken its first steps in that direction, adopting a transitional constitution and seating a parliament whose powers remain undefined. This gives Washington and Europe a window of opportunity to press for institutions that outlast any one leader. A strong rule of law would also do more to protect Syria’s diverse communities than sectarian power-sharing arrangements. Minority protections are most durable when they are embedded in institutions that constrain state power, rather than dependent on the goodwill of whoever happens to govern.
Washington should judge Syria’s success not by whether it can project military power into Lebanon, but by whether it can build a government capable of governing Syria itself. A stable Syria will ultimately do more for Lebanon, and for regional security, than a fragile Syria asked to fight someone else’s war.
Jeffrey points to one early test case: the January 30 agreement between Damascus and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, reached after weeks of fighting in the northeast, which commits the government to integrating Kurdish forces into the national army and protecting Kurdish civil and educational rights. Ensuring that the deal is fully and fairly implemented, he says, will do more to strengthen Syria than any military favor it could do for its neighbors.
Washington can also help ensure the stability that Syria’s reconstruction depends on. This is especially urgent along Syria’s southern border, where continued Israeli military activity is undermining reconstruction and investor confidence. Landis identifies this as an immediate obstacle. “You don’t know where the borders of Israel really are,” he says. “That is something America has leverage over. It could stop Israel from expanding into Syria, and it should try to hammer out lasting agreements in both Lebanon and Syria, so that we get firm borders between those countries.”
Washington should judge Syria’s success not by whether it can project military power into Lebanon, but by whether it can build a government capable of governing Syria itself. A stable Syria will ultimately do more for Lebanon, and for regional security, than a fragile Syria asked to fight someone else’s war.
