Will Trump's Order To Lift U.S. Sanctions on Syria Be Followed?

Reason heard from a minister in the new Syrian government about the Trump administration's outreach.

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."