Trump Is Quietly Expanding the U.S. Military Role in Syria and Gaza
The U.S. government is reportedly looking to put boots on the ground in Damascus to guard the border with Israel.
President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance came into the White House promising to take more of a backstage role in the Middle East. In a May 2025 speech, Trump railed against military interventionism and praised Arabs "developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way." A few months before, Vance had argued that U.S. support would help "Israel, with the Sunni nations," to "actually police their region of the world. That allows us to spend less time and less resources in the Middle East."
Nearly a year into the second Trump administration, it looks like Americans will be doing a lot of that policing themselves. The administration is pushing the United Nations to pass a two-year mandate for international peacekeepers in Gaza, to be overseen by a Board of Peace chaired by Trump himself. U.S. forces are already in Israel to monitor the ceasefire with Hamas, and the U.S. military seems to be getting a lot more directly involved in guarding the borders between Syria and Israel. Reuters reports that Americans have made several visits to an air base outside Damascus, the Syrian capital, in preparation "to use the base to help monitor a potential Israel-Syria agreement."
There are already around 1,500 American troops in Syria supporting Kurdish forces and other militias against the Islamic State group. But the U.S. government has always insisted that these forces were a temporary counterterrorism measure. In June 2025, U.S. Ambassador Thomas Barrack, the special envoy to Syria, announced that the U.S. military would consolidate its forces in Syria from eight bases to only one. Setting up a permanent peacekeeping force right outside Syria's capital would be a reversal of that policy.
Asked about the potential U.S. base, the U.S. State Department referred Reason to the Pentagon, which did not respond to a request for comment. The state-run Syrian Arab News Agency denied that the Reuters report was true without getting into specifics. Although Reuters complied with a U.S. government request not to name the base for security reasons, independent Syrian media has named Al-Seen Military Airport as a likely candidate.
In May 2025, Al-Seen was taken over by the 70th Division, a former Syrian rebel unit based out of the U.S. special operations base in Al Tanf. (That month, Syrian Information Minister Hamza al-Mustafa told Reason that the U.S. was not demanding a permanent military presence in the country.) U.S. Adm. Brad Cooper discussed the possibility of taking over the air base during a September 2025 meeting with Syrian officials in Damascus, according to Reuters. A delegation from the U.S.-led military coalition then visited Al-Seen in October 2025 "to assess its readiness," reports the Kurdish news site Xeber24.
Syria and Israel have had territorial disputes dating back decades. Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria during the Six Day War of 1967. During the Syrian revolution of 2024, the Israeli army seized an additional buffer zone in southern Syria. After forces loyal to the new Syrian government committed atrocities against the Druze minority, Israel demanded that the Syrian army stay out of the Druze homeland and began funding Druze militias.
The Trump administration has been urging the new government of Syria and Israel to make peace, starting with a security pact over the border and possibly moving on to full diplomatic relations. The two countries reportedly came close to a security agreement in September 2025—a U.S. official told The Times of Israel that they were "99% of the way there"—but the talks fell apart after Syria refused to let Israel open a "humanitarian corridor" to the Druze homeland. According to Reuters, the U.S. base outside Damascus would be used for "logistics, surveillance, refueling and humanitarian operations" in support of the truce.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military has already set up a similar surveillance base in the Israeli city of Kiryat Gat, which also hosts troops from nine other nations. American drones have been monitoring Gaza since the beginning of the war in October 2023. Although U.S. officials insisted that they were not involved in gathering targeting intelligence, and were only trying to locate hostages, former President Joe Biden later admitted that the U.S. military was directly involved in hunting Hamas leaders. Now, rather than choosing targets, U.S. forces are ostensibly watching for ceasefire violations.
Last week, the U.S. military published drone footage of "suspected Hamas operatives" robbing an aid truck. (Hamas claims that the looters were actually Palestinian gangs backed by Israel.) The United Nations says that aid looting has fallen from 80 percent of trucks over the summer to 5 percent of trucks after the ceasefire.
In theory, all sides have agreed that Hamas must disarm and hand over power to a new Palestinian ruling authority. Egypt has been hosting talks between Palestinian parties to form that government. Israel's Channel 12 reports that Israeli officials are unhappy with the U.S. plan to take parts of Gaza out of Israeli control and put them in the hands of foreign peacekeepers. The Times of Israel reports that Arab countries, on the other hand, are unhappy with a U.S. proposal to begin rebuilding only the half of Gaza currently under Israeli control.
The Trump administration has ensured that, no matter how these questions shake out, the U.S. will have a central role. Last month, Vance visited the U.S. base in Kiryat Gat and laid out his vision for the future peacekeeping force. It was a far cry from his earlier promise to let Israel and Sunni Muslim nations "police" the region themselves.
"The only real mediators are the United States of America and so that's the role that we're going to play. I think the American people should be proud, but they should know that they're not going to be no American boots on the ground in Gaza," the vice president told reporters, in an American base that did not exist a month before.
