Syrian President Ahmed al-Shara’a, leader of the new transitional government in Damascus, is set to make a historic visit to Washington to meet with President Donald Trump on Monday. The state visit is a significant moment in the historically difficult relations between the two countries, marking a major shift from Washington’s adversarial relationship with former dictator Bashar al-Assad. While closer ties are welcome, the United States should avoid deeper military involvement in the conflict-scarred country, recognizing that economic and diplomatic tools are sufficient to achieve U.S. interests in Syria, including the country’s successful transition to a functional state.
The al-Shara’a-Trump meeting comes nearly one year after the collapse of the decades-old Assad family regime, which saw the former jihadist leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)—formerly aligned with Al-Qaeda—shed his past and claim leadership over Syria. The Trump administration quickly moved, following support from key Middle East countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, to support the new transitional authority, lifting sanctions and offering international legitimacy to the new rulers.
In parallel, Washington has moved to lower its military footprint in the country. Since coming into office, the Trump administration has withdrawn an estimated 1,000 troops from Syria. Further, the Pentagon has drawn up plans to remove all troops in a bid to transfer responsibility to a new, unified Syrian government. The goal is to provide intelligence support to Damascus, which—alongside the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—would take the lead on anti-ISIS missions as part of their duty to manage the country’s domestic security.
That approach is wise for multiple reasons. For one, Washington has no business in prolonging the U.S. troop deployment in Syria and has never done so legally—namely with the U.S. Congress passing an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Multiple administrations have relied on the faulty legal argument that because ISIS stems from al-Qaeda, the former 2001 AUMF targeting the latter can be extended to the former. Simply put, the American people have not had a fair say in the deployment of U.S. troops to a faraway country to fight ISIS.
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