Damascus has agreed to surrender its Assad-era nuclear material to the custody of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
To hear Donald Trump’s more vehement critics on both the right and the left tell it, the president and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu move in lockstep — an assumption that speaks more about their hostility toward Israel than their powers of observation.
That supposed lockstep has not been true on a host of fronts. To take only one example, the U.S. and Israel have taken divergent approaches toward the post–Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. The skepticism that has prevailed in Jerusalem toward Ahmed al-Sharaa’s regime in Damascus, since the onetime al-Nusra militant captured the seat of Syrian government, has not been shared by Washington. The Trump administration remains undeterred in its efforts to usher al-Sharaa and his new Syrian regime in from the cold.
Toward that end, the Trump administration scored what looks like a coup this week. On Monday, Axios revealed that the U.S. and Israel (however reluctantly) negotiated a deal, in secret and over the course of a year, in which Damascus will surrender its Assad-era nuclear material to the custody of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Syrian government subsequently confirmed the report and pledged its commitment to cooperating with IAEA inspectors as well as other “friendly countries.”
“The agreement validates US President Donald Trump’s approach towards Syria and shows that his administration is utilizing close relations with Syria to neutralize a possible crisis,” the Jerusalem Post reported. The deal will relieve pressure on the Israeli regime to develop contingencies in the event that instability in Syria risks allowing its loose nuclear material to fall into the wrong hands.
In a separate but not unrelated development, Damascus announced this week that it had reached an agreement with Moscow “to take control of two Russian military bases,” as the Financial Times put it, “largely ending Moscow’s military presence in the country.
“The announcement appeared to mark a significant strategic blow for Russia,” the FT added. That’s putting it lightly. The surrender of the Russian navy’s foothold on the shores of the Mediterranean at Tartus has been something Vladimir Putin was not willing to trade away. Indeed, the potential threat to it during the Syrian Civil War arguably forced Moscow’s hand, compelling Russia’s military intervention in Syria both on Assad’s behalf and in defense of its own military outposts in the country.
The Kremlin insists there’s nothing to see here. What were once Russia’s military bases will be “transformed into joint training and qualification centers,” and Russian military personnel will preserve their modest footprint on Syrian soil. Thus the arrangement between the al-Shaara and Putin regimes isn’t a divorce agreement. Rather, it represents a commitment to strengthen bilateral ties.
Ahmed al-Sharaa inherited a nation that had for decades relied on access to Soviet and, later, Russian technology, markets, and imports. It would be “very painful for Syria to break that relationship completely,” said one regional analyst in a recent interview with Al Jazeera. As such, the new regime in Damascus has been cautious in its dealings with Moscow. Yet, as another informed observer remarked, the new deal reflects “Syria’s new leverage as sovereign gatekeeper rather than as Moscow’s client.”
Whatever the new regime’s demerits may be, the al-Sharaa regime is infinitely preferable to a brutal despot who deployed WMD against civilians, aligned himself with America’s enemies in Iran and Syria, and offered his country up as a conduit to execute terrorist attacks on U.S. soldiers and Israeli civilians. The Trump administration deserves credit for failing to make the perfect the enemy of the good in Syria. The risk it took in taking al-Sharaa’s overtures to the West at face value seems to be paying off.