View from USA: The new risks are huge with Assad gone

Celebrations broke out on Sunday after President Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria collapsed.
Photo: The New York Times

Washington awoke on Sunday morning to a new reality, notes ‘The New York Times’. It is perhaps the most momentous upheaval yet in the 14 months since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel unleashed a wave of violent retaliation that changed the region’s power dynamics.

Now, with Mr. al-Assad’s ouster, two urgent and related questions are circulating through Washington, just six weeks before the inauguration of President-elect Donald J. Trump for his second term — one in which the world looks dramatically different than when he left office just shy of four years ago.

First, will the rebels evict the Iranians and the Russians from Syrian territory, as some of their leaders have threatened? Or, out of pragmatism, will they seek some kind of accommodation with the two powers that helped kill them in a long civil war?

And will the Iranians — weakened by the loss of Hamas and Hezbollah, and now Mr. al-Assad — conclude that their best path is to open a new negotiation with Mr. Trump, only months after sending hit men to kill him? Or, alternatively, will they race for a nuclear bomb, the weapon some Iranians view as their last line of defense in a new era of vulnerability?

But where things go next may well determine whether Sunday represented a day of liberation and the start of a rebuilding — or the prelude to more military action.

Before the fall of Damascus, the leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the formerly Al Qaeda-linked rebel group (banned in Russia) that led the lightning strikes on Mr. Assad’s government, told a CNN interviewer that “the revolution has transitioned from chaos to a sense of order.”

But the leader, Mohammad al-Jolani, who is still sought by the United States as a terrorist, gave no indication of how the group might try to govern. “The most important thing is to build institutions,” he said, suggesting that he now wanted a society to which displaced Syrians would want to return and rebuild. “Not one where a single ruler makes arbitrary decisions.”

But it is one thing to celebrate the ouster of Mr. al-Assad, who Russian state television said arrived in Moscow on Sunday. It is another to manage the vacuum of power that follows — and to make sure that Syria becomes neither a terrorist state of a different kind nor a failed state, as Libya did after Muammar Gaddafi was deposed and killed 13 years ago.

President Biden acknowledged as much after declaring from the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Sunday afternoon that the “moment of opportunity” before the world was “also a moment of risk and uncertainty, as we all turn to the question of what comes next.”

“Make no mistake, some of the rebel groups that took down Assad have their own grim record of terrorism and human rights abuses,” he said. He noted that leaders like Mr. Jolani were “saying the right things now, but as they take on greater responsibility we will assess not just their words, but their actions.”

That assessment, though, will fall largely to Mr. Trump’s administration. And it will test the meaning of his social media postings claiming that the best strategy is for the United States to stay out.

Mr. Trump is unlikely to have that luxury. The United States already has a military force of 900 in eastern Syria, hunting down and striking ISIS forces (banned in Russia). And while Mr. Trump’s instinct in his first term was to pull out, he was persuaded by his military advisers that an American withdrawal from its Syrian base could cripple the effort to contain and defeat ISIS forces.

On Sunday, as Mr. al-Assad fled, the United States targeted gatherings of ISIS fighters, dropping bombs and missiles in a counterterrorism effort that officials said had no relation to the fall of Damascus. A senior administration official told reporters on Sunday that it was a “significant strike.”

But the bigger question is how the incoming president will deal with Iran. In recent weeks, he has expressed interest in a new negotiation with Tehran, six years after he terminated the 2015 nuclear deal with the country. The Iranians have shown some interest in engaging, as well — though it is not clear they are willing to give up the nuclear program in which they have invested so much in the past few years.

The risk is that Iran’s leaders could decide that the country is so weakened — its proxies crippled, its pathway to ship arms through Syria imperiled, its air defenses wiped out in recent Israeli strikes — that it needs a nuclear weapon more than ever.

Clearly, the Iranians were as stunned this weekend as everyone else. Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, appearing on state television, said Tehran had been caught off guard by the speed of events. “Nobody could believe this,” he said.

Iran is already closer to a nuclear weapon than at any point in the 20 years of Iran’s efforts to build its nuclear capabilities. On Friday, Rafael M. Grossi, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog, said that Iran had undergone a “dramatic acceleration” of its production of near bomb-grade uranium. It already has enough of a stockpile to build four bombs, though fashioning them into a warhead could take a year to 18 months. Mr. Grossi’s statement suggested that it was now moving at a pace that would enable the production of many more.

That could just be a bargaining ploy.

Whether that new insecurity leads them to negotiate their way out of a hole, or obtain the ultimate weapon of survival, is one of the many mysteries ahead.

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