នៅស៊ីរី វាជា Trump ទល់នឹង Trump
Donald Trump wants to give Syria “a chance at greatness,” but his assault on U.S. foreign aid threatens to undo any progress achieved.
In the thorny debate over how to handle Syria, U.S. President Donald Trump has surprisingly emerged as a realist, a pragmatist, and a man of nuance. Since the December 2024 toppling of Syria’s Russian-backed dictator, Bashar al-Assad, the war-torn country is under radical Islamist leadership. In May, however, Trump took the lead in scrapping years-old sanctions, explaining that he wanted to offer Syrians a path to economic recovery.
Unfortunately, this pragmatic and stability-oriented policy is just half of the story. Trump’s legacy in Syria may be defined not by sanctions relief nor the reestablishment of diplomatic relations but a decision made much earlier that now reverberates through Syria’s humanitarian sector: the chaotic destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
“I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump told a surprised audience in Riyadh on May 13. He received standing ovations. Citing a personal appeal from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the president went on to shake the hand of Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander. The meeting went well, and Trump seemed to take a genuine liking to Sharaa: “Tough guy, very strong past,” he said, later musing: “Are you gonna put a choir boy in that position? I don’t think so. … It’s a nasty neighborhood.”
When Assad’s decades-old regime was unexpectedly brought down by Sharaa’s Islamist rebels in late 2024, U.S. and European sanctions on Syria should by rights have been lifted. The regime against which they had been imposed was gone, and sanctions relief seemed even more urgent given that Syria was now so economically depleted that it risked state collapse. But fears over Sharaa’s extremist background convinced Washington and its allies to keep many sanctions—and Syria continued to crumble.
Everything changed when, in May, Trump traveled to the Arabian Peninsula and was asked by the crown prince to please give the Syrians a break. Sure, he said—and just like that, Syria’s future changed. As several layers of American sanctions began to be peeled away, the Europeans followed by voiding their own economic restrictions.
Trump kept pushing. Next, he handed the Syria file to his real-estate buddy and Ankara ambassador Thomas Barrack, who promptly went to Damascus to hoist the star-spangled banner and continues to drive Syrian-American normalization forward at breakneck speed. Unlike the dysfunctional Syria policymaking of Trump’s first term, when he would regularly be misled by his own appointees, the administration now seems to be united and on-message. The other week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ripped off another Band-Aid by clearing Sharaa’s militant group of its terrorist designation.
The Trump administration’s enthusiastic embrace of Syria’s ex-jihadist ruler is neither uncontroversial nor risk-free. Sharaa is a man with much baggage, and Syria’s internal tensions are dangerously combustible, as seen in March when former rebels massacred minority Alawites. But it’s hard to conceive of another course of action that would not just make Syria’s internal problems worse.
The new U.S. policy is based on the very reasonable assumption that Sharaa is Syria’s best hope for stability, since he is the only game in town. And stability is needed to enable the other things the United States wants to see in Syria: reconstruction, refugee return, counterterrorism and nonproliferation cooperation, a smooth U.S. military disengagement, and some form of detente with Israel.
So credit where credit is due. Under Trump, the United States has, at least for now, rediscovered pragmatism and is trying to pull a key Arab nation back from the brink of state failure. The region will be better off if he can.
To succeed, however, Trump’s bet on Syrian stability must overcome the enormous obstacles created by Trump’s other policies.
After 14 years of conflict, Syria is desperately poor and fractured, teeming with unrest. The war saw large parts of Aleppo, Homs, and Raqqa be ground into rubble by shelling and airstrikes, and years later there has been no serious reconstruction. The power grid delivers a few hours of electricity per day, and infrastructure is crumbling. There is rising pollution, soil degradation, and deforestation, and disease spreads as water and irrigation systems fail. The United Nations estimates that two-thirds of the population will need foreign aid in 2025. Millions of refugees linger miserably around Syria’s borders, and although many dream of going home they have little to return to: no jobs, no schools, no hospitals, no homes. Making matters even more dire, Syria is suffering its worst drought in 60 years, and the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization has warned that 16 million people may be pushed into food insecurity.
If Sharaa’s fledgling government is to cope with these problems and the resulting social tensions, while also rebuilding the state and forming a chaotic mass of ex-rebels into a loyal army, it will need significant outside support. Indeed, Syria has depended on foreign aid for years. But in a cruel twist, its foreign helpers aren’t increasing their aid spending now that Syria needs it more than ever to cope with the aftershocks of regime change. To the contrary, Syria has seen much of its foreign assistance withdrawn, with devastating results.
Stingy and shortsighted European and Arab governments bear their share of responsibility, but the main culprit behind this tragic outcome is Syria’s would-be savior, Trump.
Trump has long been disdainful of foreign aid, but his decision upon taking office to immediately destroy America’s foreign aid agency, USAID, seems to owe more to theatrics than to ideology—an artifact of America’s culture wars. A traditional conservative president might have called for cuts and changes to the aid budget, but not Trump. Amid bizarre claims about USAID being a nest of “radical left lunatics,” he moved so rapidly and recklessly to destroy the American aid apparatus that researchers now say millions may die.
Until this spring, the United States was one of the leading humanitarian actors in Syria, overshadowed only by the European Union and its member states. Between 2012 and 2024, Washington provided more than $18 billion worth of assistance, helping millions of vulnerable Syrians survive one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. That aid also served U.S. strategy by sustaining infrastructure and institutions to avert Syria’s full collapse, and by shoring up regional partners overwhelmed by the refugee crisis, like Jordan and Lebanon.
Last year, USAID handled about a quarter of global assistance to Syrians. But beyond this the agency also played a vital role in providing leadership, niche capabilities, and expertise for the broader international effort. This winter, however, Trump tore all of that down to antagonize his domestic foes—and half a year later, the results are starting to show.
Across Syria, people are now rapidly losing access to food support, health care, and potable water, as defunded nongovernmental organizations fire staff and wrap up projects. Mercy Corps warned in February that it would stop clean-water deliveries to 118,000 Syrians, and Save the Children said it had closed 20 out of 50 nutrition programs in Syria, leaving more than 400,000 kids at risk of severe malnutrition. A report from Refugees International noted the loss of water, sanitation, and hygiene support for 1 million Syrians, and warned that these aid cuts may trigger new refugee waves as families scramble to survive. The funding cuts also hit projects designed to cultivate democracy and good governance, at the exact moment when they could have mattered. For example, support has been withdrawn from the popular online platform Verify-Sy, which weeds out disinformation from Syria’s toxic political environment, and Enab Baladi, an independent weekly battling for real journalism in a media landscape infested by partisanship and propaganda.
In Syria, then, it’s Trump vs. Trump. On the one hand, the U.S. president has shown himself willing to plot a pragmatic course, attempting to pull Syria back from the brink by assisting its new Islamist leader and ordering unprecedented sanctions relief. On the other hand, Trump’s reckless aid cuts have struck at the socioeconomic base of Syrian stability and domestic peace. In a country awash with arms and vendettas, the social malaise likely to follow from USAID’s destruction won’t just translate into human suffering—it could easily spark new cycles of violence and instability.
Trump’s true legacy in Syria remains to be seen: Will he be the man who gave it a chance at greatness, or the man who thwarted its post-Assad transition?
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