Will Trump’s Order To Lift U.S. Sanctions on Syria Be Followed?
President Donald Trump ordered something last week that previously seemed impossible: lifting U.S. economic sanctions. At a U.S.-Saudi investment forum in Riyadh, he declared that he was “ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness.” Then he shook hands with Ahmad al-Sharaa, the new Syrian president, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Golani.
As Trump alluded to in his speech, U.S. sanctions were imposed to put pressure on the previous government of Bashar Assad. When Sharaa overthrew Assad late last year, the embargo outlived its policy purpose.
But the devil is in the details. Sanctions are a complicated bureaucratic knot to untangle. Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned on X that “people in [Trump’s] own administration are trying to stop it or slow it down severely.” And a Syrian government minister tells Reason that a U.S. delegation has come with a set of “requests” for Syria to fulfill.
The Caesar Civilian Protection Act, passed after Assad had fought a civil war against rebels to a standstill, punishes foreign investment in reconstructing areas under the Syrian government’s control. There is also a general U.S. trade embargo on Syria passed by executive order. And Sharaa himself is a designated terrorist because of his past fighting for Al Qaeda, which he later violently turned against.
Turkey and the oil-rich Arab monarchies are keen to invest in Syria’s postwar reconstruction without incurring U.S. sanctions. After Trump’s announcement, a company in the United Arab Emirates signed an $800 million deal to develop Syrian ports.
On Tuesday, the European Union lifted all remaining sanctions on Syria. Later that day, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio testified in favor of sanctions relief to Congress. Syria’s neighbors “want to start helping them, and they can’t, because they’re afraid of our sanctions,” he said. Rubio added that the administration can only issue temporary waivers, so permanent sanctions relief would require Congress to repeal the Caesar Act.
As Rubio was speaking, Syrian Information Minister Hamza al-Mustafa was giving a speech at Oxford University about his lofty hopes for Syria’s revolution. (One of them was abolishing his own job: “In a democratic country, you don’t need a ministry of information.”) In his speech, Mustafa alluded to “requests” recently brought to Syria by a U.S. delegation.
“They sent their requests, 10 requests, for the Syrian government, especially about counterterrorism,
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