Despite the president’s desire to pull back from the Middle East, dealing with Damascus could be his first big strategic test.

The truck attack in New Orleans on Jan. 1, in which 15 people were killed and more than 50 injured, has raised new worries about transnational jihadist extremism. The man whom the FBI has identified as the perpetrator, a U.S. citizen named Shamsud-Din Jabbar, appears to have been a lone-wolf operator, inspired by the Islamic State and motivated in part by Israel’s conduct in the Israel-Hamas war. It was entirely predictable that harsh treatment of Palestinians at the hands of a U.S. ally—a central al Qaeda grievance—would reinvigorate jihadi terrorism targeting the United States. In this light, the attack could be part of a nascent resurgence, albeit one using trucks as bludgeons rather than airplanes as cruise missiles.

This possibility arises at an especially awkward time for the United States. Domestically, the transition from President Joe Biden to President Donald Trump, which Trump intends to be politically radical and structural in scope, is likely to purge key foreign-policy agencies of many of their most experienced and capable personnel. This will inevitably hinder responsiveness.

Internationally, Syria—where the Islamic State is still present—is in a delicate state following the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad by a coalition headed by the Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS). The Trump team is likely to consider the China and Ukraine challenges paramount and could well be inclined to sideline Syria, if not ignore it entirely.

Though Islamist, HTS has sought to distance itself from al Qaeda, with which earlier incarnations of the group were affiliated, and did not regulate conduct as unforgivingly and brutally as the Taliban and the Islamic State when it essentially ruled part of Idlib province starting in 2017. The group did enforce some conservative Islamic policies, such as banning alcohol and segregating schools according to gender, but it refrained from fielding morality police, allowed people to smoke, and permitted men and women to mingle in public.

HTS’s head and Syria’s new leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, has issued general reassurances of his intent to disband armed groups, form a single national army, and consensually establish a government. He is hoping that the United States, having relaxed some restrictions on transactions with Syrian government entities now controlled by HTS and dropped the $10 million bounty on al-Sharaa, will exclude the group from the State Department’s list of proscribed terrorist groups. The European Union and France have cautiously begun to ease sanctions on HTS, though the United States still appears reluctant to do so.

It remains uncertain whether Sharaa will seek to accommodate or suppress the Islamic State. The key variable is likely to be HTS’s capability—lethal terrorist car bombings in northern Syria over the past week attest to the security challenge facing the new government—rather than a lingering attachment to jihadism. In the interim, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkey could take the lead against the Islamic State in Syria.

If the Islamic State is unable to gain traction in Syria, it may still have leeway to harness Gaza-driven anger and ramp up its transnational operations, as it did a decade ago, to perpetuate the global jihadi confrontation of the West that began in earnest on 9/11 and was extended through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In that event, even if Syria is not currently a priority, significant friction on the issue could arise within the Trump administration.

During his first term, senior officials reined in Trump’s attempt to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria that were essential to helping local Syrian allies contain the Islamic State. Commentators have observed that Trump now has fewer guardrails—and, burned once by the supposed adults in the room, is not inclined to appoint people who might inhibit his freedom of action.

While some appointments and nominees to his national security team are notably dubious in terms of qualifications and experience, in policy substance, most are quite conventional: Marco Rubio, Pete Hegseth, John Ratcliffe, Elise Stefanik, and Tulsi Gabbard all enthusiastically supported the so-called global war on terror. Notwithstanding protestations of “America First”—or perhaps in sync with them—they could feel compelled to reprise some version of old counterterrorism efforts—particularly if any major terrorist attacks occurred on U.S. territory.

Trump’s subcabinet and staff appointments, especially at the National Security Council (NSC), also suggest a potential clash with the president’s apparent desire to pull back from the region.

The president has designated Mike Waltz as his national security advisor. Waltz is a decorated Special Forces veteran, worked as an advisor at the Defense Department and the White House during the George W. Bush administration—including as then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s counterterrorism advisor—and vehemently denounced the Biden administration’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Andrew Peek, who will become a senior Middle East advisor, was a deputy assistant secretary of state for Iraq and Iran during Trump’s first term and vigorously defended the administration’s “maximum pressure” policy toward Iran. He could favor an immersive policy designed to preempt Iran from unleashing its regional proxies—however weakened they are—and from gaining a nuclear weapons capability. And Sebastian Gorka, a new deputy national security advisor and NSC senior director for counterterrorism will be pushing hard to keep the campaign to defeat the Islamic State moving forward.

Granted, Brian Hook—Trump’s Iran policy hawk in his first term and head of the State Department transition this time around—has been excluded from the new administration. And Michael DiMino, the mid-level Pentagon official responsible for the Middle East, emphatically rejects the idea that the United States has vital strategic interests in the Middle East and seems to favor negotiations with Iran. More or less the same goes for his potential boss, Elbridge Colby, nominated to become the undersecretary of defense for policy, for whom China is the tight strategic focus.

Nevertheless, the neo-neoconservatives in this team of rivals have proactive policy inclinations that seem to be a far cry from their boss’s more inward-looking ones. They are also predisposed to put their regional focus on Iran, which could translate into a militarized effort to ensure that Tehran’s loss of Syria—its erstwhile ally and bridge to Lebanon and Hezbollah—is permanent, even if Syria’s new government is unlikely to lay out a welcome mat for Tehran.

Trump’s nominees also include several strongly pro-Israel figures who are likely to respond energetically to Israeli worries about having a potentially hostile regime run by someone other than the devil they knew and could deal with—Assad—near Israel’s northern border. If Turkey looks to HTS for assistance in disempowering Syrian Kurds, who lead the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that were integral to rolling back the Islamic State in the past, the U.S. military itself could press for a more assertive policy that keeps the SDF and its governing authority intact within a new scheme of Syrian national governance.

Trump himself, however, in line with his America First agenda, has said on Truth Social that the United States “should have nothing to do with” Syria and that “this is not our fight.” As in his first term, he appears to be ambivalent about whether to leave U.S. troops in Syria.

The Obama administration’s instincts were similar. After the 2011 uprising against the Assad regime, Washington resolutely sought to avoid an Iraq-style intervention, opting instead to support a predominantly diplomatic political transition enhanced by massive material support for the rebels. The two of us helped formulate and implement this policy. But by 2015, the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq had made serious gains, which impelled Washington to adopt a forward military counterterrorism strategy, continued by the Trump administration despite the president’s own opposition to it.

The neocons-at-heart in the incoming Trump administration could argue credibly that the situation in Syria today—with Hezbollah and Iran overcome in the Syrian context and Russia, having now withdrawn its ships and equipment from the port of Tartus, possessing few if any assets and negligible influence there—renders a U.S. counterterrorism effort materially easier to mount, with lower political risk and greater promise of success.

If an Islamist extremist carries out another New Orleans-style attack, pressure could build within the new administration and in Congress to keep U.S. forces in Syria at their current numbers. At some point, regardless of the Syrian government’s desire to suppress the Islamic State, its determination to eject foreign forces from Syrian territory will come to the fore. U.S. troops could then find themselves battling both the Islamic State and HTS.

This will not have a happy ending. Indeed, it might not have an ending at all, and the United States will have embarked on another self-perpetuating conflict. From this perspective, Syria—alongside Ukraine—looms as the Trump administration’s first big foreign-policy trial. Is it irrelevant to U.S. interests, as Trump asserts, or could it potentially be the new Afghanistan?

If Trump’s appointees carry the day, it could mean a continuation of the forever wars. If Trump—as he’s positioned himself during the campaign and in his social media posts—prevails, then Washington will test the proposition that the United States can deal with a threat such as the Islamic State without committing the cardinal sin of occupying Middle Eastern countries and fueling the very war it is seeking to end.

by Steven Simon

Credits: foreignpolicy.com