Donald Trump announced Tuesday he will lift all U.S. sanctions on Syria, but the timing of the lifted international penalties was remarkably suspicious.
“I will be ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness,” Trump told an auditorium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, describing the apparently unnecessary sanctions as “brutal and crippling.”
“In Syria, which has seen so much misery and death, there is a new government that will hopefully succeed in stabilizing the country and keeping peace. That’s what we want to see,” he continued. “In Syria, they’ve had their share of travesty, war, killing many years. That’s why my administration has already taken the first steps toward restoring normal relations between the United States and Syria for the first time in more than a decade.”
American caution toward Syria has spanned half a dozen administrations. Syria has been designated as a state sponsor of terrorism by the U.S. since 1979, when Syrian forces occupied Lebanon. The Bush administration slammed Syria with more sanctions in 2004, condemning Syria’s “pursuit of weapons of mass destruction” and its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. The Obama administration imposed more sanctions on Syria in 2011, denouncing the country’s dictator, former President Bashar al-Assad, for human rights abuses against its protesting citizens.
“We’re taking them all off,” Trump said Tuesday.
But the decision to strip what had effectively become an embargo of Syrian goods followed another important development for the Trump family: the possibility of building a Trump Tower in Syria’s capital Damascus.
“[Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa] wants a business deal for the future of his country,” pro-Trump activist Jonathan Bass—who met with Sharaa for hours in late April—told Reuters Monday.
Sharaa is working to meet face-to-face with Trump, but his priorities include economic revival, regional stability, and healed relations with Israel, according to Bass.
“He told me he wants a Trump Tower in Damascus. He wants peace with his neighbors. What he told me is good for the region, good for Israel,” Bass told the newswire.
As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments—but that hasn’t stopped Trump one bit. The Trump family’s Middle East real estate plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion cryptocurrency investment by an Abu Dhabi firm into one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial Coin.
The family also revealed in December that they would be expanding their presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.
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