The meeting this week between a U.S. president who doesn’t care a fig for democracy and a former anti-American jihadist who is swiftly discovering that democracy isn’t likely to work in his country—war-torn Syria—amounted to more than a stunning optic. It also felt like a huge farewell—a valediction for an entire generation of failed U.S. policy in the Mideast.
Donald Trump made that clear even before he shook hands Wednesday with Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Islamist Syrian leader who once spent five years imprisoned by the United States in Iraq and later toppled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In a speech in Riyadh—where he credited his new autocratic confederates, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for prodding him to lift sanctions on Syria—Trump said he was quite consciously leaving behind the failures of past Washington policies.
“In the end, the so-called ‘nation-builders’ wrecked far more nations than they built—and the interventionists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves,” Trump said in a clear critique of the U.S. architects of the 2003 Iraq invasion and its quixotic aim of spreading democracy in the region.
Instead, Trump said, the best way forward is “the Arabian way.” The “great transformation” in the Middle East “has not come from Western intervention noise,” or “a radical rejection of your heritage but rather from embracing your national traditions and embracing that same heritage that you love so dearly,” he declared.
But let’s be clear: Over the past century or so, that “heritage” has embraced either autocracy and oppression on one hand, or radical Islamism on the other, and there’s been little in between. Despite Trump’s touting of “the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi” in his speech, the tragedy of the Arab world is that neither dictatorship nor political Islamism has worked in genuinely lifting those societies into modernity.
Pretty much all that remains of the once-hopeful “Arab Spring” are rejuvenated tyrannies that have crushed Islamist popular movements—most recently in Tunisia. All that remains of former U.S. President George W. Bush’s Iraq debacle is a shaky and chaotic Shiite democracy dominated by next-door Iran.
And now Trump is effectively sanctifying tyranny for the long run, some critics say.
“We’re headed for a new form of authoritarianism in Syria and the region,” Nader Hashemi, a scholar of Islamic politics at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, said in a phone interview.
“Because you have an authoritarian-leaning president of the United States who’s coordinating with leaders who are also authoritarian, any commitment to human rights and democracy will be nonexistent. Trump’s authoritarianism at home is actually emboldening other autocrats to move in that direction. They’re saying, ‘If he can make certain students disappear from campuses, so can we.’”
Sharaa, to give him credit, has pledged an open and inclusive Syria, and many Mideast experts praise him for saying the “right” things on national unity and respect for minorities, and at least fudging when it comes to whether he will impose sharia, or Islamic law.
But in March, Sharaa signed an interim constitution that leaves the country under Islamist rule for five years during a supposedly transitional phase.
“There is real potential here in his leadership,” said Charles Dunne, a former longtime U.S. diplomat in the region, in an email. “But pressures from within—the need to impose order—and pressures from without—his backers in Turkey and the Gulf—will complicate his path.” Dunne said that Turkey and the Gulf states may disagree somewhat on the potential Islamist leanings of the Sharaa government, but “both sets of backers will be fine with authoritarian rule and suppression of civic and political rights as necessary.”
There are, of course, compelling strategic reasons for Trump to be supporting Sharaa’s rule. These go well beyond cozying up to Sunni autocrats like Mohammed bin Salman who are promising huge investments in the United States—what Trump is mainly after—and who see the fall of Assad, a member of an ancient branch of Shia Islam called the Alawites, and the rise of a fellow Sunni leader in Syria as a huge boost in their power and leverage.
Assad had been a strong ally of two major U.S. adversaries, Iran and Russia, and now Iran in particular is weakened without Hezbollah receiving overland supplies through Syria. Indeed, so dire is Tehran’s situation after a year in which Israel has decimated its main proxy, Hezbollah, that Trump may well reap the benefit with a surprise nuclear deal.
“We’re in very serious negotiations with Iran for long-term peace,” Trump told reporters on the way to his final stop in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday.
But unfortunately, Sharaa’s early promises sound all too familiar. After a senior Muslim Brotherhood leader, Mohammed Morsi, took power in Egypt following the toppling of Hosni Mubarak in 2011, he made similar pledges. At one point, leading Muslim Brotherhood figures—including the Islamist political group’s chief strategist, Khairat el-Shater—held friendly conversations with a visiting delegation of U.S. lawmakers. As one member of that congressional group reported to me then: “They all go out of their way to say what we want to hear. They are going to fully protect women’s rights, minority rights, the constitutional assembly.”
Yet ultimately Morsi engendered violent protests after he forced through an unpopular sharia-inspired constitution, appointed fellow members of the Muslim Brotherhood to key ministries, and sacked generals. Above all, he failed to comprehend the demands of a modern economy; under his rule food prices kept rising, fuel ran out, and major cities suffered daily blackouts. The final result? An army takeover in 2013 by then-Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, now the president of Egypt.
It’s been a tragic pattern throughout the Arab world, extending to Iran as well. We saw this dramatically after the U.S. pushed for elections in the Palestinian territories in 2006, when Hamas—an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood—won in Gaza and later seized power. We’ve seen it for nearly a half-century in Iran, where a mullah autocracy featuring well-orchestrated elections has ruled since the Islamist revolution of 1979.
Even the most promising democratic experiment post-Arab Spring, in Tunisia, has foundered. In the early years of the revolution the Islamist Ennahda Party sponsored a very inclusive, widely praised constitution, but later on Tunisia’s impoverished populace rebelled and the elected president, Kais Saied, imposed autocratic power in 2021.
Other experts say the most likely model for Sharaa is what his rebel group, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—which led the offensive to topple the Assad regime—did in the northwest Syrian city of Idlib, where it led a brutal crackdown on dissent.
Similarly, in the last few months there have been jihadist massacres of Alawite civilians in coastal areas of Syria, though it’s not clear what the Sharaa government’s responsibility is. Violence has also erupted against the minority Druze population, and many Syrians have had their homes requisitioned, often by shady militiamen claiming to represent the state.
“The question is not whether he has shed his jihadist skin but what kind of government he has set up in Syria: a typical authoritarian Arab government with a Sunni-Salafi identity,” said Fawaz Gerges, author of the new book The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East.
Joshua Landis, head of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and author of the forthcoming Syria at Independence: Nationalism, Leadership, and Failure of Republicanism, said Trump’s lifting of sanctions was “a great victory” for Sharaa.
“Without it, his government would, in all likelihood, fail. As it is, he now has a fighting chance to jumpstart Syria’s failing economy. It is also good news for Syrians, most of whom are in a state of abject poverty,” he said in an email.
But Landis added: “The consolidation of Sharaa’s government and power is also likely to mean that Syria will be ruled by a highly authoritarian and Islamist government. The constitution puts all power in the president’s hands. He gets to appoint all parliamentarians directly or indirectly. He appoints the Supreme Court and heads the army and security forces.”
To be fair, it’s not that Trump has a lot of choices. And he’s probably right to criticize what he called “the so-called ‘nation-builders’” and “neocons” of past U.S. governments who “spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, [and] so many other cities.”
Many Mideast experts say that for humanitarian as well as strategic reasons, Trump was right to reach out to Sharaa, whose future form as a leader remains, after all, a work in progress.
Said Hashemi: “There is this broader sense geostrategically that now that Assad is gone and Iran’s influence has evaporated, this is an opportunity for the U.S. and Europe to try wooing Sharaa over to their view of the world.”
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