THOUGH HE is not the first American to question the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, President Joe Biden’s rationale for leaving reveals a broader problem with how Washington is fighting its Middle Eastern wars. Much as George W. Bush’s Afghan war evolved from a campaign of revenge and counterterrorism into a nation-building enterprise, Barack Obama’s intervention in Syria expanded far beyond his administration’s original intentions. It is imperative that the Biden administration aggressively appraise its strategy for Syria to ensure that U.S. policy is actually advancing American interests in the Middle East. If not, it must immediately be revised with an eye towards producing the conditions for an honorable U.S. exit. To do otherwise will only guarantee that Syrians and U.S. allies alike are left in the lurch once Biden, or a future U.S. president, ends what has ineluctably become yet another U.S. “forever war.”

U.S. INVOLVEMENT in the Syrian conflict began in earnest in 2013, two years after Syrian president Bashar al-Assad began a brutal crackdown on protestors that provoked a civil war. Although the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been actively advising America’s Middle East allies on aiding Syria’s rebels since 2012, President Obama was hesitant to directly intervene due to fears of mission creep and inadvertently arming terrorists. But Assad’s viciousness and pertinacity in response to demands for his resignation exhausted Obama’s patience. Obama ordered the CIA to launch Timber Sycamore, a clandestine operation to train and provision Syrian rebels in order to force Assad from Damascus, even as he vetoed more vigorous proposals to punish the besieged dictator.

Timber Sycamore was a tactical success, training and arming thousands of fragmented Syrian fighting factions who made impressive territorial gains and, according to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, killed or wounded more than 100,000 Syrian Arab Army or regime-allied forces. By 2015, CIA-backed forces had captured such extensive Syrian territory that the opposition began to seriously imperil the Syrian Alawite heartland along the Mediterranean coastline and, increasingly, Damascus itself. Both Assad’s enemies and allies took notice: while CIA officers anxiously spoke of a “catastrophic success”—where Assad would be toppled without a sure moderate successor to replace him—the regime’s allies sprang into action. Tehran dispatched Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps major general Qassem Soleimani—whom Donald Trump would assassinate in a January 2020 airstrike—to Moscow with a strategy to save Assad, and the Russians, which had been covering for Assad at the United Nations, answered with a massive military intervention. Russian Air Force jets began flying over Syria and, in what the Wall Street Journal called a “direct challenge” to the Obama administration, forged a new balance of power by methodically targeting the CIA’s proxy forces and other “terrorists.” The rest is history. Russia not only saved Damascus from defeat but cemented its forward-deployed military posture by signing a number of permanent basing agreements with the Assad regime, engendering perennial Western protestations of Russian “malign influence” in Syria. What began as a tactical triumph ended as a strategic failure.

ISIS’ genocidal blitzkrieg across Iraq and Syria had not factored into the White House’s Syria strategy, but it diverted attention from Obama’s impotent response to Assad’s crimes and provided Washington with new opportunities to shape the conflict. In the summer of 2014, the U.S. military began pummeling ISIS-held territory from the air while seeking out local partners that could supplement its ground game. After Ankara spurned a U.S. request to send in Turkish troops against ISIS—instead opting to enable the terrorist menace against Damascus—the Obama administration initiated the Syrian Train and Equip Program, a Congressionally-approved Department of Defense venture to train a vetted anti-ISIS rebel force of 8,400 soldiers with Turkish, Jordanian, and Saudi Arabian assistance. However, within thirteen months, the program was dead: Congress deemed it a “total failure” after $500 million had been spent training fewer than sixty fighters, many of whom were promptly routed by extremists and lost or surrendered their U.S. weapons to ISIS and the Al Qaeda-aligned Nusra Front. In October 2015, the Obama administration pulled the plug on the Pentagon program and began looking elsewhere for indigenous, moderate proxies.

Since Syria’s Sunni Arab opposition had proved itself generally unwilling to adhere to the Obama administration’s official policy of only fighting ISIS—instead exhibiting Turkey’s similarly unyielding preference to topple the Assad regime—Washington partnered with the Syrians who were already battling the jihadist caliphate, and in September 2015 the Defense Department began backing the Kurdish and Arab fighters that would comprise the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Although U.S. support for the SDF fashioned a highly effective anti-ISIS force, it also inadvertently incited a standoff with Turkey, as Ankara viewed—and continues to view—the secessionist Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) that provide the bulk of America’s on-the-ground allies as a dire threat to its territorial integrity and national security. As one State Department official told Foreign Policy, this became “a nuclear bombing waiting to go off.”

Nevertheless, for the Obama administration, fighting ISIS brought clarity to an otherwise tumultuous Syria policy. Throughout his tenure, Obama unsuccessfully sought regime change in Damascus by championing a deadlocked UN-backed political process, sanctioning the Assad regime, and tepidly abetting armed resistance. However, the president concurrently endorsed the conviction that Syria had “no military solution”—rejecting kinetic reprisals in response to Assad’s use of chemical weapons and eschewing the establishment of a formal no-fly zone, even as the White House lamented massacres committed by Assad’s air force and as U.S. fighter jets had de facto control of large swaths of Syrian air space. But this political disarray did not hinder the U.S. military’s anti-ISIS operations, which expanded with great success. Fighting ISIS, therefore, became the focal point of Obama’s Syria policy, and U.S. strategy shifted in kind. For example, the United States, which at one time myopically weighed leveraging ISIS against Damascus and its allies, ultimately changed tack and began cooperating with Russia and Iran to defeat the shared terrorist threat.

AFTER INHERITING Barack Obama’s policy confusion, Donald Trump espoused both continuity and change in Syria. On the one hand, the new president kept ISIS as the cynosure of U.S. policy with the intention of extricating the United States from the conflict. But, on the other hand, Trump nearly leaned into regime change when he directed the U.S. military to strike a Syrian air base and considered assassinating Assad for again using chemical weapons in the spring of 2017. Nonetheless, by that summer, the White House clarified its agenda. The president ended the CIA’s support for Syria’s anti-Assad rebels—lambasting it as a “massive, dangerous, and wasteful” program—but also loosened the Defense Department’s rules of engagement and increased the number of deployed U.S. soldiers to aggressively roll back ISIS’ caliphate. The administration continued America’s military partnership with the SDF—even approving direct U.S. arms shipments to the Kurds for the first time—while repeatedly stressing to both its leadership and Turkey that the relationship was, in the words of former Defense Department official Dana Stroul, “temporary, tactical, and transactional.” It did little to mollify Ankara’s anger, but by December 2018, enough progress had been made that Trump declared a total victory. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria,” the president announced on Twitter, “my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency” (emphasis added).

It quickly became apparent that this “mission accomplished” moment was anything but. Trump’s snap announcement that the United States would be leaving Syria emitted global shockwaves and warnings that, absent U.S. pressure, ISIS would regenerate. The president’s civilian and military advisors lobbied hard against a total withdrawal and won; the U.S. presence was only cut by half to 1,000. National Security Advisor John Bolton soon proclaimed that rather than leave, the United States would remain in Syria until ISIS was defeated and the Syrian Kurds’ safety was ensured, and he echoed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s promise that Washington would “expel every last Iranian boot” from the country. Syria’s civil war, Special Representative for Syria Engagement James F. Jeffrey affirmed, had “become a great-power conflict.”

As the Syrian conflict assumed great power dimensions, U.S. military efforts intended to disrupt ISIS were recast as leverage against Russia and Iran. The U.S. military outpost at Al Tanf, which sits along the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian tri-border area, is illustrative of this evolution. In March 2016, U.S.-backed rebels captured Al Tanf from ISIS and began using it as a staging ground to secure the Iraqi-Syrian border area. However, when ISIS left, the United States stayed. Despite Washington’s assertions that its posture in the region is all about ISIS, it has long been apparent that the United States is utilizing the Al Tanf garrison, which straddles the Baghdad-Damascus highway, as a base to strangle the Syrian economy and disrupt an Iranian land bridge to the Mediterranean Sea. In fact, General Joseph Votel, then the commander of United States Central Command, conceded during a 2018 visit to Al Tanf that the U.S. military’s “defeat ISIS mission” was having “an indirect effect” on Iran and its proxies “malign activities”—a remarkably modest reading of what Jeffrey specified was the Trump administration’s “dual purposed” strategy of countering ISIS while “denying terrain and resources to the Assad government and its allies.”

To be sure, after Trump became president, it did not take long for Al Tanf, specifically, and Syria, more generally, to become a pillar of the administration’s “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran, which had established extensive military and paramilitary capabilities throughout the country. But sustaining this strategy involved accepting significant risks to U.S. forces. For instance, similarly to how, in 2018, several hundred pro-Syrian government forces and Russian mercenaries attacked the U.S. military and its Kurdish and Arab allies in the oil-rich Deir al-Zour province—an eastern Syrian governorate that U.S. forces recovered from ISIS, occupied, and are now exploiting vis-à-vis Damascus and Tehran—the Al Tanf garrison has been repeatedly assaulted by the Russian Air Force and Iranian-backed proxy forces. Now completely isolated by pro-Assad fighters, U.S. soldiers at Al Tanf are risking their lives to advance indeterminate political outcomes, including maintaining pressure on Damascus, making Russia’s intervention more costly, and assisting Israel’s stalemated air war to uproot Iran’s military entrenchment. How to define—let alone achieve—“success” in the face of such ambiguous objectives is anyone’s guess.

PERHAPS THE most baffling aspect of the Trump administration’s Syria policy is that the White House did not adjust its strategy after Trump first made a break for the exit. Instead, after barely nullifying the president’s initial order to depart Syria, senior administration officials doubled down on staying; lending credence to the façade of a unified administration strategy by publicly advocating for keeping U.S. troops on the ground. That veneer was shattered in October 2019 when Trump abruptly ordered a second U.S. military withdrawal that coincided with a Turkish military incursion to expel the Kurdish YPG from the Turkish-Syrian border. The ensuing disarray in northeastern Syria subsequently generated a power vacuum that revealed the limits of U.S. staying-power, damaged U.S. interests, and empowered U.S. adversaries.

In fact, with American and Kurdish attention diverted from their counterterrorism mission, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported to the Defense Department’s inspector general that ISIS was able to “reconstitute [its] capabilities and resources within Syria and strengthen its ability to plan attacks abroad.” But it was not just ISIS who was on the move. Even as the White House was tempering Trump’s edict following Congressional uproar over the Kurds’ abandonment, Russia and the Syrian government were actively filling the political and military void. Predictably, the Kurds hastily parleyed with Damascus and allowed the Syrian Arab Army to restore its presence in several key northeastern cities in order to stop Turkey’s advance. Then, after Trump threatened to “swiftly destroy Turkey’s economy” to attain Ankara’s acquiescence to a temporary ceasefire, Moscow and Ankara bilaterally arranged an end to the hostilities. Soon, hundreds of fresh Russian military police joined Turkish troops in joint patrols along the entire Syrian-Turkish border, and Russian and Syrian forces further acceded to overseeing the withdrawal of Kurdish military assets from a thirty-kilometer safe zone.

The deployment of Syrian government and Russian soldiers to the northeast has endangered U.S. personnel, and Trump’s braggadocio appears to have further intensified the threat. After the United States began cultivating Syria’s oil fields to both fund the SDF’s anti-ISIS operations and deprive the Assad regime of badly-needed revenue, Trump publicly boasted that he had “secured” Syria’s oil. In response, the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies stepped up their anti-U.S. propaganda, decrying U.S. troops as “occupiers” intent on plundering the country and warning of imminent “popular opposition and operations” to thwart them. Sure enough, on multiple occasions in both 2020 and 2021, U.S. patrols were attacked by Syrian government forces, leading U.S. troops to return fire, and Americans operating in the vicinity of Syria’s al-Omar and Conoco oil fields were subjected to attacks by rockets, drones, mortars, and small arms fire.

U.S.-Russian frictions also rose following a series of standoffs on the region’s highways, where Russian and U.S. military forces have routinely engaged in “cat and mouse” games consisting of erratic driving, roadblocks, and checkpoints, and even physically blocking each other’s passage. But it is all fun and games until someone gets hurt. In August 2020, only a month after Trump’s Syria envoy warned that Russian military contractors had been violating an agreed-upon deconfliction zone with increasing frequency, the New York Times reported that seven U.S. troops were injured after a Russian military vehicle intentionally rammed them. To deter additional confrontations, the Defense Department has stepped up its fighter jet patrols and deployed additional troops and sophisticated Sentinel radars to the region. Although avoiding escalation with Russia has long been a priority in this frozen conflict, it has once again taken on new urgency.

JOE BIDEN has never been a fan of the war in Syria. Much like his well-documented aversion to Obama’s 2009 Afghan troop surge and 2011 Libyan invasion, the New York Times relays that Biden’s Obama administration colleagues do not remember him wanting to arm opposition fighters at the war’s onset. And his skepticism did not fade with time. Biden was excoriated for remarking in 2014 that Syria had “no moderate middle” that the United States could reliably support—a contention that, foreign affairs columnist Daniel DePetris observed, was largely proven right over time—and he stuck to his guns during the 2020 presidential campaign by candidly voicing his intention to “end the forever wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East.”

Nonetheless, a Biden withdrawal from Syria is not a foregone conclusion. To the contrary, Biden may be doubling down. Despite his reluctance for foreign forays, Biden repeatedly pilloried Trump’s “reckless” and “insidious” 2019 decision to renounce the Syrian crisis once and for all; Biden was aggrieved that the U.S. exit “sold out” America’s Kurdish allies and gave ISIS “a new lease on life.” Undoubtedly, both the Kurds and ISIS, as well as the country’s humanitarian disaster, have been persistent concerns for Biden. In 2019, he told the Wall Street Journal that leaving a residual force in Syria to protect the Kurds “makes a lot of sense,” and in 2020, on the anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, he agreed with Trump’s plan to drawdown U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, “as long as there’s a plan to figure out how [Trump is] going to deal with ISIS.” Then, last March, Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, gave a heartfelt plea to the United Nations Security Council where he spoke of suffering Syrians and the necessity of delivering humanitarian aid to non-government-controlled areas in the north. And in mid-November, a U.S. delegation led by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Affairs Ethan Goldrich quietly visited SDF and Syrian Democratic Council leaders in northeastern Syria with a promise that the U.S. military would stay in the country.

Consequently, Biden’s Syria policy may seek to accomplish three goals: alleviating human suffering, resolving the Kurds’ fate, and defeating ISIS for good. Unfortunately, if the administration adheres to its predecessors’ policy of regime change via sanctioning and isolating Syria, it will never succeed in solving these truly wicked problems, and the United States will never depart. But Biden can create the conditions for a responsible U.S. exit from Syria by amplifying what he alleges to have learned from the U.S. war in Afghanistan, namely the importance of eschewing “major military operations to remake other countries” and “set[ting] missions with clear, achievable goals—not ones we’ll never reach.” Biden is right: The post-9/11 era has forced Americans to acknowledge that there are real limits to what U.S. power can achieve. Now, he must go further by recognizing that, like Afghanistan, Syria cannot feasibly be made into the country Americans want and, therefore, U.S. policy must abandon the pursuit of nebulous, unachievable goals. Accordingly, a new, more focused U.S. Syria strategy that capitalizes on emerging regional dynamics in the Middle East can achieve what is possible—reducing humanitarian suffering, eviscerating ISIS, ensuring the Kurds’ longevity, and countering Iran. Advancing such a paradigm will not be easy, but, for Biden, it begins with a single step: talking directly with the Assad regime in Damascus.

Just as Obama negotiated with Tehran, and Trump sought détente with Pyongyang and the Taliban, Biden, too, must thaw Washington’s frozen relations with Damascus. First and foremost, as scholar Stephen Walt perceived, this is because Assad is the key to solving the conflict’s most “vexing problems”: ISIS’ commination, Iran’s military presence in Syria, and Turkey’s aggression towards the Kurds—not to mention the war’s continuation—all become less viable under an Assad regime that is stable and secure. For example, in contrast to conventional wisdom which held that defeating ISIS and Sunni extremism in Syria were dependent on deposing Assad, Max Abrahms and John Glaser determined in 2017 that ISIS’ “demise was inversely related to Assad’s power”; The diminution of opposition-held territory has seen the Assad regime, Russia, and Iran pursue terrorists with increasing tenacity. ISIS is no longer just America’s problem.

Israel, the Kurds, and Turkey, too, are better off with Assad in power than under siege. It is remarkable that Israel has been battling Iran and Hezbollah—and not the Assad regime—in a stalemated and incremental struggle to degrade and exact a price from Tehran’s military encroachment. Given that Iran and its proxies’ power in Syria correspondingly swelled as Assad’s waned, Israel likely prefers a return to the prewar status quo, when a predictable Assad, and not Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), managed frictions in the Golan Heights and across the country. 

Syria’s Kurds are of a similar mind. Rojava views the Assad regime as a necessary and reliable bulwark against Sunni extremism and Turkish aggression. Despite their current partnership with the United States, the Kurds know that Washington is a fair-weather friend; Successive U.S. attempts to withdraw from Iraq and Syria, and Trump’s passivity in response to Baghdad and Tehran’s seizure of the Kurdish-administered city of Kirkuk in 2017 are telling. The Kurds, therefore, will continue cooperating with the Assad regime: supplying Damascus with oil, relying on its army as a safeguard against Turkey, and negotiating with Assad over their autonomy in the northeast. They should be encouraged to do so. 

Turkey also stands to benefit from such an arrangement. Incited by fears of Kurdish separatism and new refugee outflows spilling into Turkey, Ankara’s armed adventure into northern Syria has left Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the losing side of Russian and Assad regime escalation in Idlib—a jihadist-riddled, humanitarian disaster in waiting—and with few options to quell the Kurdish insurgency that his occupation has created. Turkey is now stuck defending a safe zone that is home to five million displaced Syrians and has requested that the United States support its efforts to hold Assad at bay. In future negotiations with Assad and Russia, Turkey’s military presence and U.S. aid for the Kurds are crucial leverage that the United States can use to promote de-escalation and advance sustainable political outcomes. This will not be easy, but progress can be kickstarted by first acknowledging Assad’s victory in the Syrian conflict—a reality that has been evident for some time. Next, the United States and its allies should allow Assad to reclaim control of his prewar territory and permit reconstruction aid to flow in exchange for modest, though impactful, political concessions.

ADMITTEDLY, THIS will not be a painless policy shift. Negotiations with Assad—a vicious dictator who has conducted “surrender or starve” siege warfare to suppress opposition areas, exploited and violated agreed-upon ceasefires, disappeared and tortured perceived enemies of the state, and weaponized terrorists against demands for his removal—are certain to provoke domestic denouncements that Biden is so appetent to exit yet another Middle Eastern conflict that he is willing to “legitimize” the regime and let it off the hook for its crimes. Fortunately, if Afghanistan is any guide, this caviling is unlikely to deter the forty-sixth president. In a speech on August 16 following the Taliban’s takeover of Kabul, Biden remarked that

I will not repeat the mistake […] of staying and fighting indefinitely in a conflict that is not in the national interest of the United States, of doubling down on a civil war in a foreign country […] I know my decision will be criticized. But I would rather take all that criticism than pass this decision on to another president of the United States […] Because it’s the right one, it’s the right decision for our people.

It’s reassuring that Biden can remain resolute under pressure, but unlike in Afghanistan—where a bipartisan majority favored withdrawal—Americans are more ambivalent about departing Syria, and there is broad bipartisan agreement among policymakers that sanctions remain an effective tool in coercing Assad’s capitulation. Regardless, Biden can make a convincing case for a new U.S. strategy by explicitly proving that the current one is not serving U.S. interests. For while former Trump administration officials speak glowingly of economically isolating Syria to “deny [its] benefactors the spoils of war” and turning the conflict into a “quagmire” like the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, the truth is that U.S. policy has not held Assad accountable, changed his behavior, or resolved the conflict—but it has made Syrians suffer.

Indeed, U.S. economic warfare has delivered the Syrian economy a one-two punch: sanctions have sent the Syrian lira into free fall while the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act has denied its economy badly-needed reconstruction assistance and foreign investment. Economic conditions have become so dire—83 percent of Syrians are living below the poverty line; 60 percent risk going hungry due to soaring food prices; and fuel for heating, cooking, and transportation is scarce—that U.S. policy is indisputably killing Syrians.

Meanwhile, the Assad regime continues to fund its war and survival. For example, the regime rakes in billions of dollars selling drugs to young users in the Gulf and Europe and pays off regional warlords and regime elites with the proceeds. Similarly, the regime has filled its coffers by bureaucratizing extortion, charging Syrians new, onerous fees and taxes on routine administrative procedures; targeting formerly opposition-held areas with “systematized” looting, where everything down to the copper wiring is stolen, and arson; and arresting and seizing the assets of those deemed “disloyal” due to where they live or as punishment for avoiding military conscription. Since the regime “channels its limited resources into combat,” researchers Elizabeth Tsurkov and Suhail al-Ghazi concluded in 2020 in a dismaying assessment of Syrian living conditions, its “war machine does not appear to be significantly affected.” To be sure, Assad’s defiance was on full display just last summer and fall: As the regime intensified its bombardment of Idlib, Syria’s final opposition stronghold, Assad issued a series of decrees raising the salaries and pensions of Syrian civil servants and military members by 50 percent while simultaneously reducing subsidies for bread, gasoline, and diesel fuel—staple commodities that Syrians rely on for food, cooking, and heating. It’s clear what Damascus’ priorities are.

FOR BETTER or worse, signals emanating from both Washington and Middle Eastern capitals suggest that a policy shift is not dependent on Biden—it is already in the works. “Bashar has longevity… the regime is there to stay,” Jordan’s King Abdullah II bin Al-Hussein told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria last July, becoming the latest Middle Eastern leader to acknowledge that regional momentum is building towards normalization. In truth, Abdullah has done more than that; After speaking directly with Assad in October, the Jordanian king quietly presented a plan to Biden, Russian president Vladimir Putin, and Arab leaders to link regional normalization to a political solution that sees all foreign forces exit Syria.

The region’s other powerbrokers are also doing more than talking. Tunisia began the regional rapprochement by reopening its embassy in Damascus in 2015, and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Jordan followed suit three years later. In October 2020, Oman became the first country to restore its ambassador to Syria, and the two countries quickly publicized their goal of increased trade. Then, last fall, Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Zayed spoke with Assad on the phone before the Emirati foreign minister traveled to Damascus. Likewise, in an inversion of how Syria and Jordan once helped Iraq’s Saddam Hussein skirt international oil sanctions, Jordan and Egypt have agreed to supply Lebanon with electricity and natural gas through Syria—a plan the Biden administration has endorsed despite it paying Assad transit fees—while Baghdad is also conferring with Damascus about importing Egyptian natural gas. The Arab League, too, which suspended Syria in 2011 over its vicious crackdown on protestors, is weighing whether to reinstate Damascus’ membership as a means to reduce “foreign meddling” and return Syria “to the Arab region”—in spite of Qatari and Saudi Arabian reluctance. However, in light of Riyadh’s decision to have its intelligence chief meet twice with his Syrian counterpart in Damascus and then Cairo last year, it appears that the Saudis are interested in détente with Damascus and were hitherto only toeing the Trump administration’s line of keeping Assad isolated. It’s striking how badly that endeavor has failed.

Insisting on isolating Syria is a fool’s errand—not just because of the region’s political environment, but also due to the Biden administration’s very own Middle East policy priorities. For months, the Biden administration has been negotiating with Tehran over a proposed roadmap where both countries would resume compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in exchange for Iranian sanctions relief. Thus, as an intended result of U.S. policy, Iran is set to reap an economic windfall of more than $90 billion. Even if the bulk of those funds are spent revitalizing the Iranian economy—which Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi has made the centerpiece of his agenda—and tackling challenges from the Covid-19 pandemic to dire water shortages, it would stretch credulity to believe that additional rials will not soon trickle down into Assad’s pockets. Of course, the certainty that Iran, as Assad’s primary patron, will bestow even more money on Assad due to U.S. policy is not a reason for the Biden administration to change its Iran policy. Unlike Syria, which is a country of marginal strategic importance for the United States, the consequences of an Iranian nuclear weapon remain the paramount national security concern for U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Moreover, Tehran’s largesse has not resulted in Damascus being comfortable with Iranian domination of Syria. Damascus has not forgotten the years following the 1980s Iran-Iraq War when Syria—as the senior partner in the relationship—provided aid to Iran in its existential war against Saddam. Since then, Syria military affairs expert Kamal Alam has noted, Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and modern Syria’s founding father, “never allowed Tehran to dictate terms to Damascus” and the two countries often worked at odds in Iraq and Lebanon despite mutual ties forged in ideological resistance to Western imperialism.

Yet, after years of war, Assad’s desperation “turned the tables” on the relationship. Today, Assad is well aware that his country has become a playground for Iran’s expansionist ambitions and a rump-state beholden to its munificence, and that his security is reliant on Iranian-backed militias, which outstrip his regime’s own forces in combat power and scope. Tehran’s schemes to demographically engineer Syria by repopulating previously-Sunni areas with Shiites from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, and to offer financial incentives to those who convert to Shia Islam and enlist in IRGC-backed military brigades have also not gone unnoticed. Now, with the war approaching its end, Damascus may be cautiously moving against Tehran. The recent expulsion of Iran’s senior-most IRGC Quds Force general from Syria, reportedly at Assad’s personal behest, for his “overactivity” in the country—a nod towards the IRGC’s use of Syrian territory against Israel—indicates that Damascus may be starting to view Iran’s military entrenchment as a liability. Providing Syria with alternatives to Iran is in the U.S. interest.

A NEW U.S. policy that sees Syria readmitted into the regional fold would not require the United States to spend its own funds rebuilding Syria and is not intended to “reward” Assad for his barbarous behavior over the last decade—even if that is the ultimate outcome—but for the United States to pick winners and losers in the Middle East. If forced to choose between, on the one hand, a weak Syrian state that an ascendant Iran exploits to wage war on Israel and U.S. allies in the Gulf and, on the other, a prosperous Syrian state that elects to balance the interests of regional players and to which Syrian refugees can return to, it should be an easy choice for the United States. Moralizing about such a policy’s deficiencies will not address America’s direst challenges in the region, nor will slapping Assad with additional pressure for pressure’s sake prevent more Syrians from enduring intolerable conditions or reduce threats to U.S. regional allies and interests. Despite the Middle East’s many changes, the Assads have proven that they are here to stay.

Adam Lammon is the Managing Editor of The National Interest and a Junior Fellow in Middle East Studies at the Center for the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter @AdamLammon.

Image: Reuters.