Trump has big plans at home, but Syria shows why he can’t escape the world’s problems

Analysis by Stephen Collinson, CNN

(CNN) — Even the normally brash Donald Trump seems disconcerted by the volatile international situation he’ll inherit as the new president next month and to which he’s certain to inject new unpredictability.

“It certainly seems like the world is going a little crazy right now,” the president-elect said Saturday when he met French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris as he climbed back onto the global stage for his second go-around.

The stunning fall of the al-Assad dynasty in Syria on Sunday created new and treacherous circumstances that will demand Trump’s attention — despite his wish to disengage the US from dangerous Middle Eastern war zones — and will likely provide an immediate test of his foreign policy goals and acumen in January.

“This is not our fight. Let it play out. Do not get involved,” Trump wrote Saturday on Truth Social, in block capital letters, as rebels raced toward the Syrian capital of Damascus. His comment was characteristic of a foreign policy backlash against nearly two decades of US wars in the Middle East and South Asia. But as a global power, in an integrated world economy, and with US enemies seeking to dilute American influence, there may also come a time when American interests mean Trump has no choice but to get involved, diplomatically if not militarily.

“When it becomes a national security interest and a threat to the United States, then we would get involved,” Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a key Trump ally, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

And the sudden reordering of Middle East geopolitics could offer openings for Trump’s other international goals, including his renewal of his confrontation with Iran. In his weekend social media posts, the president-elect also highlighted how the toppling of President Bashar al-Assad was a defeat for Russia and pushed President Vladimir Putin to cut his losses by ending the war in Ukraine.

But Trump’s first-term policies and his plans for his second term — including those laid out in his first major TV interview since the election, which was taped on Friday, before Assad’s ouster — show that he sees the world and its crises through a win-loss prism for the United States. In the wide-ranging interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which aired Sunday, he, for example, said Ukraine should “probably” prepare for less aid with him in power and would commit to staying in NATO only if other members pay their bills and “treat us fairly.” And he underscored his “America First” outlook by previewing his plans to prioritize the mass deportation of migrants with criminal records and to end birthright citizenship.

Trump faces tightening web of US adversaries

But Trump has stiff challenges in Syria and beyond.

The takeover, led by a rebel group that Washington regards as a terrorist organization once affiliated with al Qaeda, raises uncertainty over whether the fractured nation could again become a terror haven threatening US security. Trump may have to quickly decide whether to maintain a deployment of hundreds of US troops in Syria to fight any resurgence of ISIS. President Joe Biden ordered a volley of US strikes against ISIS targets in the country on Sunday.

And Assad’s fall from power is intricately linked to other US foreign policy priorities — including, as Trump noted, Russia, which propped up the Syrian president’s rule to save its own footprint in the Middle East.

Assad’s fall is another serious blow to Iran, after Israel’s wars in Lebanon against Hezbollah and in Gaza against Hamas devastated the Islamic Republic’s proxies and left the leadership in Tehran looking more vulnerable than it has for years as it braces for a looming succession drama given the advanced age of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Perceptions that Iran is weakened could prompt an even tougher line than is already expected from the Trump administration as the regime increases its stockpile of near-weapons grade uranium.

Related foreign policy challenges for the new president stretch in a vast arc from Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Yemen in the Middle East, through Eurasia, rooted in the war in Ukraine and its tributary crises. The conflict has gone global with North Korean ground troops’ stunning entry into a European land war. If Russia, as some experts suspect, is supplying Pyongyang with ballistic missile expertise or technology in return, the US standoff with the isolated state could become even more dangerous. Iran has also supplied Russia with drones and missiles, according to US officials.

And America’s problems with Russia, North Korea and Iran are compounded by the loose but expanding strategic synergy between the trio and China. Many of the incoming Trump administration’s top officials and supporters have previously argued that the US needs to disengage from places like the Middle East and Europe to direct military and financial resources to what they see as an existential face-off with Asia’s superpower. But quickly changing geopolitical realities mean that America’s adversaries probably won’t give the president-elect the option.

This is a far more complex and potentially dangerous world than the one with which Trump was familiar during his first term. The globe often reeled from his unpredictable pronouncements and rebukes to US allies — like those in Europe and Asia, many of which are now weakened by their own domestic turmoil. Those allies are also bracing for his demands for increased defense spending, which many may struggle to satisfy given their diminished economic situations.

Biden leads US response, but the world looks to Trump

Until January 20, Russia is not officially Trump’s problem — even if his aggressive foreign policy statements, tariff threats and trip to Paris for the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral this weekend made it look like he’s already running the show.

Biden reacted to Assad’s fall by proclaiming justice for the Syrian people and vowing to prevent any instability in the country from barreling across the region. He pledged to work with the United Nations to transition to an independent and sovereign Syria with a new constitution and a new government. And he announced the airstrikes by B-52 bombers, F-15 fighter jets and A-10 aircraft against ISIS targets in central Syria.

But he will soon hand over to Trump, whose deep suspicion of Middle East ventures is fueled by years of bloody foreign wars. History also suggests that most hopeful moments in a tortured region are merely false dawns.

“I think the US is conflicted. On the one hand, they are basically boasting in the fact that basically this is a … major setback for Russia and Iran,” Fawaz Gerges, an international relations professor at the London School of Economics, told CNN’s Becky Anderson. “On the other hand, the Americans know very well that Syria could really go … the wrong way. And Syria ruled by an Islamist Salafi movement is not really the American preference for Syria.”

A week ago, no one would have predicted the end of Syria’s murderous half-century rule by Assad and his father, the late President Hafez al-Assad. The speed at which the regime fell means it’s impossible to predict the situation Trump will inherit next month.

The danger is that a nation that is deeply split ethnically and religiously will further splinter, that a murderous civil war will again break out and that refugees will flood neighboring states and cause a humanitarian crisis. Even if the dominant group in the rebel coalition, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), asserts control and brings peace, the economy is in shambles, cities and public services are ruined, and the return of refugees who fled in recent years could breed huge instability.

So, as Trump considers the current US deployment in Syria, he must also decide how deeply he will engage in the country’s future — and if he doesn’t, whether he’s content to let US adversaries fill the vacuum and build their own power.

There’s no obvious monetary gain for the US in Syria — and the traditional view of most presidents that the US should promote stability clashes with Trump’s character and “America First” worldview.

Still, the fall of Assad could help enhance Israel’s security, which is important to Trump. A unified, stable country could block off Tehran’s land shipments of weapons to rebuild Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Trump uses Assad’s fall to pressure Putin on Ukraine

The president-elect showed that he appreciates the wider implications of Assad’s fall on Sunday, placing immediate pressure on Putin to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, even if his post on Truth Social underplayed how hard this might be.

“Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success. Likewise, (Volodymyr) Zelensky and Ukraine would like to make a deal and stop the madness,” Trump wrote, a day after meeting with the Ukrainian president in Paris. “Too many lives are being so needlessly wasted, too many families destroyed, and if it keeps going, it can turn into something much bigger, and far worse. I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!”

Trump vowed to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours if elected president, but it’s not clear Putin is ready to talk peace after recent battlefield advances. At the very least, he’ll drive a hard bargain, leading to fears that Trump will force Ukraine to accept a deal that hands Russia territory seized in its brutal and illegal invasion. That would reward Putin’s aggression. The president-elect’s critics worry he will also oppose any security guarantees for Ukraine and thwart its hopes of a path to NATO and EU membership to appease Putin. Such a deal might stop the killing in the short term. But Putin’s history suggests he’d probably use such a settlement to rearm and regroup for a new onslaught aimed at wiping Ukraine off the map.

One of Trump’s former national security advisers, H.R. McMaster, urged his old boss on Sunday to treat Iran, Russia, China and North Korea as different threads of the same challenge.

“Some people think you should try to separate them. I think we should glue them together because whenever we act like they’re separate, they get to cover for each other and act like they’re not operating together,” McMaster said on “Fox News Sunday.”

This, however, would fly in the face of Trump’s desire to broker individual deals with foreign dictators and to play adversaries against one another.

Still, the weekend’s events in Syria are a reminder of the speed of global political change at a time of shifting alliances, growing great power challenges to the United States, and the way that even Trump’s red lines on the use of US power abroad will be challenged by events.

“I think that the president-elect is right to say that the United States for the moment should sit back and see how this plays out,” Uriel Epshtein, CEO of the Renew Democracy Initiative, said on CNN International. “I would also note that this is actually an important moment in which we can see how you cannot look at conflicts individually, how you have to look at the world globally, because Assad’s fall in Damascus runs through Jerusalem and Kyiv.”

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