Trump vs Harris: How the US election could impact Syria's war

Donald Trump is not known for showing his emotions, but as he stood at the White House lectern under a heady shower of flashlights on 7 April 2017 there was a brief flash of the human behind the president's bombastic veneer.

Hours earlier, in Khan Sheikhoun, northwest Syria, families were preparing for another nondescript Tuesday when a Syrian Air Force jet circled overhead and dropped three bombs on the remote Idlib village. 

Among the payload was a sarin-loaded weapon, a deadly nerve agent, which caused an excruciating death for 89 men, women, and children.

Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, reportedly thrust images of the lifeless bodies of children at her father, urging him to act, and shortly after a salvo of Tomahawk cruise missiles hit the Shayrat airbase in Homs province, believed to be the launchpad for the attack. 

Trump was here to announce that justice had been served, a token act of retribution against the Syrian regime, something that had evaded Bashar Al-Assad despite multiple chemical massacres taking place in opposition areas during President Barack Obama's time in the White House.

"Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack. No child of God should ever have to suffer such horror," Trump said, pausing on every word with uncharacteristic care.

It was to be a defining point early on in his presidency and for all his faults, Trump had acted decisively, doing so again almost exactly one year later when Eastern Ghouta was targeted by regime forces with a sarin-like substance, putting a stop to Assad's campaign of targeting civilian areas with nerve agents.

Trump's willingness to intervene briefly made him a hero with some Syrians, who bestowed him with the honorific moniker Abu Ivanka amid anticipation that the brutish approach of the new US president might stop Assad in his tracks. After all, it takes a bully to fight a bully.

Hopes were dashed when Trump reverted to the US's hollow Syria policy and talks between the regime and opposition stalled, with the Syrian regime cannibalising more Syrian land and Bashar Al-Assad free to continue his murder spree, so long as it was only conventional weapons he used against civilians.

Few expect major changes to US-Syria policy regardless of whoever enters the White House in January, with a likely continuation of the same limp approach 13 years after the pro-democracy uprising broke out in Syria and descended into a brutal war killing 500,000 people.

"I think the US government is resigned to the Syrian regime staying in place, the issue has always been about trying to contain the consequences of the conflict or potential violence spilling across the borders," Natasha Hall, Senior Fellow at the CSIS Middle East Program in Washington told The New Arab.

"For a long time, the US has dealt with the Syrian war from the DC perspective of these different poles - Iran, counter-terrorism, and to a certain degree, Israel - rather than dealing with the civil war on its own terms."

The US has looked for ways to disengage its small military presence from northeast Syria, Hall said, although the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon might have changed the calculus in Washington, where a troop withdrawal would undoubtedly benefit Iran, Turkey, or other players.

"If Afghanistan hadn’t gone so horrendously for Biden, then we might have seen a withdrawal of US forces from Syria already," said Hall.

"Now it's really unclear if this will happen with the next administration, regardless of whether it’s Trump or Harris, and that is primarily because Syria is now a playground for arms and money from Iranian-backed groups. So, keeping a handle on things with a few hundred troops in northeast Syria is probably strategically advantageous - it always has been, but probably even more so now."

A sharp rise in Islamic State (IS) attacks recently and the current paralysis on the release of residents of Al-Hol and other camps controlled by US-allied Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) could determine the fate of the US troop presence in northeast Syria, says Steven Heydemann, a professor at Smith College. 

"The precise timing of the US troop withdrawal remains uncertain but with the recent agreement between the US and Iraq about drawing down the small US contingent presence there, the position of US troops in northeast Syria becomes that much more tenuous," he told The New Arab. 

"So the time horizon for that operation is probably fairly limited, but if Donald Trump were to win the election next week, his victory could accelerate the withdrawal of US forces."

From the Harris camp, one name put forward as a likely candidate to draw up a new US strategy for the MENA region is veteran foreign policy advisor Philip Gordon.

He has repeatedly called for a reassessment of the US approach toward Syria that recognises the weaknesses of the opposition and the likelihood Bashar Al-Assad will remain in power for the foreseeable future with a hybrid approach of "diplomacy and de-escalation" to engineer behavioural change from the Syrian regime.

Many have pointed out that the dysfunctional and fragmented make-up of the Syrian regime would make such an approach unlikely to succeed, in part due to competition between different factions and outside powers - notably Iran and Russia - over institutions and policy in Syria, in addition to the territorial divisions within the country, 

Yet Trump’s reported ambitions to fill the US civil service with MAGA loyalists would essentially remove the guardrails that currently exist in US institutions and allow the president to rule by fiat, says Heydemann, with a few frightening parallels to the shift towards greater authoritarianism in the Arab world post-2011.

Previously, there were enough institutional checks and balances to prevent Trump from acting on his more ill-conceived ideas - particularly when they might benefit US adversaries - as when he made the surprise announcement as president in 2018 of plans for a full and swift withdrawal of US troops from Syria without consulting allies

"I think essentially a second Trump administration would mean the US turning its back on Syria, giving Russia, by default, carte blanche to pursue whatever ambitions it has in Syria without the US checking these, and I suspect he’d also give Israel the same authority," he said.

"Syria is seen as somewhat of an irritant by the Biden administration at the moment, but it would be seen as a significant irritant to Trump."

Paul McLoughlin is a senior news editor at The New Arab. 

Follow him on Twitter: @PaullMcLoughlin