Upsides of Syrian normalization Assad Is Heinous, But Arab Isolation of Him Did More Harm Than Good

The Foreign Affairs is weighing the pros and cons of al-Assad's rapprochement with the Arab world. Caliber.Az republishes the article.

In July, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad made his triumphant return to the Arab League, 12 years after it had suspended his country’s membership for cracking down on protesters during the Arab Spring. On his arrival at the group’s summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Assad exchanged kisses with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He shook hands with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. And in front of the assembled leaders, he celebrated Syria’s reentry. Syria’s “past, present, and future are Arabism,” Assad said.

Assad’s appearance in Jeddah caps off what has been a dramatic recovery for him and his regime. For more than a decade, Syria’s leader had been at odds with most Middle Eastern and North African states as he fought to crush a domestic rebellion. But beginning in 2018, various Arab countries started to renew ties. Then, in the winter of 2023, Saudi Arabia intervened to more fully reintegrate Syria into the region. After two months of energetic diplomacy, Riyadh succeeded. Assad’s Syria has been welcomed back to the community of Arab states.

Arab countries’ renewed ties with Syria have angered many in the West. Officials and analysts have argued that Assad’s rehabilitation is deeply unjust, threatens the well-being of Syrians, and endangers the broader region. “The Arab rehabilitation of Assad will only accelerate dangerous trends across the region,” wrote Emile Hokayem, the director of regional security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in Foreign Affairs last May. Hokayem predicted normalization would strengthen Assad inside Syria and worsen pressure on Syrian refugees outside the country.

The outrage is understandable; Assad has done heinous things to remain in power. When Syrians protested, mostly peacefully, in 2011, Assad’s security services responded with extreme violence. He then waged a brutal, indiscriminate military campaign to defeat the ensuing armed revolt. He even used chemical weapons against his people.

Yet Arab normalization is the right move. Restoring ties with Damascus may seem noxious, but the region’s boycott did nothing to stop Assad or to make life better for Syria’s suffering people. And by reestablishing relations, Arab states can engage Damascus on issues that matter. They can push Assad to rein in drug traffickers who have flooded the region with dangerous amphetamines. They can make sure Syria is not entirely in thrall to Iran. Most important, they can work with Damascus to improve the conditions of ordinary Syrians by expanding aid access, restoring basic services, and generally ensuring Syria is not so miserable that its people have no choice but to leave.

The United States is unlikely to outwardly endorse Arab normalization, and Washington itself certainly will not restore ties with Damascus. But given the facts, the United States should not stop its Arab partners from cooperating with Assad. Instead, Washington and its Western allies should work with these countries as they try to make Damascus less destabilizing and dangerous—both for the region and for Syrians.

In and out

At a November 2011 emergency session, the Arab League announced it was suspending Syria’s membership. The league’s verdict came in the middle of the Arab Spring and after a decision earlier that year to suspend Libya for President Muammar al-Qaddafi’s attacks against his citizens. Assad, for his part, had defied a deal brokered by the Arab League that was meant to halt violence against protesters and pave the way for dialogue between Damascus and Syria’s opposition. As a result, the league said, it had no choice but to evict him.

“Syria is a dear country for all of us,” Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem told reporters in announcing the decision. “We hope there will be a brave move from Syria to stop the violence and begin a real dialogue toward real reform.”

There was not. Instead, Assad escalated his violent crackdown on Syria’s protest movement. That movement, in turn, gave way to an armed insurgency as groups fighting against Assad seized control of much of the country. The brutal civil war that followed killed hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.

But Assad survived. And eventually, with the help of Iran and Russia, he largely defeated his enemies. By July 2018, the Syrian army had recaptured the last rebel-held enclaves in central and southern Syria. The civil war is still ongoing, but only a few peripheral areas of the country remain outside of Damascus’s authority.

In the months following Assad’s major wins, Bahrain, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates—all Arab countries that previously supported Syria’s opposition—began to reengage with Syria’s leader. Jordan, for example, reopened its main border crossing with Syria. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates reopened their embassies in Damascus.

At the time, these countries did not do much else to improve relations, deterred by the Trump administration’s fierce opposition to regional normalization. But after Joe Biden became the US president in 2021, they resumed their outreach. According to Asharq Al-Awsat, an international Arabic newspaper, Jordanian King Abdullah bin al-Hussein promoted an Arab-led plan to reengage Syria during a July 2021 trip to meet Biden. Senior Jordanian and Syrian officials met later that year, and in October, Abdullah spoke with Assad by phone. The UAE, meanwhile, steadily upped its contacts with Syria. The Emirati foreign minister visited Damascus in November 2021, and the UAE’s leaders hosted Assad in Abu Dhabi and Dubai the following March.

At first, Saudi Arabia remained more circumspect about reengaging with Syria than did these three neighbors. Damascus and Riyadh reestablished some limited official contacts during 2021, but publicly, Saudi Arabia mostly held to a hard line. Indeed, as late as December 2021, Abdallah al-Mouallimi, Saudi Arabia’s envoy to the UN, fiercely attacked Assad for claiming victory in the country’s conflict. “How can victory be declared among the shreds of the innocent, amid homes reduced to rubble?” he asked at a UN General Assembly meeting. “What victory is this, for a leader on the bodies of his people and his citizens?”

Then, in February 2023, northern Syria was hit by a catastrophic earthquake. The disaster, which killed an estimated 6,000 Syrians, elicited an outpouring of humanitarian assistance to the country from across the Arab world—including from Riyadh. Saudi Arabia made unprecedented deliveries of relief to government-controlled parts of Syria and, in parallel, moved to rekindle its relationship with Assad. Saudi officials began to say that the Arab world was increasingly inclined toward direct dialogue with the Assad regime. In late February, for instance, the kingdom’s foreign minister, Faisal bin Farhan, declared that when it came to Syria, “the status quo is not workable." In March, Saudi Arabia and Syria agreed to resume consular services. Within weeks, the deal developed into a full diplomatic opening.

Saudi Arabia then spearheaded Syria’s return to the Arab League. On May 1, Riyadh helped convene a meeting with the Saudi, Egyptian, Jordanian, Iraqi, and Syrian foreign ministers in Amman, Jordan’s capital. The states signed a joint communiqué in which they agreed on a set of humanitarian, security, and political steps to resolve the Syrian conflict. Six days later, at Saudi Arabia’s prompting, the foreign ministers of the Arab League countries voted to restore Syria’s membership. And on May 19, Assad made his formal return at the league’s Jeddah summit.

Dealing with the devil

Assad’s victory lap in Jeddah scandalized many in Washington. The Democratic chairman and ranking Republican on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee issued a statement arguing that the league’s decision threatened “to further freeze conflict” and served “as an obstacle to accountability.” Their counterparts in the House of Representatives agreed, condemning normalization as “a grave strategic mistake.” Multiple members of Congress have since introduced bills to discourage countries from normalizing ties with Assad.

The indignation at Assad’s rehabilitation is understandable yet misplaced. Normalization was bound to happen sooner or later for a simple reason: Assad’s continued rule in Syria is a reality. Damascus put down the country’s insurgency, despite the best efforts of many international players to support the Syrian opposition. Most of the Arab states that met in Amman would know. Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE spent years arming Syrian opposition fighters before giving in and restoring ties with Damascus. They understood that a few more years of isolation would do nothing to shake Assad’s regime.

The status quo, meanwhile, was making life worse for almost everyone—including ordinary Syrians. Damascus’s isolation has helped immiserate the state’s people, who are largely stuck, through no fault of their own, in a wrecked country. Even before February’s earthquake, Syrians’ humanitarian needs were already at an all-time high. Most of the millions of people who fled the country did so when the war was most intense, but even now, Syrians are leaving to escape their state’s ruined economy and to avoid military conscription. Those earlier waves of refugees have strained host countries’ economies, and now Syrians in Lebanon and Turkey face mounting xenophobic backlash. It does not help Syrians—or Arab states—that Syria has become an exporter of illicit drugs and a staging ground for Iranian-backed paramilitaries. Arab states therefore had little choice but to deal with Damascus. Syria is simply too pivotal, geographically, economically, and politically, to be isolated and quarantined like an Arab North Korea.

Assad, of course, is far from an ideal partner. But Arab states are not wrong to think that engagement may serve their interests. The simple fact of renewed ties, for instance, is likely to make Damascus less dependent on Tehran and to dilute Iranian influence in Syria. And Arab countries appear to have already secured some Syrian cooperation on stopping drug trafficking. According to reporting by Reuters, in May, Jordan carried out an airstrike on a drug factory in southern Syria. Damascus’s response—conspicuous silence—made it clear that Syria did not object. In fact, Jordan and Syria have since convened a working group on countering drug trafficking, and Syrian security forces have carried out anti-drug sweeps along the Jordanian-Syrian border.

Critically, Arab normalization should also benefit ordinary Syrians. In the Amman communiqué, for example, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia agreed with Syria on a number of joint humanitarian measures. These include steps by Syrian authorities to clarify which Syrian refugees abroad would be granted amnesty under decrees issued by Damascus. The communiqué also calls for further cooperation between all five countries on the release of Syrian detainees and the search for missing Syrians, with the help of organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross. And the communiqué links efforts by Damascus to facilitate the voluntary return of refugees with Arab and international contributions toward building infrastructure and essential services in the areas where people will be moving. To this end, the communiqué stipulates that its signatories will work with international donors and UN agencies to accelerate the construction of schools and hospitals in Syria, as well as to provide economic opportunity for Syria’s people.

It is not yet clear whether Damascus is truly committed to these goals. But the government has made significant good-faith gestures. Since the meeting in Amman, for instance, it expanded UN humanitarian access to opposition-held northern Syria. It first renewed permission for the UN to use two border crossings (initially opened after February’s earthquake). Then, when Russia vetoed a UN Security Council resolution authorizing the organization’s use of another vital crossing, Damascus and the UN struck a deal that lets the body use it anyway. Arab engagement, then, may already be helping improve the lives of Syrians.

An inconvenient truth

Some opponents of normalization grant that Arab engagement will make Syria a more habitable country. But they argue that this change will come at an intolerable human rights cost. “An improvement of humanitarian access and economic conditions in parts of Syria is likely,” ceded Hokayem. But inside Syria, he said, “the regime will use Arab support to subsidize its brutal strategy for consolidating power.”

Yet there is no evidence to suggest that normalization will in fact make Assad even more repressive. Syria’s security services have not been waiting for external validation to target dissidents and perceived undesirables. There is little indication that the government has struggled to suppress dissent because it lacks the economic resources normalization might give it. Analysts may fear that normalization will enable Assad to conquer the few remaining enclaves outside Damascus’s control, but these concerns do not hold up to logical scrutiny. The main obstacle to a total Assad victory is not Arab countries but the presence of Turkish and US forces in Syria’s north and east. There is no reason to think that Arab normalization will prompt either of these states to pull back.

Arab cooperation with Damascus on refugees does carry more risks, and as these countries restore ties, UN agencies and donor states will have to work closely with Arab governments to ensure any returns are truly voluntary. But Jordan, the country at the forefront of refugee returns, is a reliable and trustworthy partner for Western countries, and it has largely avoided pushing Syrians back. Egypt and the Gulf states also seem unlikely to expel Syrian migrants. It is mostly Lebanese and Turkish authorities who have been summarily deporting refugees. And these governments are doing so because of domestic anti-Syrian sentiment, not because of anything Arab countries have agreed to do.

Opponents of normalization contend that these countries’ agreements will make it impossible to hold the Assad regime accountable for its atrocities. But it was always a mistake to believe that Arab states would deliver justice for Syrians. Saudi Arabia’s leader famously had the journalist Jamal Khashoggi murdered and escaped punishment; no one should have expected him to champion accountability. The leaders of other Arab states also have checkered human rights records. And even if these countries would punish Assad, the reality is that Syria’s continued isolation was not achieving accountability. Instead, all it was doing was hurting Syria’s people.

Reconciling with Assad is still too distasteful for the United States and most of its Western allies, which remain resolutely opposed to reestablishing ties with Damascus. But thankfully, Biden appears to understand why his Arab counterparts have gone a different way. Although the Biden administration criticized the Arab League’s decision to welcome back Damascus, it has also emphasized that these Arab countries share objectives with the United States in Syria and has not tried to force Arab countries to reverse course. The State Department official Barbara Leaf instead encouraged governments reengaging with Damascus to secure “concrete actions that benefit the Syrian people.” The European Union has adopted a similar line.

Washington should stay the course. It should not try to roll back normalization (which is impossible), but it should push its Arab partners to work as hard as they can to meaningfully improve conditions for Syrians. The United States should, for example, urge Arab states to keep issues like aid access and detainee releases central to their engagement with Assad, instead of simply focusing on drug trafficking and Iran. Washington should also encourage its Arab partners to coordinate with Geir Pederson, the UN special envoy for Syria, who has been trying to incorporate various parties’ political and humanitarian gestures into a “step-by-step” framework to resolve Syria’s conflict. None of these steps would require the United States to itself normalize relations with Syria.

Ideally, no one would have to choose between accountability in Syria and the well-being of Syria’s people. But the reality of the situation means the world must prioritize. Assad is here to stay, and so the broader Middle East is stuck with him. The Arab world’s decision to welcome Damascus in from the cold was therefore as sensible as it was inevitable. Now it is up to Washington and its allies to help Arab states make sure that ordinary Syrians benefit.