President Donald Trump ordered something last week that previously seemed impossible: lifting U.S. economic sanctions. At a U.S.-Saudi investment forum in Riyadh, he declared that he was "ordering the cessation of sanctions against Syria in order to give them a chance at greatness." Then he shook hands with Ahmad al-Sharaa, the new Syrian president, formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Golani.
As Trump alluded to in his speech, U.S. sanctions were imposed to put pressure on the previous government of Bashar Assad. When Sharaa overthrew Assad late last year, the embargo outlived its policy purpose.
But the devil is in the details. Sanctions are a complicated bureaucratic knot to untangle. Aaron Zelin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, warned on X that "people in [Trump's] own administration are trying to stop it or slow it down severely." And a Syrian government minister tells Reason that a U.S. delegation has come with a set of "requests" for Syria to fulfill.
