博客

In a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, the Trump administration announced Monday that it has formally stripped Syria of its decades-old designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST), a policy change that lifts longstanding U.S. export restrictions and paves the way for American military assistance to Damascus.

Alongside the delisting of Syria, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed in an official statement that the U.S. has also revoked the Specially Designated Global Terrorist classification of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the armed group now led by Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, who is widely known by his former nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Sharaa previously led HTS as an offshoot of al-Qaeda before the group broke ties with the global terror network.

Rubio framed the dual delistings as another landmark step forward by President Trump to open a path toward greater economic prosperity for the Syrian people. The policy change comes just one week after Israel carried out an airstrike on Syria’s Abu al-Duhur airbase, an attack that inflamed existing tensions between Washington, Damascus, and Syria’s key international backer Turkey. Last week, U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Syria Envoy Tom Barrack described the Israeli strike as “serious and worrying” in a media interview, noting that the attack appeared to be an attempt to bait Turkey into open military conflict.

The formal delisting on Monday follows months of deliberate signaling from the Trump administration that it planned to remove Syria from the terrorism blacklist. President Trump officially launched the delisting process last month during his high-profile visit to the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, where he held a landmark bilateral meeting with Sharaa on the sidelines of the official summit proceedings. That meeting marked another milestone in the rapidly warming relationship between the two leaders: Sharaa was first introduced to Trump just over a year ago in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, before becoming the first Syrian leader in decades — and the first with a past designation as a U.S. terrorist — to visit the Oval Office and exchange gifts with the U.S. president last November.

Syria was first added to the U.S. SST blacklist in 1979, when the country was led by Hafez al-Assad, father of former longtime president Bashar al-Assad. At the height of the Cold War, Syria received substantial economic and military support from the Soviet Union. While Hafez al-Assad maintained quiet diplomatic channels with the U.S. alongside his alliances with Cold War adversaries, relations between Washington and Damascus collapsed over disagreements over Lebanon and Assad’s open support for Palestinian resistance groups.

Trump’s rapid diplomatic embrace of Sharaa over the past 12 months stands out as one of the most unconventional foreign policy moves of his second term, a step that analysts agree no recent Democratic or Republican U.S. president would have been willing to take. Trump has publicly praised Sharaa repeatedly, describing him as “fantastic,” “highly respected,” and “tough” in public remarks.

Monday’s formal delisting is rooted in an executive order Trump issued in June 2025, which ordered targeted sanctions relief for Syria based on what the White House called verifiable positive changes and effective counterterrorism actions by Sharaa’s government, plus formal security assurances provided by Damascus.

“Over the past year, the Government of Syria has taken significant steps to counter terrorism, to include formally joining the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS in November and conducting operations to disrupt the terror networks of ISIS, al-Qa’ida, Hizballah, and Iran-aligned groups,” Rubio said in his statement.

Rubio added that revoking both Syria’s SST designation and HTS’ terror label removes the last major barriers to private sector investment in Syria, creating new opportunities for the country’s economic recovery and reintegration into the global economy.

Analysts have described the policy shift as a transformative moment for Syria. Natasha Hall, an associate fellow in the Middle East and North Africa programme at London-based think tank Chatham House, previously called the delisting “earth-shifting” for the country in comments to Middle East Eye. She noted that the terror designation was one of the final major obstacles blocking Syria’s path to economic recovery.

The Syrian American Council, a grassroots advocacy group that lobbied extensively for the delisting, said it was grateful for the Trump administration’s action. “This is a clear win for US policy… from just the American national security perspective,” the group’s grassroots officer Alberto Hernandez told Middle East Eye. “This is the right way for engagement.”

Amid a collapsing de facto ceasefire and escalating tensions in the strategic Strait of Hormuz, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a sweeping new round of sanctions against Iran and what the Trump administration terms the regime’s “enablers” on Monday, framing the action as a deliberate push to economically asphyxiate Tehran.

Speaking to reporters in Washington D.C., Bessent laid out what he calls Operation Economic Outcast, an initiative designed to eliminate any alternative path for the Iranian government beyond total capitulation to U.S. demands. “Iran now faces a very clear choice: complete global isolation and a subsistence economy, or a path back to normalcy with an opportunity to rejoin the global economy,” he told press. “America is no longer managing the Iranian threat. We are ending it.”

To implement the campaign, the Treasury Department has adopted what Bessent describes as a “zero leakage approach”, mapping every node, facilitator and network Iran has historically used to smuggle crude oil and evade existing international sanctions. President Donald Trump has also already held private phone calls with global leaders to issue specific demands that they cut all commercial and financial ties with Tehran, though Bessent declined to name the countries that received these requests.

Some 60 additional entities and individuals are set to face secondary sanctions in the coming weeks, but the administration is rolling out the measures gradually rather than imposing them immediately. When pressed on the phased timeline, Bessent acknowledged the need to avoid broader financial disruption, asking reporters “Why would I want to blow up the global financial system?” All countries have been given a structured deadline to wind down the activities the U.S. has flagged; if they fail to act, the Treasury will unilaterally impose penalties using its existing regulatory authority. A key target of the campaign is Bank Melli, Iran’s largest commercial bank with decades of history and a network of branches across Europe and the Middle East, which the U.S. demands be fully shuttered globally.

The new sanctions come as Washington faces lingering questions over its failure to reassert military control over the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint through which roughly a fifth of global oil supplies pass daily. The six-month U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran has already roiled global energy markets and upended international shipping, sending tanker charter rates soaring. A shipping-focused exchange-traded fund, BWET, has jumped 98% over the past month alone, reflecting widespread market disruption. With midterm elections approaching in November, rising energy prices have become a pressing political concern for Trump administration among American voters.

The phased rollout also reflects sensitivity around existing commercial ties between major U.S. partners and Iran, particularly China—currently the top buyer of Iranian crude oil, according to data from California-based research firm SRI International. Other major export destinations for Iranian energy include Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. Asked about potential friction with Beijing ahead of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned state visit to the White House next month, Bessent said the administration is pursuing quiet diplomacy to set clear expectations for all global partners, adding that operating in the “gray areas” of the current conflict is no longer acceptable. “Countries cannot claim they are blind to enabling this activity,” Bessent said. “Iran’s enablers purchase and transport its petroleum. They facilitate the flow of its finances through exchange houses and free trade zones… all the while concealing the extent of their complicity.”

Because the global financial system is structured around U.S. banking standards and U.S. dollar transactions, newly sanctioned parties will effectively be locked out of most cross-border economic activity. Just last week, Bessent first previewed what he called “the toughest sanctions in history” against Tehran, while Trump framed the campaign as an “economic D-Day” in a social media post, warning that any country that provides even a minor lifeline to Iran will face “tremendous economic consequences.”

Iran has already pushed back against the new measures. In a speech last Thursday at an Arbaeen ceremony in Karbala, Iraq, Iranian Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf said Tehran and Baghdad will not allow foreign powers to dictate their futures, calling for deeper security and economic cooperation between the two neighbors to advance shared prosperity.

U.S. and independent policy analysts have cast mixed doubt on the effectiveness of the new sanctions campaign. The National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington-based advocacy group, warned Monday that the new measures will likely push Iran to escalate regional military actions—including a renewed blockade of the Strait of Hormuz or targeted attacks on Gulf energy infrastructure—consistent with Tehran’s long-held position that it will not tolerate economic warfare.

NIAC Policy Director Ryan Costello noted that the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign has a long track record of harming ordinary Iranians while leaving ruling elite largely insulated from economic pain, and that Tehran has never capitulated to U.S. demands. “Trump’s gamble is that this time, amid the destruction of war, and with the reinforcement of a blockade, time is on his side and ultimately Iran will be forced to concede defeat,” Costello said.

Richard Nephew, a former Biden administration national security official and architect of earlier U.S. sanctions campaigns against Iran, described Bessent’s announcement as mostly rhetorical bluster, noting on X that the phased rollout has watered down the “economic D-Day” framing into something far less decisive. “So, they took the weekend and looked at what they were going to do and thought ‘hmmmmm’ and are now turning this into less a ‘D Day’ than a ‘don’t make me count to 3’,” Nephew wrote.

Eurasia Group senior analyst Gregory Brew similarly characterized the announcement as a “warning shot”, arguing that the U.S. is seeking to ratchet up pressure on Tehran without triggering major Iranian retaliation or alienating key Iranian trading partners, most notably China.