Samer Bakkour

The collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in December 2024 forced a fundamental recalibration of Syria’s external relationships, particularly with the U.S. and Russia. This article argues that post-Assad Syria is not experiencing straightforward normalization but a structured renegotiation of influence. Washington has shifted from comprehensive sanctions and military containment toward conditional engagement, redesigning sanctions as bargaining infrastructure to incentivize counter-ISIS cooperation and enable gradual troop drawdowns, while exposing new vulnerabilities, especially in detainee management and northeast governance. Moscow, in contrast, has moved from regime patronage to managed relevance, seeking to preserve strategic basing rights and limited economic leverage under tighter regional and geopolitical constraints. The resulting order is neither alliances nor ruptures, but a probationary equilibrium shaped by security imperatives, reconstruction politics, and competing forms of external leverage. Syria’s trajectory now depends less on summit diplomacy than on whether transitional institutions can stabilize authority without reproducing coercive fragmentation.