The stage is set for Trump’s global leadership moment
By Frederick Kempe
The stage is set for Trump’s global leadership moment
Connect the dots across the factors that brought about the collapse of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad last week and you’ll see glaring new evidence of Russian and Iranian weaknesses. These dramatic vulnerabilities provide President-elect Donald Trump with a historic opportunity of global consequence early in his second term.
My recent conversations with US and Middle East officials, conducted on the condition of anonymity, provide rich insights into the interconnections of events in the Middle East and beyond over the past several weeks. Most importantly, they offer a roadmap for the incoming Trump administration to counter an emerging “axis of aggressors”: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
History has shown that even the most fearsome of dictatorships have underlying weaknesses that make apparently impregnable autocrats suddenly vulnerable. Such was the case with Assad, who fled his country for Russia this month after his family’s half century of despotic leadership. Now it also could be the case for Assad’s autocratic allies, which previously had saved and propped up his regime.
For the incoming Trump administration to effectively respond to this axis, however, the proudly transactional president-elect will need to discover his inner Henry Kissinger. Trump should respond strategically, alongside US partners and allies, in a manner that could shape the future decisively and for the next generation.
The road to Damascus
Let’s start with the lessons US and Middle East officials have gleaned from recent events in the region, beginning with the November 27 ceasefire agreement signed by Lebanon, Israel, and several mediating countries, including the United States.
A source familiar with Turkish actions says that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in direct response to this agreement, provided Syrian rebels the “go signal” for their attack on Aleppo the following day. (Some Turkish officials have denied that the government green-lit the offensive, while Trump has claimed that Erdoğan mounted an “unfriendly takeover” of Syria.) By November 30, the Turkish-backed forces, in lightning-like manner, had captured most of the city amid the collapse of Syrian government forces.
Following that, Syrian rebels took the Hama Governorate countryside, bordering on Aleppo. By December 5, the entire city of Hama, just 130 miles from Damascus, had fallen to them. Then, without encountering any real opposition, they made their way another thirty miles from Hama to Homs, down the M5 highway, the central link between the country’s interior cities. From there, it was on to Damascus.
On December 8, the Assad regime collapsed during a major rebel offensive spearheaded by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Sunni political and military organization—and former offshoot of al-Qaeda in Syria, the Nusra Front—that led the revolt and is supported by the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army. The capture of Damascus ended the brutal rule of the Assad family, which had governed Syria since Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, took complete power as president in 1971.
Turkey saw a turning point
What’s important for the incoming Trump administration to understand is why Turkey moved so quickly after so many years of relentless civil war. Erdoğan’s decision, informed by the Turkish National Intelligence Organization and its director, İbrahim Kalın, stemmed from their assessment of new Iranian and Russian weakness. They concluded that they had a window of opportunity to act—one they feared might close if the rebels didn’t strike swiftly and decisively.
The Israel-Lebanon ceasefire deal had changed the situation. What the Turks saw in the thirteen-point agreement—including its prohibition on Hezbollah and other groups attacking Israel from Lebanon or storing weapons south of the Litani River—was that Iran was no longer capable of intervening to support Hezbollah, and thus wouldn’t act to support Assad either. Hezbollah had lost the ability to defend Iran’s interests in Lebanon following Israel’s devastating attacks, which included the precision airstrike on September 27 that killed its sixty-four-year-old leader, Hassan Nasrallah, among the most consequential of Israel’s targeted killings of adversaries in memory.
In advance of the offensive, Turkey and its Syrian allies also had observed signs of Russian vulnerability: The Kremlin had pulled a large number of its planes and vast amounts of its heavy military equipment from its Syrian bases in order to support its escalating war against Ukraine.
Had Russia maintained its usual military presence in Syria, it likely would have hit rebel troops on the roads they traveled from Aleppo to Hama, Homs, and then on to Damascus. US and Middle East officials regarded the fall of Assad as a demonstration of how weak Russia has become in its ability to project power.
A lesson that took too long to learn
The US officials I spoke with also believe that the past month’s events mark a turning point for Russia—one where it abandoned its role as a Middle East and global power. Moscow seems to have grasped that even its regional power role is at stake in Ukraine, so the fight there has to take precedence. The fall of Assad put an end to Russia’s commanding role in Syria, which began in 2011 as the Syrian civil war was starting and gathered steam in 2015, when Russian President Vladimir Putin, sensing the lack of resolve of the Obama administration, intervened militarily to save the Assad regime.
The Kremlin’s military deployment to Syria marked the first time that Moscow involved itself in an armed conflict outside of Soviet Union boundaries since the Cold War’s end in 1991. “Now that Russia has moved most of its toys outside of Syria, that period has ended,” one individual familiar with the situation told me.
Though it was not decisive in Assad’s fall, it’s also worth noting the involvement of Ukrainian intelligence and the country’s military in the setback that Iran and Russia suffered in Syria. As the Washington Post’s David Ignatius chronicled in a recent column, Ukrainian intelligence operatives provided twenty experienced drone operators and about 150 first-person-view drones to the Syrian rebels who overthrew Assad.
Whatever role this played in Damascus, wrote Ignatius, “it was notable as part of a broader Ukrainian effort to strike covertly at Russian operations in the Middle East, Africa, and inside Russia itself.” Most dramatically this week, Ukrainian operatives in Moscow killed Lieutenant General Igor Kirillov, the head of Russia’s nuclear, chemical, and biological defense forces, taking a page from Israel’s covert attacks on Iranians inside their own country.
What US officials have taken too long to learn: As long as Russia’s aspirations remain global and aimed above all at Washington, there is a benefit to frustrating them anywhere.
Risk and reward in the Middle East
US officials hadn’t anticipated that Lebanon would become the linchpin to so much of what is now transpiring, but as they connect the dots themselves, they are recognizing how transformational Israeli actions there have been.
US officials weren’t informed in advance about the Israeli attack on Nasrallah, a strike they assess was high-risk but ultimately high-return, and which came at a time when they were trying to rein in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s military offensive in Lebanon.
If Israel had failed to kill Nasrallah, that might have had devastating consequences, particularly if only Lebanese civilians had been killed in the strike. But the Israeli effort was a success. It shifted the Biden administration from trying to constrain Israel’s operations in Lebanon to leveraging its military success for a more lasting and positive outcome for the country.
What’s also connected to the factors that prompted the ceasefire in Lebanon—Israeli strength, Iranian weakness, and Hezbollah’s devastation—is recent progress toward negotiating a Gaza agreement that would include Hamas releasing its hostages.
US officials hedge their increased optimism about the chances for a Gaza agreement with Hamas due to multiple disappointments over the past year. At the same time, they feel that Hamas is more willing to reach agreement now as it recognizes that it has lost Hezbollah and Iran as effective allies, with neither sticking by Hamas as the group had expected. Hamas is also still reeling from Israel killing its leader, Yahya Sinwar, on October 16.
Trump’s three historic opportunities
So where does all that leave the incoming US administration?
Trump is inheriting a far more dangerous world from the Biden administration than what he confronted during his first term. But the new dangers are not simply ongoing wars in the Middle East and Europe and heightened tensions regarding China and Taiwan. Most dramatically different is a change that Trump hasn’t yet publicly addressed: the “axis of aggressors” he confronts.
“At a structural level,” writes the Atlantic Council’s Andrew Michta, “an alliance hostile to the United States and its allies in Europe and Asia has coalesced, with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea forming a new ‘Axis of Dictatorships’ to support and enable each other at speed and scale, with Russia benefitting both economically and in terms of weapons and munitions supplies—and, of late, also manpower—to press for advantage in Ukraine. Our world is unraveling before our eyes, with regional power balances in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia on the verge of imploding.”
Against this backdrop, Trump’s opportunities are three-fold.
First, Trump should support Israel in confronting an Iran that Biden administration officials believe is at its weakest point in decades. Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Gaza—Hezbollah and Hamas—have been defeated militarily and are severely weakened politically, while Tehran’s Syrian ally is now out of power as well. Its Shia militias in Iraq, also now more vulnerable, were unwilling to come to the assistance of their Syrian partners.
Iran’s air defenses are down following precise, targeted Israeli air strikes on October 25. Since then, sources familiar with the matter say, Israeli or US planes (or really those of any other country) could fly over Iran almost with impunity. That includes Turkey, an apparent new enemy of Iran, which at the same time has humiliated Moscow through its role in ensuring Assad’s fall.
Moreover, Iran’s missile attacks this year have shown it incapable of seriously damaging Israel, and Middle East and US sources tell me that Iran’s production of new missiles since then has been reduced to one per week, down from two every day. An individual familiar with intelligence reports on the matter tells me that there are increasing disputes within Iran between the military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps over who is responsible for Iran’s mounting difficulties.
Israel has re-established itself, in the words of one observer, as the regional superpower. It also has expanded its territorial hold by taking Mount Hermon and the surrounding area in the United Nations-administered buffer zone between Israel and Syria that was established following the 1973 war. It’s hard to imagine Israel giving up these hard-won gains any time soon, given that what comes next in Syria, and who will control territory along the Syrian side of the border, remains a question mark.
On the other side is Iran, which has lost two parts of its triple threat against Israel. It has lost the axis of militias that were its frontline deterrent, and it has lost the missile-production capacity that had given it confidence that it could launch a devastating attack against Israel. What remains is the threat of it possessing nuclear weapons.
Should Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, take decisive steps toward nuclear weaponization—something he has said he will not do because it is “anti-Islamic”—Biden administration officials have said to me that US forces could strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the officials are confident that the strike would succeed. In other words, the one action Iran’s leadership could take now to reestablish its military credibility and deterrence could, once the dust has cleared, set back Iran even further.
Second, the Trump administration confronts a Russia that in the Middle East has demonstrated that it’s far weaker than its recent gains in Ukraine would suggest. The incoming US administration also has a potential ally in Ukraine, which has shown itself to be a proven, capable, and resourceful military actor, if NATO and the European Union embrace the country.
In Ukraine, Russian forces have made advances, even if at the cost of devastating human losses, in the past three months, during which they have captured more than 600 square miles of Ukraine and recaptured 190 square miles in Russia’s Kursk oblast, where Ukrainian forces had taken territory.
It would be a mistake, however, for the incoming Trump administration to interpret these gains as enduring strength. Writing for TIME, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, the Atlantic Council’s John Herbst, Atlantic Council lifetime board director Robert Hormats, and Stephen Henriques raise the possibility that the latest developments in Syria might be the beginning of a “reverse domino effect” that could topple Russia’s imperialist ambitions.
“Vladimir Putin,” they write, “is running out of time with his crumbling economy and overstretched, faltering army trying to advance his ill-advised invasion of Ukraine, while attempting to suppress pro-democracy activities in several nations around his intended sphere of influence.” Now the Russian president is betting on Trump’s return to the White House to turn the tide in his favor.
“It need not happen that way,” they argue. While incoming Trump administration officials agree on taking a tougher approach to Iran, they are divided on Russia. A greater realization of Moscow’s expansive intentions and growing vulnerability should settle this debate in Ukraine’s favor.
Third, with Iran and Russia both looking weak, it’s a good moment for US officials to drive home to their Chinese counterparts the cost of linking themselves to what Stephen Hadley, who was national security advisor under President George W. Bush, calls an “axis of losers” in a recent Foreign Affairs essay.
Writes Hadley, who is also executive vice chairman of the Atlantic Council’s board: “China has made its prestige hostage to the success of its axis partners. If they should be seen to be failing in their respective efforts to impose their will on their neighbors by force, it would become clear to the world that Beijing has cast its lot with losers. That would not only undermine China’s effort to project itself as the global leader of a new kind of international order; it would also damage Xi’s personal standing, at home and abroad.”
Though China’s vulnerabilities aren’t as apparent as those of Iran and Russia, concerns about its slowing economy are growing, despite its recent efforts at stimulus, reflected by a continuing plunge in its sovereign debt yields. “In reality, businesses are struggling to keep their lights on, people are having severe difficulty in finding jobs, and municipalities are struggling in debt,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Lingling Wei this week. Beijing, she adds, “is facing a crisis over policy credibility.”
That provides one more reason why this is a good moment for Trump to take on this “axis of aggressors.”
With regard to the fourth member of this axis, North Korea, Hadley calls upon the United States to demonstrate that Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons won’t provide it the ability to bully its neighbors. That would require Washington strengthening the diplomatic, economic, and military capabilities of Australia, Japan, and South Korea—“all with the aim of continued progress toward a free, open, and peaceful Indo-Pacific.”
That’s a lot to expect of any incoming president, much less one who has many isolationist advisors around him who hope to restrain him from pushing for geopolitical advantage due to their perceptions of the risk and the cost of doing so. But at this time of historic opportunity, underscored by unfolding events in the Middle East, the greater military risk and long-term cost would be a failure to act.
As Michta concludes, “The world is at a critical juncture, one that will require the United States to restore its regional power balances so as to avoid an all-out war . . . It’s a time to return to realism in US national security policy, putting hard power considerations and geopolitics front and center. There is no time to waste.”
History is in motion as President Joe Biden leaves office and Trump assumes control. If the incoming president connects the dots and ignores advisors who aren’t willing to do so, the scene is set for Trump’s defining leadership moment on the world stage.