After the meeting, President Trump described Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa as a ‘young, attractive guy.’

This morning, President Trump did something that no U.S. president has done in 25 years: meet the president of Syria.

Trump’s meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa is even more extraordinary than an American president meeting with some repugnant branch of the Assad family. Until late December, the U.S. government was willing to pay $10 million for information about al-Sharaa’s location, because he was on the “specially designated global terrorist” list. Al-Sharaa, who used to be known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, ran Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which the U.S. government characterized as a terrorist group. HTS overthrew the old regime of Bashar al-Assad.

After the meeting, on Air Force One, Trump described al-Sharaa as a “young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter. . . . He’s got a real shot at holding it together. I spoke with President Erdoğan, who is very friendly with him. He feels he’s got a shot of doing a good job. It’s a torn-up country.”

Trump also announced that the U.S. will be lifting the sanctions on Syria, which were initially put in place to punish the Assad regime. The U.S. sanctions were on . . . just about everything, including prohibitions on “new investments in Syria by U.S. persons, the exportation or sale of services to Syria by U.S. persons, the importation of petroleum or petroleum products of Syrian origin, and U.S. persons from involvement in transactions involving Syrian petroleum or petroleum products.” As a result, there is almost no trade between the U.S. and Syria (which made the new “Liberation Day” tariffs on Syria even more absurd). In 2023, Syria exported about $27 million in goods to the United States; the main products were spice seeds ($3 million), building stone ($2.3 million), and antiques ($1.31 million).

Syrian Americans like Farah al-Atassi, president of the American Arab Center are elated, calling the lifting of the sanctions one of the “three pivotal milestones in modern Syrian history.”

The U.S. is joining the United Kingdom and European Union in lifting sanctions. In March, the U.K.  lifted asset freezes on 24 Syrian entities, including the Central Bank of Syria, the state airline, and state-owned oil companies, and a month later removed asset freezes on Syrian government bodies such as the defense and interior ministries. The EU made similar moves.

As I wrote after my visit earlier this year, “No matter who’s doing the measuring, the Syrian economy ranks near the absolute bottom of national economies worldwide. The Syrians are also enduring a currency crisis; the largest denomination is 5,000 lira, which comes out to about . . . 38 cents. (Even more infuriating is that, because the Syrian government has never printed its own currency, it has to pay Russia to keep printing new banknotes, and the 2,000 lira banknote, worth about 15 cents, still features the face of Bashar al-Assad.” (The new Syrian government has a long and complicated to-do list, but “design and print some new currency without the old bastard dictator’s face on it” seems like a good idea.)

Syria needs all the help it can get, economic and otherwise:

Syria is emerging from what was probably the worst 13-year stretch that any country on earth has endured in recent memory: the rise and fall of ISIS, hundreds of chemical weapons attacks, atrocities of every kind, and a death toll from the civil war so high that most international organizations stopped counting and now just say “around half a million.” The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is more specific: as of March 2024, it has documented the names of 507,567 people who have died in Syria since the outbreak of the conflict in March 2011. For perspective, consider that the U.S. suffered 407,316 military casualties in the Second World War.

Now that the U.S. president and Syrian president have met, a likely next step would be a gradual return to normal diplomatic relations and perhaps reopening embassies in the two countries. The U.S. embassy in Damascus suspended operations in 2012, and the Syrian embassy in Washington closed down in 2014.