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The Middle East seems to be on the brink of a transformation—whether toward stability or fiercer mayhem is hard to say, all the more so with Donald Trump returning to the White House in six weeks.

Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, followed by the ouster of Bashar al-Assad from Syria, has stripped Iran of its two main allies in the “axis of resistance” that has maintained its power in the region.

It is a ripe moment for settling some of the region’s myriad sources of tension—Iran’s nuclear program, the Sunni–Shiite divide, the Israel–Palestine problem—either through negotiation or by force. Either way, success would require deep knowledge of the area’s history, politics, and players, and a shrewd sense of mixing diplomacy and force in just the right proportions.

There is no sign that Trump or anyone that he’s named as an official so far has any of these qualities—or even an understanding of the necessity of these qualities.

Trump’s inclination is to stay entirely out of it. At one point in his first term as president, he dismissed the question of who controls Syria, describing the country as holding nothing but “sand and death.” This past Saturday, after the anti-Assad rebels conquered Aleppo but before they entered Damascus, he posted on social media, “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend, & THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”

On one level, Trump has the right instincts here. We should be glad that Assad has fled (to Moscow, it turns out) and that the half-century reign of his family’s brutally murderous regime is at last over. But we don’t know what happens next. A renewed civil war may break out between Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Islamist group that mounted the offensive against Assad’s army, and various other rebel groups, some of which joined in, others of which didn’t, and most of which have quarrels with one another to some degree. The U.S. has rarely been adept at choosing sides in these sorts of conflicts, and there’s no reason to think we’d be any better here. “Let it play out,” indeed.

However, the crumbling of Assad’s regime and the ensuing vacuum of power do unleash or heighten some dangers that it is very much in U.S. interests to help quell.

One of those dangers is ISIS. A combination of Syrian, Russian, Kurdish, and U.S. forces has killed or contained most of the terrorist group’s remnants. (It’s the one mission that nearly all armed factions in Syria share.) But 2,500 ISIS fighters remain in the country; with the Russians preoccupied in Ukraine and now with Assad’s army melted away, ISIS could surge once again out in the open. And so, just over the weekend, U.S. Central Command launched dozens of airstrikes on over 75 ISIS targets, in order “to ensure that ISIS does not seek to take advantage of the current situation to reconstitute in central Syria,” according to an official statement.

Another danger is the stockpile of chemical weapons scattered across Syria, in unknown states of security. Assad occasionally fired chemical munitions at his own people—some of them armed rebels, some peaceful protesters, some innocent bystanders. A successor regime, or organized challengers to that regime, could do the same.

Finally, there are unknowns about the main rebel group and its charismatic leader, Abu Mohammed al-Golani. What is its charter? What are his goals? Can he form a governing coalition with the other rebel factions? Hayat Tahrir al-Sham started out as an affiliate of al-Qaida, though Golani split from that organization long ago. After defeating Assad, he said he envisions a federated Syrian government that observes minority rights—a pledge that repeats, almost verbatim, a hope expressed on Sunday by Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister of Turkey, which has strongly backed HTS.

However, some are skeptical. HTS has ruled the territory it has controlled, in northwestern Syria, under strict Salafism, an Islamist sect that rejects as heretical not just all secular beliefs but all non-Salafi beliefs. The U.S. and Britain have long branded HTS a “terrorist organization.”

Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism at the Council on Foreign Relations, predicted in an email to me on Monday that Golani “will turn Syria into a Salafi state. Minorities might be protected but only if they pay jizya (a tax paid by infidels to be left alone).” To believe otherwise, Hoffman said, “is wishful thinking,” similar to the dashed hopes for positive outcomes after other cruel regimes have been overthrown—Iran in 1979, Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Afghanistan in 2021. “And Syria,” he added, “is far more complex than any of those other countries.”

It is a welcome thing that HTS’s defeat of Assad’s regime has ended Syria’s enabling of Iran’s aggressive ambitions. But if it also presages Syria’s transformation into a well-armed terrorist state in the heart of the Middle East, the dangers are immense—to nearly all its neighbors, including Iran, Iraq, and Israel, as well as to the United States.

Israel has played a significant, if somewhat understated, role in Assad’s downfall, having bombed dozens of Syrian military targets—as well as Iranian deployments—over the past year, further weakening Syria’s ability to deal with HTS’s offensive. However, Israelis, and not just Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition partners, must be noting that Golani adopted his Islamist ideology during the second intifada against Israel in 2000.

In response to Assad’s overthrow, Israel has sent troops across the buffer zone along its border with Syria, which has been in place since the end of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The reasoning is that Syria’s government and army, which signed and enforced the accord creating the zone, have gone up in smoke, so the status of the zone—along with the security of the border—is unclear. Will this be taken by all parties as a strictly defensive measure? That too is unclear.

Americans might be concerned by the fact that Golani’s views were hardened by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—it was then that he joined forces with al-Qaida—and that he crossed the border to fight U.S. forces in Iraq, resulting in his imprisonment in Abu Ghraib.

What Trump makes of all this can’t easily be predicted. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said at a forum this weekend that he is keeping Trump’s transition team—including his own successor, Rep. Mike Waltz—fully briefed on the evolving developments and the related concerns.

But Trump sets his own priorities; he is also more self-confident than he was going into his first term, in 2016, so he’s less likely to be roped in by advisers this time around. He is on good terms with Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whom he views as a fellow “strong man,” and so may turn to him for counsel. Since Erdoğan is Golani’s main backer, Trump may be inclined to go along. Erdoğan helped build Golani’s HTS into the main anti-Assad group in order to sideline the other leading contender for that role—the Kurds, whom Erdoğan views as a threat to Turkey’s territory. The United States still has 900 troops in northern Syria, in part to protect the Kurds. But Trump doesn’t care about the Kurds. He demonstrated that in 2019, when he withdrew U.S. forces from the area, ceding it to Assad’s troops, the Russians, and—incidentally—ISIS. He may well do the same again. Erdoğan would be fine if Golani did not incorporate the Kurds into a federated government. Trump may be fine with it too.

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Should Trump call on Golani or take the call if Golani reaches out? Will some form of aid from the U.S. reinforce whatever intentions toward pluralism Golani may genuinely hold? Will a shrug from the U.S. stiffen his more hard-line views? Or is the U.S. no longer an important party in this region—and if that’s the case, how much does that matter?

Trump might be faced with some serious choices about Iran. The mullahs of Tehran aren’t going to take the collapse of their axis passively. There will be pressures, from within the ruling elites, to enrich enough uranium to build a bomb, to stiffen their deterrence, now that their allies have all but vanished—or to revive some version of the Obama-era accord in which they dismantled their nuclear machine in exchange for the West’s lifting most of its sanctions. Trump, who scuttled that deal, has said he will resume his “maximum-pressure” strategy, seeking to overthrow the regime. Will he continue on that path, which probably won’t work (it certainly didn’t the last time) and will probably only accelerate Iran’s drive toward a nuclear arsenal—or, tempted by the allure of a big deal, will he go that route?

Meanwhile, the Russians, whose military bases in Syria marked their only presence in the Middle East, seem to be permanently displaced, and Trump, a bit out of character, doesn’t seem to mind that either. In his social-media posting on Saturday (the one where he urged, “DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”), he wrote that the Russians’ removal “may actually be the best thing that can happen to them. There was never much of a benefit in Syria for Russia, other than to make Obama look really stupid.”

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Russia, despite hosting Assad in exile, still wants some foothold in Syria, if only because it’s the sole foothold it has anywhere outside the former Soviet Union. In a meeting over the weekend with fellow diplomats from Qatar and Turkey, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov made a plea for the preservation of his country’s bases in the country. His fellow diplomats acceded, but that says nothing about what Golani does. As the country that sent fighter planes to bomb Syrian citizens with merciless force, Russia is unlikely to be viewed as a choice ally for the new Damascus government, whatever its composition.

Whatever happens in the coming days, weeks, and months, geopolitical realities will be altered, and in as-yet-uncertain ways—not only in the Middle East but also among outside countries with interests in the Middle East. The U.S. will help shape these realities, whether it’s by getting involved or by staying out and thus leaving the intervention—with its gains or losses—to others.