How did everyone just "accept" a former Al-Qaeda member, who ran Al-Nusra front, and was in some kind of allyship with ISIS at one point as the new ruler of Syria?
It contradicts literally everything the neocons have ever said about anything.
To the point that dude had a 10 million dollar bounty on his head in the west until he took control.
How do people just ignore this reality, because its convenient?
What does it even mean for Syria's future?
Because you can't have this liberal kumbaya lets build oil money casinos in gaza shit and also be a jihadist who wants to establish an Islamic state...right?
-neocons arent in charge anymore so they cant do shit about al sharaa
-he fought against russian/iranian aligned assad regime which they also didnt like
-after over a decade of civil war, you'll have a very hard time trying to find a potential leader for syria who wasn't associated with some jihadi group at some point
-zero appetite for invading syria and installing an american aligned puppet regime
similar reasons why they just accept the taliban being in charge of afghanistan again: there arent any better options around. assad might have been preferable because he was secular while al sharaa is islamist, but on the other hand assad was simping for iran and russia while al sharaa isn't doing that.
To add to this, Trump & his crew are explicitly anti-neocon and in favor of a more realistic approach to geopolitics, especially in the Middle East (if they were neocons, that bombing of Iran would by now have become an actual ground occupation). Al-Jolani/Al-Sharaa is undoubtedly a bastard, but literally everyone who matters in the Syrian Civil War was a bastard of some variety (certainly including the Assads, who fell at the end because they had turned their 80% of Syria into a drug smuggling empire and
rotted the SAA so badly from the inside-out that it's since come to light they actually killed their top Iranian advisor at the start of the final rebel offensive themselves in a chimpout).
This guy has a history of buckbreaking equally bad/even worse Islamists alongside the most overt American puppets like Jabhat Thuwar Suriya/the Syrian Revolutionaries Front and is willing to pretend to be more moderate than he almost certainly really is for now, to not overly repress the Christians and most other religious minorities (except Alawites, who as the Assads' own sect and the foundation of their power, are being subject to the Boer/Rhodesian treatment with extra Arab headchoppery thrown into the mix) and
has already arrested the ISIS cell responsible for that church bombing the other day.
That is, of course, on top of his fanatical anti-Shi'ism translating to a fanatically anti-Iranian foreign policy, to the point of being willing to let the Jews take Mt. Hermon & fly their jets over Syria to hit Iran without complaint while also actively collaborating with the Christians in Lebanon to further buckbreak the Iranian proxy (and mutual enemy) Hezbollah. For all his faults, he really does seem like realistically the 'best' guy you can find from the anti-Assad circles to hold the remaining rebel coalition together and has managed to prevent the rest of the country outside of Latakia (the Alawite zone) from spiraling into another civil war right after the rebel victory. All of which is 100% a win for present American (and Israeli) foreign policy.
I'm as shocked & astonished as the next guy that not only did Al-Sharaa win at the end, but also that a New Yorker president would approve of him to the extent of repealing all sanctions on Syria. Wouldn't have expected THAT when I first tuned into SCW news more than a decade ago. But, it is what it is, and I don't see what a president all-in on realpolitik (as opposed to chasing neocon/neolib idealism) would do differently. After all, if AJ can keep Syria from flying into another civil war, spares minorities the West (and Trump's own voting base) care about from
too much Islamic Content, and stands against Iran & whatever remains of the Axis of Resistance - then he hits the boxes on a realist foreign policy-maker's checklist, which would not include 'is a liberal democrat' or 'doesn't shit on
any minority, including the core base of his defeated enemy'. Apparently Trump & Hegseth's nominee for CENTCOM after the current guy (Kurilla) retires,
Brad Cooper, thinks that AJ is going to be critical for Syria's stability and it's difficult to disagree because I genuinely can't think of any other rebel leader who could do better in his job.
Also on top of everything else I don't think Trump was in position to decide whether AJ should lead Syria in the first place anyway, dude had only just been elected & wasn't yet inaugurated when the rebels launched their war-winning blitz. So he had to work with the facts already on the ground by the time he formally became president again. It sucks, but realism in foreign policy is basically accepting that 'everything sucks' and rolling with the shit option that benefits you & your objectives the most instead of wishing for/forcibly trying to create better ones (the 'idealist'/neocon-neolib position), and I guess the White House has thoroughly decided that AJ fits that bill.
