Syria between Geopolitical Constraint and Regional Repositioning
The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 marked a strategic rupture in the role Syrian geography had long played within the Iranian axis. For decades, Syria had served as the logistical and overland link between Tehran and southern Lebanon, sustaining Hezbollah’s supply lines while remaining embedded in Israeli strategic thinking as a potential source of threat throughout nearly fifteen years of war. Yet the collapse of that arrangement did not produce durable security. Geography is not remade by domestic political change alone; regional powers are already interpreting the strategic opening created by the regime’s fall through their own priorities and wider regional designs.
The new Syrian government therefore faces a particularly difficult equation: before it has consolidated a stable state from which to assert neutrality or non-alignment, it must already preserve a margin of autonomy amid a regional contest over Syria’s future role.
The challenge reaches beyond the accumulated burdens of a revolution and war that lasted for a decade and a half. It becomes sharper at the level of regional strategy, where Syrian geography itself has become the object of a struggle over its future alignment and political identity, at a junction where the interests of Washington, Tel Aviv, Ankara, Tehran, and the remnants of an axis weakened by war yet still present all meet. Since the outbreak of the US–Israeli war on Iran in February 2026, the Syrian government’s existential test has come into sharp relief: can Damascus keep its territory outside the regional conflict, or will the very location that once gave Syria its historical strategic value draw it back into the centre of the struggle in a new form?
II. From Function to Dilemma: Syrian Geography after Assad
Under Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s role in Syria grew beyond alliance into an integrated regional system. The overland corridor linking Tehran to southern Lebanon, Syria’s function as Hezbollah’s strategic rear, and the deployment of units affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps across Syrian territory gave the Iranian axis a practical coherence that far exceeded political coordination or ideological alignment.
The fall of the regime dismantled this system in its previous form without diminishing the strategic value of Syrian geography. It released Syria from its former Iranian alignment while opening it to a new regional contest over the terms of its repositioning. The central paradox lies here. Damascus is trying to build a national authority guided by an independent Syrian interest, outside both the entanglements of the Iranian period and the expectation, common in some quarters, that Iranian alignment would simply give way to Turkish dependency. It has sought to demonstrate this through an unusually active opening towards the Arab world, the reordering of its regional relationships, and a clear effort to avoid full incorporation into any pre-existing alliance structure.
Israel, however, has met this transformation with neither recognition nor restraint. The persistence of strikes on Syrian territory after the regime’s fall suggests that Israeli anxiety is attached less to the identity of Syria’s rulers than to what Syria might become if it recovers the capacity to act.
A deeper geopolitical constraint shapes this entire predicament. Syria lies at the intersection of the Levant, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Arabian Peninsula, and borders Turkey, Israel, Iraq, and Lebanon — states whose competing interests bear directly on its room for strategic manoeuvre. Neutrality in such a setting cannot rest on declaration alone; it requires either regional acceptance or the power to sustain it. Robert Kaplan’s notion of the “revenge of geography” is useful here: geography narrows the field of strategic choice without cancelling political agency altogether2. For Syria, therefore, keeping its territory outside the wider regional conflict is a long-term task of state-building and power accumulation.
III. Israel and Syrian Recovery as a Threat
The most serious obstacle to Damascus’s attempt to keep Syria outside the regional conflict lies in Israel’s treatment of Syrian recovery itself as a threat. This was evident from the first hours after the fall of the Assad regime on 8 December 2024. Israeli policy has been described as “designed to keep Syria broken and unable to harm Israel” 3. The point reaches beyond Iran’s departure from Syria: what Israel seeks to contain is the prospect of a Syrian state able once again to act in the region.
The Israeli strikes of April 2025 on T4 airbase4, Palmyra, and Hama military airport pointed to a dual strategic logic. They disrupted the early rebuilding of Syria’s military capacity and signalled to Ankara that Israel would oppose any durable Turkish military presence on Syrian territory. The aim appears broader than the exclusion of Iran. Israel seeks a Syria too weak to rebuild an effective army, too constrained to become a Turkish strategic depth, and too exposed to impose meaningful costs on Israeli operations inside its territory.
Israeli pressure has also operated through the Lebanese front and through Syria’s internal fractures. On the Lebanese front, Washington sought to turn Syria’s break with the Iranian axis into an active contribution to the dismantling of what remained of that axis, above all Hezbollah5. Damascus was being asked to reverse the function of its own geography: the corridor that had once sustained Hezbollah was now to become an instrument of pressure against it. Accepting such a role would have assigned Syria a new externally defined function at the very moment when the new government was trying to restore the authority of the state itself. By resisting that conversion, Damascus kept its departure from the former axis within the project of rebuilding the state, rather than allowing it to become another stage in the redistribution of Syrian roles among regional powers.
On the domestic front, As Suwayda has become Israel’s most dangerous point of leverage inside Syria. The province brings together unresolved local tensions, armed formations beyond the authority of the state, and a distinct Druze social and political setting, giving Israel an opening through which to recast intervention as “minority protection”. This policy reached its clearest expression when Israel struck the vicinity of the Ministry of Defence and the presidential palace in Damascus6 during the escalation in As Suwayda, before the file was mobilised again during the ongoing war on Iran7. The pressure at work here reaches beyond the province itself: it seeks to place Israeli limits on the Syrian state’s ability to restore authority within its own territory.
More broadly, the danger of this strategy lies in how little force it requires. Israel can keep Syria under pressure through intermittent strikes, the manipulation of local identities, and the steady obstruction of any serious military or security recovery, while stopping short of open war.
IV. The Security Dilemma and the Limits of Syrian Neutrality
The Syrian case now displays the logic of a security dilemma. Measures that Damascus sees as necessary for restoring a minimum degree of security and rebuilding state institutions, and that Ankara supports in order to secure its southern border and prevent a security vacuum, are read in Tel Aviv as the early formation of a new threat in place of the receding Iranian one.
Israeli strikes therefore operate as a pre-emptive strategy8. They deepen Damascus’s need for Turkish support, which in turn sharpens Israeli fears of a larger Turkish role in Syria. Each move thus confirms the anxieties that produced the previous one, locking the parties into a cycle none has yet shown a willingness to break. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan warned that continued Israeli strikes on Syria were “paving the way for future instability in the region”, insisting that “Israel’s security cannot be achieved by undermining the security of its neighbours”9.
Thus, these dynamics place Damascus in the predicament of a state weakened by years of war: neutrality requires power, power requires partnerships, and partnerships can narrow the margin of independence they are meant to preserve. The more Israel pressures Syria, the harder it becomes for Damascus to maintain distance from Ankara. A closer relationship with Turkey may help rebuild the army and secure Syria’s borders, while also giving Israel further grounds to depict Syria as a Turkish extension and placing Damascus closer to the front line of any prolonged Turkish–Israeli confrontation.
In this context, “functional neutrality” can be understood as an attempt to reduce the external usability of Syrian geography. The most realistic task before Damascus goes beyond announcing a foreign policy of non-involvement; it lies in preventing Syria from being pulled into pre-defined binaries of alignment, whether with one camp or against another. In practical terms, this means disrupting any return to Syria’s former function as the “Iranian corridor”, while also avoiding its conversion in the opposite direction into an instrument within the US–Israeli strategy against Hezbollah or against any possible Turkish arrangements in Syria. Syrian neutrality, therefore, should not be measured by the language of distance from regional axes in official statements, but by its practical capacity to disable the military and political functions that regional powers seek to assign to Syrian geography.
Conclusion: Time as a Strategic Wager
The latest war on Iran shows that the fall of the Assad regime has altered Syria’s place in regional politics without removing it from the regional equation. Damascus has so far achieved a limited tactical success: it has kept its western frontier out of the war on Hezbollah, contained the As Suwayda file provisionally, and managed its relationship with Ankara within the bounds of cooperation rather than dependence. The achievement remains fragile. Israel still possesses the means to strike Syria’s military infrastructure, exploit its internal vulnerabilities, and raise the cost of any attempt at state recovery, in the absence of an effective Arab or international constraint.
The question of Syrian repositioning therefore goes beyond movement from one axis or camp to another. It becomes a question of whether Damascus can wrest a new meaning for its location and role amid the competing pressures and agendas around it and within it. Syria’s departure from its former Iranian alignment does not, by itself, generate an independent sovereign role or a stable capacity for choice. The same geography can be reworked in other directions: Damascus may be pushed into some role in any US–Israeli confrontation with Hezbollah, Syria may become a zone of friction with Turkey, or the fragility of southern Syria may be used as an entry point for the internationalisation of domestic affairs. What Damascus is trying to gain today, amid an unstable regional balance of power, is political and security time: time in which it can prevent other actors from fixing a new role for Syria before the state acquires the capacity to define its position according to its own interests. For this reason, forcing the current Syrian and regional scene into pre-defined scenarios for the future of Syria’s role and geography would flatten the complexity of the moment.
Time has therefore become Damascus’s central strategic wager. It gives the new government room to rebuild institutions, widen its margin of autonomy, and shape its relationship with Turkey in accordance with Syrian interests. It also gives Israel further opportunity to deepen its policy of attrition, and gives local actors beyond the authority of the state, especially in As Suwayda, time to consolidate facts on the ground. The central question has moved beyond Syria’s departure from the Iranian axis, a transition already under way. It is whether Damascus can turn that transition into real capability before geography draws Syria into a new regional role it did not choose for itself.
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