Syria's foreign relations may be in better shape today than at any point in decades. It has shown in its dealings with its neighbors, and in a shared push by nearly every state in the region, except Israel, toward a future of cooperation rather than the old inheritance of meddling, plotting, and grievances that has for so long defined how these countries treat one another.
The Assad family, which ruled Syria from 1970 to 2024, bears the greatest share of the blame, nowhere more than in three arenas: Lebanon, the Palestinians, and Iraq.
Israel stands alone in resisting the effort to build something more cooperative. Its opposition flows first from the nature of the Israeli state itself, and it has been sharpened by the rise of the hardliners around Benjamin Netanyahu. Driven by a mix of ideology and political calculations, he has escalated Israel's longstanding aggression, now invoking the war against Iran and its militias as fresh justification. The result is a set of policies squarely at odds with the mood taking shape around Syria and across the region - a mood that wants to move from an age of conflict toward one of cooperation, or at least to say so out loud.
Under the new government, Syria has begun to chart a different course. It has turned hostility into friendship with Türkiye - the northern neighbor the Assad regime treated as an enemy, even as Ankara kept trying to open a new track with Damascus. It has refused to be baited by the militias; it has gone further still, declaring that it wants peaceful, mutually beneficial relations with Iraq.
The approach to Lebanon has been much the same. Lebanese governments once looked the other way while Hezbollah and other groups intervened and committed crimes in Syria during the years of the uprising. Even so, Damascus has moved to resolve a number of outstanding issues, among them the fate of Lebanese detainees held in Syria, while insisting publicly that it will not interfere in Lebanon's affairs and wants sound official relations built on common interest. The Syrian foreign minister's recent visit to Beirut, where he met a wide range of Lebanese leaders and public figures, captured the substance of that new policy.
Taken together, these are real shifts in how Damascus treats its neighbors, and they have been reinforced from outside. Regional and international efforts have brightened the prospects both for Syria's recovery and for a new Syrian role in the region.
Saudi Arabia has led the way. Its initiatives helped soften Western positions, above all Washington's, whose backing has been decisive in clearing a path for Syria to return as an active presence in the eastern Mediterranean. That has become especially clear since sanctions were lifted and Syria began normalizing relations with its neighbors and the wider world and considerable ground has already been covered on both fronts.
All of this - the change in Syrian policy, the practical and administrative steps that go with it, and the parallel moves made regionally and internationally - is bound to reshape Syria's standing on two levels.
The first is bilateral: Syria's ties with other states, especially those on its borders. These relationships matter not only for the two parties to each of them, but because they knit together countries that share the same neighborhood - better transport links between Syria and Lebanon, water-sharing arrangements with Türkiye, comparable understandings with Iraq.
The second level is larger, reaching well beyond the eastern Mediterranean: gas and oil pipelines, rail connections, supply routes for goods, networks for moving people. Projects like these have become essential to the region in the aftermath of the US-Israeli war against Iran.
Between the demands of its immediate neighbors and these wider needs, Syria now finds itself well placed, with a major role to play today and in the years ahead.
None of it, though, will come without a serious, practical response from the Syrian state and Syrian society and, before that, from preparation: building the right institutions and structures, and cooperating openly in every direction and at every level. Above all, it will mean readying Syrians themselves to take up a role this large.
