Why Sharaa Cannot—and Will Not—March on Beirut

From the moment French troops departed Syria in April 1946, the young republic became arguably the most coup-prone country in the Arab world for nearly a quarter century. By 1970, Syria had lived through ten successful coups. On 13 November 1970, Hafez al-Assad carried out a palace coup and installed himself as strongman.

For Assad, Lebanon was not simply a neighbor; it is Syria’s backyard and a tool for a stronger regional posture. After the civil war erupted in Beirut, Syria intervened militarily in 1976 — initially against the Palestine Liberation Organization and Lebanese leftist groups, and later in support of these same pro-Palestinian forces against the self-organized Christian groups rallied to defend themselves. From that intervention onward, Syrian intelligence and military apparatuses integrated themselves into the Lebanese political fabric, brokering power by alternately backing, betraying, or preying on local groups.

The October 1973 war — launched jointly with Egypt against Israel — was a turning point that transformed Assad from a local player into an indispensable interlocutor for Washington. The war ended in stalemate, but it was how Assad handled the aftermath that revealed his strategic genius.

Henry Kissinger, who spent nearly a month shuttling between Damascus and Jerusalem in May 1974, was reportedly "astonished and surprised" when Assad accepted the disengagement framework. The agreement, signed in Geneva on 31 May 1974, created a UN-monitored buffer zone along the Golan, and  froze the Israeli-Syrian frontier for the next five decades. No other Arab-Israeli front remained as quiet for as long. That stability became Assad's paradigm: as long as the Golan remained frozen, Syria remained necessary. No peace could happen without Damascus; no war could safely start without its consent.

One of Assad's greatest diplomatic achievements was perhaps his management of the Cold War. The Syrian Arab Army became one of the most comprehensively Soviet-equipped and Soviet-trained forces in the Arab region. Its doctrine, its weapons systems, its officer training all ran through Moscow. Yet Assad never gave the Soviets what they truly wanted: exclusive influence. He maintained a back channel to Washington, met American officials regularly, and refrained from joining any formal Soviet alliance framework.

Assad turned this ambiguity into operational leverage. He fought U.S. allies in Lebanon when it suited him, undermined Egypt’s Arab leadership after Camp David, and simultaneously extracted Soviet military hardware at preferential rates. Damascus was too valuable for Washington to isolate and too independent for Moscow to control. That was the sweet spot Assad occupied for two decades.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Assad faced a defining choice. Syria joined –albeit symbolically- the U.S.-led coalition to liberate Kuwait; a key decision that earned Assad a free hand in Lebanon as a reward from Washington and the Saudis.  Syria's occupation of Lebanon would last another 15 years, the political umbrella for which was provided through a deal between Assad and the Saudis. Rafic Hariri, a self-made Saudi-connected billionaire became prime minister in 1992. Under this arrangement and almost until his assassination in 2005, Hariri controlled Lebanon's economy, reconstruction, and financial policy, while Syria controlled its military, security services and foreign policy.  

Upon his death in 2000, Hafez’s son Bashar inherited a finely calibrated domestic and regional portfolio he did not fully understand and could not preserve, let alone grow. Heavy international pressure, combined with a local popular backlash (aka the Cedar revolution) emerging in the aftermath of Hariri’s assassination in February 2005 drove a rapid Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon, erasing three decades of influence in a matter of weeks. Within less than ten years of his presidency, Bashar Assad changed from being the favorite dictator of the international community to its black sheep. When the Arab uprisings reached Syria in March 2011, the regime's response — brutal, indiscriminate repression — triggered a civil war that killed hundreds of thousands, displaced half the population, and reduced Syria's military capacity to a fraction of its former self.

Post-Assad Syria, led by Ahmed al-Sharaa, once commander of the al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, rests on a power structure shaped by the rebel alliance that prevailed—one that functions more as a hegemonic factional state than as a genuine pluralist democracy.

Al-Sharaa has achieved remarkable international legitimacy in a short time. In just over one year, he met Trump at the White House, addressed the UN General Assembly, and secured the removal of some Western sanctions. Yet his domestic control remains fragile: sectarian violence in the western coast, de facto Kurdish autonomy in the northeast, Druze resistance in the south, and the persistence of jihadist factions hostile to his pragmatism all continue to constrain central authority.

By 2024, the Syrian Arab Army was already a shadow of the force Hafez had built. Hezbollah fighters, Iraqi Shia militias, Russian forces, and Iranian advisors effectively replaced the Syrian army as the backbone of regime defense — meaning Syria's own military did not possess significant capabilities. Furthermore, right after the Assad regime fell, Israel moved with extraordinary speed to ensure that whatever came next would begin from near-zero military capacity by  targeting airbases, air defense batteries, weapons production facilities, missile stockpiles, radar systems, and research centers in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia, and Palmyra. By the IDF's own account, the campaign destroyed approximately 80% of Syria's remaining strategic military assets.

What Syria has left is a coalition of armed factions rather than a professional military. Most fighters come from former Islamist militias — effective in terrorism, guerrilla warfare and civil war tactics, but with little training in conventional state warfare: border control, territorial defense, logistics chains, joint operations. Equipment is disparate, largely obsolete, and sparse in medium and heavy weapons. There are no meaningful air or naval capabilities left. Without the foreign fighters — the jihadist volunteers from Central Asia, North Africa, and elsewhere who had swelled rebel ranks during the civil war — Syria's armed forces are numerically insufficient to patrol, let alone project power across, a country the size of Syria.

Syria's economy compounds its military weakness. Despite the decision to lift some sanctions, the US and EU are still moving cautiously. Investment has not materialized at any meaningful scale. Public wages are desperately low, feeding endemic corruption. Infrastructure is shattered. There is no economic base for a major military build-up, let alone a foreign military adventure.

In 2025, some voices in the region and beyond began suggesting that Syria could or should move military forces into Lebanon, framing it as a counter to Iranian influence. The suggestion reveals a fundamental misreading of what Syria currently is. However, what Washington formally asked for was a border security question, not an occupation mandate. The US request to the Syrian government was specific: prevent the land movement of Iranian assets — weapons, fighters, funds — from Iraq to Lebanon through Syrian territory. That is why Syrian reinforcements were dispatched to both the Iraqi and Lebanese frontiers, not the Lebanese border alone. The goal is interdiction, not invasion.

An occupation requires sustained logistics, reliable command chains, territorial administration, and force protection. Occupying and administering Lebanese territory is an undertaking that has historically required a force of 35,000–40,000 disciplined soldiers with intelligence services, checkpoints, political proxies, regional and international endorsement. The new Syrian leadership has none of that.

Israel's position is an additional hard constraint. Tel Aviv does not trust the current Damascus government — regarding al-Sharaa, as a jihadist in a suit and a Turkish puppet. More fundamentally, Israel is deeply opposed to Turkish influence expanding into Syrian territory, and it categorically opposes its extension into Lebanon. On the other hand, U.S. interests in Lebanon center on stabilizing the Lebanese army and constraining Hezbollah, not on opening another front of uncertainty with an untested Islamist military structure.

On the Lebanese side of the border, the U.S. equipped and trained Lebanese Army and armed border communities in the north and east of Lebanon would impose a serious cost on any incursion by disparate and lightly equipped Syrian Islamist forces.

For pro-Iranian actors and Hezbollah-affiliated networks, the spectre of a jihadist army marching on Beirut is not an analysis but a political lifeline. Since December 2024, both have absorbed devastating losses including the Syria corridor severed. By stoking alarm about Sunni extremists massing on Lebanon’s border, they aim to rebuild, notably among Shias and Christians, the communal solidarity — the sense of shared existential threat — that long sustained their mobilizing power. The trap is cynical: a Syrian military operation, were it ever to occur, would hand them precisely the raison d’être they seek, confirming that Hezbollah’s weapons remain Lebanon’s indispensable shield. The invasion narrative, in short, should be read for what it is — not a security assessment, but a measure of how much these actors urgently need an enemy to sustain their relevance.

Syria's century-long story is about the gap between ambition and capacity. Hafez Assad was extraordinary precisely because he closed that gap — he leveraged Syria's geographic and political position to punch well above his country's weight for three decades. His son deepened that gap again, catastrophically. The new Syria, under al-Sharaa, is still in the process of deciding what kind of state it wants to be. Lebanon, for now, is not a prize within reach.