The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Syria Turns Violent...Again || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: January 1, 2026

Following the recent attacks on US troops in Syria, the question of the day is: Why does the US continue to maintain a presence there?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://bit.ly/44Kkfcj

Hey, Al, Peter Zine here coming to you from a windy Colorado. Today we're talking about what's going down in Syria. So over the course of the last few weeks, there's been a lot more violence in internal Syria, and it's even resulted in a gunman shooting a couple of American soldiers who were on patrol. So two things. Number one, why is the U.S. still involved at all? And number two, I thought we had defeated the Islamic State. Why is it back?

So, number one, why we're still there? The United States, even after the Biden administration, and completed the pull-out from the region left, a few dozen to a few hundred, depends on whose numbers you're using, special forces there to keep a clamp down on the ISIS group. Remember that ISIS is a militant group that thinks al-Qaeda are pussies,

and really you just need to shoot everybody. The Trump administration has decided to actually reinforce that force because the new president of Syria, who is a former militant himself, has said nice things about Trump, and that's what it takes to get in America. strategic commitment these days. So they're there kind of on an open-ended assignment to

generally help keep ISIS in check, and alone gunmen took shots at forces and killed a few. There's no real strategic reason for the United States to still be involved, and whether the Trump administration is going to change his mind in the future, who knows? We do know, however, that this is one part of the U.S. defense community that has not been gutted by the Trump administration. So if you're dealing with Europe or China or Russia or Venezuela, you've probably been put in a box or fired. But if you're dealing with the Arab world, those institutions are still there, so there's still advice flowing. Whether or not the White House, you choose to use that advice, of course, is a different topic. Anyway, that's piece one. Piece two is I thought Islamic State

was dead. It'll never really be dead. So here's the issue. The deserts that are west of the Tigris and the Euphrates and going into western Iraq and Syria have always been kind of a no man's land. And the problem is civilization in this area, even though it's the fertile crescent, is pretty thin once you get away from the waterways. And there are parts of the Euphrates, that's the more wobbly one that goes up from Baghdad and then goes west into a little bit of Syria before going up into Turkey. The waterplane there is very thin, sometimes just a few. few miles from green to green with the river in the middle and then it's hard desert on all sides. So there's so little for states to work with that they can't really project power

into the barons very well. So what has traditionally happened in this region is when you have strong states like Iraq centered on Baghdad or Turkey centered on Akira or someone in the Levant, either whether it's in Jerusalem or Damascus or Aleppo, when you have strong states, they can project power into these barons and basically keep it under control. But there's no benefit for doing so except for specifically keeping it under control because there's no resources there. Hardly anyone lives there. And so if you have weak states, then this area kind of masticizes into a zone that can generate a lot of problems and a lot of militancy. So the Islamic state, ISIS, is really just the last generation of problems that have been in this little part of the world. It's been going back

since the dawn of civilization, 6,000 years. This has always been an area where the wackos live. Well, if you think about what's gone down, and the last time ISIS was really strong in the 2000s, the United States had invaded and toppled the Saddam regime in Iraq, and so Iraq was in chaos. Damascus was under the control of the old Syrian government of Bashir Assad, and he basically was, I mean, they called him Mr. 40% sometime,

because he just wanted 40% of everything. He really didn't run the country. And so the place fell into civil war. And the Assad government just wasn't very powerful. And we had a lot of other factions that were competing. And so this area became ungoverned. And then that just left Turkey. And Turkey was far more concerned with keeping the Kurds under control

than it was with the Stipaldi of its neighbor. So it was actually invading from time to time to displace the Kurds, whether in Iraq or Syria, which took the potential of having a strong power off the board. In that environment, the Islamic State became very, very powerful, actually was able to capture several cities in both Syria and Iraq for a short period of time. Fast forward a few years. The United States has left Iraq, and it has consolidated kind of. It's not, you know, the best place, but it's able to at least control itself. The Turks have consolidated their border region

to their satisfaction. And while the Civil War was continuing in Syria, we had U.S. forces in Syrian Kurdistan and Iraqi Kurdistan who would project power into the areas where ISIS was, and we basically had this artificial third power on the outside going after ISIS. And for the most part, that ultimately worked. But then the Assad government fell. And when the Assad government fell, Syria broke into a bunch of pieces. Nominally, it's all on the same page now, but the Alawites have gone their own way, the Christians have gone their own way, the Kurds are kind of going their own way and the ability of a now broken and getting ready for the second phase of the civil war, Syria, is incapable of patrolling these vast wide opens in the desert barons. And so

ISIS is on its way back. And the only way that ISIS can be tamped down again is if Syria consolidates in some way. Syria lacks the ability to consolidate in some way unless an outside power gets very deeply involved. During the civil war, the Russians played part. The Russian's played part of that role and that helped quite a bit because all of a sudden you had air power from Damascus that was actually playing a role in keeping some of these areas tamped down. That is not a recommendation. It was not the cleanest way to do this by far. The other option would be for the United States to get more involved if we care about Syria and ISIS that much. But more likely, longer term, it's got to be Turkey,

because Turkey is the country with the troops and the interests and the power in the region. The problem, of course, with the Turks, if the Turks do it, they're going to do it for their own reasons. They're going to expect other things. And the Turks aren't sure they want to because the Turks have interests in the Balkans and in Ukraine and in Greece and in the Western Mediterranean. And they can't do everything at once. And for them, what's going on in the center of the Syrian desert is more of an irritant than a strategic threat. So the norm of this region is for this place to just be very chaotic and pretty blammy because no one on the outside. really cares all that much and no one in the immediate vicinity really has the power to project

especially not from Damascus. So you should expect a lot more violence like this. You should expect some version of the Islamic State to become more and more powerful as time goes on unless someone like the United States decides to tend 30,000, 40,000 troops into an area where we have really no strategic interest whatsoever.