We've All Had Rough Pasts

In this episode we begin with President Trump welcoming Syrian President Ahmad al-Sharaa to the White House, and we reflect on Sharaa’s remarkable success on the diplomatic stage. Grant reviews the decisions on the battlefield and in policymaking in Damascus where Sharaa has acted to protect minorities and ease Western concerns about what Trump calls his “rough past” as a young jihadi. I’m encouraged by the enlistment of Damascus in the fight to crush ISIS and the effort to peal Syria away from Iran and Russia. Grant credits Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan for much of the Sharaa government’s success to date and criticizes the Biden administration for freezing Fidan out of the diplomacy over Gaza, a posture that Secretary Rubio reversed. Speaking of foreign leaders visiting the White House, we discuss Trump’s meeting with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán last week, a gross lovefest that is somewhat less alarming than it otherwise might be in light of the possibility that opposition leader Peter Magyar may defeat Orbán next year — despite Trump more-or-less campaigning for the incumbent, an ill-advised echo of mistakes that the Obama and Biden administrations made trying to influence allies’ internal politics. Finally, we discuss the bombings this week in Islamabad and New Dehli, apparently perpetrated by terrorists with unrelated agendas but a common friend in Qatar.