Trump suggested that Syria should perhaps take on Hezbollah — and to anyone following the Middle East, that won't sound ridiculous or far-fetched.
Some context.
Syria has historically viewed an independent Lebanon as a mistake and a whim of white colonizers — after the Sykes-Picot agreement handed the territories of modern Syria and Lebanon to France.
In 1920, the French carved out what is now Lebanon from Syria to separate Christians from the Sunni Muslim masses, named the new entity Greater Lebanon, and made Beirut its capital.
Christians welcomed this. The Sunni masses did not — nor did they welcome the splitting of their land into Lebanon and Syria.
Both countries, meanwhile, were under a single French administration (with Christians enjoying special French patronage).
So the revanchist dream of reunification runs deep in Syria. Even under the Assads, Syria sent troops into Lebanon and stayed for decades — this kind of move is nothing new for them.
But that was the history. Now for the current picture.
During Syria's decade-long civil war, Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah were crucial in keeping Assad in power.
Hezbollah fighters did all the dirty work: hunting down and punishing deserters, running extortion rackets, committing murders, seizing apartments and other property.
It was largely Hezbollah — which kept Assad's army from disintegrating through executions, torture, and the persecution of deserters' families — that held the regime together. (Russia's air force was also a factor, but the Hezbollah factor was enormous.)
After Israel started a war with Hezbollah in 2024 (the pager operation and beyond), the group pulled its fighters out of Syria and back to Lebanon — one of the factors behind HTS's triumphant march on Damascus. Not the only one, but one of the key ones.
Without Russia (bogged down in Ukraine) and Iran's Lebanese proxy, Assad couldn't hold on alone. His army literally fell apart and ran.
The former HTS — now Syria's governing authority — remembers everything Hezbollah did: the rackets, the torture, the killings, the looting. The new Syrian army won't need much convincing.
The rank and file are sitting on a hair-trigger, waiting for the day they can march into Lebanon — to settle scores, to kill, to plunder.
On top of that, there's the sectarian factor: Sunnis (Syria) and Shia (Hezbollah) have always been at each other's throats. Getting to cut down yesterday's Shia occupiers, looters, and murderers is, for them, the sweetest thing imaginable.
And radical Sunnis don't even consider Shia to be Muslims — worth noting that HTS is yesterday's Al-Qaeda, for those who forgot.
There's also a convenient optics angle for the US and the West: Syria doesn't have serious combat aviation capable of bombing Hezbollah in Beirut the way Israel does — which means no "horrifying" footage to make progressive Westerners and their immigrant communities nervous.
Instead, it'll be good old-fashioned ground-level slaughter — like the massacre of Alawites that Syria's new rulers carried out last year — and the West will shrug.
Just some Arabs killing other Arabs, who cares, it's not Jews, right?
How much coverage did you see in Western media about the massacre of Alawites in Latakia and Tartus? Exactly. You won't hear much about a massacre in Lebanon either, if Syria gets the green light to move in with serious force.
So I wouldn't dismiss Trump's suggestion about giving Syria a green light against Hezbollah as unrealistic — it's a very real scenario.
One that Hezbollah, by the way, has every reason to fear: unlike Israel, Syrian soldiers will come to Lebanon to take revenge — and they won't be holding back.