Syria could become indispensable. Will its people reap the rewards?

The photograph of Syria’s president at the recent meeting in New York captures the gulf between two eras. Donald Trump presided, joined by the King of Jordan, the Emir of Qatar, Turkey’s president and the prime ministers of Egypt and Iraq.

Until 2024, Syria featured at international gatherings as a seemingly endless catalogue of crises: civil war, devastation, millions of refugees and internally displaced people, Islamic State and crippling sanctions. Foreign armies fought over its violated territory while the regime busied itself turning the country into a vast Captagon factory.

At this latest meeting, Ahmed al-Sharaa looked relaxed and at ease, as though among family. His demeanour reflected a change that is hard to ignore. Having spent more than a decade on the dissecting table, Syria now had a seat among the physicians considering the region’s ailments.

With the outbreak of the American-Iranian war and disruption to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, one of the oldest facts of Syrian geography has acquired renewed importance: the country offers a short overland route linking Iraq and the Gulf to the Mediterranean. Yet the meeting was about much more than economics. It was, above all, political.

The proposed oil pipeline from Basra to Baniyas, long confined to old maps, is once again being discussed by major companies and governments. France’s TotalEnergies is considering joining the consortium studying a link between southern Iraq’s oilfields and the Syrian coast, at an estimated cost of $15 billion. The immediate attraction is an export route that bypasses Hormuz. The project remains at the feasibility stage and would take years to become a reality. Even so, its return to discussions on this scale points to a broader shift.

Iraq needs alternative outlets to the sea. Turkey needs routes south to Arab markets. The Gulf states need to reduce their dependence on threatened shipping lanes, while Europe is constantly seeking to diversify its energy supplies and trade routes. Syria’s ports lie at the natural terminus of several of these connections.

The photograph thus captures a possible transformation: from a country whose geography invites a struggle for control to one whose stability serves a shared international interest. Such a shift has profound implications for the very idea of Syria — for its future, and for what that future will require.

The 22 September meeting attended by al-Sharaa brings to mind an episode from European history.

On the morning of 10 May, 1940, German forces crossed into Luxembourg. The tiny grand duchy’s declaration of neutrality proved worthless; its borders offered no protection from its larger neighbours. The occupiers went beyond seizing the country. They incorporated it into the Reich, imposed the German language and conscripted thousands of its inhabitants.

Forty-five years later, almost in the same place, an altogether different scene unfolded. On 14 June, 1985, a small boat lay on the River Moselle beside a village called Schengen, where Luxembourg meets France and Germany. Representatives of five European countries boarded it and signed the agreement that began dismantling controls at Europe’s internal borders — part of the process of integration that would later produce the Maastricht Treaty and the European Union as we know it today.

A place where war had exposed the inability of borders to keep armies out became a symbol of a project allowing people and goods to move freely across them.

For all the immense differences in history, scale and circumstance, that reversal offers a useful way of reading the scene in New York. Syria may yet revert to being valued chiefly as an arena for other countries’ conflicts. But the opposite is also possible: as at Schengen, several powers may find that their interests are best served by working for its stability.

Schengen embodied that principle in the context of Europe’s shared interests. The small state’s security came to depend on changing the meaning of its borders, rather than simply defending them.

The comparison ends there. Syria is being pulled in several directions, and faces a difficult test. Pipelines, railways and roads can change the value of its territory. They do not automatically transform the state.

The United Nations Development Programme estimates that about 90 per cent of Syrians live below the poverty line. The World Bank puts roughly two-thirds below the poverty threshold used for lower-middle-income countries. Differences in measurement do not alter the essential truth: talk of billions of dollars flowing through Syria comes as most of its citizens struggle to make ends meet.

At this point, a question of geography and economics becomes a political one. What matters is not simply how many barrels of oil can travel from Basra to Baniyas, but what the route leaves behind.

Will it help build Syrian industry? Will it bring ports, railways and roads back into service? Will it create jobs, develop skills and nurture local businesses? Will transit fees and investment translate into electricity, schools and infrastructure? Or will Syria remain a poor country across whose territory other people’s wealth flows?

For this change in Syria’s geographical role to fulfil its promise, it must be accompanied by political and institutional reform. An economic corridor needs laws and courts whose decisions are predictable, clear investment rules, a capable civil service, transparent financial systems and institutions whose operating rules do not change with every shift in the balance of power.

Syria may be facing a rare opportunity, created, paradoxically, by the crises of others. The closure of sea routes is prompting a rediscovery of routes overland. Conflict around the straits is revealing anew the value of the Syrian coast. The turmoil that made Syria a regional problem may now drive the region to seek a stable Syria, because it needs to pass through it.

But there is a considerable distance between possessing a strategic location and making it work for your people. Can the state turn other countries’ need for its geography into lasting benefits for its own people — and develop a political system capable of growing with that new role?

For the people of a land haunted by nightmares for so long, the real achievement will be measured by the Syrian dreams that can come true once the caravans have passed.