by Frank Holmes, reporter
Over the Christmas season, a major foreign policy earthquake shook the Middle East and seems poised to reshape America’s national security for decades to come.
In Syria, a coalition overthrew the brutal regime of dictator Basher al-Assad.
Washington’s foreign policy establishment has wanted to remove Assad from power for more than a decade, with two presidents putting all their efforts into eliminating him.
The media gave President Joe Biden credit for the foreign policy win in pushing the Assad dynasty out of power in Damascus — but everyone outside the U.S. knows any praise for the action ought to belong to President Donald J. Trump.
Toppling the Assad regime has been a leading goal of the Democratic Party for years. In 2013, then-President Barack Obama — who had a close relationship with the Islamic terror-aligned group Muslim Brotherhood — declared that Basher Assad “must go.”
Obama launched a covert CIA operation to arm, fund, and train “moderate” Syrian rebels to overthrow Assad… but many of the organizations ended up having ties to al-Qaeda or other Islamic radicals and terrorists.
Then-Vice President Joe Biden also said Assad had to go in 2013…and again a decade later.
When a Syrian-American Democratic donor said “Assad must go” at a June 2023 fundraiser, President Biden replied, “I agree.”
In early December, an Islamic extremist group called HTS overran Damascus, and, as Basher Assad fled the country on a hasty flight to Russia, Joe Biden immediately claimed credit.
“Our approach has shifted the balance of power in the Middle East,” bragged Biden as soon as the news broke. “Through this combination of support for our partners, sanctions, and diplomacy and targeted military force when necessary, we now see new opportunities opening up for the people of Syria and for the entire region.”
President Biden: "After 13 years of civil war in Syria, more than half a century of brutal authoritarian rule by Bashar al-Assad and his father before him, rebel forces have forced Assad to resign his office, flee the country…At long last the Assad regime has fallen." pic.twitter.com/0laXTCNYbd
— CSPAN (@cspan) December 8, 2024
Not so fast, says one of the foreign policy leaders of America’s closest ally.
It all started when President Donald Trump authorized the killing of Qassem Soleimani—the leader of the Iranian Quds Force, which was active in Syria—on January 3, 2020.
“He should have been taken out many years ago!” said President Trump at the time.
….of PROTESTERS killed in Iran itself. While Iran will never be able to properly admit it, Soleimani was both hated and feared within the country. They are not nearly as saddened as the leaders will let the outside world believe. He should have been taken out many years ago!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2020
The nation just marked the fifth anniversary of the day Soleimani, who supported radical Islamic terrorist attacks against U.S. soldiers in the region—last week.
Today is January 3rd, the day that Trump chopped Qasem Soleimani like an onion 5 years ago. Happy anniversary! pic.twitter.com/fH1KSD3uGA
— Hani (@HNI87) January 3, 2025
As it turned out, Soleimani was “much more seminal, much more key, pivotal” than anyone ever realized, because he “held in his head all the relationships, all the deals for everybody around the region,” Tugendhat stated.
After Trump’s killing of the terrorist leader, Soleimani “was replaced, but he wasn’t really, because nobody could replace the personal 20-year relationships that he held.”
Without Iran and Soleimani as mastermind to help prop him up, Assad eventually collapsed, said Tugendhat, who used to be chairman of the UK Parliament’s foreign affairs select committee.
In fact, he believes Iran will be the next country to fall thanks to Trump’s actions.
“There are moments like now when the old era is dead, the old illusions are dead, and various things are killing it. And I suspect that the regime in Tehran will be gone in the next few years,” said Tugendhat. “I think there’s a real opportunity for freedom to spread and for opportunity to spread.”
Although he’s the only voice courageous enough to speak up about Trump’s bold decision to take out an anti-American terrorist leader, those in the Middle East admit he’s right.
The independent Middle Eastern news site Al-Monitor reported this week, “Iran’s Quds Force struggling for relevance 5 years after Soleimani’s death.”
The Iran International website called the killing of Soleimani “a punch in Iran’s mouth.”
The Iranian government definitely hasn’t forgotten. During the 2024 election, officials arrested three people and charged them with taking part in an Iranian plot to assassinate then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as vengeance over Trump’s killing of Soleimani.
The loss of Syria may have created a second Iranian revolution led by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
“Young members of the IRGC are saying two things,” Tugendhat revealed. “One, the old guard are corrupt and incompetent: That’s why Hezbollah has been hung out to dry and defeated; that’s why old allies like Assad have fallen,” he said.
“The second thing they’re saying is that they’re hearing rumours…that the Ayatollah and the government in Tehran wants to talk to the Americans to try and find a way out of this and perhaps hang on” to power.
That means President Donald Trump forced Iran to play ball on America’s terms — and the hardliners don’t like it.
The radical members of IRGC don’t want the mullahs in Teheran to talk to “the killers of Qassem Soleimani,” said the British MP—and that could mean the Ayatollah is the next to fall.
“There is a really big problem within the regime itself, a really big challenge, because actually there’s no way through,” because the IRGC hold views that are “completely inconsistent with reality,” Tugendhat decided.
The mullahs think they will go the same way as the Assad family, which has ruled the country with an iron fist since the 1960s, going so far as to gas an entire city, including women and children, in the 1982 Hama Massacre.
As brutal as the family was, it has been replaced by a group that says it used to be affiliated with al-Qaeda…and that most people say, still is.
President Trump did not necessarily want to topple Assad out of fear over who might fill the vacuum—and he’s said America needs to stay out of the Middle East’s civil wars.
But Tugendhat believes Trump has the ability to keep the region moving in the right direction, for the West and the whole world.
“Frankly, if we get Syria right in 10 years, Syria could be absolutely not just a pole of stability but a fantastic economic powerhouse in the region, exporting stability and civilization…to the rest of the world again,” said Tugendhat.
The good news is in 13 days, with President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance in charge, America will be better equipped to handle whatever happens in the Mideast—and to dispatch the Islamic terrorist leaders who rise up to threaten Americans—than at any time in the last four years.