Shortly after Washington announced the withdrawal of troops from Syria, both the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain—two reliable supports of American efforts to contain Iran—reopened their embassies in Damascus, effectively announcing their recognition that Bashar al-Assad is the victor in the civil war and thus has regained legitimacy. Worse, the UAE has repeatedly shown interest in investing in Syria. David Adesnik argues that the U.S. must tighten sanctions on Assad and make clear to its allies that they should follow suit:

While Hizballah has for four decades successfully terrorized civilian populations on at least three continents, European states have proved painfully slow to designate it a terrorist group, let alone impose sanctions and other law-enforcement measures. Both the EU itself and France only applied the designation in 2013, but still hold fast to a fictitious distinction between the group’s terrorist “military wing” and its supposedly legitimate “political wing.” Nonetheless, the continent has begun to acknowledge the dangers of Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy, and last year six Central European states banned Hizballah completely. Much credit, writes Alex Benjamin, is due to Tsvetan Tsvetanov, the former deputy prime minister of Bulgaria: