The regional struggle between Iran (backed by Russia) and pro-Western powers stretches beyond what we normally think of as the Middle East to places like Sudan. In 2020, following the ouster of the murderous dictator Omar al-Bahsir, Khartoum took steps toward joining the Abraham Accords. But just three years later, the country again devolved into a civil war far bloodier than anything happening in Gaza (albeit much less interesting to Western protesters). And that is when the African country abandoned any hope of diplomatic relations with Israel for a different kind of normalization, as Oved Lobel explains:

On October 9, while Israel was still fighting to clear its own territory of more than a thousand terrorists . . . who had invaded the country and carried out mass atrocities and kidnapping two days before, Sudan and Iran suddenly announced they were normalizing relations. This normalization of relations, ruptured in 2016 at the behest of the Gulf Arab states, follows a broader normalization between those states and Iran since 2022.

Up until 2016, and particularly during the 1990s, Sudan served the same purpose to the south of Israel as Syria did in the north: a command-and-control, training, financing, and logistics hub for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its Palestinian and Lebanese [allies]—Hizballah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)—as well as al-Qaeda and other terrorist clients. Missiles and other weapons were transferred by the IRGC to Sudan and then smuggled into Gaza, necessitating multiple Israeli airstrikes inside Sudan.

The IRGC already has a substantial presence in the Red Sea, including on islands off Eritrea as well as in Somalia, where it arms al-Qaeda’s al-Shabaab—the current leader of al-Qaeda, Saif al-Adel, has been based in Iran since 2003—as well as, in the other direction, the IRGC’s branch in Yemen, Ansar Allah, widely known as the Houthis.

The upshot? If Sudan once again becomes a terrorist hub, and Iran obtains footholds on either side of the Red Sea, Lobel goes on to explain, Tehran will have almost unrestricted routes for smuggling arms to Gaza.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.