... war in the country, Trump’s Secretary of State Pompeo mobilized international support for regime change through economic strangulation. To do this, a bill was tabled in the Congress, as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which imposed sanctions on Syria.
Passed in June 2020, the bill was called the “Caesar Act”, deriving its name from a mysterious figure who claimed to have been the photographer employed by the Syrian Ministry of Defense to take photographs of victims killed in the civil war. Described as a “defector”, he delivered more than ...
... to Syria, much less for transit to Lebanon (owing to the sanctions). Predictably, Syria’s imports have dropped and the prices of food and other imported goods gone up as a result of the high sanctions risks and increased cost of logistics services.
Caesar Act: Real Sanctions
Unfortunately for Syria, the secondary U.S. sanctions under the "Caesar Act" quickly began turning into an effective mechanism (much unlike previous measures, often limited to the compilation of sanctions lists), although Washington ...
... increases U.S. domestic political costs of suspending or easing
sanctions. For sanctions that were imposed under executive branch authorities, rather than
mandated by Congress, the executive branch retains broad discretion to suspend and terminate the
sanctions.
While the Caesar Act and other statutory sanctions requirements do put some limits on the
U.S. executive branch’s ability to lift sanctions on Syria, practically speaking, the U.S.
president continues to have a degree of legal discretion to offer partial sanctions ...
... Syria’s “grain stores.” This showed that Damascus was ready to restore economic ties before the political settlement of the Kurdish problem had been achieved.
The EU’s Stance on the Caesar Act
Much will depend on the stance that Europe takes on the Caesar Act, and this is a complicated matter. In May, Brussels once again extended its sanctions against Syria for another year. On the other hand, Europe is debating adjusting its approaches to the Syrian reconstruction effort. The German expert
Muriel Asseburg
notes that the European Union’s consolidated standing is eroded by differences ...
