Why isn’t America policing the entire world?

The world is teaching all dictators a lesson right now about how to commit crimes against humanity, escape accountability and eventually get accepted back into polite society. And the Biden administration is helping write that playbook – by tacitly allowing the normalization of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Thirteen years after the start of the Syrian revolution, Syria has been crowded out of Western media by newer crises. But Assad continues to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, including bombing, jailing and torturing thousands of civilians, while actively working to further destabilize the Middle East in partnership with his benefactors Russia and Iran.

As tensions with this autocratic axis rise, the United States and its allies ought to be holding the line on Syria. Instead, more and more countries, especially U.S. partners in the Persian Gulf, are welcoming Assad back into the diplomatic fold – lusting after lucrative contracts to rebuild the cities he destroyed.

The Biden administration’s official policy is to oppose the normalization of Assad, chiefly through sanctions, until he stops the slaughter. But behind the scenes, the administration is quietly but deliberately loosening that pressure, according to lawmakers in both parties and Syrian American groups.

“The forgotten war of this generation is really Syria,” Rep. Brendan Boyle (DPa.), co-founder of the Congressional Syria Caucus, told me. “I’m disgusted at the way so many in the Western world seem to have totally forgotten about the atrocities that have taken place there.”

Boyle is a co-sponsor of the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act, the main effort in Congress to extend and expand sanctions against those who aid the regime’s rehabilitation, especially in Arab gulf countries. It would also impose sanctions on Assad’s parliament and the Syria Trust for Development, led by Assad’s wife, which stands accused of broad corruption and theft of international assistance. In February, it passed the House of Representatives 389-32.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (RLa.) wanted to include this bill in the supplemental aid package that passed Congress last week. But in the course of negotiations, the White House objected, several lawmakers and congressional aides told me. The White House did not object to including other sanctions bills, including several targeting Iran.