Beirut, Lebanon – Sitting alongside his Lebanese counterpart, Joseph Aoun, at the White House on Tuesday, United States President Donald Trump repeated a suggestion that Syria could intervene in Lebanon to “do something with Hezbollah”.

Despite widespread opposition, Trump has multiple times floated the idea that Syria, under new President Ahmed al-Sharaa, could militarily interfere in the neighbouring country, whose government has come under US and Israeli pressure to disarm the Iran-backed group.

“[Al-Sharaa] would like to come in,” Trump claimed. “You know, they’ve been fighting. He’s been fighting Hezbollah for a long time. I think it’d be very effective. So it’s something I think about,” he said.

But on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio appeared to downplay the prospect of an intervention.

“The Syrian authorities are not big fans of Hezbollah, but what we’ve encouraged Syria to do is to focus on its own internal challenges that it has in building a nation state,” he told reporters.

Hezbollah was a crucial ally of Syria’s former President Bashar al-Assad before his removal in 2024 by fighters led by al-Sharaa.

According to Bassel Doueik, a political and security researcher, a military intervention in Lebanon to help disarm Hezbollah “would be strategically counterproductive” for Syria’s new authorities, which have previously dismissed the proposal.

“It would undermine establishing a stable relationship with the Lebanese state and could inadvertently strengthen Hezbollah’s domestic narrative. Hezbollah would almost certainly portray any Syrian military action as foreign aggression, allowing the group to reframe the situation as a resistance defending Lebanese sovereignty. Such a move could rally support from anti-Hezbollah segments of the population.”

Syrian animosity towards Hezbollah

Syrian troops first entered Lebanon under Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, in 1976, during the early days of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990). Syria occupied most of Lebanon (with the exception of the south, which was under Israeli occupation until 2000) for nearly 30 years, only pulling its troops out after widespread protests in 2005.

When Syrians rose up against their own government in 2011, al-Assad responded with heavy-handed violence and suppression. After the opposition picked up weapons to fight back, Hezbollah intervened on behalf of al-Assad.

This left deep resentment among many Syrians that remains to this day.

Still, analysts believe that a Syrian intervention in Lebanon could incite regional sectarian tensions, risk dragging both countries back into war and disrupt Syria’s post-war state-building project.

“A Syrian military return would reopen a deep wound in Lebanon’s political memory and provoke resistance even from communities that strongly oppose Hezbollah, because it would revive the experience of decades of Syrian control,” Nanar Hawach, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst on Syria, told Al Jazeera.

“Regionally, it would cast doubt on Syria’s claim to have broken with past patterns of interference, while stretching a still‑fragile transition and risking turning Syria, again, into a theatre of a regional conflict,” said Hawach.

‘Recipe for disaster’

There is also fear that such a military intervention could undermine Syria’s domestic security, as it faces threats from remnants of the former government and groups affiliated with ISIL (ISIS).

Samy Akil, a Syrian security analyst, argued that despite Trump’s push, the wider intelligence and defence community in the US recognises that the move would be a “recipe for disaster”.

Syrian troops were unlikely to enter Lebanese territory at all – and in the unlikely event they were to do so, it would be as part of a regional agreement, he said.

“Getting into Lebanon is easy, getting out of Lebanon is always very difficult,” added Akil, calling a potential intervention a “short-sighted policy”.

Pressure tactics

Trump’s comments came as the Lebanese army on Tuesday began deploying in “pilot zones” as stipulated in a US-brokered framework agreement signed between Lebanon and Israel last month that involves a gradual Israeli withdrawal and the deployment of Lebanese troops to prevent Hezbollah from re-establishing a presence in the country’s south.

Israel and Hezbollah have been fighting since October 2023, with varying levels of intensity, but the former has twice escalated the conflict – first in September 2024 and then in early March this year, following the start of the US-Israel war on Iran.

Hawach argued that Trump may be pushing the narrative of Syrian intervention in Lebanon as a tactic to signal that the US “has more than one lever on the Lebanon war, and to unsettle Hezbollah, Iran and Israel by putting a different kind of pressure on each of them”.

“It also serves a narrative of having partners who can do what Israel so far has not,” Hawach added. “Meanwhile, this gives Damascus an opportunity to look like the responsible actor by publicly refusing a role that would escalate the conflict.”

Instead of an on-the-ground intervention, Syria could support Lebanon in disarming Hezbollah in other ways.

“The most realistic scenario is that it remains within Syrian territory, not in Lebanon,” Souhaib Jawhar, a non-resident fellow at the Beirut-based Badil Policy Institute, told Al Jazeera.

“Strengthening the Syrian army’s presence on the Syrian side of the border, tightening control over illegal crossings, closing or destroying tunnels used for smuggling, along with increasing the level of security information exchange with the Lebanese army, are all more realistic and politically acceptable steps.”

Rubio also suggested that Syria could act against Hezbollah without sending troops on the ground.

“Hezbollah is an enemy of this new government in Syria and they, in many ways, have sought to seek to undermine that government over time. And one of the best things Syria can do to secure its future is to secure their border with Lebanon, so that we don’t have weapons and arms coming back and forth across that border in an effort to destabilise Syria,” he said.