Testifying in the House Foreign Affairs Committee today, US envoy for Syria engagement Jim Jeffrey said the Donald Trump administration's policy in Syria "is not regime change," but an "irreversible political process which will change the nature and behavior of the Syrian regime."

Why it matters: Jeffrey’s comments are an indication that the US may not move to force Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster, even though the United Nations-backed Geneva peace talks — which the former US ambassador to Turkey was hired in August to resuscitate — seek to reunify the country with national elections.

"We do not have an official position on any personality except that Assad is the worst person to rule any place,” Jeffrey said when pressed by Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., on whether the US administration is committed to pushing Assad out in a future election. "We cannot imagine the bulk of the population voting for that individual.”

Don’t call it regime change: But not all experts are buying the idea that the US strategy doesn’t center around regime change. “The whole concept of Geneva was to provide a framework to get Assad out of power,” Nick Heras, a Middle East fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told Al-Monitor earlier this month. “The fundamental challenge is that the new administration strategy is regime change without using the phrase regime change because of the bad connotation it has in Iraq.”