In private, Trump mused over exit ‘ for weeks’

Abrupt change in the president’s thinking has drawn concern both inside and outside US

President Donald Trump’s unscripted remark this week about pulling out of Syria “very soon,” while at odds with his own policy, was not a one- off: For weeks, top advisers have been fretting about an overly hasty withdrawal as the president has increasingly told them privately he wants out, US officials said.

Only two months ago, Trump’s aides thought they’d persuaded him that the US needed to keep its presence in Syria open- ended— not only because Daesh has yet to be entirely defeated, but also because the resulting power vacuum could be filled by other extremist groups or by Iran.

Trump’s first public suggestion he was itching to pull out came in a news conference with visiting Australian Prime Minister Alastair Campbell on February 23, when Trump said the US was in Syria to “get rid of Daesh and go home.”

But Trump’s Ohio declaration on Thursday caught US national security agencies off- guard and unsure whether Trump was formally announcing a new, unexpected change in policy.

‘ America First’ mantra

For Trump, who campaigned on an “America First” mantra, Syria is just the latest foreign arena where his impulse has been to limit the US role.

As with Nato and the United Nations, Trump has called for other governments to step up and share more of the burden so that Washington doesn’t foot the bill.

His administration has been crisscrossing the globe seeking financial commitments from other countries to fund reconstruction in both Syria and Iraq, but with only limited success.

Yet it’s unclear how Trump’s impulse to pull out could be affected by recent staff shake- ups on his national security team.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and former national security adviser H. R. McMaster, both advocates for keeping a US presence in Syria, were recently fired, creating questions about the longevity of the plan Tillerson announced in his Stanford University speech in January.

But Trump also replaced McMaster with John Bolton, a vocal advocate for US intervention and aggressive use of the military overseas.

The abrupt change in the president’s thinking has drawn concern both inside and outside the United States.

Other nations that make up the US- led coalition fighting Daesh fear that Trump’s impulse to pull out hastily would allow Daesh to regroup, several European diplomats said. That concern has been heightened by the fact that US- backed ground operations against remaining Daesh militants in Syria were put on hold last month.

The ground operations had to be paused because Kurdish fighters who had been spearheading the campaign against Daesh shifted to a separate fight with Turkish forces, who began combat operations in the town of Afrin against Kurds who are considered by Ankara to be terrorists that threaten Turkey’s security.

An American withdrawal would also likely cede Syria to Russia, which along with Iran has been propping up Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces and would surely fill the void left behind by the US.

That prospect has alarmed countries like France, which has historic ties to the Levant.