Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Trump longs to get U.S. out of Syria
Advisers fret early withdrawal may let extremists regroup
WASHINGTON — 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 fretted about a hasty withdrawal as the president has told them privately he wants out, U.S. officials said.
Two months ago, Trump’s aides thought they had convinced him that the U.S. needed to keep its presence in Syria openended — not only because the Islamic State group has yet to be defeated, but also because the resulting power vacuum could be filled by other extremist groups or by Iran.
Trump signed off on a major speech in January in which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson laid out the new strategy and declared “it is vital for the United States to remain engaged in Syria.”
But by mid-February, Trump told his top aides in meetings that as soon as victory can be declared against ISIS, he wanted American troops out of Syria, said the officials.
Alarm bells went off at the State Department and the Pentagon, where officials have planned for a gradual, methodical shift from a military-led operation to a diplomatic mission to start rebuilding basic infrastructure like roads and sewers in the warwracked country.
The officials weren’t authorized to comment publicly and demanded anonymity.
Trump’s first public suggestion he was itching to pull out of Syria came in a news conference with visiting Australian Prime Minister Alastair Campbell on Feb. 23, when Trump said the U.S. was in Syria to “get rid of ISIS and go home.”
On Thursday, in a domestic policy speech in Ohio, Trump went further.
“We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now. Very soon — very soon, we’re coming out,” Trump said.
The public declaration caught U.S. national security agencies off-guard and unsure whether Trump was formally announcing a new, unexpected change in policy.
Inundated by inquiries from journalists and foreign officials, the Pentagon and State Department reached out to the White House’s National Security Council for clarification.
The White House’s ambiguous response, officials said: Trump’s words speak for themselves.
“The mission of the Department of Defense to defeat ISIS has not changed,” said Maj. Adrian RankineGalloway, a Pentagon spokesman.
But without a clear directive from the president, planning has not started for a withdrawal from Syria, officials said.
For Trump, who campaigned on an “America First” mantra, Syria is just the latest foreign arena where his impulse has been to limit the U.S. role.
As with NATO and the United Nations, Trump has called for other governments to step up and share more of the burden, so Washington doesn’t foot the bill. His administration has been crisscrossing the globe seeking financial commitments from other countries to fund reconstruction in Syria and Iraq, but with only limited success.
It’s unclear how Trump’s impulse to pull out could be affected by recent staff shake-ups on his national security team.
Tillerson and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, both advocates for keeping a U.S. 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 U.S. intervention and aggressive use of the military overseas.
The change in the president’s thinking has drawn concern both inside and outside the United States.
Other nations that make up the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS fear that Trump’s impulse to pull out would allow the resourceful militants to regroup, several European diplomats said.
That concern has been heightened as U.S.-backed ground operations against remaining ISIS militants in Syria were put on hold this month.
The ground operations had to be paused because Kurdish fighters spearheading the campaign against ISIS shifted to a separate fight with Turkish forces, who began combat operations in the town of Afrin against Kurds considered by Ankara to be terrorists.
Beyond just defeating ISIS, there are other strategic U.S. objectives that could be jeopardized by a hasty withdrawal, officials said, chiefly those related to Russia and Iran.
Israel, America’s closest Mideast ally, and other regional nations like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are concerned about the influence of Iran and its allies, including the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, inside Syria.
The U.S. military presence in Syria has been seen as a buffer against unchecked Iranian activity, and especially against Tehran’s desire to establish a contiguous land route from Iran to the Mediterranean coast in Lebanon.
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 U.S.
In calling for a withdrawal “very soon,” Trump may be overly optimistic in his assessment of how quickly the anti-ISIS campaign can be wrapped up. Although the group has been driven from basically all of the territory it once controlled in Iraq and 95 percent of its former territory in Syria, the remaining 5 percent could take many months, officials said.