Trump’s foreign policy one of incoherence, inhumanity

It was just five years ago that a U.S. president, faced with a crisis on Syria’s border, acted decisively and honorably.

Barack Obama responded with airstrikes and a rescue operation in 2014 when the Islamic State group started a genocide against members of the Yazidi sect, slaughtering men and forcing women and girls into sexual slavery. Obama’s action, along with a heroic intervention by Kurdish fighters, saved tens of thousands of Yazidi lives.

“While America has never been able to right every wrong, America has made the world a more secure and prosperous place,” Obama declared.

Contrast Obama’s move with President Trump’s betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran — and, of course, Russia, because almost everything Trump does seems to end up benefiting Moscow.

“Who can trust Trump’s America?” The Economist magazine asks on its newest cover. Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, added: “What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a bloodstain in the annals of American history.”

Trump doubled down by saying that the Kurds were “no angels” and compared the fighting in Syria that he unleashed — with hundreds dead and 300,000 displaced — to a couple of kids fighting in a vacant lot. His own former special envoy, Brett McGurk, responded on Twitter: “This is an obscene and ignorant statement.”

Given the Kurdish heroism in arresting genocide against the Yazidi in 2014, it is savagely ironic that Trump’s betrayal has now put the Kurds themselves at risk of war crimes and ethnic cleansing by Turkey. Gunmen backed by Turkey dragged a Kurdish politician, Hevrin Khalaf, from her car by her hair, beat her and broke her legs, facial bones and skull, and shot her dead.

It’s nauseating to hear Trump claim that this cave-in represents “a great day for civilization” and that “millions of lives will be saved.”

Trump has emphasized his desire to bring U.S. troops home, and that’s a perfectly reasonable aspiration if undertaken in a prudent way. But even as Trump abandoned the Kurds and unleashed this disaster, he was actually increasing the number of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East — sending some 3,000 additional troops to Saudi Arabia.

So we’re sending more troops to Saudi Arabia to help a misogynist dictatorship that kills a journalist for a U.S. newspaper, even as we betray the Kurds who have been trying to build a democratic enclave that empowers women. We’re sending troops to Saudi Arabia to confront Iran, even as we give Iran a helping hand in Syria.

This is where incoherence and inhumanity converge.

By failing to prepare for a phone call with Turkey’s leader, then allowing himself to be manipulated, Trump undid years of work in the Middle East. But he also is corroding the entire 75-year-old American postwar international order, built on American credibility and values. Everyone knew the United States did not always live up to its rhetoric but that its ideals and commitments counted for something. Until now.

It’s true that Syria was Obama’s greatest foreign policy failure. Yet at least he was always wrestling deeply with the issues.

Trump in contrast is callow, reckless and indifferent.