The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Trump sought $4B from Saudis to stabilize Syria
In a December phone call with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, President Donald Trump had an idea he thought could hasten a U.S. exit from Syria: Ask the king for $4 billion. By the end of the call, according to U.S. officials, the president believed he had a deal.
The White House wants money from the kingdom and other nations to help rebuild and stabilize the parts of Syria that the U.S. military and its local allies have liberated from the Islamic State. The postwar goal is to prevent Syrian President Bashar Assad and his Russian and Iranian partners from claiming the areas, or the Islamic State from regrouping, while U.S. forces finish mopping up the militants.
The Saudis, whose crown prince arrives in Washington on Monday for extensive meetings with the administration, are part of the anti-Islamic State coalition but have largely withdrawn from the fight in Syria in recent years. They are questioning the eye-popping sum even as U.S. officials at one point were drawing up line items totaling $4 billion.
For Trump — who has long railed against insufficient burden-sharing by allies under the U.S. security umbrella — getting others to pay for expensive postwar efforts is important.
A $4 billion Saudi contribution would go a long way toward U.S. goals in Syria that the Saudis say they share, particularly that of limiting Assad’s power and rolling back Iran’s influence. By comparison, the United States last month announced a $200 million donation to the stabilization effort.
At the same time, Trump is eager to get the United States out of a war in which he has already claimed that victory over the Islamic State is near. Boasting of the Islamic State’s defeat in a speech Tuesday to U.S. troops in California, he said, “We knocked the hell out of them.”
“We won’t let up until ISIS is completely destroyed,” Trump said, using an acronym for the militants. “ISIS never thought this would happen.”
While Trump has approved the expansion of U.S. forces in Syria since coming to office, he remains wary of any broader role and doesn’t want the Americans to stick around for long. The roughly 2,000 troops currently deployed train, advise and often assist the main U.S. partner, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), near the front lines. One U.S. official said that involvement should be reevaluated every 18 months.
One senior official said the SDF should cut a deal with the Syrian regime, given that Assad is ascending and there is little U.S. appetite to expand the military mission. The SDF shares Assad’s goal of ridding Syria of opposition rebels, the Islamic State and Turkish forces.
A second senior administration official, however, completely rejected the notion that Assad is winning, saying the regime is “weaker than it has ever been, certainly in this half of the civil war.”