Syria: Is Trump’s withdrawal in America’s interests?
This was “an impulsive act by an ignorant man,” said David French in NationalReview .com. President Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw all 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria has already lost him the service of Defense Secretary James Mattis, who resigned in protest. But the eventual cost to the nation could be much, much higher. By leaving Syria, we hand a huge strategic gift to Russia and Iran, who have kept their own militaries in Syria as a means of expanding their influence in the Middle East. We abandon our Kurdish allies in northern Syria to the predations of Turkey, which has long sought the Kurds’ destruction. (It was during a phone call with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Trump shocked advisers by suddenly declaring the U.S. was pulling out, as he told Erdogan, “You know what? It’s yours. I’m leaving.”) Worst of all, we give breathing room to ISIS’s remaining 30,000 fighters, who may have lost the great swath of territory they once controlled but are far from “defeated,” as Trump boasted in a tweet. If we’ve learned anything from two decades of war, said former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell in The Washington Post, it’s that jihadist groups “quickly regenerate” when military pressure is reduced. By pulling U.S. troops out of Syria—and by reportedly demanding a major withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan—Trump has made it more likely that “we will again face a threat to our homeland.”
Don’t be fooled by these “doom and gloom” predictions of an
ISIS resurgence, said Oubai Shahbander in TheFederalist.com. As Trump has noted, Turkey is highly motivated to suppress ISIS and stabilize neighboring Syria, and its large local army can do that more efficiently than the U.S. The use of troops to prop up friendly governments in this region is doomed to failure—as we’ve seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s time to “break the vicious cycle of the ‘forever war’” and leave the quagmire of Syria to its regional stakeholders. The U.S. mission in Syria has been muddled from the start, said Michael Brendan Dougherty in NationalReview.com. We originally went in to support “moderate” Syrian rebel groups against dictator Bashir alAssad, and then moved on to defeating ISIS. But hawks now tell us we need troops in Syria to limit Iranian and Russian influence. Enough “mission creep.” Time to go home.
But even if ISIS stays in check, Trump’s decision to leave Syria could still hurt him politically, said Walter Russell Mead in The Wall Street Journal. Despite the “America First” element of Trump’s populist support, the conservative base is still “more hawkish than isolationist.” Hence the swift condemnation of the Syria pullout from Republican senators Marco Rubio, who called it a “major blunder,” and Lindsey Graham, who predicted “devastating consequences” and likened it to President Obama’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq. That sharp criticism may explain why Trump this week acceded to a more gradual withdrawal from Syria—six months instead of 30 days.
That won’t undo the damage from this impulsive decision, said William Galston, also in the Wall Street Journal. America made a commitment to protect our allies in the region—Israel, the Kurds, and Syrian rebel groups, who crafted their own high-stakes strategies around the continued presence of our troops in Syria. To abandon the Kurds and Syrians to their fate “betrays everyone who relied on the word of the U.S.,” and it may be a long, long time before they, or anyone, trusts us again.