Isolationism won’t put an end to endless wars
AMERICANS ABROAD
In his rash decision last month to suddenly pull U.S. troops out of Syria — creating a power vacuum that risks a resurgence of defeated Islamic State terrorists — President Donald Trump enshrined as policy a campaign pledge to end foreign entanglements.
“Let someone else fight over this long-bloodstained sand,” Trump said of Syria on Oct. 23, after explaining earlier that his broader plan is “to get out of endless wars, to bring our soldiers back home, to not be policing agents all over the world.”
As enticing as this might sound to some Americans, the reality is that Trump hasn’t done anything of the sort. And if he did, it would be a disaster for national and global security.
He has ended no wars. It’s true he’s withdrawing several hundred U.S. combat troops from northeastern Syria, largely special operations soldiers who were working with Syrian Kurdish-Arab fighters to prevent ISIS elements from reforming. But they haven’t come home. They’re going to Iraq.
And American armored units are being sent back into Syria to guard oil fields, so the difference will largely be a wash. Moreover, in a separate and unrelated move, about 1,800 U.S. troops are going to Saudi Arabia to deter Iranian aggression.
Beyond the Middle East, more than 200,000 U.S. troops are positioned around the globe, quietly serving — without engaging in combat or suffering any killed-in-action casualties — to safeguard U.S. security and interests by preserving a stable world order. They train and support a network of allied forces, guarantee freedom of navigation for 90% of world commerce, preserve access to energy, allow rapid dispatch of humanitarian aid and, ultimately, prevent the kind of endless wars Americans worry about.
Tens of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in Japan, South Korea, the Middle East and Europe act — with local forces in each region — as a buffer against a growing Chinese militarism in the South China Sea, a nucleararmed dictator threatening from North Korea, Iranian menacing in the Persian Gulf and Russian military aggression along NATO’s eastern flank in Europe.
There are also 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, 5,200 in Iraq and, until Trump’s recent announcement, a thousand or more in Syria, fighting with and through local forces to target terrorist elements at their source.
In arguing to bring troops home, he has invoked a 19th century isolationist view that the United States is protected from harm by oceans. “They can’t walk to our country,” Trump said of ISIS fighters. “We have lots of water in between our country and them.”
Perhaps he has forgotten how malign actors have influenced U.S. elections or inspired mass murder in the USA by radical disciples, all via a 21st century internet. Or how al-Qaida terrorists based in Afghanistan killed nearly 3,000 people in America on Sept. 11, 2001.
Under a framework of projected America power, along with a series of mutual defense agreements, the United States has succeeded since World War II in preventing the kind of global wars that killed tens of millions early in the 20th century.
Ordering America’s troops to pack up and go home would make neither America nor the world a safer place.