This evening on the NewsHour's Shields and Brooks, David Brooks opines
It's complete incoherence. I think Donald Trump — the logical thing is, Donald Trump spoke to somebody on the phone, he made a decision. It was a terrible decision, an immoral decision, and just bad for our foreign policy. I mean, who's going to fight ISIS, or I.S., if we're out?
Who's going to guard the 10,000 prisoners who the Kurds — we have been relying on the Kurds to guard? And the Kurds are going to turn to Russia or Iran or somebody. And so it will further strengthen Russia and Iran. So it's a terrible decision.
And then they get a little bad publicity, the administration does, and so then Mnuchin and various other people in the administration come out and say, oh, this is terrible.
And so it's not a foreign policy. It's a foreign policy by what Donald Trump's latest emotion is.This is bizarre. Mr. Trump campaigned on pulling US forces out of the Middle East, specifically Syria. His former defense secretary, Jim Mattis, resigned on precisely that issue. John Bolton left his job over similar concerns. The president has been considering this move for at least four years now--nobody can seriously claim it comes as an "incoherent" surprise except in the narrowest, tactical sense.
In Mr. Trump's mind, the original sin was the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, embroiling us in a series of "endless wars." President Obama partially corrected the error with his precipitous withdrawal from Iraq. Arguably that was a huge mistake, leading to the rise of ISIS and the Syrian civil war. Our departure likely permitted more than half a million deaths and many millions more refugees. Mr. Obama has definitely not lived up to the hopes of the Nobel Committee!
Mr. Trump apparently doesn't believe in "tripwire" tactics. We only had a thousand troops in Syria--not an intimidating force. But behind those troops stood the full faith and credit of the US military--namely a promise that we'd bring in the cavalry if so much as a hair on the head of one US soldier be harmed. Our presence in Syria was effectively a promise of US protection.
Mr. Trump has long said he doesn't want to extend that promise, especially in a country where the stakes for the US are so low. Much better to retract it now than wait for a crisis later on. Of course there are humanitarian consequences--take away the policemen and disorder will ensue. Though it is unlikely that Mr. Trump's withdrawal will be as catastrophic as Mr. Obama's.
Of course the war party is up in arms about this. "War party" is Mr. Trump's pejorative name for advocates for the Iraq war, for the preservation of our force in Iraq, and now for the continued presence of a tripwire in Syria. These people are mostly Republicans--though I think the war in Iraq was more bipartisan than people now let on. Apart from defending their own reputations, they believe strongly in the traditional tools of American power and diplomacy: strong alliances, an international perspective, and credibility.
I'm sympathetic to the war party. I supported the war in Iraq at the time, and I deeply opposed Obama's withdrawal in 2009 (still do). At the same time, I'm skeptical of high-sounding verbiage like "strong alliances." I increasingly agree with Trump that "alliances" are a means and not an end. Without a definite purpose, what's the point of an alliance? (NATO no longer has much of a purpose.)
Ultimately, once you scrape away all the highfalutin language, the war party's argument is humanitarian. For just as Obama's decision led to the complete destruction of two whole countries, so too will Trump's move destroy the Kurds (or at least force them into other alliances). It's heartrending! Why can't the US be a policeman--especially since the cost (a thousand troops) is so cheap?
But it's not cheap, if only because we have too many tripwires. There's the famous one in Korea--Trump has promised to bring those troops home. Then we still have 30,000 troops in Germany--there to ensure Europe's internal borders. They're coming home, too (and no, they aren't moving to Poland). Every tripwire is like writing an insurance policy--and some day we'll have to pay a claim. That likely involves us in a major war, and inevitably that will eventually happen. Think World War I.
But we need to answer Mr. Brooks' questions.
- Who is going to fight ISIS? Everybody and nobody. ISIS used to be a caliphate that controlled extensive territory, including the city of Mosul. Driving them out of that territory was a military objective--and one that Trump accomplished in short order. The caliphate is now gone, and ISIS is reduced to being a loose ideology connecting adherents around the world. Confronting them now is a matter for the police and other civil authorities. They are not a military target. The thousand troops in Syria weren't protecting us against ISIS, but instead they were protecting the Kurds against Turkey. In the unlikely event the caliphate ever resuscitates itself, then we can send the Marines back in.
- Who is going to guard the 10,000 prisoners? Probably nobody. As I understand it, a large fraction of those prisoners are European nationals. The Europeans have not repatriated them, leaving them for the Kurds, and indirectly, for the Americans to guard. The Americans have no dog in the fight--this is between the Europeans and the Kurds. The former are incapable, and the latter have more serious problems. My prediction is the prisoners will be killed, if not by the Kurds, then by the Turks or the Iranians or Russians. Or somebody.
President Trump has turned down many opportunities to go to war. His retaliation against Syria (for chemical weapons violations) was destroying an empty "research facility" in the middle of the night. When Iran shot down a drone, it turned out that he didn't want to kill any Iranians. He rejected John Bolton's desperate pleas to invade Venezuela. He wants to pull our troops out of Afghanistan. He has studiously ignored all the provocations coming from Pyongyang.
The man, of German ancestry (who, reputation notwithstanding, tend toward pacifism), studied at Fordham and Penn (two institutions in the larger Quaker tradition). He attended the New York Military Academy in high school, and apparently enjoyed the military lifestyle. But he never joined the military.
The man is a pacifist. It's that simple.
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