VARIOUS TAKES: Trump Courts Catastrophe If He Leaves Syria.
I don’t know what I think, though it’s amusing to see the people who cheered Obama’s disastrous withdrawal from Iraq dragging Trump here. And the two aren’t comparable: Iraq was in good enough shape in 2010 that Obama’s operation was bragging about it, while Syria is still a mess. America had a huge investment in Iraq, and had made a difference, which was squandered on withdrawal. We have no such investment in Syria, and it’s not clear how much of a difference we’ve made, other than killing a few hundred Russian “volunteers,” which was admirable for the message it sent but made no major difference on the ground.
When Obama wanted to send large numbers of troops to Syria, basically no one here at home wanted to do it (except John McCain), and then Putin talked him out of it, so Obama let Russia in. We still wound up with a couple of thousand there, but the mission and strategy are unclear. And the “moderate” Syrians seem to mostly be Al Qaeda. So it looks like a mess, and a fairly low-stakes mess at present compared to other problems; Syria seems more like a quagmire for Putin than a win. This is especially true as the Middle East matters less now that the U.S. is a net oil exporter and the world’s largest oil producer. (Have you hugged a fracker today?)
So I can’t get too excited. Am I missing something? If so, tell me in the comments.
UPDATED: This was in the revered Weekly Standard: “Obama has accommodated leaders hostile to America, like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” But now we’re hearing — from people who praised Obama’s foreign policy skills — that it’s Trump who’s a Putin puppet. I’m willing to be convinced that pulling out of Syria is a mistake, but you’re going to have to convince me. You can’t just yell about Putin because that cuts more ways than you think.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Here’s what may be driving a US troop withdrawal from Syria. “A confrontation between the U.S and Turkey, officially NATO allies, would create a geopolitical crisis at the heart of the world’s most powerful military alliance.”
I say, give the Kurds a few nukes to even the odds with Turkey, and say goodbye. We probably have a few of the old Soviet backpack models stashed away somewhere.