Opinion | Trump’s Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is Alarming. Just Ask His Advisers. - The New York Times
Trump’s Decision to Withdraw From Syria Is Alarming. Just Ask His Advisers.
This isn’t the first time the president and his administration have sent mixed messages.
By The Editorial Board
The editorial board represents the opinions of the board, its editor and the publisher. It is separate from the newsroom and the Op-Ed section.
Dec. 19, 2018
It was less than three months ago that John Bolton, the national security adviser, declared an expanded objective for American troops in Syria.
The goal is not just defeating the Islamic State, but also ensuring that Iranian forces leave the country, he told reporters in what seemed like an authoritative statement of official policy.
Only, as is so often the case with Donald Trump’s chaotic presidency, it apparently wasn’t.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump summarily overruled Mr. Bolton and the rest of his national security team. He ordered the withdrawal of all 2,000 American ground troops from Syria within 30 days.
That abrupt and dangerous decision, detached from any broader strategic context or any public rationale, sowed new uncertainty about America’s commitment to the Middle East, its willingness to be a global leader and Mr. Trump’s role as commander in chief.
Soldiers have a duty to follow their leader and carry out lawful orders. But success depends on trusting that the leader knows what he’s doing and where he’s going.
Sending conflicting orders to soldiers on the battlefield, as Mr. Trump and his administration are doing, not only hampers morale and undermines allied forces like the Syrian Kurds, it could also risk getting American soldiers killed or wounded for objectives their commanders had already abandoned.
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Even some of Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters were alarmed. “It is a major blunder,” a Republican senator, Marco Rubio of Florida, wrote on Twitter. “If it isn’t reversed it will haunt this administration & America for years to come.”
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who generally supports Mr. Trump, said he and others in the national security establishment were “blindsided” by the announcement. He called for congressional hearings on the decision.
This isn’t the first time the president and his administration have sent mixed messages. During the 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump promised to withdraw troops from Syria and has been looking for a way do it ever since. In April, he gave the Pentagon more time to complete the mission, which since the Obama era has been strictly focused on finishing off the Islamic State. Then Mr. Bolton arrived on the job and declared that “we’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.”
As late as Monday, James Jeffrey, the State Department’s Syria envoy, told the Atlantic Council that the United States would stay in Syria until ISIS was defeated, Iranian influence was curbed and there was a political solution to the Syrian civil war.
But on Wednesday, Mr. Trump undercut his advisers, and American interests, by reversing course and declaring in a tweet, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.”
There was no attempt to use the leverage of an American withdrawal to achieve any specific political or military goal.
Mr. Trump’s assertion that the Islamic State is defeated is absurd. “We have won against ISIS,” he boasted in a video. The ability of the terrorists to strike has been significantly degraded and much of the territory they claimed for their so-called caliphate has been liberated. But the group still retains a pocket of land on the Syria-Iraq border and has roughly 20,000 to 30,000 fighters, according to military researchers. As Mr. Jeffrey said Monday, “The job is not yet done.”
No one wants American troops deployed in a war zone longer than necessary. But there is no indication that Mr. Trump has thought through the consequences of a precipitous withdrawal, including allowing ISIS forces to regroup and create another crisis that would draw the United States back into the region.
An American withdrawal would also be a gift to Vladimir Putin, the Russian leader, who has been working hard to supplant American influence in the region and who, on Thursday, enthusiastically welcomed the decision, saying, “Donald’s right.” Another beneficiary is Iran, which has also expanded its regional footprint. It would certainly make it harder for the Trump administration to implement its policy of ratcheting up what it calls “maximum pressure” on Iran.
Among the biggest losers are likely to be the Kurdish troops that the United States has equipped and relied on to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, considers many of the Kurds to be terrorists bent on destroying his country. In recent days he has vowed to launch a new offensive against them in the Syrian border region. Mr. Trump discussed his withdrawal decision in a telephone call with Mr. Erdogan on Friday.
The American withdrawal worries Israel, anxious about Iran’s robust military presence in Syria, and Jordan, which bears a considerable burden from Syrian refugees who fled the fighting across the border. While Israel withheld criticism of Mr. Trump’s decision, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said his government would escalate the fight against Iranian-aligned forces in Syria once the Americans leave.
Decisions of such consequence normally are thoroughly vetted by a president’s national security advisers. But congressional lawmakers said there were no signs that any process was followed, and a senior White House official, refusing to discuss internal deliberations, said Wednesday, “The issue here is the president made a decision.”
It’s hard not to wonder whether Mr. Trump is once again announcing a dramatic step as a way of deflecting attention from bad news, in this case a torrent of legal judgments that are tightening the legal noose around him.
That would be the worst rationale for a commander in chief sworn to protect the nation and to honor the men and women who serve in uniform.
