If you didn’t know any better, you might think that President Trump is winging it on Syria and the rest of us are confined to holding our breath and praying he gets it right.
Nearly 72 hours after the U.S., British, and French strikes on three of Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons facilities, Republicans and Democrats in Washington are pressing the White House for a long-term strategy. Even those who vocally supported Trump’s decision to use force on the Syrian regime last Friday are concerned about a supposed lack of a “comprehensive strategy” for the country, one of those D.C. buzzwords members of Congress and blowhards on cable television often use as a talking point to make themselves sound smart
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., a former 2016 GOP presidential candidate, called for the administration to release “a real and comprehensive strategy” on the Syrian conflict now that the strikes are over. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the progressive lion conservatives love to hate, urged the White House to “provide a comprehensive strategy with clear goals & a plan to achieve them.” And House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce of California, one of the dozens of Republican lawmakers retiring this year, put out a statement advocating for “the administration … to begin fully explaining its strategy in the months ahead.”
Everybody in Washington wants an explanation from Trump about why he took action and what he intends to do about the Syria problem in the future.
Have these people been paying attention? If it’s a policy they want, Trump couldn’t have been any clearer as to what it is: extricate the U.S. from this hellhole as soon as possible.
For better or worse, the U.S. will be getting out of the Syria muck the second after victory over the Islamic State losers can be achieved. Everything else, like whether Assad stays in his palace or whether Syria undergoes a political transition to a democratic system of government (fat chance!), is a sideshow. The most Trump is willing to do with Assad is order a repeat of the punitive strikes that occurred this past weekend — and even then, only if Assad the dictator conducts another chlorine or sarin gas attack on civilians.
To the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in the Beltway, killing the last few thousand ISIS militants in the Syrian desert and getting the hell out is akin to cutting and running. How, they ask, could the U.S. betray the Kurds and expose them to the Turkish army after proving to be such effective fighters against the jihadists? How can the U.S. allow Assad to stay in power when there is overwhelming evidence and gory pictures of his atrocities? How are millions of Syrians supposed to return to their homes when their neighborhoods are likely razed to the ground by regime bombing or full of explosives planted by ISIS?
Trump’s answer to those questions essentially boils down to “not our problem.” It sounds cynical, uncaring, and cruel for the world’s most exceptional nation to be saying this. Yet the sentiment is also likely be endorsed by the American public, many of whom are sick and tired of forking over billions of their taxpayer dollars every year for reconstruction projects and civil society programs that resemble science experiments. In the Middle East, the experiments almost always end up causing a fire in the lab.
The Trump administration has a Syria policy. It may not be “comprehensive,” idealistic, or values-based. It may drive the interventionists, humanists, neoconservatives, and mainstream columnists nuts. And to be honest, Trump’s Syria strategy is barebones in how little it seeks to accomplish and depressing in how little effect it will have on the violence. Yet in a nasty and brutal conflict where every party has committed unspeakable crimes, there is very little the United States can do given its minimal leverage and interest.
The Middle East must prepare to arrest the political and social cancer metastasizing through the region without Uncle Sam playing the good doctor.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
