President Trump’s new Syria policy is consistent with his “noninterventionist” instincts and demonstrates his reluctance to be drawn into a protracted no-win military mission that would amount to a classic case of “mission creep,” according to a range of national security experts.
“If we stay any longer we will in effect be taking sides in a civil war. Up until now we have avoided that because we focused on ISIS,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It would be a classic example of mission creep, that is, we got into the war focused on ISIS now we’re going to expand what we are doing to participate in a civil war and there a huge downside.”
After publicly announcing this week that it’s time to bring U.S. troops home from Syria, Trump was persuaded to leave them there a little longer, at least long enough to help U.S.-backed Kurdish and Arab fighters finish off ISIS.
“The military mission to eradicate ISIS in Syria is coming to a rapid end, with ISIS being almost completely destroyed,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders in a statement issued late Wednesday morning. “The United States and our partners remain committed to eliminating the small ISIS presence in Syria that our forces have not already eradicated.”
The statement came one day after Trump lamented that war in the Middle East had cost the United States $7 trillion, and in return the U.S. got “nothing except death and destruction.” The final decision commits the 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria to remain in an advisory role until the last bit of territory held by ISIS is liberated, but not for the reconstruction and stabilization period, which is expected to take years and is vastly complicated by the ongoing civil war, which last month marked its seventh anniversary.
While it’s not clear how Trump was convinced to stop short of a full withdrawal, key people made it clear they opposed his plan to leave the field entirely. On Sunday, after Trump first announced that the U.S. would be leaving Syria “very soon,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Trump would be making “the single worst decision the president could make.”
“If we withdrew our troops anytime soon, ISIS would come back, the war between Turkey and the Kurds would get out of hand, and you’d be giving Damascus to the Iranians without an American presence, and Russia and Iran would dominate Syria,” Graham said on Fox News Sunday. “This is a disaster in the making.”
Now that the White House has clarified that the U.S. troops would continue to advise and assist Syrian fighters until ISIS is vanquished, James Carafano of the Heritage Foundation says the new policy “looks like a nothingburger, basically an edict against mission creep.”
“Basically, the president has said we won’t be sticking around in Syria and doing nation-building. I don’t think there ever was an expectation that we could or should do that,” Carafano said. “Mostly what the president has signaled here is there not going to be a permanent presence or an expansion of U.S. goals — no mission creep. That’s not a bad thing.”
Most military experts now agree that withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011, combined with the failure to work out an agreement with Iraq to leave some U.S. forces behind to ensure stability, created the conditions that led to the rise of ISIS.
But the role of U.S. troops in Syria, where Russia, Turkey, and Iran are the major players, is much more problematic and might present a strong rationale for the U.S. to leave once ISIS is eliminated, argues CSIS’s Cancian.
“Iraq and Syria are different. We had a very bad experience in Iraq when we pulled our forces out, and the situation deteriorated, and we should not make that mistake again,” said Cancian. “But Syria is in the middle of a civil war and the side we backed is losing. There is a lot more to say in favor of pulling out of Syria than there was for pulling out of Iraq.”
The Trump administration is putting other countries on notice that once ISIS is gone, they will need to step up, including footing the bill for reconstruction.
“We expect countries in the region and beyond, plus the United Nations, to work toward peace and ensure that ISIS never re-emerges,” said Sanders in her White House statement.
President Trump has frozen $200 million in State Department aid that was pledged to help restore services in areas liberated from ISIS and ordered a review of how the money would be spent.
“This very important review … required us … to go to our coalition partners and remind them that the coalition has a big role to play in this,” said Brett McGurk, the president’s special envoy to the Defeat ISIS coalition at a forum Tuesday.
The fact is the U.S. will be in weak position once ISIS is no longer a force on the battlefield. Unlike Russia, the U.S. is not in Syria at the invitation of the government.
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and current Defense Secretary Jim Mattis have both argued that keeping troops in Syria would strengthen the negotiation position of diplomats taking part in U.N.-brokered peace talks in Geneva.
But the reality is the U.S. has been effectively sidelined by Russia, Turkey, and Iran, who are charting Syria’s future without any input from the U.S.
“Why should any of these players defer to U.S. interests when the U.S. ability to shape events on the ground is limited by a tiny commitment,” said Stephen Biddle, who teaches military strategy at the George Washington University. “The trouble is all the other actors have greater stakes than we do and greater investments than we do, and that means they have more influence over the outcome.”
And because Trump says the U.S. “will not rest until ISIS is gone,” analysts say he’s keeping his pledge not to telegraph his military moves.
“There is no end date for the mission, and the president has said we will stay until the job is done. That’s still pretty open-ended,” said Heritage’s Carafano. “This decision doesn’t really give aid or comfort to any of our enemies.”
