President Trump said Tuesday he wants to leave U.S. forces in Syria long enough to thwart Iran’s ambition in the country, a goal he announced after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron.
“So we want to come home, we’ll be coming home, but … we want to leave a strong and lasting footprint,” Trump said during a joint press conference at the White House. “And that was a very big part of our discussion.”
Those remarks were an apparent departure from the plan provided by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who told lawmakers during a classified briefing that Trump plans to withdraw American forces from Syria as soon as possible. That sparked concern in the Senate, and among some U.S. allies, that Iranian forces allied with Syrian President Bashar Assad would seize strategically-significant territory in the country.
“I would love to get out,” Trump said. “With that being said, Emmanuel and myself have discussed the fact that we don’t want to give Iran open season to the Mediterranean, especially since we really control it to a large extent.”
Macron and other allies worry that the Syrian civil war will allow Iran to form a “land-bridge” through Iraq and Syria to Lebanon, the home of its chief terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Israel, in particular, has warned that Iran is trying to build military installations would pose allow Iran to threaten Israel from across two borders.
“When it comes to countering Iran, it is pretty much all talk and no real strategy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., complained last week after Mattis reiterated Trump’s plan to exit Syria.
Trump seemed more persuaded by those concerns after talking to Macron, who had announced in advance he would raise the issue during his state visit. He linked the resolution of the Syria crisis to his parallel frustration with the Iran nuclear deal, which national security hawks maintain emboldened the regime to pursue an aggressive military policy in the region.
“I want to come also with having accomplished what we have to accomplish,” Trump said. “So we are discussing Syria as part of an overall deal. when they made the Iran deal . . . They should have made a deal that covered Yemen, that covered Syria, that covered other parts of the Middle East.”
