A senior State Department official slated to provide an update on current United States strategy for the Middle East spontaneously switched topics at the podium Tuesday, amid uncertainty about President Trump’s Syria policy.
“So, it says here I’m supposed to speak on ‘update on current U.S. strategy toward the region,’” David Schenker, the assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs, said Oct. 8 during an appearance at the Atlantic Council. “But, I had seen that the title of this conference was ‘new strategic visions and power competition in the Middle East,’ so I’m going to speak about China and Russia today, the new threats to Middle East security and stability.”
Schenker focused on Russia and China at a time when U.S. lawmakers are coming to grips with Trump’s announcement that he will uncouple American troops from the Kurdish partners who have helped defeat the Islamic State in Syria. That decision, which clears the path for Turkey to attack the Kurds, is a major shift in the policy that U.S. officials were touting as recently as last week.
“A conflict along the Turkey-Syria border would serve the interests of all the bad actors in the conflict and in the surrounding region — whether that’s Daesh [ISIS], or al Qaeda, or the Iranian regime,” Joel Rayburn, the State Department’s special envoy for the Syrian conflict, said last week.
At the Atlantic Council event, Schenker did not ignore Syria. He stressed that “the United States will continue to support U.N.-led peace efforts throughout the region” and faulted Russia for ignoring ISIS while providing military support to Syrian dictator Bashar Assad in the Syrian civil war.
“Russia intervened to prop up the murderous Assad regime,” Schenker said. “It did so under the guise of counter-terrorism. Yet Russia, along with the Assad regime, has not demonstrated the ability or willingness to even fight ISIS in Syria. Rather, the regime has shown a willingness to tolerate ISIS and other extremists in a bid to undermine the legitimate aspirations of the Syrian people.”
[Read more: Trump insists he is not abandoning Kurds after GOP backlash against Syria withdrawal]
Trump’s team maintains that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s insistence on attacking the Syrian Kurdish fighters — whom he fears will ally with a Kurdish militant group to carve an independent state out of the Syria-Turkey border region — leaves him responsible to prevent the resurgence of ISIS. “The Turks would bear full responsibility for dealing with that, the potential for such a reoccurrence of violence on the part of ISIS,” a senior administration official told reporters Monday evening.
That’s a misguided hope, according to some analysts, given that Erdoğan is widely perceived as having permitted ISIS to gain strength.
“Most of the foreign fighters that joined the front would fly to Istanbul and make their way east,” Jonathan Schanzer, a senior vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told reporters Tuesday. “So, when we sort of talk about Turkey’s ISIS policy and the role that they can play now, with the role that they played before, it’s just very hard to think of them as credible partners or actors in this regard.”
One of Schanzer’s colleagues offered a somewhat different assessment, noting that Erdoğan was burned by “the PR disaster from their earlier leniency [towards] the Islamic state militants,” and has since adopted a strategy of backing other Islamist groups to prevent the Kurds from gaining strength in northern Syria.
“It is possible that some of these fighters could one day show up among Turkey-backed Syrian jihadist proxy forces,” said FDD’s Aykan Erdemir, a former member of the Turkish parliament.
Schenker, the assistant secretary, reiterated previous declarations of U.S. commitment to the region. “We are committed to a vision of shared prosperity, regional and global security, and stability and lasting partnership,” he said at the Atlantic Council event. “We’ll look to Middle Eastern governments to be constructive partners on both regional challenges and then global engagements with both Russia and China. It’s a challenge that the United States is well positioned to lead.”
And then he left the stage. “Um, sorry to say, I won’t be taking any questions,” Schenker said, smiling as the audience laughed with understanding.
