Of the arguments for voting to reelect President Trump, the utilitarian case is the best understood.
Trump may pathologically lie in pursuit of some ephemeral dream of greatness while caring little for the norms and values that made America in the first place, but the economic data are good!
We may all distrust each other more, but unemployment is down and wages are up. Tax cuts and deregulation have given us an economy good enough that many of us could all look past his personal failings. And every time Ben Rhodes or Susan Rice goes off on Trump, it’s a reminder that the last three years have seen the defeat of ISIS and no new foreign wars.
Less war, less ISIS, more jobs. What’s not to love?
Trump, however, just undermined this utilitarian case for his own reelection.
In a last minute announcement that reportedly caught the Pentagon and the president’s closest congressional allies off guard, the White House announced Sunday night that the United States will withdraw all of its armed forced from northern Syria and leave the fates of millions once subjected to ISIS rule in the hands of the Turks. This leaves Turkey in control of ISIS detainees, whom Trump erroneously claimed were held by our own forces. Instead, the 60,000 detainees have been held by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a majority Kurdish militia reviled by the Turks, who lo and behold, we just put at the mercy of Turkey and its President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Here’s why this is a mistake, even on Trump’s terms: The U.S. now appears to the rest of our allies as the worst kind of ally — a turncoat willing to use and abuse less powerful forces only to leave them in the dust with their adversaries knives pointed at their backs.
Bad things will happen to the Kurds, and more generally in Syria. We likely will see catastrophic bloodshed there, with the Kurds now alone and imperiled, ready to fight back in the imminent case of a Turkish invasion in northern Syria.
Here’s how this moral failing by Trump could be a political disaster. Back when Trump was corralled by Jim Mattis and John Kelly and even a Bolton or a Nikki Haley, he was an obviously safer bet than a President Warren or Sanders bringing back the dregs of the Obama administration’s foreign policy apparatus. But now that the grownups are obviously out of the House, voters have to worry about what sort of chaos — including harm to America and Americans — will fall out from Trump’s inconstancy.
Trump, before now, managed to walk a tightrope between demonstrating brute force in the areas to which we had already committed while avoiding the interventionist foibles of his predecessors. There’s no question that we don’t want to invade our ways into new “forever wars,” and it’s worth reevaluating the need for our presence in Afghanistan some two decades later. But in pulling the U.S. out of one of our most fruitful foreign policy initiatives in recent memory, Trump has fallen off his prudent course. And we may all feel the pain soon.
