It’s been a rough week for President Trump. His decision to withdraw approximately 1,000 American troops from northeast Syria continues to reverberate in Washington, D.C., like the aftershocks of an earthquake.
In a rare case of bipartisan cooperation, the House of Representatives voted Wednesday 354 to 60 on a non-binding resolution opposing Trump’s withdrawal. The president has gotten an earful from a Republican conference that usually follows his lead, and Defense Secretary Mark Esper was in the firing range this week as he conducted a briefing on Capitol Hill about the Trump administration’s Syria policy. Democrats, who already regularly hit Trump over the head during the normal course of business, have used this opportunity to go berserk.
The criticism only deepened yesterday when Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Turkey and announced a pause to the Turkish offensive. The deal, which suspends the fighting and facilitates a Syrian Kurdish redeployment away from the border, was greeted with jeers and boos from liberals and conservatives alike.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it a “sham ceasefire” and a capitulation to the Turks. Sen. Mitt Romney was beside himself, fuming on the Senate floor that America got duped. Even Turkish officials were pleasantly surprised about how the talks went, with one telling the Washington Post that “It was as easy a negotiation as we’ve ever had.”
All of this anger, however, is vastly misplaced — Washington didn’t have a lot of leverage at the negotiating table. This overreaction isn’t a surprise: Lawmakers, think-tankers, and pundits consistently overstate U.S. influence across the board and are firmly convinced that regardless of the situation, Washington has the power to pressure other parties to accept terms that wildly favor the United States.
This isn’t actually the way the world works. Sometimes Washington has the weakest hand and no amount of bluffing will get the other players at the poker table to fold their cards. The situation in Syria is one of those instances.
The U.S. had terrible cards to begin with, so Pence had very little leverage in his talks with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. American forces were already in the process of moving out, Turkish soldiers and their Syrian Arab proxies were already entrenched in northern Syria and pushing south, and Kurdish defenses were crumbling. Meanwhile, Turkey had far more at stake in Syria than the U.S. and was thus willing to risk more.
While Washington could certainly enact sanctions on the Turkish economy if Erdoğan didn’t make a deal, it was always an open question if sanctions alone would be enough to force the Turks to change course. Slapping sanctions on a few Turkish ministers may have been enough to get an American pastor released from a Turkish prison last year, but a similar strategy may not have had the heft to stop the Turkish military offensive.
So once Turkish troops crossed the Syrian border, it was always going to be difficult to put the Turkish military genie back in the bottle.
With the game stacked in Turkey’s favor, Pence was essentially asked to fly to the Turkish capital and salvage the fast-moving situation in northeast Syria with hardly any cards up his sleeve. The deal that was announced after eight hours of talks — a 120-hour pause, a Kurdish withdrawal, and an indefinite Turkish military presence along a 20-mile deep buffer zone — was likely the best the vice president could have gotten with the little leverage he had.
Deal or no deal, the Turks were always going to come out on top.
The Trump administration had two choices. It could have signed an agreement with Erdoğan that would at least cease the violence and enable the creation of a Turkish safe-zone in a somewhat peaceful matter. Or it could have walked away from the table, in which case the Turks would have proceeded with their operation, only increasing the death toll and displacing even more communities. The result was going to be the same regardless.
Let this entire episode serve as a lesson for the U.S. to never put its military in a lose-lose position. If you want to withdraw troops, withdraw as soon as your primary national security objective is achieved. And make it abundantly clear to your partners on the ground — in this case, the Syrian Kurds — that they would be wise to make their own arrangements because Washington is preparing to leave.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
