President Trump has projected Jimmy Carter-like weakness to foreign leaders in getting utterly humiliated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Syria. My fear is that Trump is going to overcompensate in the opposite direction, taking rash action in hopes of appearing tough.
During his presidential campaign, Trump’s foreign policy statements demonstrated competing impulses. On the one hand, he made noninterventionist arguments against endless involvement in foreign wars. On the other hand, he attacked Sen. Ted Cruz as a “pussy” for equivocating about waterboarding terrorists and promised to “bomb the shit out of” the Islamic State.
Essentially, Trump’s rhetoric reflected the tension among different impulses within the Republican electorate. The experience of Iraq and Afghanistan had soured many Republicans on indefinite military engagements overseas and the idea of sending lives and money to the Middle East out of some fantasy of promoting democracy that had become untethered from a sense of national interest. At the same time, they viewed Barack Obama as a wuss and wanted a president who conveyed strength and confidence on the world stage — somebody who didn’t draw a “red line in the sand” and then do nothing when it was crossed.
As president, Trump has vacillated: taunting North Korea’s Kim Jong Un about the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, before meeting with him and heaping praise on him; tearing up the Iran deal and then effectively keeping it alive by short-arming the reimposition of sanctions.
In this case, Trump has said he just wants to get out of Syria to put an end to “endless” wars. In reality, the troops are still there, but they just had to get out of the way because Trump tacitly greenlighted Erdoğan’s invasion of Syria.
On the night of Oct. 6, the White House announced that Trump had spoken to Erdoğan and that “Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria,” assuring that U.S. troops “will no longer be in the immediate area.”
After receiving significant blowback domestically for the rash decision, Trump attempted a do-over in a desperate and now infamous Oct. 9th letter to Erdoğan begging him to “make a deal” to avoid U.S. economic sanctions. “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” Trump ridiculously wrote.
Erdoğan went ahead with his invasion plans anyway, which have resulted in predictable attacks on Kurds as well as escaped ISIS prisoners. The Turkish government is even taunting Trump, boasting that Erdoğan threw Trump’s letter in the trash.
This is a colossal embarrassment for the United States that makes Trump look absolutely pathetic.
But as I read daily reports of the unfolding disaster in Syria that Trump has greatly exacerbated with his erratic and feckless leadership, I wonder if the damage has already been done. Before Trump’s announcement, a relatively small U.S. troop presence was keeping Erdoğan from invading. At this point, how could we put the genie back in the bottle? U.S. troops have ceded ground, international trust has already been shattered, and the escaped ISIS terrorists are spread out by now and not easily recaptured. Getting further entangled now may be a worse option than doing nothing and treating the Trump disaster as a sunk cost.
What’s most worrisome is the risk that a humiliated Trump, mocked by the media and his political critics at home and abroad, does something completely reckless in the opposite direction to overcompensate for his loss of face.
