While most of Washington was watching the hometown team get thumped by the visiting Dodgers on Sunday night, the White House announced that it was pulling military forces from the Syria-Turkey border. The unexpected news was followed by President Trump tweeting that “it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.” He also added that “Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to figure the situation out.”
Almost instantly, the foreign policy establishment had a collective bed-wetting at the thought of militarily disengaging from a small piece of territory in faraway northeast Syria. From South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham on the Right to Hillary Clinton on the Left, the criticism rained down on the president. Unfortunately, this widespread reaction against the pullback says a lot more about the stale groupthink of these mandarins than the wisdom of the policy. They simply lack imagination about how it could be to our advantage in this case to “buckpass” to others while steering clear of extended commitments.
Trump, on the other hand, is right to pull back our troops from the Syrian-Turkish border. It is not in our national interest to have a small U.S. force in the middle of a long-running dispute between our NATO ally Turkey and various Kurdish groups in Syria. At the very least, a pullback is warranted.
But consistent with past promises to the American people, Trump shouldn’t be afraid to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria. Remaining any longer simply isn’t necessary for our safety or prosperity. We were in Syria for a very limited reason: to eliminate ISIS’s territorial caliphate. We have satisfied that goal and can rely on the self-interest of local forces and long-range strike capabilities to deal with any lingering threats from ISIS.
To keep American troops in Syria is only to invite trouble. A particularly dangerous possibility involves an unnecessary war with Iranian proxies. Our continued presence also risks further entanglement in regional politics, where there are few white hats and many gray ones. One of the latter — Turkey — is actually our formal ally, while some of the Kurdish groups we have relied upon are not ideal partners. One even adheres to a communist ideology and has engaged in terrorism to advance their goals.
This why some conservative analysts such as Michael Doran at the Hudson Institute and Luke Coffey at the Heritage Foundation have been critical of how we have engaged in Syria. Doran warned of the danger of some Kurdish ties: “We aligned under Obama not with ‘the Kurds,’ but with the PKK, the sworn enemy of the Turkish Republic, our ally. We were sowing the seeds of a Turkish-PKK war with that policy. We were also driving Turkey toward Russia.”
Coffey highlighted their connection to left-wing ideology and terrorism, noting, “The YPG is a neo-Marxist group that serves as Syrian branch of the PKK (designated a terrorist group by US Govt)” and added, “Call me old fashioned, but I’m not comfortable arming and training a Marxist group with links to terrorism.”
Yet, Trump’s critics worry about abandoning these “allies.” But as President George Washington taught us at the beginning of the republic, eternal interests trump temporary partnerships. Despite the French helping us win our independence, Washington refused to have France’s back in its wars, eventually issuing a neutrality proclamation and concluding a trade deal with France’s arch-enemy the British.
It is not America’s job to sort out the future of Syria. Trump should bring our troops home as he has promised.
Dr. William Ruger is the Vice President for Research and Policy at the Charles Koch Institute. He is also a veteran of the war in Afghanistan.
