President Trump’s botched removal of United States troops from northern Syria quickly caused a firestorm in Washington. Pundits and members of Congress from across the ideological spectrum bashed the president for supposedly abandoning the Kurds, even though staying would require risking U.S. soldiers’ lives to thwart Turkey’s offensive. Critics were concerned that the Kurds, our short-term partners in the fight against the Islamic State, were forced to turn to Damascus and Moscow for help, but this is something the U.S. should have encouraged them to do a long time ago.
It’s true that the Trump administration handled the whole episode terribly, especially since this seems likely to result in a reshuffling of troops rather than a full withdrawal. But the critical mistake that put the U.S. in this no-win situation in the first place was the failure to leave Syria following the fall of ISIS’s caliphate.
The recent violence was avoidable: The Kurds should have been given a fair warning, and our foreign policy shouldn’t be so easily influenced by flattery from would-be despots. But, despite what congressional leaders such as Mitch McConnell might say, the conventional wisdom about the threat posed by ISIS is wrong.
For one, most of the troops leaving Syria are simply going to Iraq on explicitly anti-ISIS assignments. Even so, strategically, Syria has never mattered that much to the U.S., and it matters even less now after five years of civil war have left the country in ruins.
Fears of ISIS’s reemergence are unsupported. The military threat posed by ISIS is now virtually nonexistent, and the other forces in the region can and should mop up ISIS’s remnants. Turkey routed the Kurds, who routed ISIS, and Syria and Russia stopped Turkey in its tracks. So even if it were at full strength (and it’s not), ISIS would be the weakest force on the ground in Syria. The U.S. protects itself in spite of a presence in Syria or Iraq, not because of it.
The problem with the stay-in-Syria-forever crowd is they operate on a set of unrealistic assumptions about what the U.S. needs to accomplish and overestimate what is actually possible. They have no serious limiting principle when considering the circumstances in which they deem military action appropriate.
The U.S. entered the fray of the Syrian Civil War in two primary ways: early on, it supported factions aimed at removing Bashar Assad, and eventually intervened with direct U.S. military power to destroy ISIS’s caliphate. We failed to accomplish the first goal but swiftly accomplished the latter. After dismantling the ISIS caliphate, the goal of “eliminating ISIS,” an outgrowth of radical Sunni Islam, is not something that can be achieved with military power, as our failed post-9/11 interventions have proven.
At its most basic level, ISIS is a set of ideas and motivating principles. Military force can’t kill an ideology.
The military accomplished everything it reasonably could in Syria, and with that done, our troops should have quickly returned home. ISIS will “reemerge” because it never went away, not because we moved some troops from northern Syria to southern Syria or Iraq. There is no shortage of radical Islamists in the Middle East, and indefinite occupation can’t change that.
ISIS was and will remain a regional threat but one that regional powers can easily contain.
A methodical U.S. exit would force local actors to counter ISIS’s remnants, which are surrounded on all sides by states that seek their elimination. Assad and his backers in Tehran and Moscow certainly don’t want someone else carving up territory within Syrian borders. This means the straggling ISIS adherents can be defeated without continuing to keep Americans in harm’s way.
Lawmakers who wish for the U.S. to stay fail to recognize an indefinite presence is not only unnecessary but counterproductive. Permanent U.S. ground troops in the Middle East are a recruitment tool that attracts extremists and paints a target on our men and women who are deployed. It is not a panacea. After all, leaving U.S. troops behind in Syria did nothing to resolve the enmities fueling a century of conflict between Turkey and the Kurds.
The only U.S. interest in Syria is disrupting anti-American terror threats. But that is not the current mission in Syria, which is more about refereeing local squabbles and denying Assad total control. The U.S. can monitor the region from afar and use its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities to singularly strike at credible and actionable threats that various regional actors are unable to handle. The focus should be on specific threats and not the mere existence of bad guys, both in Syria and Iraq or elsewhere in the Middle East.
In an ideal world, the Kurds would have cut a deal with Assad long ago (which U.S. officials actively prevented) and a botched American withdrawal from Syria would have been avoided. But a less-than-ideal situation in a turbulent region is certainly superior to never-ending U.S. entanglement.
Jerrod A. Laber is a Washington-based writer and a fellow at Defense Priorities. Follow him on Twitter @JerrodALaber.
