President Trump announced this week that he’s withdrawing U.S. troops from Syria, essentially abandoning our Kurdish allies and allowing Turkey to reenter the region. The move is rightly being decried as the wrong one: It makes our promises look weak; our work crushing the ISIS caliphate is not yet complete; and it’s clear Trump is listening to the advice of Turkish President Recep Erdoğan over that of our Middle Eastern allies.
And yet, none of this should come as a surprise. This is the result of having a populist president who values loyalty but offers none in return.
Populist movements “feed off grievances and impatience with traditional politics,” as Robert B. Zoellick noted a few years ago. Tired of never-ending wars and costly regime change ventures, Trump is pulling the plug on the U.S.-Syrian mission because, quite simply, he’s had enough. He’s tired of spending American dollars and resources to bolster allies who can’t give the same.
Trump is a transactional president, and our alliance with the Kurds simply didn’t live up to his idea of a fair deal. The majority of the American people would agree, which is why they elected him.
But the problem with this kind of populist drive is that alliances require commitment, stability, and loyalty. Sometimes this means the United States will have to give more than it receives. This is the cost of being the world’s superpower — a cost we should willingly bear. Better to be the one in charge than to allow other nations to meddle with the balance on the world stage.
This doesn’t mean the U.S. should involve itself in every conflict that arises. But it does mean the U.S. must firmly commit to a select number of trusted allies, instead of leaving them out to dry when the cost becomes too high. And there will also be occasions when war is popular, yet the U.S. must refrain from joining it.
Trump is breaking things left and right — trade deals, partnerships, international market practices — in part because he distrusts the international system. His instincts are right, but his follow-through is not. Trump’s populist sentiments have stripped the U.S. of any uniform foreign policy, and in its place we have Trump’s case-by-case deal making, which tends to favor his political purposes over the nation’s long-term interests.
Syria is just another example, and it won’t be the last.
