America’s Predictable, Avoidable, Unnecessary Syrian Disaster
Never has a foreign policy decision gone so bad, so quickly, for such bad reasons
In the week since President Trump ordered the U.S. military to stand aside and allow Turkey to invade northern Syria, thousands of ISIS fighters and supporters escaped detention, America’s Kurdish allies have faced overwhelming attack, a growing number of civilians have been summarily executed, Turkey fired on U.S. military positions, and Syrian government forces — along with their Russian allies — have advanced. The United States looks weak, immoral, untrustworthy, confused.
None of this had to happen. No event forced it to happen. The only reason it happened is Donald Trump.
A Difficult Situation
After a multi-year campaign to dislodge ISIS from its self-proclaimed “caliphate,” America’s local allies — the predominantly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who led the ground fighting and suffered nearly 11,000 casualties — controlled northeast Syria (yellow on the map).
