Morally, strategically, politically — domestically, internationally — Trump’s abrupt withdrawal from Syria is disastrous
It really doesn’t make a difference how Trump reached his decision to abandon the Kurds to the tender mercies of Turkey. Was Trump impulsive? Or does he have some long-range strategy? Either way, he puts Israel at danger.
It is rare in Washington these days when both Republicans and Democrats see a major move the same way. They both see Trump’s move as a dramatic error with terrible consequences for the US, not to mention for many other friendly countries, not least among them, Israel.
Turkey, once Israel’s closest ally in the Muslim world, turned on a dime against Israel years ago, under Turkey’s would be dictator, Recep Erdogan. Turkey cannot tolerate the idea of a small independent state, such as Kurdistan, or a small non-Muslim state, such as Israel. Iran’s fulminations against Israel’s existence do not disturb Turkey’s leadership in the slightest. If Syria is weak, so much the better for neighboringTurkey, and if Syrian weakness means increased Iranian influence in Syria that directly threatens Israel, Turkey is indifferent.
In one fell swoop, President Trump strengthens all of the Turkish, Syrian and Iranian anti-Israel and anti-American forces by withdrawing American troops from Syria — by killing American leverage on the Syrian-Turkish border. Pathetically, Trump now falls back on “sanctions” against Turkey, abandoning all other instruments of foreign policy: diplomacy, threat of military force, and military force.
Pathetic indeed: First invite Turkey to invade, then try to punish Turkey economically for invading. Put another way: First fight with determination to defeat ISIS, then facilitate the release of the remaining ISIS soldiers by abandoning the ally — the Kurds — who held the ISIS men. If not reversed, this decision of Trump to withdraw from northern Syria our forces there — a small contingent to begin with! — will go down in American history as one of our worst foreign policy moves.
Israel does not exist in a vacuum. An American president is not “pro-Israel” if American policy toward Israel is strictly bilateral. An American president, if truly interested in a genuine democracy in the Middle East, takes into account the “neighborhood” Israel lives in, not just tiny Israel itself, not just the status of its capital, not justthe personality and policies of its prime minister.
Not to mention, it is both a moral and a strategic benefit to the US to stand with the Kurds. Kurds stood with the US in our recent fight against ISIS. The Kurds provided key military support to the US effort and some Kurdish soldiers paid the ultimate price. By what moral calculus does the US now turn on a dime and throw the Kurds to the wolves? Strategically, why should other minorities in menaced regions around the world ever trust the US again?
For that matter, what if ISIS or an equivalent resurfaces in Syria (or nearby) and the USneeds Kurdish help once again? Based on Trump’s recent withdrawal, the US will not be able to count on Kurdish sympathy or support.
More fundamentally, why should the Turks be allowed to abuse Kurds on a scale that approaches the Ottoman abuse of the Armenians a century ago? And why shouldn’t there be an independent Kurdistan? In the 1970s, when Henry Kissinger was the US Secretary of State, a headline appeared in Jerusalem: “Will Kissinger Say Kaddish for the Kurds?” Decades later, the American fiasco in Iraq did have one bright spot: northern Iraq flourished as a de facto Kurdish state. What was wrong with this, such that Trump now says kaddish for the Kurds?
Trump says that his foreign policy is based on “America first.” This seems to mean that whenever an outrage is committed, such as Syria’s use of poison gas against civilians, or Saudi Arabia’s gruesome murder of a Saudi citizen inside an embassy in Turkey, President Trump will almost always satisfy himself with a symbolic military response or, even less, with a few words of outrage, to be followed by silence in word and deed.
It is not just one-sided alliances that Trump opposes, where he has a point — it is not just the US that should pay the price, financially and militarily, for the viability of an international alliance. Trump goes further. He seems to oppose any concrete American involvement around the world other than via gestures, even when American moral and strategic interests are at stake, as they surely are in the Middle East.
Trump’s carte blanche to Turkey, in putting Israel at risk, is, in its own way, not putting America first. The massive American military aid to Israel, it is to be remembered, is mostly spent in the US on American armaments. A weaker Israel would weaken American defense industries, and that’s not even talking about the direct Israeli missile-defense technology (Iron Dome, Arrow, David’s Sling) that benefits the US. A weaker Israel would weaken this kind of Israeli defense innovation. A weaker Israel would weaken American intelligence, which in the Middle East relies in large part on Israeli intelligence.
Bottom line: We do not see any short- or long-range benefit to Trump’s withdrawal of the small but effective American force in Syria, not for the US, not for Israel, not for the Kurds, not on moral or strategic grounds.
Copyright © 2019 by the Intermountain Jewish News
