Donald Trump was mostly correct in his recent social media post on Syria, in which he argued in block capitals: “This is not our fight. Let it play out.” The United States “should have nothing to do with” Syria’s mess, at least in a military sense. Leaving U.S. forces there, whether or not Bashar al-Assad’s fall ends the civil war, is pointless and dangerous.
But the question remains whether the President-elect, this time around, will enact foreign policies consistent with his sensible rhetoric. His record on Syria, after all, is typically unpredictable. As president, he famously announced in 2018 that he was pulling out troops.
But he backtracked after howls of outrage, including from his own defence secretary, who resigned. Trump then gave in to arguments from other hawkish subordinates, including national security advisor John Bolton, that he should keep forces there to protect Syria’s oil fields and evict Iranian forces. He claimed to be a peacemaker in his campaign this year but ignored the unauthorised U.S. war there. Even in his recent post, he blamed Syria’s trouble on Barack Obama being insufficiently committed to making war there—not bombing over Syria’s chemical weapons use, as Trump later did.
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