President Donald Trump recently informed Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel that he intends to withdraw the 2,000 U.S. troops stationed in Syria to combat the remnants of Islamic State, according to Israeli media.
If true, that news is sure to stir the pot in Washington, where Trump’s pledge to remove U.S. troops from Syria in 2019 unleashed histrionics on Capitol Hill—even though by then ISIS had been thoroughly defeated and lost all of its territory.
Unfortunately, Trump’s original directive to leave was sabotaged by Pentagon leaders who snookered the president into believing that U.S. forces needed to stay for Syria’s oil.
But given the emerging tagline of Trump II: “This time it’s personal”—we can only hope the president sticks to his guns through the inevitable pushback to any discussion of withdrawal from Syria. Because despite his eccentric views on other foreign policy topics, such as the Panama Canal and Greenland, Trump’s reluctance on Syria has been spot on.
The simple truth is that Syria is in revolution—and revolutions tend to get much, much worse before they get better. The United States may have only a narrow window to pull out its troops before they are drawn into what Trump has rightly discerned “is not our fight.”
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