President Donald Trump recently consolidated U.S. military bases in Syria, reduced troop levels and lifted all sanctions on the country, signaling U.S. support for the new government that took over after Bashar Assad was deposed. These are good moves given America’s emerging counterterrorism partnership with Syria.
Now Trump needs to take the next step and agree to withdraw the remaining 1,500 or so U.S. troops still in Syria. This will encourage regional cooperation and allow the U.S. to pivot to more pressing global challenges.
Strategically, a withdrawal makes sense, because conditions are especially ripe in Syria for the United States to pivot to a strategy of over-the-horizon counterterrorism (OTH-CT).
OTH-CT works best when threats decline due to a terrorist organization transitioning from global to local reach, meaning away from attacks against the U.S. and its closest allies in Europe and toward targets either in-country or in the surrounding region. This switch typically happens due either to a change in a group’s mission (as with Syria’s al-Nusra Front in the 2010s) or a weakened capacity to carry out global strikes. Every U.S. president since 9/11 has used this standard of global versus local reach as a barometer for when to wind down ground operations against terror groups.
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