NP: Syria. part 9

[jody2.718]

Turkey, Syria, the Kurds, and Trump’s Abandonment of Foreign Policy

The President’s ignorance of the world has never been so blatant—or produced such bipartisan opposition.

By [Robin Wright](https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/robin-wright)

October 20, 2019

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/28/turkey-syria-the-kurds-and-trumps-abandonment-of-foreign-policy

uch of the world watched aghast, last week, as President [Donald Trump](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/donald-trump) shattered any notion of an informed or sane U.S. foreign policy. He paved the way for President [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/recep-tayyip-erdogan), of Turkey, to invade Syria, abandoning America’s Kurdish partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces, who had eliminated the [Islamic State](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/islamic-state)’s caliphate in March, after five years of gruelling warfare. (The S.D.F. lost eleven thousand soldiers; the U.S. lost six.) Erdoğan views Kurds—the world’s largest ethnic group without a state—as terrorists, because of a Kurdish separatist campaign in Turkey. After a phone call with Erdoğan, Trump ordered the withdrawal of a thousand U.S. Special Forces soldiers, who had been backing the S.D.F., even though ISIS sleeper cells are still waging an insurgency in Syria and Iraq. The retreat was so abrupt that the U.S. had to bomb a depot full of arms that it didn’t have time to remove.

Trump’s ignorance of the world has never been so blatant—or produced such bipartisan opposition. The House of Representatives voted 354–60 to condemn the pullout. On the Senate floor, Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rebuked the President for leaving “a bloodstain on the annals of American history.” Yet Trump seemed delighted with his decision to let the Turks and the Kurds—both U.S. allies—fight it out. “It was unconventional, what I did,” he told the crowd at a campaign rally in Dallas, on Thursday. “Sometimes you have to let them fight like two kids. Then you pull them apart.”

Trump and Erdoğan share a crude egotism and a paranoia about deep states trying to undo them, but Erdoğan deftly gamed Trump. On October 9th, Trump sent a remarkably puerile letter to the Turkish leader, warning him not to go too far. History, he wrote, “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen.” He added, “Don’t be a fool!” Erdoğan reportedly tossed the letter into the trash. The same day, he launched Operation Peace Spring, to destroy the S.D.F.

Erdoğan’s perfidy dates back years. His government allowed thousands of jihadis to cross the Turkish border and join the caliphate. With Turkey as a partner, the [Obama](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/barack-obama) Administration spent millions of dollars training and equipping Syrian Arabs to fight the jihadis; those militias failed. Obama turned to the Kurds as a last option, in 2014. Over time, two thousand Special Forces soldiers were deployed in Syria. Erdoğan has long pressed Trump to remove them. Last December, he persuaded him to do it, even though the caliphate had not yet been defeated. The Pentagon called for leaving half the soldiers in place, and prevailed. To forestall an invasion, the U.S. agreed to get the S.D.F. to withdraw up to nine miles from the Turkish border. In August, U.S. troops supervised as the Kurds destroyed their own military posts along a sixty-mile stretch of the border; meanwhile, Turkey deployed more troops and matériel. “The real salt in the wound,” a U.S. official said last week, is that “we told the S.D.F. not to worry. ” He went on, “Turkey was building up for an invasion the whole time. We made it easier for them.”

(Continues)

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