Trump's Leaving Syria `Very Soon' Vow Adds to Muddled Policy

(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump says the U.S. will withdraw troops from Syria “very soon.” He's also vowed to counter Iran's influence throughout the Middle East. Doing both at the same time may be impossible.

Trump's off-the-cuff aside at a rally in Ohio last week -- “We're knocking the hell out of ISIS. We'll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.” -- underscored the muddled state of U.S. policy toward the country's civil war.

As Islamic State terrorists lose most of their self-proclaimed caliphate, the U.S. is losing its only professed reason to keep troops on the ground and send airstrikes into the maelstrom of the seven-year war. Yet Pentagon officials have made it clear they have no intention of pulling out and enabling President Bashar al-Assad and his allies Russia and Iran to seal their victory.

“Right now they haven't come up with a coherent policy” in Washington, said James Jeffrey, who served as U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Turkey and as an assistant to President George W. Bush. “Unless we're very lucky, it will be just as flawed and based on unrealistic goals as the last two administrations.”

While Trump has remained more conciliatory toward Russian President Vladimir Putin than others in his administration -- he has yet to comment personally on the U.S.'s expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats after the nerve-gas attack on a former spy in the U.K. -- he has made a centerpiece of his foreign policy combating what he's called Iran's “deadly funding, training and equipping of terrorists and militias.”

A QuickTake: How Syria's Assad Prevailed, With the Help of Friends

Trump has threatened to drop out of the multinational accord intended to curb Iran's nuclear program, and his tough-on-Iran stance is expected to be reinforced by his new national security adviser John Bolton and his nominee for secretary of state, CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

Yet Iran and its ally, the militant group Hezbollah, will gain in influence if Assad consolidates his victory in Syria. That prospect threatens neighboring Israel and has led Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to warn that his country would “act not just against Iran's proxies that are attacking us, but against Iran itself.”

Army General Joseph Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, told a House committee in February that “countering Iran is not one of the coalition missions in Syria” but “Iran's malign activities across the region pose a long-term threat to stability in this part of the world.”

From the start of Trump's campaign for the White House, he called for an “America First” foreign policy based on avoiding costly conflicts and nation-building exercises. In his Ohio comments predicting a U.S. departure from Syria, he said, “Let other people take care of it now.”

Yet Trump's talk of leaving Syria soon contradicts “everything that he has said his foreign policy would stand for -- except for his resistance to getting involved in new foreign wars," said Charles Lister, director of the Extremism and Counterterrorism Program at the Middle East Institute.

Lister said a U.S. withdrawal would be seen as “empowering Iran further in the Middle East, not weakening it.”

Chemical Weapons

Trump, like his predecessor Barack Obama, has at times broached a deeper U.S. engagement in the war. Both condemned Assad's use of chemical weapons, and Trump acted almost a year ago by approving a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase after accusing Assad of using deadly sarin gas against civilians.

The official Pentagon stance remains that Islamic State, also known by the acronym ISIS, has yet to be completely wiped out in Syria even though the jihadist group has been driven out from almost all of the territory it once controlled. The U.S. also continues to back forces in the region that have fought against Islamic State, including Kurdish fighters who are considered terrorists by Turkey.

“We cannot allow our focus to deviate from the most important task of eliminating ISIS from the region,” Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told reporters last week. “The ISIS terrorist network is more fragile than it was one year ago, but it is still presents a capable and committed threat.”

For now, at least, the U.S. remains engaged in Syria. The Pentagon said in December that about 2,000 American troops were deployed there, four times what the Trump administration had previously disclosed. Since September 20, 2014, when operations in Syria began, the U.S. has spent an average of $14.3 million a day on operations there and in neighboring Iraq, according to the Pentagon.

Just last week, two coalition soldiers -- one American and one British -- were killed by an improvised explosive device near Manbij, a city in northern Syria near the Turkish border. The blast wounded five others, according to the U.S.-led coalition. The American, Master Sergeant Jonathan Dunbar, was the fourth killed in Syria.

Argument to Stay

Some U.S. foreign policy analysts say the Trump administration has an obligation to stay involved for leverage to seek a negotiated settlement and stem human-rights abuses in a war that has killed about half a million people and displaced millions more. Rebuilding Syria “could cost at least $100 billion and take at least 10 years to complete,” U.S. Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said in a statement to senators in March.

“We need a mechanism of transition,” said Evelyn Farkas, a nonresident fellow of the Atlantic Council who was deputy assistant secretary for defense under Obama. “Without that, the opposition and regular civilians will not be able to accept Assad, and we will have a moral failure on our hands."

But Trump isn't alone in pondering the value of keeping American soldiers in the midst of Syria's continuing turmoil.

“The larger strategic mistake is thinking that the continued presence of U.S. forces is going to produce stability,” said Andrew Bacevich, professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston College and a retired Army colonel. Looking at the history of U.S. intervention overseas, he said, “it has actually produced instability.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Flatley in Washington at dflatley1@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert, Ben Holland

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