President
Trump’s tweets fly in the face of the norms that even during the Cold
War kept the two great nuclear powers from needlessly provoking each
other. They risk further inflaming a conflict that has already drawn in
regional and world powers in a dizzying nest of alignments. With the
common enemy the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) on the brink of
defeat, those opposing forces are increasingly coming into conflict as
they jockey for position and territorial control inside Syria.
Just
this year, U.S. forces in Syria have battled Russian mercenaries who
attacked their base, reportedly at the direction of the Kremlin, and
killed more than 100 of them. In northern Syria, U.S. troops and their
Kurdish allies remain engaged in a tense face-off with the military
forces of Turkey, a NATO ally. This week, Israeli warplanes attacked a
military base in Syria, where Iran coordinates its militias, killing
four Iranian military advisers.
A
Syrian child receives medical treatment after the Assad regime forces
allegedly conducted a poisonous gas attack in Damascus, April 7, 2018.
(Photo: Halil el-Abdullah/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
This
week’s suspected chemical weapons attack by Syrian forces, which
reportedly killed more than 40 people in a rebel-held stronghold near
Damascus, and President Trump’s telegraphed determination to respond
militarily, have set the escalation cycle spinning even faster.
“The
new normal is that President Trump uses Twitter as direct fire to
convey his feelings and intent to audiences at home and abroad,
bypassing the United States’ entire foreign policy and diplomatic
apparatus. It’s now understood around the world that those tweets are a
direct pipeline to his thinking, which is an unprecedented and
significant development,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Barno, a former
senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, and currently the distinguished
practitioner in residence at American University’s School of
International Service.
In
weighty matters of war, the president’s tweets may offer a direct
conduit to the Trumpian id, but they are unfiltered by a careful
calculation of U.S. interests and the risks involved, or by a strategy
guiding the actions of a great power. Instead, Trump’s tweets and
off-the-cuff pronouncements, Barno notes, reveal “a constant tension
between U.S. military commanders who want to sustain a military presence
in Syria to consolidate their gains from the defeat of ISIS, and a
commander in chief who instinctively dislikes U.S. boots on the ground,
but is willing to use bombs and missiles to achieve his goals. Those two
ideas remain very much in tension in this administration, and I’m not
sure that adds up to a strategy.”
Retired
U.S. Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, left, and Gen. Joseph Votel. (Photos:
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images; Samuel Corum/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
In
the wake of Trump’s recent dismissal of his secretary of state and
national security adviser, the administration’s Syrian policy has
devolved into incoherence. In January, then Secretary of State Rex
Tillerson articulated a Syrian strategy that envisioned an indefinite
U.S. military presence to achieve ambitious goals, including removing
Syrian strongman Bashar Assad from power, returning millions of Syrian
refugees to their homes, rolling back Iranian influence and securing
Syrian chemical weapons.
On
April 3, U.S. special presidential envoy Brett McGurk and U.S. Central
Command chief Gen. Joseph Votel spoke at the U.S. Institute for Peace in
Washington. They laid out a carefully crafted stabilization plan to
return millions of displaced residents to their homes in territory in
Iraq and Syria liberated from ISIS, to consolidate the military rollback
of the extremists. “The hard part is still to come, which is
stabilization, getting people back in their homes, consolidating our
gains, and creating the conditions that will allow these things to
happen,” said Votel.
Even
as his top diplomat and general on Syria were laying out their
stabilization plan, however, President Trump was telling reporters at
the White House that he wanted U.S. troops out of Syria. The White House
subsequently froze over $200 million in aid earmarked for stabilization
in Syria by the State Department. “I want to get out, I want to bring
the troops back home, I want to start rebuilding our nation,” Trump said
at a White House news conference with leaders of the Baltic nations on
April 3. Trump has reportedly told the Pentagon to withdraw the roughly
2,000 U.S. military troops in Syria in the next four to six months.
Retired
Gen. Barry McCaffrey is a former commander of U.S. Southern Command,
and a division commander in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “We now have a
White House in chaos, a president threatening missile strikes even as he
blunders by mindlessly signaling that he wants U.S. troops out of
Syria, and U.S. military commanders who lack a coherent strategy or
realistic objectives learning about U.S. policy from the president’s
tweets. So we’ve never seen a mess like this,” he said in an interview.
If Trump carries through on his threats to launch missile strikes to
enforce a so-called red line against Assad’s use of chemical weapons, as
seems likely, McCaffrey believes the U.S. should hit hard to gain
leverage in future negotiations over an eventual U.S. withdrawal from
Syria. “Military power is a terrible tool for sending political signals,
but if the Trump administration truly intends to send a signal, it
should take out the Syrian air forces and as many of Assad’s generals as
possible. That would signal to a lot of bad actors in Syria not to
screw with us as we look for an exit.”
In
reality neither the Obama nor the Trump administration has had a clear
plan for a post-ISIS Syria. The defeat of the Islamic State is now in
sight, as Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies are close to winning
the civil war. Those seismic events have left the major players looking
to consolidate their gains, and eyeing opposing forces suspiciously. The
current status quo of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces holding territory in
northern Syria near the Turkish border, and Iranian forces entrenched on
bases in central and southern Syria, has also drawn the ire and
military interventions of Turkey and Israel, respectively.
Survivors of a reported air strike in a section of Aleppo, Sept. 11, 2016. (Photo: Ameer Alhabi/AFP/Getty Images)
“The
question of what happens the day after we defeat ISIS has been kicked
down the road for a long time, and now the Trump administration is
having to confront the really complex realities of that situation,” said
Andrew Tabler, a Syrian expert and fellow in arab politics at the
Washington Institute for Near East Policy. With the help of its Russian
and Iranian allies the Syrian regime has all but defeated the rebellion,
he noted, but that victory leaves Assad as “king of the rubble.”
“And
two neighboring countries and U.S. allies find the outcome of the war
unacceptable, and the interventions of Turkey and Israel threaten to
turn the Syrian civil war into a wider regional war also involving Iran,
Russia and the United States,” said Tabler. “So while Americans on both
sides of the political aisle are war weary, the United States still has
a significant interest in insuring that ISIS doesn’t reclaim safe
havens in Syria from which to launch terror attacks on the West, and in
preventing Iran from launching attacks on our ally Israel from Syria
that could ignite an all-out regional war that impacts energy prices.”
In
weighing those interests against the inherent risks involved, Trump
administration officials will confront the reality that the
long-standing U.S. position that “Assad must go” was never pursued with
the same determination that Iran and Russia brought to their desire that
he should stay. Syrian territory has long represented a critical land
bridge between Iran and its chief Lebanese ally and proxy Hezbollah, and
Damascus has been a key foothold in the Arab world for Moscow going
back to the early years of the Cold War. The resulting disparity between
the two sides’ willingness to expend resources and accept risks has
hamstrung U.S. policy on Syria for years.
Syrian
President Bashar Assad, center, speaks with Syrian troops near
Damascus, March 18, 2018. (Photo: Syrian presidency Facebook page via
AP)
“Overthrowing
Assad and replacing him with a better leader was always desirable, but
as a goal it was always well beyond what the American people were
willing to commit in blood and treasure,” said retired Ambassador James
Dobbins, the former special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan
in the Obama administration, and a senior fellow at the Rand Corp.
Instead the Trump administration should concede that Assad has won the
civil war and offer to normalize relations and withdraw U.S. troops,
Dobbins argues, based on two conditions: an offer of limited autonomy
for Syrian Kurds in territory they now control, thus keeping faith with a
key U.S. ally in the fight against ISIS, and the withdrawal of all
foreign militias.
“At
the moment, the Iranian militias and Hezbollah are key to Assad’s
survival, but when the war is over he will want them to go home, which
will go a long way toward addressing Israel’s concerns. I also think the
United States can broker an accommodation between Turkey and the Syrian
Kurds, just as we once did between Ankara and the Iraqi Kurds,” said
Dobbins. “The wider point is that it’s time to take the politically
unpalatable position of acknowledging that Assad has won, and try to
make the best of a bad situation.”
A
number of experts worry, however, that the conflicting signals and
constant chaos emanating from the White House will undermine the deft
diplomacy, complex messaging and military posturing needed to strike
such a deal. The alternative is that the United States continues to
lurch between a premature pullout from Syria that could leave a wider
regional war in our wake, and a “shoot from the lip” bellicosity that
risks miscalculation and conflict with a nuclear superpower.
“Rather
than having a strategy driving our actions, we have a president who
speaks and thinks in terms of applause lines and impulsive showmanship,
and there is a price to be paid for that kind of strategic incoherence,”
said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA intelligence analyst specializing
in the Near East and South Asia. “Our adversaries like the turmoil that
messaging sows between the United States and our allies, who are
constantly confused about who speaks for the administration, and what
exactly to make of the president’s tweets.”
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