Back in July, I wrote that I’d rather have my son run our foreign affairs than the president.
In particular, [Trump] has absolutely no feel for how other nations think about the United States. He doesn’t know how South Korea feels about North Korea or Japan, or what it meant to tear up the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He doesn’t know why the Russians were so interested in the success of Brexit, although he certainly jumped in with both feet to lend a hand. He doesn’t understand why the European Union wanted to strengthen their economic relationship with Ukraine or why they so strongly object to the annexation of Crimea. He doesn’t know why the Assad regime is opposed by ISIS or why the Turks don’t want us using the Kurds as proxies in the region. He doesn’t know why the Saudis are so angry with Qatar or that we depend on Qatar for our most important military base in the Middle East.
The general pattern has been so disastrous that it appears to all the world like Trump is deliberately following a Russian-inspired plot to alienate America from its allies, weaken NATO, tear apart the European Union, and drive our troops out of both the Far East and the Middle East. More than anything else, it seems this way because almost all the “errors” are pointed in the same direction of undermining Russia’s adversaries.
But is has to be admitted that Trump routinely makes mistakes that are rooted in his own magical thinking and ignorance. His “wall” with Mexico is one example, while his trade war is another. These actions may please Russia but they’re equally explainable by Trump’s racist and superficial understanding of how things actually work.
All of those issues are still current and causing our nation problems. In the case of the Kurds, the president impulsively sold them out while talking on the phone with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He clearly did not understand the implications of what he was doing. Almost immediately, our best allies in the region applied for protection from the government in Damascus.
Syria’s most powerful Kurdish militia has called on the Assad government to send its forces to protect against an attack by Turkey, the first sign of shifting political alliances in eastern Syria since President Trump announced that he would withdraw American troops…
…In a statement issued on Friday, Syria’s most powerful Kurdish militia, the People’s Protection Units, or Y.P.G., called on the Syrian government to send troops to the city of Manbij to ward off a possible attack by Turkey.
The call was notable in that a United States ally, the Kurds, was calling on an enemy of the United States to protect it against another United States ally. The Kurds see Mr. Trump’s decision as a betrayal.
For my part, I’ve been concerned about our reliance on the Kurds ever since I was given an off-the-record briefing by three senior Obama Administration officials in September 2014 in which they spelled out their strategy for taking back Mosul and defeating ISIL’s “caliphate” in Syria. I spent that call pulling my hair out mainly because I didn’t think it was going to work in the long term. I didn’t want us investing in a problem we couldn’t solve, and I didn’t think we’d be able to stick with the Kurds even if they enjoyed victories because their more powerful Arab and Turkish neighbors would eventually turn on them.
That is coming true now, but for a reason a lot different from what I anticipated. I did not expect an American president to simply give Turkey a green light to slaughter them. Fortunately, some people in the administration convinced Erdoğan to delay the ethnic cleansing that Trump so breezily approved, but that doesn’t seem like it will last.
Turkey has postponed a military offensive in northeastern Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Friday, citing conversations with President Trump and other American officials, but he added that it would eventually follow through on plans for an assault on Kurdish and Islamic State forces there.
And, as with all things Trump, what looks like bumbling incuriosity and ignorance somehow winds up serving Russia’s interests.
One [Israeli] official said the United States was practically evacuating the Middle East, leaving Russia as the sole global power there. The official said Israel feared that without an American presence, weapons would flow freely from Iran and Russia to Syria, and from Syria to Hezbollah, the Iranian proxy in Lebanon.
The official said Mr. Trump had effectively thrown Israel under the bus — and the bus in this case was a Russian Army transport truck transporting weapons to Syria and Hezbollah.
It’s almost a magic trick how Trump’s immorality and superficial understanding of how things actually work somehow always work to Putin’s advantage.
I didn’t think we should use the Kurds as proxies for a whole host of reasons, including that we’d eventually betray them. But this is a worse betrayal than anything I could have imagined, and cannot be justified on any level, whether moral, strategic, military, or diplomatic. We are under no real pressure to leave Syria right now. Our mission has been incrementally successful. It’s not an enormous investment, we are not suffering many casualties, and the American people are not clamoring for us to end our commitment. So, why has Trump just forced our Kurdish allies to run for protection to Assad and his protectors in Tehran and Moscow?
this is how we have achieved the Forever War. Once in there will NEVER be a good time to leave.
I think Colin Powell said something like if you break it you own it. Then we broke up Iraq pretty good. It is exceedingly more difficult to leave once you fuck up a culture. So, yeah, it is damn near never when you can leave after that, not to mention they may be a cog in a very important wheel. In the Kurds case we enlisted their help to fight ISIS. And now they are in danger from Erdogan.
We didn’t break it, we can’t fix it, and we don’t own it.
How much more American blood and money for how many years do you believe we owe them?
We didn’t break Syria, Assad and the counter-revolution broke Syria. However, we did facilitate their slaughter by intervening and installing a weapons blockade that prevented the rebel forces from accessing anti-aircraft weaponry. We also chose to back the certain Kurdish forces because they were willing to fight ISIS, the revolution be damned. Other FSA groups were not willing to go along with these terms.
So we “broke” it in a sense. But not the most responsible for once.
You are measuring the drops of blood now.
Well Assad also destroyed and suffocated all civil society, so we don’t need to just measure the blood.
And ISIS? Gone forever you would say?
ISIS would not be what it is (in Syria) without Assad. The militarization of the conflict is responsible for the cell growth. Other actors may have taken advantage if it never was militarized in the first place, and considering the border it shares with Iraq there was bound to be some sort of IS presence to fill in the vacuum. Although again the growth of IS in Iraq is a direct result of sectarian governance that we allied with.
We formed a coalition to defeat ISIS. The Kurds fought for that. It would seem we owe them some allegiance. You can’t cut and run or disown your obligation whenever you choose or you risk losing future support. I fact, in this case the Kurds have already asked Assad for help and invited them in. So that game may be lost.
Oh yeah, as Aron Lund said today:
I agree with your point about abandoning allies.
Yes, there is a way to do it without breaking faith. That sort of thing will tend to spread among others as we lose their trust. In this case it seems we have broken our bond with them and they are now seeking help from a former enemy. But at least that enemy is not friendly with Turkey. So the “game” of alliances now moves on with our blessing. Hello Iran.
. . . so I interpreted “it” to refer to Iraq, which I would say we most certainly broke.
Well, some Iraqi legislators want us out of their country following Trumps visit and whatever the Obama coalition hoped to accomplish in Syria with respect to Iran etc. is a failure. Seems our presence in the ME is a broken enterprise. I shouldn’t complain since I always thought we should stay out. My concern is our allies.
We allied with them in 2016 to fight ISiS. Now we want to back out and withdraw. How much American blood and honor is involved to you think? Do we stand by our allies or cut and run? Is SK next?
honor isn’t worth one more nickel let alone lives. Do you think Obama’s mistake in 2016 commits the US to attempting to protect the Kurds from their neighbors forever?
Not forever but cut and run is nothing at all. You would risk genocide just to get out? Once you commit to an ally, running away is not an option, if you want your word to mean anything in the future. Booman referenced a few good articles and the WaPo has several more. You could be giving it away to Iran and Russia. Obama was at least trying to prevent that and defeat ISIs whose death has been exagerrated.
Honor may be nebulous in the scheme of things, but trust ain’t. And that’s the risk here, that we are proving ourselves as a nation to be untrustworthy when it comes to alliances that requires others to stick their necks out, especially when our own national security depends on them doing so.
To be fair though, this practice of abandoning allies when its expedient, political or otherwise, didn’t start with Trump.
That said, as nuclear power continues to proliferate, and other state-less actors achieve leverage through their ability to act without the usual consequences of nation states, taxing the resources of their targets, being “the world’s only superpower” is not enough, and we’re going to need these alliances more than ever. And yet, at a time when we should be working on strengthening alliances, we’re making it a policy of burning through them.
I agree. Kinda what Mattis said in his letter. We are not being smart about this. Why simply pull up stakes and run?
I agree. Kinda what Mattis said in his letter. We are not being smart about this. Why simply pull up stakes and run?
It appears alliances are already changing as the Kurds are now looking to side with Assad, for their own protection against the Turks. This is a betrayal of our ally. We risk others moving away from our leadership. We broke it. If we want to withdraw we owe them more than a wave on the way out. They are afraid for their lives. It sure sounds nice to say we have nothing to do with it.
The Kurds that live within the territory of Syria have had a complex relationship with Assad, and the idea of siding with him, not only for protection against the Turks but for other reasons of mutual interest (such as fighting ISIS), did not just suddenly occur to them. Here, for example, is an item from July 30 of this year that may surprise you.
I have wondered whether someone close to Trump — like maybe Jared, or Hicks — is actually the one who had been compromised by Russia, to flatter Trump into these kinds of actions, feeding Trump his lines.
Jared most definitely has been compromised by Russia and well before the fateful June 2016 meeting with the Russians and Don, Jr. Like his father-in-law, he has been using Russian money to finance his schemes though probably not as much as the Trump Organization. OTOH, I doubt whether Hope Hicks had any influence at all over Trump’s foreign policy (such as it is).
Trump is not much interested in American foreign security policy (and not all in US economic development policy and programs) so he’s mainly intent on disengagement, which usually benefits Russia either directly or indirectly. That said, I do think he (and Jared) do take direction from Putin, which must infuriate Bolton (though Bolton doesn’t seem to have had much impact on Trump since he became NSC Advisor).
Hey, what happens in Turkey-Iran-Iraq-Syria, stays in Turkey-Iran-Iraq-Syria.
If the Kurds had had the foresight to have an ethnically compact nation state none of this hand-wringing about their fate would be necessary. Bad planning on their part.
Human rights is a good talking point, but in a crunch, our anti-imperialist bona fides is what really matters.
Are you being sarcastic about the Kurds not having foresight?
It was the US, Great Britain, France and the USSR that carved up the old Ottoman Empire. How much agency did the Armenians, Kurds or other ethnic groups have after the two World Wars to determine their boundaries?
No, he’s mocking the Left. That’s his shtick.
He is mocking a very specific brand of left politics, not “the left” writ large.
There are many ways to play a Paladin in D&D. You don’t have to be Lawful Stupid.
. . . distinction/clarification.
It’s true that he’s mocking a very specific brand of left politics, and I might go along with that myself — except he commonly directs that mockery against people who don’t actually belong to that brand.
This is a type of ad hominem fallacy, name-calling, or “guilt by (false) association; and he typically does it by innuendo rather than any actual argument, even a fallacious one.
. . . way to go through life.
You still don’t get the point. I know it’s satire, and so does everybody else in this discussion. But satire has a point, and with him the point is directed against people that it doesn’t actually apply to. And that is what’s not funny. For example, you could make no end of funny jokes about Communists, but when you direct these jokes against people who aren’t Communists, it’s very much like red-baiting.
I get it, you think he’s doing a sort of “Colbert” persona. I thought that for a while too. But it’s not that. His real persona is that of a centrist Democrat that wants to show that he’s not too far to the left. He does another kind of joke too, with a 1930s-1950s Stalinist persona. (Nobody talks like that any more except North Korea.) He uses that to mock left-wing positions, even though they have no actual resemblance to left-wing positions today. It’s a dog whistle.
His basic joke is: Anyone one who’s more to the left than he is is too far to the left. Ha ha.
. . . you don’t get what you say you do.
You say you “know it’s satire”, but have betrayed little/no understanding of how satire actually works throughout this entire subthread, including this comment I’m replying to. Specifically, that satire depends on hyperbole to such an extent that it practically is hyperbole (perhaps exceptions exist, but I can’t think of any; this was one point of linking the the quintessential, classic example of this, Swift’s “A Modest Proposal . . . “. (Yes, you’re probably going to say “of course I understand that” but what you’ve written throughout this thread says otherwise.) This was NJ, not you, but is a pretty definitive illustration of not getting how satire works (and thus how silly an objection it was):
You keep declaring as fact that DXM’s satire is directed at people it does not fit. I’ve already offered my nutshell guess (note emphasis, coming back to that) on what tends to prompt DXM’s snark. (I’ll amend/add to it that I’m guessing it’s more what was said than who said it that’s the prompt. Though of course if the same person repeatedly says similar things, the one morphs into the other.) Also repeatedly pointed out that there is only one person in the history of the universe with the ability to definitively declare whether my guess is right or wrong (or some of each).
Nevertheless (and by far the funniest thing about this subthread, imo), you and NJ have over and over and over throughout the subthread asserted as fact what are in fact merely your speculation, surmises, guesses, personal tastes, opinions, etc. Including repeatedly, wrongly attributing to me what you say I “think” in addition to declaring as fact what DXM thinks and intends, when you can’t possibly know that (unless he tells you, of course — but he hasn’t!). (Contrast with my consistent caveats and disclaimers, e.g., “only DXM could say if this is right”, “I think”, “my guess”, “not offensive to me“, “YMMV” [“your mileage may vary”, just in case that needed explaining], etc., etc., etc.). Including rather wonderful impressions of famously humorless “conservatives”/Banana Republicans (“not funny! . . . not funny! . . . not funny!”). Funny that you could be so oblivious to how self-discrediting(-as-humorless) such faux-objective, universal declarations of what’s in fact merely your subjective [taste/opinion/impression/interpretation/etc.] are.
So, yeah, “satire-proof” still seems to me both on-point and rather sad.
. . . this post in this thread that we jumped over here from the subthread I referred to where the discussion had been occurring.
Needless to say, I completely, 100% disagree with this. He’s not “punching left”, he’s punching stupid.
And as for this line “with him the point is directed against people that it doesn’t actually apply to”, I read this helpful line years ago that really stuck with me, in a discussion about racism or sexism or some such thing:
Look, this is America. We punish children all the time for choosing the wrong parents.
This is just scaling up.
And another aspect of this sudden and capricious withdrawal: any nation depending on the United States for protection had better be making other plans. South Korea, Israel, Ukraine would be some examples, I think — they should be scrambling now to either build up their own military capacity or find other alliances. The United States is no longer a nation they can rely on, and their enemies will no longer be frightened by the threat of certain US retribution for bad behaviour.
This is the long-term lesson that the world is learning from Trump, and it will affect US standing in the world long after Trump is gone — that because US citizens elected someone like Trump, and could do so again, the United States is not a reliable partner anymore. Though some in the US will be glad that the world isn’t depending on you anymore, the nations of the world will also stop listening to what you want — Trump’s tariffs are proving that already. You have lost your influence over world affairs, and we will all be poorer for that.
American influence over world affairs (translated: military adventures not really helping national security) is the reason that other rich countries like Canada have national health care and we don’t. I’m not convinced this was a good choice by our government over the years.
That is untrue. But it sounds like it might be. We don’t have health care bc we would rather not. Nothing prevents us from having it other than our will. It is true we value national security and to that end we spend more resources on it than the next ten or some such number combined. Hell of a thing to run out on an ally when you spend so much….
Off topic, but since Johnson brought in Medicare in the 60s, I thought the program would gradually be expanded to cover everyone, as has happened in every other democracy in the world, because over time the politicians realized that people just wouldn’t vote for politicians who opposed medicare.
But its been fifty years and this still hasn’t happened in the United States, and for the longest time I couldn’t understand why not.
Now I have come to believe that the reason the United States has never demanded that its politicians introduce universal government-paid health care is basically because of racism — there are still far too many people in the States who don’t want “my taxes” to pay for “those people” (black, mainly, but now also brown and yellow) to “get something for nothing”. Its very sad.
It is indeed sad. And now there are many who say “we can’t afford it”, as if we are not already paying for health care today – – every damn nickel and about twice as much per capita as any other major country in the world. Whew that was a mouthful. Sad you said. Yep, it is.
In the end Trumps moves to make America smaller will impact world peace and will likely result in new alliances, which may not be favorable to us.
“why has Trump just forced our Kurdish allies to run for protection to Assad?”
Because Trumper had been browbeaten into having to have an…um, unpleasant call with Erdogan and was having the cold sweats over it. And since Trumper is overawed by ethnic authoritarian strongmen, and hasn’t the balls to actually confront them, he caved. And caved to a phony “demand”, no less! Hell, Trumper is afraid to personally fire Mad-dog Mattis, for God’s sake. The Art of the Deal, indeed
This would be the Trump’s Razor analysis, since your post opened up with the incontrovertible fact that Der Trumper literally knows nothing about anything, hence his being able to cleverly calculate what course change best aids his idol Putin is probably beyond him. (That is, unless the monkey-wrench is so obvious than a bright 10 year old could figure it out, such as undermining NATO and our European allies.) The Israel angle to this withdrawal was surely quite over the Stable Genius’s head, no matter how painstakingly it might be explained to him.
He.Doesn’t.Know.Anything. Yet thinks he’s a genius. That’s the reality, no matter how many of his lamebrained 46%ers believe him to be a billionaire and “highly successful!” biznessman. Of course, they themselves are too ignorant to tell an intelligent person from an abject dunce, so garbage in, garbage out. As their obdurate refusal to care about the Mueller investigation makes clear, we are shackled to a corpse.
“… his being able to cleverly calculate what course change best aids his idol Putin is probably beyond him.”
True, but it’s not beyond Putin. The only question is about the channels of communication.
Interesting to compare with your post from 2014 about the Obama team’s analysis.
The worry about the effectiveness of the Iraqi forces did not come to pass.
The assertion that the war can not end with Assad in power looks flat out wrong, as unless there is a full scale war against a neighboring state – in particular Turkey – or he has a heart attack, he will likely win the war.
The part about the wetting of moderate forces and arming them shows is interesting in light of the previous arming of the opposition since at least 2012. Was the anti-ISIS arming program run separately from the CIA program and the Pentagon program (or possibly programs)? Or was it just presented without reference to these other programs for PR purposes?
Interestingly, this isn’t the first time the US threw Kurds to the wolves:
“For its part, the U.S. has long denied its role in the chemical attacks on Halabja, often saying that its ally never announced it would use chemical weapons. But now-declassified intelligence shows that members of the Reagan administration knew Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin in four prior major offenses against Iran – all of which relied on satellite imagery, maps and other intelligence provided to Iraq by the U.S.”
“As Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, told Foreign Policy, ‘The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas.’ He added: ‘They didn’t have to. We already knew.'”
https://timeline.com/halabja-chemical-attack-kurds-794abf43f862
Given the history, the US is fortunate the Kurds trust us as much as they apparently continue to do. They may be done with us after this, and justifiably so.
Smarter nations take this as part of a larger, longer term pattern.
America has become an unreliable partner because it’s internal political structure is weak. There is no alignment between the national consensus and the governing faction. The Democrats remain weak even though they represent the national consensus because they can’t get control of the levers of power. The Republicans remain weak because it’s only through the flaws of the Constitution that they control the leversof power without any underlying consensus supporting their policies.
When a partner cannot keep its own house in order and an ignorant racist minority starts making ignorant racist short term decisions from a position of weakness, things will end badly. Any smarter nations know this.
The most fundamental problem for America is that this problem did not start with Trump, it started with Bush/Cheney. If Trump was a black swan event, things might be recoverable. But he’s not. He’s the continuation of the pattern Bush/Cheney started of ignorant, incompetent, counterproductive international disruption by America.
And to evaluate the Syria situation without acknowledging the vast refugee and regional power disruptions from the Iraq War is ignorant in the extreme (not a criticism of Booman).
So yes, we broke it. We can’t fix it because we’re too incompetent – as a matter of national policy implemented by the crassly ignorant Republican base at this point. Not to conclude that a fix could be obtained if we were not functionally incompetent at this point.
We’re approaching a perfect storm in my opinion: a broken super power that can’t govern itself properly, a consequential broken international order that no longer has a reliable core anchor, a pending economic discontinuity as technology puts non-agricultural sectors into agricultural levels of producivity with severe adverse consequences on inequality, and global warming starts to intensify.
An intermediate term future where Obama is the exception to the evolving pattern set by Bush/Cheney/Trump/Brexit is a pretty desperate one.
Let me see if I have this straight.
The United States incarcerates a higher % of our people than any other country, we deny climate change and refuse to do anything about it, we let millions of families live in poverty while we spend more money on our military than the next 10 countries combined, we lock up innocent children at our borders, we’re the only industrial nation that does not have some form of Universal Healthcare, we pass tax cuts for the rich rather than fix our crumbling infrastructure, we have 37,000 people die of gun deaths a year and do nothing….and this is the country you expect to be the World’s moral leader and fix all of its problems?
My God what arrogance.
Well, now that you put it that way….
. . . followed by a non-sequitur, bogus conclusion:
Except Booman didn’t say/imply that. (No room for shading/nuance in your world, I guess.) So what closes is also pretty non-sequitur and, well, dare I say “arrogant”, too?
Sorry my bad. This was not intended for Booman. It was intended for anyone that thinks the United States still has the moral standing to be the arbiter of what is right and wrong in the world. LosGatosCA stated it better than I did.
morality |məˈralətē, mô-|
noun (pl. moralities)
Not sure how it is arrogant on my part to point this out but I’d be glad to listen to a reasonable argument.
Also if anyone wants to defend the morality of our current government I’m all ears…
Matthew 7:5
. . . The arrogance I perceived lay in addressing that to Booman (as your use of “you” and the position of the comment in direct reply to Booman’s top-post implied).