Day: October 15, 2019
Stevenson’s army, October 15
The Trump administration says it wants a cease-fire in northern Syria. Treasury announced sanctions against 3 ministries and higher tariffs on Turkish steel. VP Pence is supposed to go to Ankara sometime soon to talk about a cease-fire. Sen. Graham and Speaker Pelosi have talked about a joint measure to punish Turkey. We don’t know what the US and Turkish leaders said in their Monday phone call, but there is at least one report that Erdogan promised not to attack the Kurdish stronghold of Kobani.
Cease-fires don’t solve problems; at best they just turn them to a simmer. We can’t go back to the status quo ante. Do we want to keep Turkey as an ally? What about our nuclear weapons there? Will Trump pull remaining US forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Whatever the president decides, will there be a coordinated interagency effort to carry it out?
How did we get here? David Sanger says Trump rejected the advice of his national security officials and acted on gut instinct.
Meanwhile, the Russians have moved in, patrolling between Turkish and Kurdish forces. [And Putin was lavishly treated in a visit to Saudi Arabia]
My SAIS colleague Charlie Stevenson distributes this almost daily news digest of foreign/defense/national security policy to “Stevenson’s army” via Googlegroups. I plan to republish here. If you want to get it directly, To get Stevenson’s army by email, send a blank email (no subject or text in the body) to stevensons-army+subscribe@googlegroups.com. You’ll get an email confirming your join request. Click “Join This Group” and follow the instructions to join. Once you have joined, you can adjust your email delivery preferences (if you want every email or a digest of the emails).
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Whose side would you choose?
These have been consequential days to be out of commission due to lack of a computer power supply, but Amazon delivered yesterday in Bologna, where I am meeting with students and faculty at the SAIS campus. So I’ll try to catch up.
President Trump has pulled the plug on the US presence in Syria with the expected results: a Turkish invasion from the north and a push from Syrian government forces from the south. The Syrian Kurdish YPG, formerly the core of the US-sponsored forces fighting the Islamic State, has understandably opted for allying itself with Damascus, while Islamic State personnel are busy escaping from YPG captivity. International politics abhors a vacuum and fills it with armed people.
What could have been differently? The Americans needed to negotiate their withdrawal, as they have been trying to do in Afghanistan. Rather than leaving a vacuum, they might have arranged for Ankara, Damascus, Moscow, and the Kurds to come to an understanding about areas of control, at least on a temporary basis. Without such an understanding, the parties concerned will need to fight it out, to the detriment of the effort against ISIS and other extremists. The US is moving towards imposing sanctions on NATO ally Turkey in order to get it to stop fighting the Kurds. The absurdity of that sentence tells you all you need to know about how bad the decision to pull the plug was.
The second major development in recent days is the US/China mini trade agreement. Beijing will supposedly renew massive imports of US agricultural products in exchange for a truce on tariff increases. That accords with the first law of holes: when in one, stop digging. The tariffs are having a negative effect on the world economy, and the dip in Chinese agricultural purchases is blowing a multi-billion dollar hole in the US government budget as the Trump Administration tries to compensate farmers for their losses and hold on to their political loyalty.
But the agreement does little or nothing to solve the bigger problems in the US/China trading relationship, especially theft of intellectual property and forced technology transfer while leaving in place the several waves of tariffs already levied. My guess is that Trump is happy with that: he shows no sign of wanting to get rid of the tariffs, which he views as encouraging US manufacturing despite massive evidence to the contrary. The tariffs are hitting a lot of intermediate goods needed by US manufacturers, making them less competitive in US and world markets. But Trump is a mercantilist. He’ll want to keep the tariffs, no matter what Beijing agrees to do.
The mini deal is at least a step in the right direction: an end to a trade war the US cannot win. That is not true of the President’s decision on Syria. It is prelude to a wider and even more ferocious war in northeastern Syria, where erstwhile US allies will find themselves crushed between the Turkish onslaught and the Syrian counterattack. Levying tariffs on Turkey compounds the misjudgment, as it suggests the Americans did not understand what everyone else knew would happen. Trump is proving the US an unreliable ally to both Turkey and the Kurds, to the advantage of Syrian President Assad. He now has an opportunity to retake the substantial agricultural lands and oil and gas resources of northeastern Syria.
Making America great again is proving not just an empty slogan but a menace to American friends, who will need little encouragement in the future to rely on others for protection. Russia and Iran are the big winners from US policy in Syria. China is proving that trade wars are not easy to win. Whose side would you choose to be on?
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