Tag: Turkey
Walking back
President Trump and his minions are walking back a lot of things:
- No, the Trump Doral resort will not host the G7;
- No, Trump did not greenlight the Turkish invasion of Syria and attack on the Syrian Kurds;
- No, the President’s chief of staff did not confirm that the President wanted an investigation into Joe Biden and his son in exchange for Congressionally mandated military aid to Ukraine.
None of these corrections comes even close to erasing the original mistakes. If it is wrong for Trump to host the G7 at one of his resorts, it is also wrong for foreign governments and US agencies to be padding his income at the Trump hotel in DC and a resort in Scotland. He definitely did yank the US troops who were preventing a Turkish invasion of Syria, without apparently thinking about the consequences, which are catastrophic for both the Kurds and Arabs who did the bulk of the fighting against the Islamic State in Syria. Chief of staff Mulvaney’s denials don’t pass the laugh test, or Chris Wallace’s grilling.
Trump is reaching his limits. Public opinion among Democrats and independents is turning against him on the impeachment inquiry. John Kasich may not be a typical Republican today, but he is an intelligent one calling for impeachment. At least a few Senators may not be far behind. The damage to America’s standing in the world, and to their hopes for re-election, is becoming all too evident. Still, most rank and file Republicans are backing Trump. If that starts to change, the Senate dam will break.
Ron Chernow, who knows more American history than anyone else alive, has the most interesting and compelling take on impeachment today: it was designed, he says, precisely for someone like Trump. I confess to me it seems almost too good for someone of his ilk, but Chernow helpfully notes that prosecution can come once he is out of office. I do hope to live long enough to see that happen.
Meanwhile, American interests worldwide are suffering mightily. Everyone who depends on the US has to see the instant betrayal of the Kurds as a warning. No American friend or ally should be neglecting to hedge by seeking support elsewhere. America’s adversaries are enjoying the spectacle, which has handed Russia and Iran a leg up in Syria and enabled both of them to gain invaluable intelligence on US military operations both from the abandoned bases and from erstwhile US allies.
Trump’s move has also signaled, once again, that he is a pushover who yields easily to adversaries. Turkish President Erdogan rolled him, the Iranians have apparently gotten away with a serious attack on Saudi oil production facilities, Russia is enjoying impunity for its invasion of Ukraine, and the North Koreans have given Trump an ultimatum if he wants them to make even small moves to limit their nuclear program. Make America Great Again is not only isolating the United States but diminishing it. Even at the end of the Vietnam war, which was unquestionably a low point for US influence in the world, American influence was greater than it is today.
The spectacle of the United States walking backwards is demoralizing, not only to Americans but also to much of the rest of the world. Let’s hope we get Trump out of office within the next year or so. If he gets re-elected, the damage will be irreversible.
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Stevenson’s army, October 18 and 20
October 20: Next fights
SecDef Esper says US troops in northern Syria will move to Iraq.
Politico had an earlier report about military thinking about ISIS now.
RollCall says Congress is still likely to vote on Turkey sanctions.
I can’t locate a new CRS report on how the Senate handles impeachment, so I’ll give you the rules and precedents from the longtime Senate parliamentarian, Floyd Riddick.
FP has a bunch of articles on how to cope with Trump’s foreign policies.
October 18: Words matter
Look at the text of the US-Turkish agreement. The word “cease-fire” isn’t there, only a 120 hour “pause” to allow the withdrawal of Kurdish forces from the undefined “safe zone.” And the US agreed that it agreed the safe zone had to include “the re-collection of YPG heavy weapons and the disablement of their fortifications and all other fighting positions.”WSJ points out some of the other ambiguities in the agreement. NYT calls it a “cave-in” to Turkey. WaPo says DOD is rushing to develop its plans. Peter Beinart calls Democrats critical of the Syria pullout hypocrites because of their views on Afghanistan.
BTW, McConnell says the Senate will start taking up appropriations bills.
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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More diplomacy, less force
A friend asked today what I thought of the current situation in Syria. I responded:
Predictable and predicted. The Syria commitment was not sustainable. The US needs to reduce its commitments to the Middle East to a level that serves vital interests and is sustainable. It should do that carefully, using diplomacy to ensure no vacuums are left. That can’t happen with this President.
I guess that puts me at least partly in Elizabeth Warren’s camp and opposed to Josh Rogin, who is a fine journalist but far more of an enthusiast for US engagement in the Middle East than I am.
Let me recount the reasons:
- The US is far less dependent on oil, including oil from the Middle East, than once it was.
- The spread of US unconventional production technology has made it difficult for oil prices to top $60/barrel for long. That is a price the US and world economy can and does tolerate easily.
- Other countries should, as Presidents Trump and Obama have suggested, bear more of the burden of protecting Middle East oil supplies, in particular the Chinese, Japanese, and South Koreans since they take most of the oil coming through the strait of Hormuz.
- Middle East producers should be doing more to build pipelines that circumvent Hormuz, and consumers (especially India and China) should be building strategic oil stocks for use in a supply disruption.
- American allies in the Middle East should, after many billions in US arms sales, mainly protect themselves. Israel does already. The Saudis and Emiratis as well as the Qataris should too. Needless to say, the Turks will have to after this latest brush with the US.
- Many American bases in the Middle East are too close to Iran to serve well in wartime. They will need to be evacuated if the balloon ever goes up. Better to get them out sooner rather than later.
- If you are still worried about Middle East terrorism, there is no reason to believe that the drone wars have done anything to reduce it. To the contrary, US presence in the region makes us a prime target.
- The right answer to terrorism is better governance, not drones. Find the people who are serious about improved governance and support them, not the thieves and oppressors who rule in much of the Middle East.
- If you want to counter Russian influence in the Middle East, clearly an unsustainable military presence is not the solution. Syria is going to be a big burden on Moscow. Let them deal with it.
- If you are worried about Iran, get back into the nuclear deal (aka JCPOA) as quickly as possible and try to negotiate an extension. The only serious complaint I am hearing from anyone about the JCPOA is that it expires.
The American drawdown from the Middle East should not be precipitous. It should be cautious and leave no power vacuums. That is what diplomacy is for: we need to be working on regional security arrangements that can guarantee that no one’s interests will be ignored and reasonable compromises will prevail. That effort will require serious attention to threat perceptions, regional trade and infrastructure, people-to-people relations, and traditional conflict management mechanisms in the region. Yes, more diplomacy, less force, and a lot of hard work and commonsense.
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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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Green light
President Trump, whether intending to or not, has made it eminently clear that the US would do nothing militarily to avoid a Turkish push into Syria against the Syrian Kurds who have fought for years with the US against the Islamic State. With the US troops on the border withdrawn from their buffer role by Trump, Turkish troops are now pressing into Syria in an effort to destroy the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish forces President Erdogan characterizes as terrorists because they are an adjunct of the PKK, Kurdish forces that attack inside Turkey.
President Trump has threatened the Turkish economy, but he won’t go through with it. He is anticipated to veto a sanctions bill working its way through Congress, where the votes to override are not available.
It was hard to imagine that the situation in Syria could be made worse than it already was, but Trump has managed it. Instead of negotiating the US withdrawal with Turkey and Russia, he simply pulled the plug on the US presence at the border. I’d be the first to say that presence was not sustainable and needed to be withdrawn. But vacuums get filled. The trick is to make sure they get filled with something that protects US interests. Trump failed to even try to do that.
Now the outcome is all too predictable: the Turks will chase the Kurds from the border area, which is where most of them have lived for generations. The Kurds will respond not only by resisting the Turkish attack but also by conducting terrorist operations inside Turkey and Turkish-controlled Syria. One has occurred already in a Turkish border town, according to press reports. Distracted by the fight against Turkey, the Syrian Kurds will not be able to sustain the fight against resurgent ISIS forces or perhaps even maintain the camps in which they hold ISIS prisoners.
Damascus will seize this opportunity to offer some protection for the Kurds, who will not have any other option. They will go back to the purpose for which their military units were created by Damascus: attacking inside Turkey. So a war that today looks like it is between Turkey and the Kurds will soon be a war between Turkey and Syria, with unpredictable results.
It is not impossible that Damascus and Ankara will reach a pact restoring Syrian authority along the border in exchange for repression of the Kurdish threat to Turkey and return of large numbers of Syrian Arab refugees from Turkey back to Syria. But of course a messy continuation of war between Turkey and Syria is also possible.
The big losers in all of this will be Syria’s citizens, both Kurdish and Arab. They will suffer major humanitarian challenges as civilians are used as human shields or flee to escape the fighting. Eventually large numbers of Syrian refugees inside Turkey are likely to be forced back to Syria, violating their non-refoulement right.
Assad, the Russians, and the Iranians have reason to be pleased. Trump has demonstrated once again that US support is unreliable, the Russians are strengthening their foothold in Syria and the region, Assad is getting a chance to restore his authority over northeastern Syria, and the Iranians will enjoy his triumph as well as the smashing of the Kurds. Make America Great Again once again means weakening the United States by failing to use diplomatic instruments to enable a withdrawal that could have been executed without the risks we are now running.
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