Is Trump’s planned Syria withdrawal really a case of practical realism?

U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria, where at least 2,000 U.S. troops are supporting Kurdish-led forces in their multiple offensives against the Islamic State (ISIS), unsurprisingly led to widespread condemnation and a feeling of betrayal among the Syrian Kurds, who now fear they will become the victims of another major Turkish assault. Opponents of Trump’s move invariably stress the immorality of the decision while others, not necessarily supporters of the president’s decision, have sought to emphasize and stress that it was inevitable and merely amounts to a practice of realpolitik.

Pat Buchanan, a self-styled American isolationist among other things, aptly encapsulated the realpolitik perspective of the decision. “Forced to choose between Turkey, with 80 million people and the second-largest army in NATO, which sits astride the Dardanelles and Bosphorus entrance to the Black Sea, and the stateless Kurds with their Syrian Democratic Forces, or YPG, Trump chose [Turkish President] Recep Tayyip Erdogan,” he wrote.

Veteran journalist Patrick Cockburn, who has actually been to the Syrian Kurdish regions to cover their numerous battles and offensives against ISIS, echoed this view when he wrote: “One day the Americans would have to choose between 2 million embattled Kurds in Syria and 80 million Turks in Turkey and it dd [sic] not take much political acumen to foresee what they would decide.”

President Trump, while initially tweeting that the U.S. has defeated ISIS, later contradicted himself by saying that Turkey, and other regional powers, could adequately finish off what is left of the group. Cockburn doubts ISIS could make a major resurgence in Syria as a result of the power vacuum left by the U.S. withdrawal since either Ankara or Damascus will eventually fill it. In the meantime the U.S. may retain rapid deployment forces in neighbouring Iraq, from where it currently has no plans to remove its current 5,000-strong troop presence, that can still target ISIS remnants in eastern Syria with relative ease. However, without a sizable ground force to coordinate with they will unlikely prove capable of afflicting as much harm on ISIS, which has reverted once again to a more elusive non-state terrorist organization, as they can with the help of the Kurds.

This emerging state-of-affairs is not necessarily the product of coldly calculated realism that some observers proclaim it to be, particularly Trump’s questionable suggestion that outsourcing the war to Turkey is a workable solution. While Turkey is indeed a very important country due to its strategic location and large military the “2 million embattled Kurds in Syria” have proven themselves an indispensable ally against ISIS.

Thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of these brave men and women the U.S. did not have to commit more than 2,000 troops to destroy the Syrian wing of the physical ISIS “caliphate” while keeping the number of American troops lost in combat limited to single digits. Consequently, unnecessarily throwing these Kurds under the bus in the near future, possibly leaving them to be massacred by either Ankara or the Assad regime, or both, when a minimal U.S. commitment could adequately protect them and help forge some kind of a favourable post-war settlement in Syria. A settlement that would give them at least a chance of retaining some limited autonomy and security, isn’t as practical as its proponents otherwise suggest.

For one thing, the Syrian Kurdish forces are unlikely to continue to allocate resources and troops to confront ISIS far beyond Syrian Kurdistan’s primary northeast regions if Turkey is invading their main territories, which Ankara can only do when the American troops leave. When Turkey launched its invasion of the isolated northwest Syrian Kurdish enclave of Afrin in the beginning of 2018 the Kurdish forces fighting ISIS in eastern Syria did briefly leave their front-line positions in a futile attempt to repel the invading force. In the two months they tried, however, ISIS shrewdly used that respite to reorganize and even recruit more members into its ranks. It is now badly battered but not defeated. Its remnants in eastern Syria would be given an even greater respite and chance to rebound and reoganize by a Turkish invasion of the Syrian Kurdish heartlands, which are all situated just south of the Turkish border.

To believe that Turkey is going to focus on finishing off ISIS in Syria is to be incredibly naive. Turkey’s first course of action if it is to launch another cross-border Syria operation will doubtlessly be to destroy the Kurdish-led forces, which could necessitate invading the entire one-third of Syria those forces – estimated to number up to 50,000 fighters – currently control. Such a move is bound to generate the kind of instability that will help prolong the Syrian conflict and, by extension, ISIS’s existence. This is because it will relieve the pressure currently on the group and give it ample time to rebound and reorganize since the areas its remnants are still in are situated further south of both the Turkish border and the Syrian Kurdish territories.

In the meantime, if ISIS does successfully rebound in Syria and poses a significant threat to the region yet again the U.S. will have stood by and watched its only reliable Syrian Kurdish allies being slaughtered by its comparably unreliable Turkish ally.

When the U.S. military began working with the Syrian Kurds for the first time against ISIS four years ago it was not doing so for moral reasons, it was purely a practical and transactional partnership forged by their mutual goal of destroying a common adversary and threat. Abandoning them now is certainly not practical since they remain a reliable ally against an undefeated ISIS unlike Turkey, which has taken limited and comparably insignificant action against the group in the last four years despite its population of 80 million and its far larger army.

The only notable exception to this was Turkey’s August 2016 to March 2017 Euphrates Shield operation in the northwest, where it removed entrenched ISIS forces from a 60-mile swath of border territory. But even in that operation, Turkey had a clear motive of keeping the primary northeast Kurdish regions cut off from the aforementioned Afrin enclave since only that 60-mile-wide border region was all that separated Afrin from those main Syrian Kurdish regions in the northeast. Ankara then invaded Afrin nine months after concluding Euphrates Shield. Its unprovoked and aggressive invasion of that hitherto stable Syrian Kurdish enclave, where Syrians from across the country were permitted sanctuary, killed hundreds of civilians and displaced tens-of-thousands. Ankara has also been credibly accused of overseeing the ethnic cleansing of Afrin’s Kurdish-majority population.

For now, there are strong indications that Trump will at least slow his withdrawal of Syria by a few months. U.S. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch critic of Trump’s decision, stated after meeting the president that he was reassured about the policy. “The President will make sure any withdrawal from Syria will be done in a fashion to ensure: 1)ISIS is permanently destroyed 2)Iran doesn’t fill in the back end. And 3)our Kurdish allies are protected,” he tweeted following the meeting. However, Graham has not clarified exactly how the U.S. can achieve this without maintaining any troop presence.

Trump himself has slightly backtracked on his original pronouncements, seemingly beginning to grasp the dire implications a rapid pullout would have for the Kurds, by claiming “we want to protect the Kurds.”

However, it’s unclear how the U.S. can effectively do so without troops on the ground to actively deter future Turkish attacks if he goes through with his vow to pull them all out in the coming months. Now, the president claims he is committed to fulfilling his withdrawal plan while insisting that he never gave a “timetable” nor “said we’re doing it that quickly.”

Ultimately, President Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria and potentially ditch the Syrian Kurds in, de-facto, favour of Turkey is neither moral nor practical. It’s simply wrong.