Unmaking the Presidency by Susan Hennessey

Author:Susan Hennessey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

NINE

“Without deliberation … or appreciation of facts”

THE CONDUCT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The morning of December 19, 2018, dawned with almost no one expecting a U.S. withdrawal of military forces from Syria. Bashar al-Assad wasn’t expecting it in Damascus. Vladimir Putin wasn’t expecting it in Moscow. American allies worldwide were not expecting it. And almost nobody within the U.S. government was expecting it either.

Plenty of controversy had long attended the two thousand or so American troops serving in the country, and many people opposed the military engagement in the region more generally. But whatever problems they perceived, few analysts or political figures were recommending a sudden announcement of a quick withdrawal as the answer. The American presence, after all, had been key to rolling back the gains of the Islamic State, and it had, to some degree, restrained Turkey in its interactions with Kurdish forces and Russia and the Assad regime in their brutal victory in the country’s civil war. Virtually no one was arguing that creating a sudden vacuum in the region would help matters.

It’s safe to say that Trump awoke on December 19 facing no pressure to announce a major policy shift that had significant implications for allies and the stability of an unstable ecosystem, much less any pressure to do so without doing advance work to alert partners and allow them to prepare.

The week prior, however, on December 14, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had reached Trump by phone and complained of the U.S. presence in the country and its continued support of Syrian Kurdish fighters. As The Washington Post later recounted, Trump responded, “You know what? It’s yours.” He added: “I’m leaving.”

The matter stayed quiet over the next few days until the president suddenly took to Twitter to declare in a series of tweets that the United States had “defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there” and that it was “time to bring our great young people home.” The military let it be known that the president had ordered that the withdrawal be completed within thirty days.

The response from U.S. allies was swift and alarmed. “For now of course we remain in Syria,” said France’s European affairs minister Nathalie Loiseau. “The fight against terrorism is not over.” A British defense official shared one of Trump’s triumphant tweets about the defeat of ISIS, adding, “I strongly disagree.” Kurdish forces, whom Turkey would likely menace without the U.S. presence, declared that Trump’s decision would “lead to a state of instability and create a political and military void in the region.”

Domestically, even staunch Trump defenders expressed opposition. Lindsey Graham fretted that the announcement had “rattled the world” and declared that there was bipartisan support for the president to reverse course. When Vice President Pence went to Capitol Hill to meet with congressional Republicans on the matter, “virtually everyone who spoke, spoke in opposition to the decision,” as Senator Marco Rubio put it. The Republican-controlled Senate even passed a measure rebuking the president.

The only prominent Republican who spoke up

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