RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/trump-used-the-options-he-had-in-syria/

There was no reason to leave a few Special Forces in the middle of an armed conflict when, yes, Erdogan might be willing to risk war with the U.S.

There has been a great deal of outrage expressed over the fact that the United States did not prevent Turkey from initiating the military operation to create a “buffer zone” in northern Syria. The major objection seems to be that in withdrawing the 100 or so American Special Operations forces who had been stationed in the area, the United States was giving permission for the operation and abandoning the Kurds who have helped us in the fight against ISIS.

I don’t see the criticism; in fact, far from abandoning the Kurds, the United States has consistently opposed the Turkish buffer-zone operation and used every means to prevent it that were consistent with America’s overriding national interests in the region.

The Kurds are tough fighters and were indispensable in supplying the ground component against ISIS. They had their own reasons for doing it, of course. Apart from not wanting to become victims of ISIS themselves, the Kurds are a stateless people and they have been trying to carve out a self-governing enclave for themselves in Syria or Iraq or Turkey or wherever they can get it. The success of the war against ISIS, and the prominent role of the Kurds in the effort, raised at least the prospect of such an enclave in northern Syria.

The United States does not support Kurdish separatism in Syria, but the Trump administration did try for months to get Turkey to agree to joint patrols and shared control in northern Syria; the purpose was to prevent further conflict and instability in the region, enable a continued focus on the fight against ISIS, and ensure effective security over captured ISIS soldiers. But it would have been at least a small step toward Kurdish autonomy.

Recep Erdogan was impatient, to say the least, with the American negotiating position. Erdogan is no fool, and he was aware that the Kurds were developing a significant measure of de facto control in northern Syria. Turkey and the Kurds have a long and checkered history, and Erdogan is as opposed to Kurdish separatism and statehood as the Kurds are in favor of it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/18/congress_just_begging_for_another_quagmire_war_141524.html

I’ve been hesitant to comment on the U.S. troop withdrawal from northern Syria until now because I was conflicted.

Like many Americans, I support President Trump’s stated goal of extricating us from foreign entanglements as much as possible, and especially removing ground forces from harm’s way when they have no definable mission other than waiting to see if anyone shoots at them.

On the other hand, I have been sympathetic to the Kurds, who have helped us to restore peace in Iraq and to defeat ISIS in Syria. Moreover, I am no fan of Turkey and its Islamist autocrat, Recep Erdogan.

So when Erdogan announced his intention to invade northern Syria in order to establish a zone to which Syrian refugees could be repatriated, my first instinct was “Hell, no.”

But wait a minute. Turkey is a NATO member. Were we prepared to go to war with an ally to defend this strip of land held by the Kurds? Even if the Turks had an ulterior motive of seeking to punish their traditional enemy, the Kurds, were we willing to sacrifice American lives to take sides in that conflict?

Also, how exactly do we distinguish between the U.S. invading Syria several years earlier for our “national interest” and what the Turks are doing now for their own perceived “national interest”?

Certainly, we do not always go to war to protect people from invasion. As an example, we did not go to war with Israel when it invaded Lebanon in 1982. Many more such examples could be provided.

But then there are the Kurds…

We don’t want them to become the victims of genocide the way the Armenians were at the hands of the Turks in the last century, but what kind of commitment can Americans make to police Syria into the foreseeable future? Are we supposed to keep our soldiers at risk forever to prevent war between enemies who have irreconcilable differences?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/16/national-security-doesnt-care-about-your-feelings/

Ben Shapiro has become famous for the line: “Facts don’t care about your feelings!” Neither does strategy. And the last week should serve as a lesson in how to do strategy properly, and how to serve the national interest: clinically and without emotion.

Since President Trump made his decision to relocate 50 U.S. troops from Northern Syria, who were in the way of incoming Turkish forces, the commander-in-chief has been relentlessly attacked by the Left, their accomplices in the press, and the forever war neoconservatives and RINOs on the Right. After 18 years of war, thousands of Americans dead, and trillions of taxpayer dollars wasted, the president is being pilloried for not wanting to go to war with Turkey, a NATO ally with the largest Army in Europe.

Just let that sink in. After a generation of war, the “elite” is attacking President Trump for not getting us into another war.

Why are we told we should go to war again? Because the Kurds are suffering. Are the Kurds members of NATO? Are they our formal allies in any way? Are they even members of the same Judeo-Christian civilization to which we belong? The answers are no, no, and most definitely no.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-america-becoming-sinicized/

“All these reasons and more explain why there wasn’t a single major Western politician who warned the world of a frightening, Chinese-dominated future — one in which the West turned into China rather than China into the West. The single figure who finally issued such a warning, brash Donald Trump — without prior military or political experience — was as loudly and publicly damned as he was privately and quietly admired for doing so.”

A little over 40 years ago, Chinese Communist strongman and reformer Deng Xiaoping began 15 years of sweeping economic reforms. They were designed to end the disastrous, even murderous planned economy of Mao Zedong, who died in 1976.

The results of Deng’s revolution astonished the world. In four decades, China went from a backward basket case to the second-largest economy on the planet. It lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese into the global middle class.

Deng’s revolution came at a cost of terrible environmental damage, the rampant destruction of local communities and continued political repression. A more efficient economy empowered dictatorship.

Abroad, China systematically violated every tenet of international trade and commerce. It stole copyrights and patents. It ran up huge trade surpluses. It dumped products at below the cost of production to hook international customers. It threatened critics with boycotts, divestments and expulsions. It manipulated its currency. It demanded technology transfers from companies doing business in China. It created a vast espionage network in Western countries to steal technology. And it increasingly bullied and threatened its Asian neighbors.

Such criminality abroad and such repression at home was contextualized and mostly excused by Western nations.

U.S. foreign policy toward China seemed to be based on the belief that the more China modernized and the more affluent its citizens became, the more inevitable Chinese political freedom would be.

Supposedly a free-market China would drop its communist past to become a Westernized democracy such as Japan, South Korea or Taiwan. Once China fully joined the family of successful, law-abiding nations, it would empower Western freedoms and help create a stable international order.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/kurdish-syrian-turkish-ironies/

Critics now upset about abandoning our Kurdish friends demanded abject withdrawals — and the abandonment of friends — in Afghanistan and Iraq.

O utrage met Donald Trump’s supposedly rash decision to pull back U.S. troops from possible confrontational zones between our Kurdish friends in Syria and Recep Erdogan’s expeditionary forces.

Turkey claims that it will punish the Syrian Kurds for a variety of supposed provocations, including aiding and abetting Kurdish terrorist separatists inside Turkey. But what they say they can so easily do and what they really can do inside Syria are, of course, two different things.

A Noble People
Most Americans in general favor the Kurds and oppose the Turks. Aside from Israel, Kurds are about the only American allies in the Middle East who predictably fight alongside our troops against Islamists, theocrats, and Baathists. They admire Americans, and for the most part they do not indulge in the normal anti-American histrionics. They despise ISIS as much we do and are on the front lines combatting ISIS atrocities.

Skeptics might suggest that they do so mostly for self-interested reasons. But all people do that. And what is unusual about the Kurds of Iraq and Syria is the number of times they have risked their lives in battle alongside our own soldiers. For that alone, they deserve special American dispensations and should not be left to the vagaries of Turkish or Russian air power or any combined Turkish, Syrian, Islamist, or Iranian cynical alliance.

Like the Poles, the Armenians, the Greeks, and the Israelis, the Kurds are an honorable, ancient, and brave people who drew history’s unfortunate lot of living in a dangerous geography between much larger and aggressive nations. And, to be frank, all these endangered peoples at some point in their histories, ancient and modern or both, seem to have fought against Turkish forces, been targeted by them, or threatened by Ankara.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/14/why-trump-is-absolutely-right-to-get-u-s-troops-out-of-syria/

Moving American troops from Syria would be perhaps the most far-sighted thing Trump does as president, and would benefit the United States in the years to come.

In a surprising late-night statement (late for the U.K., anyway), last week the White House declared that American troops will move aside and let Turkey invade Syria. “Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria,” the statement said, adding, “The United States Armed Forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and United States forces, having defeated the ISIS territorial ‘Caliphate,’ will no longer be in the immediate area.”

The statement continued, “The United States Government has pressed France, Germany, and other European nations, from which many captured ISIS fighters came, to take them back, but they did not want them and refused. The United States will not hold them for what could be many years and great cost to the United States taxpayer.”

Even though I am a conservative foreign policy realist, my research deals with great powers and neorealism, and I regularly advocate restraint and retrenchment and amoral realpolitik in these pages, I never in my wildest dreams anticipated waking up to an actual realpolitik move from the White House.

Naturally, the laments are severe. From Sen. Lindsey Graham to The Guardian and BBC, everyone is accusing the White House of giving up on U.S. responsibilities, and worse, “stabbing the Kurds in the back.” None of those is true. Moving American troops would be perhaps the most far-sighted thing Trump does as president, and it would be beneficial to the United States in the years to come.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/give-president-trumps-non-interventionist-turkish-kurdish-plan-a-chance/

It is host Chris Wallace’s job to ask the tough questions on Fox News Sunday.

That’s exactly what he did Sunday, grilling Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on President Trump’s decision to authorize a deliberate withdrawal of U.S. military forces as Turkish forces invade Northern Syria to battle hostile Sunni Muslim Kurds along a shared border.

Wallace’s questioning was framed around Trump’s “abandonment” of the Kurds, which has been roundly characterized as a betrayal of an ally in the fight against ISIS

Early reports coming out of the battle zone are troubling: executions by Turkish-backed militias are allegedly being carried out, and many ISIS fighters have apparently escaped imprisonment. It is a terrible situation. But though the president has stated that his administration will act to destroy the Turkish economy with severe sanctions should President Erdogan persist in or expand this incursion, he has also made clear that he’s not going to send American soldiers to fight and die in another potential Middle East quagmire.

His non-interventionist withdrawal strategy should be given a chance to succeed.

Trump’s authorization of the pullout call did not come out of a foreign policy vacuum; he campaigned on extricating us from epochal conflict in the unceasingly war-torn region. Nonetheless, he will now be inundated with criticism and admonitions from the left and right, insisting we must rescue the Kurds out of fealty to a discredited globalist foreign policy, the costs of which under sane leadership would have been unthinkable.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mike-pompeos-predicament-11571093624

Foreign leaders have found much to dislike in President Trump’s policy—the aggressive stance on trade, the chaotic policy process, the disregard for convention and past agreements. Yet they’ve seemed willing to work with the administration anyway. However much it pained them, they appeared to believe that Mr. Trump had a strong enough political coalition behind his foreign-policy program that, on the whole, it was better to deal pragmatically with the administration than to try to wait out his presidency.

That changed last week. The sudden decision to break with the Syrian Kurds, the shambolic execution of the decision, and the administration’s evident inability to manage the easily foreseeable political consequences in the Republican Senate crystallized a perception that the White House is in over its head. Unless that changes, foreign powers will increasingly act on the belief that the American executive is both politically weak and intellectually unfocused. The consequences for political stability and economic prosperity around the world are not good.

Mr. Trump’s trade diplomacy is particularly at risk. China is much less likely to make significant compromises if it thinks the president is a lame duck. As the Europeans shift from dealing with Mr. Trump through gritted teeth to waiting for his administration to end, the European Union will likely stiffen its trade stance as well.

The geopolitical consequences of a weakened Trump administration will also be significant. Revisionist powers large and small are more likely to take risks and challenge American power when they believe the U.S. is distracted and divided. Russia’s attack on Georgia came in the summer of 2008 when George W. Bush was an unpopular lame duck and the building financial crisis was beginning to distract Americans from international news.

Russia, far from seeking any kind of special relationship with Mr. Trump, is likely to revel in his weakness. In the western Balkans, in Syria, and in hot spots like Venezuela, Russia must be expected to move more aggressively.