President Trump has come under fire recently for his decision to pull US troops out of northern Syria. The decision has left Kurds in the area vulnerable to attack from Turkish forces. Politicians from across the aisle have come out swinging against Trump, berating him for leaving our Kurdish “allies” vulnerable. But Trump’s decision was still the correct one to take, albeit a little too late.
The United States has never come out in favor of an independent Kurdistan, so its alliance with the Kurds is only superficial. Over the past several decades it has used the Kurds when it suits them and abandoned them when they’re no longer necessary.
Trump is right that the US has no business being involved in Syria and should pull its troops out, but he should have done that years ago. His first move as President should have been to pull troops out and leave the Syrians to sort out their own affairs.
Yet he followed the advice of his advisers, bamboozled by rebel propaganda, and launched missile strikes against Damascus. And despite his anti-interventionist talk on the campaign trail, his foreign policy hires have almost universally been super-hawkish.
Is Trump’s recent move due to him finally taking the reins of his foreign policy, especially now that he has fired John Bolton as his National Security Advisor? Or does he realize that the American people are sick and tired of war and don’t want to be involved in Syria? Or is this just a political move to gain some support for the 2020 election?
Regardless of the reasoning behind it, it’s the right decision. It just should have been made years ago, before the Kurds were led on to thinking that the US would support them, before more innocent people were killed in a pointless civil war, and before relations with Russia deteriorated even further. Let’s hope that President Trump sticks to his guns and actually follows through, rather than kowtowing to his many misguided critics in Washington.
This article was originally posted on Red Tea News.
