Just Saying | Is Donald Trump ending the era of US military intervention? Bring it on!
- Yonden Lhatoo welcomes the US president’s shock move to pull his troops out of Syria and dares hope it’s the start of a strategic trend that eventually ends American military intervention around the world
What a twilight zone of a world we inhabit these days, where a sitting president of the United States actually seeks to curtail his country’s perennial warmongering by just a fraction and it causes a conniption that unites both conservatives and liberals in condemnation.
Donald Trump has pretty much reduced us to salivating Pavlovian lab animals, conditioned to pounce on and criticise him every time he starts a news cycle – but let’s be fair and give him credit where it’s screamingly due.
I’m talking about his shock announcement that he has ordered a full and rapid withdrawal of more than 2,000 American troops from Syria, having “defeated” the deplorables operating under the Islamic State banner in the war zone.
I don’t know about the “mission accomplished” part, considering there are still some 14,500 of those savages on the rampage out there. But they’re a vastly depleted force, and Trump is right to leave it to other players with stronger and longer-standing interests in Syria – Russia and Iran – to finish them off in partnership with the Syrian regime.
It also makes strategic sense not to risk any escalation with Russia, which could well trigger a third world war, or Nato ally Turkey, which is hell bent on wiping out the Kurdish militia that has been battling Islamic State on the ground. Those guys, by the way, are negotiating their own post-war terms with the Syrian regime – it’s not America’s duty to keep its soldiers in harm’s way to “protect” them.