As it turns out, Mr. Assad will have to wait only about a month for the American withdrawal to be complete.
In his speech this week, Mr. Jeffrey made an impassioned case that the civil war in Syria was not just about the half-million people dead, nor the 11 million others who have been driven from their homes.
It has “become a great-power conflict,” he said, with Americans, Russians, Iranians, Turks and Israelis all involved. Any American policy, he said, “cannot focus only on the internal conflict.” He added later than “Iran has to get out of there,” meaning Iranian ground troops.
Mr. Jeffrey’s ultimate boss, however, seems largely uninterested in the geopolitics of remaining in Syria, or using whatever leverage the United States has left to shape events there. American troops, in Mr. Trump’s view, should return to American shores, where they can bristle with new weapons — but only engage those who would enter the United States and seek to harm its citizens.
It is a very 20th-century view of global power. And it largely overlooks how terrorist groups are making bombs outside Damascus that can be slipped aboard aircraft, or how the newly revived Syrian Electronic Army, Mr. Assad’s team for hacking the United States from afar, can wreak havoc without ever stepping into American territory.
But as Mr. Jeffrey himself said, the Trump administration’s national security strategy, published early this year, stated outright that countering terrorism was no longer the primary goal of American policy — and that dealing with a renewed era of great-power competition was, once again, the motivating rationale.
Some of Mr. Trump’s former aides have said the president never actually read through his strategy, although he was briefed on it. With his brief, little-explained announcement on Wednesday, he leaves his allies wondering whether it is truly his strategy at all.
from Just News Update https://ift.tt/2rOaAyg
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