A nation must think before it acts.
American forces are building military bases in Syria and providing vital humanitarian assistance to embattled minorities there, and yet President Trump is insisting that troops pull out. Doing so hands Syria to Isis, Iran, and Russia in defiance of Trump’s other Middle Eastern policies proclaiming Iran an enemy and U.S. policy that aims to thwart Russia.
However, if we are to stay in Syria we must understand what that entails. In the Syrian case under both Presidents Obama and Trump the U.S. has conspicuously failed to act according to strategic rationale. This strategic ineptitude stems from the fact that we never developed a viable or credible political instrument as the basis for a future Syrian government.