I’m pretty hands off with the Wars, and think the last 30 years of military adventurism in the Middle East has gotten us a fat load of nothing except 9/11 and some dead kids.
In that sense, I’m perfectly fine pulling out of Syria. If Russia thinks that they would enjoy trying to fuck around in all of these middle eastern civil wars, then we should let them do that. I don’t really care about isis and I don’t really care about Assad. If some other nominally western nation wants to come play boogeyman for ISIS so that ISIS can focus on them, then... we should let them reap the fruits of that effort. The Russian might think they will come out the other end in charge of opec... but somehow I doubt it.
What’s really galling is the circumstances under which this is done, the likely motivations, and the lack of any sort of coherent middle eastern (and also just foreign relations) strategy whatsoever.
Like whose side are we even on? Because the various actions we take seem to have no clear agenda or goal in mind. They don’t even consistently benefit a consistent set of allies except for arguably Russia. Like, we leave Syria which helps Iran which will piss off The Saudis who are supposedly one of our most important allies as of last week.
What I think we are seeing is a mix of straight up corruption/blackmail where he’s returning favors to various benefactors and also the very limited ability of an administration that ultimately views international relations as a series of bilateral transactions but has no governing principle. They’re just basically trying to keep all of the plates spinning and smarter countries are taking advantage of 1) their corrupt nature 2) their stupidity and incompetence.
