6. Do you support Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from the Syrian border and greenlight Turkey’s military operation? Why or why not?
Going Further
What role, if any, do you think the United States should play in Syria?
In a related news analysis, David E. Sanger explains Mr. Trump’s vision for national security and how that contrasts with the United States’ traditional position as “the world’s policeman”:
He is demonstrating that in his pursuit of ending America’s “endless wars,” no American troop presence abroad is too small to escape his desire to terminate it. In this case, the mission has been to prevent Islamic State forces from reconstituting, and to keep another conflict at bay — a Turkish attack on Kurdish forces, including on those that have been America’s staunchest allies in the fight against ISIS.
To the Pentagon and the State Department, that is a traditional role for American troops, honed over 75 years of global leadership. But if there is a Trump doctrine around the world after 32 months of chaotic policymaking, it may have been expressed in its purest form when the president vented on Twitter on Monday morning: “Time for us to get out.” …
Long before he was elected, Mr. Trump had sounded a recurrent theme about Syria — as well as about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the American presence in Japan and South Korea, and other global deployments. Acting as the world’s policeman was too expensive, he complained. Allies played us for “suckers.” Both in the campaign and today, Mr. Trump sensed that many Americans share his view — and polls show he is right, even among some who loathe Mr. Trump himself.
He continues:
“Like some of those who are running to replace him, President Trump has conflated ‘forever wars’ with an open-ended presence,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior George W. Bush administration official as America went into two wars between 2001 and 2003.
“We’ve had 70 years of open-ended presence in Germany, Japan, South Korea,” he noted. “It’s part of an alliance. And it keeps countries from doing things you don’t want them to do,” like building their own nuclear weapons.
The Syria presence, Mr. Mattis had argued, was in that vein — low risk, low casualty, high returns for America’s security. It was a tripwire to keep the Islamic State from rising again, and Turkey from starting a war. Mr. Trump’s Sunday night tweet, saying everyone in the region was going to have to work things out themselves, announced an abdication of that role.
What do you think? Should the United States maintain a presence in Syria or other places around the world where it perceives a threat to national security? Or should it “get out”? What are the potential national and global consequences for each position?
Note to teachers: If you are doing this in a classroom context, you might divide students to debate the president’s decision and its implications. For more context, invite students to listen to a recent episode of “The Daily” podcast on the question, “Is the U.S. Betraying Its Kurdish Allies?”
