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We’ve got nothing but bad martinis today. Jim Geraghty of National Review and Greg Corombos of Radio America are frustrated by President Trump ordering the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, even as Turkey specifically says it wants us gone so it can attack our Kurdish allies who did more than anyone else in the region to confront ISIS. Jim and Greg also swat away the NBA’s pathetic apology to China after the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted out that people should stand with Hong Kong. And they groan as they see polls for the upcoming legislative races in Virginia looking very rough for Republicans.
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Karl Rove made a similar point on a different podcast. There’s a lot of truth to this. However, I recall that both parties exploited the Cold War for partisan purposes. JFK invented the notion of a missile gap to get to the right of Nixon in 1960. George McGovern, himself a brave fighter pilot, nonetheless painted Nixon as too aggressive in his attempts to wind down the war Kennedy and Johnson had begun and expanded. While Sam Nunn and Scoop Jackson were Democrat hawks, other Democrats criticized Republicans from a more dovish position.
And of course, the real knives came out for Reagan who was explicitly called a warmonger, even though he avoided war almost entirely and, in retrospect, brought about the decline of the USSR.
I am always good to be on the side of Andrew McCarthy
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/turkey-and-the-kurds-its-more-complicated-than-you-think/
Not completely alone.
There’s a limit to how much money we are willing to spend and how many casualties (on both sides) we are willing to tolerate.
You yourself just stated a limiting principle, though: Country invaded must be a somewhat imminent threat.
Trump’s made clear that all the various countries from which these fighters originated refused to aid in the process of securing these ISIS terrorists that we rounded up (even though their countries would be the first targets of the returning ISIS fighters). Trump’s explicit take on that was that they were playing us for suckers. They have come to expect that the US will “do the right thing” at US taxpayer’s and US soldier’s expense, in perpetuity.
Things will never change if we don’t stop doing that. So Trump is pulling the troops back 20 miles from the Turkish border (abandoning that strip – not the entire country and not the entire Kurdish population) even though that strip is now controlled by Kurdish forces. It’s on Turkey and the Kurds to fight it out. Controlling the Syrian border would be mission creep.
I think it is good to hear another side to the Syrian withdrawal, but I would note something he says.
This speaks to a complex situation that at the absolute least in my final attempt to find some truly common ground on this issue with you should not have been announced in a way that seems to have blindsided the American military, an ally (even one of convenience), or the President’s own cabinet. Republicans in general look like they, too, had no idea this was coming, so the way all of this has gone down communicates a haphazard decision making process that does not inspire confidence.
Anyway, it seems to me that justification for withdrawal is happening after the plug was pulled, and that is not good leadership. It is also thought that Jim Mattis resigned over Trump’s first threat to do this, and if we are going to make appeals to authority, I have no problem at all being on the same side as Jim Mattis whom I know is more of an expert on these matters than I am.
If the president’s view was that he should then reconsider his decision when his Secretary of Defense reigned over it but then ultimately concluded he should still withdraw, he had an obligation to the American military to make his case, which he did not do. He has laid out no nuances for American voters either. He has not said the Kurds are terrorists. He has said they don’t need our loyalty because they didn’t fight with us during WWII. All of that strains credulity.
I do not like this decision. Do you or @milkchaser like how it was rolled out?
That is the nature of politics, but the policies from the various White Houses were still fairly consistent in practice.
He can have this take all he likes, but it doesn’t solve the problem of ISIS terrorists existing as they do.
I don’t think Trump needs to make a case to the American people. Most of us want us out.
Congress has not authorized this fight. Let them openly debate it. Let Congress pass a resolution declaring war. Then force Trump to act.
So far, no one has made any case any remotely close to counter to the case to leave I just posted.
There are a lot of counters to which you just posted including the idea that Turkey would simply have not rolled into the space where the Kurds are as long as those 50 Americans stayed in place because Erdogan who has shown very bad faith in the very recent past when it comes to ISIS and other assorted terrorists—whatever a writer at NR says about our/their NATO attachment—would not want to openly agitate against us.
There’s certainly evidence that those people who are actually wearing American uniforms overseas don’t agree with you at all about this withdrawal. And notice. I said Trump should have made a case to the American military first, which is the most impacted by the possible fall out for this decision, as well as the American voter. He did *none* of that, But he said his reason for not retaining a longer alliance had something to do with which countries stormed the beaches of Normandy in 1944?
While Canada is surely relieved that *they* will keep some sort of special hold on an alliance with us, I guess you and I really don’t have any common ground on this one if you can’t even admit that the rollout was somewhat… flawed.
Oh, well.
I don’t think this helps the United States, and I have now a really much harder decision when it comes to 2020.
I had finally decided to vote for Trump over the courts because the Democrats are crazy, but this makes it much harder for me.
I can’t vote for a commander and chief whose leadership I don’t trust to at least be steady—whose world view looks much more like a Democrat’s worldview than mine—when I actually do have a child in uniform.
Also, I would kind of like @milkchaser and @bryangstephens to explain exactly why they think removing 50 men from Syria is great in the name of not getting embroiled in “endless wars” and deploying 2,000 to Saudi Arabia is awesome?
And of course, ANY of those Democrat candidates would be so much better…
They’d all be horrific. Absolutely terrible. Incredibly insane. You and I can totally agree on that one.
Did I say I’d vote for any one of them?
Nope.
The problem for Republicans is not that I will give my vote to a Democrat but that people like me will not want to show up at all because we get just so demotivated by decisions like this one that I’m told I’m supposed to just take on faith because the president doesn’t need to persuade me that his policy is the correct one.
He really hasn’t earned that type of “benefit of the doubt” capital.
Anyone, as I said, I had come to a place in which I felt I would overlook the many things I still don’t like about Trump exactly because of the Democrats’ Maoist tactics in the courts. I could see 2020 as a transactional vote because I know the impeachment stuff is built on political garbage; I find the fact that people can’t wear MAGA hats in any American city without someone throwing urine on them to be disgusting, and I also understand that a Democrat would be just as isolationist abroad–they would all be cheering this decision if anyone but Trump had made it–as well as radical at home.
But I think the inability of President Trump’s supporters to admit that anything about the Syria withdrawal is objectionable–anything at all–makes me want to chuck the whole system again and focus on finding a new hobby like knitting. Especially when a couple of days later, we deploy literally thousands more troops than we withdrew to the Middle East, and the people who are all “no endless wars” are silent.
Keep in mind, I’m not even objecting to the deployment to Saudi Arabia, as I get Iran is a threat, and the region is complicated. But I didn’t argue that I wanted to bring all our boys and girls home. I argued that we should do things that keep stability in the region with as small a footprint as possible so that we don’t have to charge into more chaos later and lose more lives.
I don’t know what I’ll do next year. I just feel super cynical in this moment.
@LoisLane — Don’t judge Trump’s Syria policy based on worst case scenarios of what might happen, but on what does happen.
A more positive scenario – again, of what might happen – is that Turkey, imitating Israel, merely wants to create a buffer zone between its territory and what it considers Kurdish terrorists.
That is fair enough, @Taras, hence why I really have no idea what I will do in 2020, though I don’t think it’s unreasonable to chalk this particular decision up at this point in time as not wonderfully made or to be very skeptical about what will happen.
I mean, this is one of those situations in which if I had a little more trust in the President’s judgement, I wouldn’t feel so taken aback by the action in this moment.
President Trump is never going to be able to win over “the Resistance.” I’m probably never going to want to have a beer with him either. However, he really could earn some more good will from me–and, more importantly, voters like me–if he just didn’t do things in ways that are difficult to define as anything but mercurial. (I’m talking both style and substance.)
But, of course, it is very much in my interests for this to turn out fine. I would absolutely love to be wrong in my reading of the outcome.
Perhaps we should put this in the context of Donald Trump‘s entire term so far.
Over and over, we have heard worst case scenarios: “Donald Trump will destroy NATO”; “Donald Trump will destroy our relationship with (fill in the blank)”.
The sky is always about to fall, and never does. (Remember when moving our embassy to Jerusalem was supposed to bring chaos to the Middle East?*)
He didn’t destroy NATO. His diplomacy with Canada and Mexico has been successful; with China and North Korea, less so**, but it’s hard to say he did any harm.
So guarded optimism is probably the best course.
*Is that like “coals to Newcastle”?
**Probably because they’re waiting to see if he stays in office.
Well, now, you see, I didn’t believe some of those Chicken Little predictions from the get go because they did not seem reasonable to me, i.e. moving of the embassy causing problems.
However, I also don’t think that everything about Donald Trump’s presidency has gone swimmingly, even if the worst case scenarios haven’t happened. I object to this withdrawal for a lot of reasons, even if the “best case” scenario is the ultimate outcome. (The “best case” has many drawbacks in my mind that would have been avoided if we had just stayed… even if the “worst case” is avoided.)
That said, I would like it if we went back to a time in which not all the conversations were at extremes, and I readily admit you give good counsel:
This is not really my nature, but I shall try more when it comes to politics. ;)
But if we all know that any Democrat would be so much worse, how much more motivation is really needed? Hope for a better nominee in 2024 all you want, but that’s no reason to possibly allow President Warren or President Biden or President Sanders to crap all over the whole world, not just on the US, starting in 2021. And what if THEY somehow got re-elected in 2024??? (I sure didn’t think people would be stupid enough to elect Obama twice.)
Like any Republican, Trump might make a mistake and hurt the U.S.
On the other hand, a progressive President, as one who sees America as “the focus of evil in the world”, will hurt the U.S. on purpose.
I think the idea that 50 Americans are going to stop them, in light of what they have already said, is naive at best.
Last I checked, the military follows civilian rule.
You have it backwards. Trump does not need to make the case to end a deployment of troops not authorized by Congress.
And I will say, yeah, what, exactly, is in it for us to support Kurds? No offence, but they are not our allies, Turkey is. We have a treaty and everything.
Canada is yet another nation with which we have formal alliances. The Kurds are not even a nation, and this particular group are the military arm of a group of Kurds our own State Department labels as terrorists.
Oh, Well.
That is laughable. Considering the Democrats all just supported stripping Churches of their tax exempt status, your support for liberty at home is pretty thin if you think leaving these Kurds alone is worth handing them power.
I cannot see how helping any Democrat into power these days is ever, ever good for the people in uniform.
Oh, and I was told you don’t have a “child” in uniform, but an adult that used to be your “child”. I know that was not your argument, but thanks for being someone else who thinks of them that way.
I would kind of like @LoisLane to show me where I said deploying 2,000 troops to Saudi Arabia is awesome.
Please post a link, and make sure to @ me again. I’ll wait.
Binary Outcome.
One or the other.
So I guess you’re saying this was a bad m0ve on the part of the president? A possible opening to “endless war” or something? You didn’t say anything actually, but what you’ve written about your own ideology suggests you would be highly critical of Trump on this point.
My child will always be “my child.” Even when he’s seventy. But since we are all adults living in a republic, I’d like a clear rationale laid out for me when any major foreign policy change that might effect our armed forces is put into play. I really don’t think that’s a lot to ask.
I’m quite aware of the rules, Bryan. Tell me where I’ve ever said Trump did something that wasn’t within his authority? But making a case for actions like these is what presidents do because they are not Julius Caesar or Napoleon. For goodness sake. We can go back and back and back and find presidents “making the case” for all sorts of actions because it’s the right–and smart–thing to do.
Good leaders do things that show respect for the people they command. I never once said that President Trump isn’t in charge. But I don’t agree with him, and I don’t have to agree with him, and I am criticizing him loudly per my analysis of his actions because the Kurds clearly were our allies, and Turkey is clearly not our friend. He isn’t even good at the politics here.
But we have definitely exchanged our opinions on this topic ad nauseam.
I wish you peace.
Well, I have not seen a podcast extolling him for it to respond too. Do I have to do an OP to prove to you I am not a Trump cultist?
Yeah. I am with you on the kids thing. See previous posts telling me that was using “the children” arguments.
You did not get what you ask for to get them into harm’s way. Weird u want it to get them out.
Making the case to go is what needs to happen. This is like proving a negative.
You are doing more than that. You really saying you might hope he loses in 2020.
I wish you peace too.
Actually, I’ve said he keeps making it very, very, very hard to go and vote for him. Just when I decide that’s what I need to do–when I feel motivated to go to the polls in 2020 despite all misgivings I’ve had in the past because I can see he is the better option–he does something like this that I find really, really, really difficult to support in any way. (I know we don’t see this in the same way. We do not need to re-litigate it, even though Donald Trump is now levying sanctions against a NATO ally as if surprised that this ally is acting as it is acting, all while Russian troops move into a stronger position of influence with Iran, and ISIS soldiers are being released from custody.)
Who knows where this will lead? Trump’s actions are completely beyond prediction because he follows no clear thought line or ideology or consistent action.
No, that doesn’t make me feel good as a mother. Ever. I know much too much history to think “the battle is won” and we are all just leaving that area now, or there will be no consequences for men and women in the military for this president’s decisions.
The truth is, I do wish there was another viable candidate for whom I could vote instead. I do, I do, I do. I’ll admit it. But there isn’t. I don’t want Elizabeth Warren, et al, to win either. I have no political home at all, which is terribly depressing.
I also have no idea what factors will be on the table in 13 months, but I can tell you at this point I will never vote for President Trump, even if I decide on some November morning in my future to cast a ballot with his name on it per a cold calculation to vote against his opponent.
But speaking crass politics, I think you are naive if you think people will show up en masse purely because they hate the prospect of Democrats in the White House.
@LoisLane — “Trump’s actions are completely beyond prediction because he follows no clear thought line or ideology or consistent action.”
Actually, he’s been expressing non-interventionist views for thirty years, or since the end of the Cold War. He’s a lot like Pat Buchanan in that sense.
Furthermore, he expressed those views throughout the Republican presidential primary campaign and arguably won the nomination because of them.
Clearly, he has a strong preference for using economic power before military power.
They better. If they know what’s good – or less bad – for them.
He said a ton of things during the campaign, and while I agree that he is a lot like Buchanan if one were to cubby hole him, I could pull up all sorts of statements about intervention as well as he’s so proud of rebuilding the military and intervention with ISIS. But yeah. Whenever I could follow an unbroken thread, I always thought Trump sounded as much like a Democrat as a paleoconservative on foreign affairs. And I still feel he’s super erratic when it comes to defense. (If we were talking tariffs, I’d say Dude is/has been super clear about loving them. That’s where clarity ends for me though.)
Regardless, I don’t think that’s why a narrow band of new people in key states voted for him. They had other rational reasons that included the economy, dislike for Hilary, and a bone tiredness at being attacked all the time. The Republicans I know who threw in with him in the end did so because they had no other choice after the primary.
I don’t know if people are wired to be inspired to make an effort for “less bad” for them. At least you might have people like me who pay close attention to politics ultimately choose on my own narrow interests, but 2016 was obviously super close. I have no idea how it will turn out. I’M tired of it all, and I’ve volunteered on campaigns and cared about politics for as long as I can remember.
I just don’t think you can count on people just despising the other guy enough to make an effort without something else to get them to the ballot box… though Democrats do seem Hell bent on creating that paradigm.
The right-wing non-interventionist believes 1) in a strong defense; 2) crushing anyone that threatens the United States; 3) letting the world go hang otherwise. Sound familiar?
The left-wing non-interventionist believes America should stay home and gut its military because it’s the source of all the world’s problems and always on the wrong side.
In Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911, you will recall, Iraq under Saddam is presented as a peaceful utopia.
Well, if you grant ME consistency, I think both visions are a bit…. short sighted. ;) .