In my great and unmatched wisdom...

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Any military folk of my acquaintance were always complimentary in their mentions of Kurds as fellow combatants. Their comments about other partners such as Iraqis and Afghanis was....less than glowing.

Trump is playing to a chunk of his base here, the ones with the old-style USA "isolationist" mentality. That part of his base would like us out of NATO, out of the UN, and more or less take the stance of bringing all military forces back to US sovereign territory. They tend to think that the rest of the world should be allowed to 'muck' off on its own. Not sure what Trump's personal thoughts are on this issue, but then again I think the cornerstone of his view of foreign policy is that he, the great deal maker, can solve anything -- even though he doesn't know crap over shinola about it.

[Montmorency]

Any military folk of my acquaintance were always complimentary in their mentions of Kurds as fellow combatants. Their comments about other partners such as Iraqis and Afghanis was....less than glowing.

Trump is playing to a chunk of his base here, the ones with the old-style USA "isolationist" mentality. That part of his base would like us out of NATO, out of the UN, and more or less take the stance of bringing all military forces back to US sovereign territory. They tend to think that the rest of the world should be allowed to 'muck' off on its own. Not sure what Trump's personal thoughts are on this issue, but then again I think the cornerstone of his view of foreign policy is that he, the great deal maker, can solve anything -- even though he doesn't know crap over shinola about it.

If it were playing to the named base he wouldn't be sending more troops to Saudi Arabia than he is removing from Syria (and who aren't even coming back stateside yet, just redeploying to Iraq).

Smart money maintains that Trump is not playing to anyone because he has no coherent strategy, he's either a stupid coward who got played by Erdogan or he's a stupid venal coward who got played by Erdogan to keep the checks from his Istanbul towers flowing.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Agree as to no coherent strategy.

Troops to Saudi are easy. The media is not interested so Trump can prop up the Saud family even more than the last three occupants.


If incompetence at foreign policy were impeachable, he'd have been out of office for a year or more already.

[Montmorency]

If incompetence at foreign policy were impeachable, he'd have been out of office for a year or more already.

By that theory nothing Trump does is impeachable so long as he is not in fact impeached!

That's some catch there.


EDIT: Holy crap, the US today gave Turkey everything it wanted and is enabling it to ethnically cleanse Northern Syria in peace (almost verbatim from Trump's words). My pop culture reference stock fails me, but this is diabolical.

What Turkey is getting now is they are not going to have to kill millions of people.

The infamous letter he had sent to "tough man" Erdogan the previous day to achieve peace in our time.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[CrossLOPER]

The infamous letter he had sent to "tough man" Erdogan the previous day to achieve peace in our time.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

He writes like a primitive bot.

[Montmorency]

He writes like a primitive bot.

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/d...th-trump-santa

[Montmorency]

Agree as to no coherent strategy.

Troops to Saudi are easy. The media is not interested so Trump can prop up the Saud family even more than the last three occupants.


If incompetence at foreign policy were impeachable, he'd have been out of office for a year or more already.

As I thought, it is confirmed that US troops withdrew from Syria only to be redeployed to Iraq to "continue operations against the Islamic State group" and "to protect the oil fields."

Meanwhile, an update on the reinforcements to Saudi Arabia:

"Secretary Esper informed Saudi Crown Prince and Minister of Defense Muhammad bin Salman this morning of the additional troop deployment to assure and enhance the defense of Saudi Arabia," Chief Pentagon spokesman Jonathon Hoffman said in a statement Friday. "Taken together with other deployments, this constitutes an additional 3,000 forces that have been extended or authorized within the last month."
The US has increased the deployment of forces in the region by 14,000 since May.

So in light of a deliberate decision to withhold available protection from Kurdish allies while abandoning US outposts built with taxpayer money to the Syrians and Russians, this Syrian business is indeed "Top 10 Anime Betrayals"-tier. All those who protested that Trump could not yet be the worst president in American history because he had not instigated a foreign policy catastrophe on par with the Iraq War will be monitoring the geopolitical consequences of this move for years ahead I'm sure.

Videos on Kurds not liking Americans so much anymore.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

...Videos on Kurds not liking Americans so much anymore.

Hard to blame them. Between the miscommunication of 1991, the inactivity on Article 140, and this last episode, we have managed to malf them over three times in a single generation.

We should have stood up a Kurdistan in 2005 and told both Turkey and the remainder of Iraq to pound sand.

[Crandar]

Hard to blame them. Between the miscommunication of 1991, the inactivity on Article 140, and this last episode, we have managed to malf them over three times in a single generation.

We should have stood up a Kurdistan in 2005 and told both Turkey and the remainder of Iraq to pound sand.

Don't forget the time when the US consciously lied and blamed the Iranians instead of Saddam for the Halabja massacre. In geopolitics, there are no friends but the mountains.

[Montmorency]

Trump belting it out loud for the world:

We don't have to defend the borders between Turkey and Syria. They've been fighting for 1,000 years. But we did keep the oil [in Deir ez-Zor] if you don't mind. We kept the oil. And we will distribute that oil.

Assad (always a smooth and sibilant speaker) appreciates the candor:

I tell you, he’s the best American president. Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he’s the most transparent president. All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the 'unique' and 'brilliant' American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil, and others.

Trump speaks with transparency to say 'We want the oil.' This is the reality of American politics since the Second World War at least. 'We want to get rid of this person... We want to provide a service in return for money.' This is the reality of American politics. What do we want more than a transparent foe?

As for how Trump intends to "take" the oil:

In a major policy flip-flop, the President said that he is not only keeping American forces in Syria to “secure” its oil fields, he is willing to go to war over them. “We may have to fight for the oil. It’s O.K.,” he said. “Maybe somebody else wants the oil, in which case they have a hell of a fight. But there’s massive amounts of oil.” The United States, he added, should be able to take some of Syria’s oil. “What I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of our great companies to go in there and do it properly,” he said. The goal would be to “spread out the wealth.”
[...]
Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. could expropriate a portion of Syria’s oil “sounds like the international crime of pillage,” Ryan Goodman, a former special legal counsel at the Department of Defense who is now at the New York University School of Law, said. Any such move is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and by the precedents set by the United Nations war-crimes tribunals that the U.S. helped establish in Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. “U.S. military commanders who engaged in pillaging Syria’s oil would risk criminal liability under the U.S. War Crimes Act,” Goodman said. The international rules of war, he added, were designed “to deter nations from engaging in predatory wars to seize other countries’ natural resources.”
[...]
It fit with Trump’s longstanding position that the United States should seize the oil of other countries to pay for its military campaigns. “In the old days, you when you had a war, to the victors belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it,” Trump said, in 2011. “You’re not stealing anything. You’re taking—we’re reimbursing ourselves—at least, at a minimum.”

Most of all, the new policy—which may keep some five hundred American troops in Syria—wasn’t well thought out, U.S. officials and Middle East experts told me. “It was seat-of-the-pants type shit,” a U.S. official said. Another told me, “To say the oil stuff isn’t thought through is an understatement.
[...]
But any American or foreign company that offers to engage in Syria could face sanctions, unless the U.S. lifts restrictions on Syria. “Who’s going to lay billions to rehab the S.D.F. oil industry?” a U.S. official asked. A further complication is that other international oil companies, including Shell and the Chinese National Petroleum Company, held rights to the fields before the civil war—and could challenge any U.S. claim to the fields.

What’s particularly baffling is that Syria now produces a piddling amount of oil—about as much as Utah. “Syrian oil was not significant at all to the world market. [...] But, as a result of the eight-year civil war and U.S. air strikes on oil installations seized by isis, production is down ninety per cent, to only about forty-thousand barrels per day, Yergin said. That’s a negligible amount on global markets—inadequate even for Syria’s domestic needs.

lolsigh

Interesting factoid: "Through intermediaries, both isis and the S.D.F. sold oil to Damascus, U.S. officials told me."