Trump and Syria.

Politico has an article out today that refers to recent comments by President-elect Trump regarding the situation in Syria.  The essence of the article is captured in the opening sentence:  “Turkey controls the militants that ousted former Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.”  Trump goes on to talk about the situation in a manner consistent with my earlier reading of his probable policy in that beleaguered region.  I would quibble with his choice of words, but not with the general conclusion that he reaches.  I don’t think that Turkey controls the people that have taken over Syria, but I do believe that Ankara is VERY influential and played a key role in supporting their rebellion.  I do not believe that Assad would have fallen without Turkey’s involvement.  As is the case with Putin and XI, Trump claims to get along well with Turkish President Erdogan and that too supports my guess as to his policy inclinations.  

I believe that unless something changes on the ground, Trump will continue to draw down our military presence in the region and will look to Erdogan to sort things out.  As this policy unfolds, his critics, including me, will point out that he is throwing the Kurds under the bus and risking a reemergence of Radical Islamic domination of some part of the Syrian hinterland.  The determining factor being Erdogan, not Trump.  Trump will be comfortable with all of that and the judgement of history will depend on how well Erdogan deals with the various forces at work in the region.  My guess is that he will be driven to damage the Kurds as gravely as possible and will tolerate a more radical form of Islamic governance in Syria than most will like.  Depending on a mountain of imponderables, the possibility is that Riyadh will support Ankara in all of this and that too will tend to make Trump feel that things are moving in the right direction, particularly since it will tend to weaken Teheran.

PS:  What is needed is a rapprochement between Erbil and Ankara, but that utopian dream will not take place while the current leadership controls the two sides of the deep cultural divide.  Ankara would have to ceed control of a large portion of Eastern Turkey in order to pacify Kurdish nationalism.  Radical Islamists will continue to be the only ones offering a third way forward.  Trump is correct in his assessment that there is very little that our military forces can do to address the basic situation that underlies the constant violence.  He oversimplifies when he argues that we have no role to play.  The role that we should be playing is not primarily military in nature.  It is diplomatic and economic in nature, but we are poorly equipped to play in that complicated arena, due to a lack of knowledge about the complexities of human relationships in the region.