Green light

President Trump, whether intending to or not, has made it eminently clear that the US would do nothing militarily to avoid a Turkish push into Syria against the Syrian Kurds who have fought for years with the US against the Islamic State. With the US troops on the border withdrawn from their buffer role by Trump, Turkish troops are now pressing into Syria in an effort to destroy the YPG, the Syrian Kurdish forces President Erdogan characterizes as terrorists because they are an adjunct of the PKK, Kurdish forces that attack inside Turkey.

President Trump has threatened the Turkish economy, but he won’t go through with it. He is anticipated to veto a sanctions bill working its way through Congress, where the votes to override are not available.

It was hard to imagine that the situation in Syria could be made worse than it already was, but Trump has managed it. Instead of negotiating the US withdrawal with Turkey and Russia, he simply pulled the plug on the US presence at the border. I’d be the first to say that presence was not sustainable and needed to be withdrawn. But vacuums get filled. The trick is to make sure they get filled with something that protects US interests. Trump failed to even try to do that.

Now the outcome is all too predictable: the Turks will chase the Kurds from the border area, which is where most of them have lived for generations. The Kurds will respond not only by resisting the Turkish attack but also by conducting terrorist operations inside Turkey and Turkish-controlled Syria. One has occurred already in a Turkish border town, according to press reports. Distracted by the fight against Turkey, the Syrian Kurds will not be able to sustain the fight against resurgent ISIS forces or perhaps even maintain the camps in which they hold ISIS prisoners.

Damascus will seize this opportunity to offer some protection for the Kurds, who will not have any other option. They will go back to the purpose for which their military units were created by Damascus: attacking inside Turkey. So a war that today looks like it is between Turkey and the Kurds will soon be a war between Turkey and Syria, with unpredictable results.

It is not impossible that Damascus and Ankara will reach a pact restoring Syrian authority along the border in exchange for repression of the Kurdish threat to Turkey and return of large numbers of Syrian Arab refugees from Turkey back to Syria. But of course a messy continuation of war between Turkey and Syria is also possible.

The big losers in all of this will be Syria’s citizens, both Kurdish and Arab. They will suffer major humanitarian challenges as civilians are used as human shields or flee to escape the fighting. Eventually large numbers of Syrian refugees inside Turkey are likely to be forced back to Syria, violating their non-refoulement right.

Assad, the Russians, and the Iranians have reason to be pleased. Trump has demonstrated once again that US support is unreliable, the Russians are strengthening their foothold in Syria and the region, Assad is getting a chance to restore his authority over northeastern Syria, and the Iranians will enjoy his triumph as well as the smashing of the Kurds. Make America Great Again once again means weakening the United States by failing to use diplomatic instruments to enable a withdrawal that could have been executed without the risks we are now running.