President Trump’s outbursts may be rambling or even, like the letter he sent to Turkey’s President Erdogan last week, written in childishly simplistic language, but they often contain a coherent world-view. The shock to the system is that it is not a world-view any senior American political figure has expressed for decades.
More significant than the letter, which simply expressed more graphically what Mr Trump had already stated his position to be, was the press conference he gave yesterday.
“Syria has a relationship with the Kurds, so they’ll come in for their border and they’ll fight,” he said. “They may bring partners in. They could bring Russia in, and I say welcome to it.”
We should not be surprised. After all, Mr Trump’s closeness to the Russian strategic position was a key aspect of his election victory in 2016, whatever interpretation has been put on that. Immediately after his victory, in an interview, he spelled out what that meant for Syria.
“I’ve had an opposite view of many people regarding Syria,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting Isis, and you have to get rid of Isis. Russia is now totally aligned with Syria.”
Mr Trump found the other aspects of the Syrian conflict that had been debated so long and hard in western capitals, the initial uprising, whether rebel groups would overthrow President Assad, or could be described as “moderate”, completely uninteresting.
Mr Trump, like President Putin, has a pessimistic view of human nature, so prefers generally to believe the worst of people. If in doubt, assume others will behave badly, and treat them accordingly. If that means you yourself behave badly, well, others are even worse.
The rebels, then, could be abandoned. President Assad was punished when he stepped over US “red lines” - but otherwise if he repressed his people, never mind.
Now the SDF can also be abandoned. After all, as he said, they are “no angels”, either. “Who is an angel?,” he added. “There aren’t too many around.”
It was Mr Trump’s Republican historic predecessor as president, Abraham Lincoln, who spoke of Americans coming together to find the “better angels of our nature”.
Lincoln’s sentiments have always been anathema to three groups of people: cynical purveyors of realpolitik, like President Putin, whose KGB training always prioritised ends over means; America’s libertarian right, which worships the gods of competition and the individual; and the anti-American left, which believes they are used as cover for American exceptionalism and a new form of imperialism.
We should not be surprised that these three attitudes have come together over Syria. President Obama, who made a show of Lincolnesque rhetoric, thought that with military pressure applied here and a bit of give-and-take there, President Assad could be brought to the negotiating table and a political solution could be found that satisfied all sides.
In the event, Mr Assad and his Russian ally bombed the country to smithereens, and the rebels lost faith in western promises, turning instead either to jihad or to Turkey, or both.
As Mr Trump put it in a tweet last night: “About 500,000 human beings were killed in Syria while Barack Obama was president and leading for a political settlement to that civil war.”
He is not wrong, and nor is he when he says that the United States has few selfish interests in the country that justify the deployment of US troops.
America may come to feel, however, that the day he made common cause with the anti-imperialist left and a former head of the KGB was the day its claim to be the better angel was finally killed off.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/presidents-world-view-is-decades-old-but-coherent-bkhnqlqjg
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