If Turkey is not acting like a NATO ally, perhaps the sensible solution is to remove Turkey from NATO rather than keeping the United States inserted in Syria, presumably forever…. I’ve heard my colleagues say we should not leave Syria without a strategy. Perhaps it is equally logical that we should not stay in Syria without a strategy…. In Syria, we have tens of Americans stuck between armies of tens of thousands who have been fighting for hundreds of years and will likely be fighting hundreds of years from now. Our mission, to deprive ISIS of Caliphate land, has largely been accomplished—with the help of the Kurds and with over $9 billion being paid to the Kurds. The Kurds have been fighting bravely where they live…. They have been trained, funded, and equipped by the United States…. We cannot accept the proposition that if we support a group of people because our interests align in one case, this somehow morally binds our country to every conflict they have—past, present, or future. To do this would constrain the utility of America’s future alliances, not strengthen them.
“We have to fight them over there so we don’t fight them over here,” the neocon chant goes. Even if you insist that this rule is true in the Middle East, I think we can all agree that it doesn’t apply to Germany. Well, maybe not all of us.
When President Trump announced the withdrawal of one-third of U.S. troops from Germany in June 2020, Liz Cheney called the president “dangerously misguided.” We had “abandoned allies” and “retreated” from the “cause of freedom” itself, she tweeted. In Germany?!
A Cheney supporting the Cheney Doctrine over the Trump Doctrine isn’t surprising. Liz wants Trump to lose, hoping that a reset of republicanism will quell the unruly populists and reempower the establishment. We were elected together and entered Congress together. On one of our first meetings, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers had purchased each new Republican member a “Make America Great Again” hat for an inaugural “class photo.” Liz was the only incoming GOP member who refused to don the hat and join the rest of us. Abandoning allies indeed.
Most recently, Rep. Cheney has teamed up with Democrat Rep. Jason Crowe to draft and introduce legislative barriers to a Trump-led Afghanistan troop drawdown. They want to stay forever.
Many in Washington can think of literally no place in the world they wouldn’t want more troops, more spending, and more problems to justify more troops and more spending. If we are so scared that Russia is going to roll tanks through Germany, why isn’t Germany scared enough to stop buying Russian oil? On military spending, we have been the fool of the world for too long, and we have been played accordingly. Trump doesn’t tolerate it. He sees that it is grotesque, particularly when the pro-war forces place the veneer of freedom and humanitarianism over their lust for power.
There is nothing humanitarian about the slave markets thriving in Libya, or the migrant crisis wreaking havoc across Europe. We had a deal with Qaddafi. He turned over his nukes and we turned over a new leaf in our relationship with his country—that is, until the Clinton-Boltonistas decided that they needed to look tough or something (it was never quite explained). So much for the Libya model! On to the next one! There should be a rule that neocons must live in the countries they invade—not just rape the government contracting process on the rebuilding of the country, as they did in Iraq.
The same “thought leaders”—or is it trend followers?—were equally desperate for regime change in Syria and the removal of Bashar al-Assad. Like Qaddafi, there was no question he was a brutal dictator. The problem with the misguided calls for regime change is the lack of a credible, superior alternative to the dictator—the main beneficiaries of such an intervention in Syria would be ISIS and the related terrorist groups fighting Assad and benefiting from chaos.
Luckily, the forever war lobby never got its desired intervention in Syria, largely thanks to Donald Trump—the only major presidential candidate who spoke against the folly. The so-called “experts” behind our failed foreign policies have not learned from their mistakes because they have never been asked to explain them or even acknowledge them. And so today the saber-rattling persists, with bigger, brighter bombs and bombast, and is directed now toward Venezuela, Yemen, and, most disturbingly, Iran.
As we look to these countries, it is our task to ensure that we don’t just repeat the mistakes of yesteryear’s decision-makers but that we learn from them. We must resolve not to start unwise wars or place our military in unwinnable and endless conflicts. We know from tragic experience that oppressors like Maduro, Rouhani, and even Kim Jong-un will use military conflict with the United States as a scapegoat for their own considerable failures, then export violence and undermine the organic desire of their people to seek freedom.
In Yemen, Syria, Libya, and beyond, we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that unwilling or unreliable local fighters necessitate the involvement of American troops. The examples of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya—just to name a few—teach us that it is wrong to presume that just beyond the lifespan of every dictator lies a peaceful, Jeffersonian democracy, rather than generations of anarchy, violence, terrorism, and chaos. Things can and frequently do get worse. The number of failed
