President Trump, in his recent abandonment of the Kurds, proclaimed that this was being done in order to fulfill a campaign promise of getting us out of foreign wars. In essence, this appeal to the a very old conservative concept of isolationism was his reason for acting, he declared.
And it may have been. The concept that the United States should stay out of foreign wars and stay inside its own borders has been a very old one. It dates back as a popular idea to the very founding of the country. And it was a particularly popular idea in the pre World War Two Republican Party. It lost the support of most people, including most Republicans, during that war, and indeed American isolationism is sometimes cited as a causal factor giving rise to the war. I.e., by staying out of foreign affairs we stood by and allowed crises to develop until they came to visit us.
Trump seems to have always had the desire to pull out of Syria and was talked out of doing that last year. This year he did it. If he was going to do it, it could have been done more gracefully, to be sure. We won't go back over all of that as we've addressed it here earlier.
But what is remarkable is that we now learn that American troops are in fact not leaving Syria. They're just leaving this part of Syria.
As earlier noted, I don't think we should have gotten into Syria in the first place, but now that we're in, I don't think we should have abandoned the Kurds. The Kurds, by the way, pelted departing American troops with tomatoes in a village the other day in order to express their contempt. Those tomatoes can be regarded as landing on the entire nation, and deservedly so, if not deservedly so on the troops, who had nothing to do with the decision.
In informing the country that some Americans will remain, for the second time Trump linked all of this to oil. The troops, he stated, remaining in Syria will "protect the oil".
Various U.S. administrations have been careful ever since first becoming involved in the Middle East not to link our presence there overtly to oil. Clearly, the reason the region is in the eye of any outsider has in part, and a very large part, to do with petroleum. Without petroleum, much of the region would go unnoticed.
Which is not to say that everything is about the oil. The American support for Israel has occasionally hurt the country fairly badly in terms of oil producing nations and Israel does not produce any oil, as a British government once pointed out to us. And the rise of the radical Islam has caused us to take policy positions related solely to that. So it isn't all about the oil.
But President Trump has twice stated something suggesting that this is how he views it over the past couple of weeks. I.e., he's an isolationist but sees our intervention as excused, at least in part, if it relates to oil.
And that view is emphasized by the fact that the United States is sending air defense troops to Saudi Arabia, a region which can darn well take care of its own air defense and doesn't need us to do it. If withdrawing from the Kurds in Syria can be viewed as isolationist, putting troops into Saudi Arabia certainly is not.
All of this, of course, has made headlines, but perhaps Trump is just exceptionally open about how he views all of this. He's opposed to Americans being in foreign wars no matter what their nature, it would appear, unless its directly tied to our economic well being.
That isn't how most people view it, however, including quite a few in the GOP. We can't say by any means that people's reactions and views on this are uniformly consistent in how they were reached, but the recent moves here have not been popular, including with Republicans.
None of this seems to be having an immediate impact on the President, however. Indeed, there's some suggestion that at this point in his administration the restraints that were present earlier have loosened to the point of disappearing. That was a trend that has been developing for some time, but now seems fully here. What that means we don't know. Not even for the Kurds.
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