Out of Syria and Afghanistan, Not to Mention Somalia?

L ooking for a coup that is succeeding? Don’t look to President Donald Trump, who is distancing himself from lawyers and apparently planning his exit. Look instead to Trump’s envoy for Syria engagement, James Jeffrey.

Jeffrey gave a valedictory exit interview to Defense One, as he was about to retire. He was astonishingly frank. And he was mostly upbeat about Trump’s foreign-policy record in the Middle East. But he was asked about Trump’s intention to withdraw all American troops from Syria, which he tweeted about and shouted down to his own national-security adviser. “What Syria withdrawal?” Jeffrey asked. “There was never a Syria withdrawal.”

Indeed. While everyone talks blatherskite about defending our Constitution from tweets and bad lawsuits, the D.C. foreign-policy “blob” has done the unthinkable. Several decades ago, it reached over from its executive-branch perches and detached foreign policy from Congress. Now, it has discovered that it can detach the conduct of foreign policy from the president himself.

Thanks to the Pentagon’s dragging its feet and a concerted effort to steer and deceive Trump, officials in the military got the president to agree to leave just 200 troops in Syria. In fact, Jeffrey avers, it was “a lot more than” that. “We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” he said. Jeffrey lied to the president, so that the president would lie to the American people.

Why lie? So that the U.S. military could continue on the mission of “playing a role” in Syria’s ongoing civil war. What might that role might be? Nobody is entirely certain. In May, Jeffrey said, “My job is to make it a quagmire for the Russians.” Who approved that?

Ongoing involvement in Syria’s civil war has been part of U.S. foreign policy since at least 2012. In 2013, it was almost put to a vote in Congress. But it never got that far. A similar vote failed in the United Kingdom’s parliament, and it would have failed in the U.S. Congress too, precisely because it was so desperately unpopular with the public.

Now there is another question. Will there be an Afghanistan withdrawal?

The New York Times, among others, has reported that Trump is “pushing to accelerate troop withdrawals” from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. (Oh, yeah, we have troops in Somalia, too.). In October, he tweeted that he wanted all of them home by Christmas.

But then he got the talking-to, and the official policy became “not a full withdrawal,” just a partial one. Trump’s withdrawal plans were criticized by State Department mandarin Brett McGurk, who served as the special presidential envoy for the global coalition to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levantine. “There’s no reason for this” he said, of withdrawal from Afghanistan. “The only reason I can think of is, again, to tie the hands and restrain the options of the incoming Biden administration.”

That’s the only reason? I can think of another: perhaps the fact that Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 in part for promising to do things like bring troops home from Afghanistan.

And would Joe Biden mind so much? As vice president under Barack Obama, Biden promised that the United States would exit its longest war. “We will leave in 2014,” he tweeted. And it sure seems like the executive branch makes it a real pain in the backside for a president to withdraw troops from a theater of war.

One of the big reasons that the Pentagon has been dragging its feet is that we would be essentially returning Afghanistan to the Taliban. So the whole thing will be coded as a “loss” in someone’s books. But Trump blames his predecessors. Biden can blame Trump. This is an L that everyone can win, unless you are a three-star general looking to babysit Kabul until you get star number four on your shoulder.

Currently, Trump is mired in his Pennsylvania quagmire. Pundits around Washington pretend to be scandalized and frightened. But if he wants to take more victory laps and have a few more accomplishments to wave in the face of future GOP hopefuls, he should bring the troops home for Christmas.

That would send Washington into a real panic. Imagine how freaked out the people who are worried about “norms” will be when a president exercises authority in a way that spooks the spooks.

Let’s call it a policy of regime change at home: Fire every career foreign-policy hack who lied to him, every Pentagon stuffed shirt who talked him out of fulfilling his campaign promises, and, for good measure, everyone who sucks up to those guys. Let General McMaster, Brett McGurk, and James Jeffrey cry to the press. Nobody voted for them. As an act of vengeance and spite, Trump can restore the chain of command.

That way, he can greet Kamala Harris — I mean Joe Biden — as a true commander in chief.