Obama pulled a small, sustainable force out of Iraq that was achieving important objectives solely based on his campaign rhetoric and natural inclination; now Trump is doing the same thing in Syria. I understand how Trump believes our wars in the Middle East were foolish and wasteful, but there is no undoing them and it doesn’t make much sense to pull out troops now that aren’t engaged in a large-scale nation-building exercise in reaction to military campaigns from ten years ago. We discussed this on The Editors podcast this week: To me this is like pulling out of TPP because you think we’ve been taken advantage of by China for so long — a non-sequitur at best, and more likely a strategically self-defeating move that we will soon regret.