Policy or politics? Trump’s sudden Syria move kicks up a storm.
When President Trump reversed US policy on Syria Wednesday by ordering a full and rapid withdrawal of the 2,000 troops on the ground there, stunned officials and foreign policy analysts saw a number of individuals and factors behind the surprise decision.
For some, it was Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who met with Mr. Trump recently and spoke with him by phone Friday, whose arguments convinced the president to make the move.
Others speculated it was the recent fall of one of the Islamic State’s last toeholds in Syria that prompted the president’s mission-accomplished decision.
And for still others, it reflected a preoccupation with domestic political setbacks: the inability to get congressional funding for the promised border wall, for one, and then the barrage of bad news coming out of the 2016 campaign investigations.
From this perspective, it was the sentencing last week of Trump’s former personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, and the court appearance this week of former national security adviser Michael Flynn, that convinced Trump he
The Kurdish questionGraham: We have been dishonorablePraise from PutinAttempts to reverse decision
