White House Chaos is Having an Impact on the Ground in Syria, and Beyond

U.S. foreign policy has been a contradictory mess practically since the beginning of the Trump administration. The president says, or tweets, one thing (“it’s time to come back home” from Syria, for example) and then U.S. military commanders and diplomats do the opposite.

But the power struggle at the top of the world’s greatest military power and largest economy has never been more visible than in recent days. Fear, Bob Woodward’s new book about the administration, shows Donald Trump ordering the U.S. military to “fucking kill” Assad, and defense secretary James Mattis defying him, while former economic adviser Gary Cohn thwarts Trump from ending key trade alliances. The vision of a White House in chaos was amplified by the Sept. 5 anonymous opinion piece in the New York Times claiming Trump’s own Cabinet appointees consider him unfit for office and are working against him.

Trump may call the New York Times “failing,” and his press secretary directed his fans to target it for harassment after the op-ed came out. But what the Trump White House overlooks, foreign policy experts and diplomats say, is how many non-western leaders mistakenly see the Times as the unofficial voice of the U.S. government. The paper did, after all, support the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and back the George W. Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

“The op-ed doubled down on the Woodword book,” said Edward Goldberg, a professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “When a senior figure in the White House speaks to the ‘official’ paper of the United States, many governments around the world consider that the official voice of the U.S. government.”

After they read the anonymous piece, he asks, “Can any foreign leader trust anything that the U.S. president says? It’s a really difficult situation.”

Syria is Just One Hotspot

It’s no surprise that Russia is pressuring the U.S. military base at al-Tanf. The base “is a really crucial part of the U.S. strategy to roll back Iran’s influence” in the area, directly conflicting with Russia’s Iran partnership, says Will Todman, an associate fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Despite Trump’s declaration in April that the United States would soon be pulling its troops out of Syria, the U.S. military will remain there through the end of the year, James Jeffrey, the State Department’s Syria engagement representative, said this week.

“If that is true,” Todman said, “it would signal a much more coherent U.S. policy than we’ve seen [in Syria] in a long time.”

The operative word there is “if.” Uncertainty about the U.S. policy in Syria is both a “risk and an opportunity for Russia,” which may be thinking it can “get away” with trying to force the United States out if there are mass divisions within the Trump administration, Todman said.

“Not having a clear strategy and not acting in a clear way makes it really hard for U.S. allies to know how to help the United States” in Syria, he added. And Syria is just one of many hotspots around the world where authoritarian governments or terrorists hope to gain power, territory, or influence.

North Korea shows no signs of giving up its nuclear weapons, Iran faces skepticism over its commitment to a nuclear deal, eastern Ukraine remains vulnerable to Russian invasion, the Islamic State is resurfacing in Iraq, and a wave of nationalism is sweeping Europe and beyond. The U.S.’s internal foreign-policy conflicts and Trump’s disregard for traditional alliances are creating space for adventurism, or worse, at a terrible time.

“What is critical for this administration to recognize is that the world is changing in a very unpredictable way and democracy is under siege” from Poland to Italy to South America, said Tim Roemer, a former U.S. congressman from Indiana and an ambassador to India during the Obama administration. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin and Beijing are more aggressive, he said, making this “a very different world than it was 20 years ago.”

Successful foreign policy relies on setting clear goals, working with other countries to achieve them, and assembling a skilled team capable of executing them, he said. “You have to go places, you can’t just tweet and just talk to people on the phone” and successfully project American power.

In areas where Trump and his appointees have acted in concert, his hard-nosed approach isn’t working. Trump said on Sept. 7 that he plans to tax nearly everything the U.S. imports from China because Beijing hasn’t met his trade demands, but Beijing isn’t blinking. Instead, Chinese officials are awaiting the results of the mid-term elections in November to renew negotiations, as questions about Trump’s own future and his influence over foreign policy loom. ”Who knows for how long Mr. Trump will still be in the Oval Office?” Yu Yongding, a commissioner and senior researcher at the state-run China Academy of Social Sciences, told Reuters.

Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi asked a similar question more than a year ago, according to Woodward’s book. “Donald, I’m worried about this investigation. Are you going to be around?” al-Sisi asked in an April 2017 conversation that Trump later told an aide was “like a kick in the nuts.”

Crazytown Deterrence

The chaos and conflict in the White House, and this week’s dark portrayals of Trump, may also carry some unexpected upside for U.S. influence around the globe, some foreign policy experts say. The U.S. military’s global footprint and annual budget dwarf that of every other nation, making some leaders particularly wary of provoking Trump right now.

“What the [New York Times] op-ed suggests is that this is an extremely impulsively, extremely id-driven operation,” said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, and former adviser to the U.S. military in Afghanistan. “If I was advising” Chinese president Xi Jinping, he said, the advice would be to “be very cautious with these people because they are crazy, and you don’t know what they will do.”

Reports suggest Trump “is angry, he is furious, he behaves like a fifth grader,” Biddle said. “You can not rule out the possibility he will do something crazy aggressive out of pique,” or that “you could end up with mushroom clouds in your major cities by doing something innocuous.”

The “crazy man” deterrence is usually good for the leader who is thought of as crazy, Biddle said. But occasionally there will be a “miscalculation, leading to a historic catastrophe,” as in the run-up to World War I. Then, “a war that no one wanted to occur happened because of a series of miscalculations, and escalated into a war that destroyed a generation of European males and wrecked a continent’s worth of economies.”

Who in the Trump administration is going to ensure that a situation like that doesn’t happen again? Like the identity of the author of that New York Times piece, right now that’s a big mystery.