These are surely disorienting times for Donald Trump, who has endured endless controversy over his steadfast commitment to more obliging relations with Vladimir Putin. As multiple investigations continue into the Trump-Russia affair, tension between Moscow and Washington has spiked, further complicating the bleary entanglement between the two. On Sunday, the U.S. shot down a Syrian warplane, alleging it dropped bombs near its allies, who were engaged in fighting ISIS militants. Damascus claims the plane was itself on an anti-ISIS mission. And now Russia, a keen supporter of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has retaliated, suspending a military hotline used to avoid clashes in Syrian airspace and declaring on Monday that any U.S.-flown plane venturing west of the Euphrates River could be a target.
Speaking in Washington, General Joseph Dunford sought to allay reports of escalating friction. “I’m confident that we are still communicating between the coalition operations center and the Russian operations center,” he said. “I think the worst thing any of us could do would be to address this with hyperbole.” America, he added, would work “diplomatically and militarily” to re-establish the so-called “deconfliction channel.” Indeed, this is not the first time that Russia has threatened to shut the channel, nearly cutting communication after President Trump ordered a strike against a Syrian air base allegedly involved in a chemical weapons attack in April.
The most recent round of sparring between the U.S. and Russia, however, feels particularly weighted in the wider context of the evolving Syrian conflict—and Trump looks increasingly out of his depth. Recently, both military forces and their respective allies have made headway in ousting ISIS militants from their de facto capital of Raqqa. The U.S.-led coalition has stepped up its aerial bombing offensive and entered several districts of the city, while the Russia-backed Syrian army has won territory in the western Raqqa countryside. Russia and the U.S.—alongside a varying mosaic of powers, from the Kurds to Turkey to Iran—are united in the mutual aim of defeating ISIS. But as they gain ground, and possibly edge closer to their goal, their brittle union threatens to collapse into a toxic mess of competing interests and discordant perspectives over control of contested territories—a geopolitical brawl that could unfurl, perilously, within a political vacuum. “As ISIS disappears off the map . . . this tolerance that Shia Iranian-supported groups and American-supported groups have shown for each other—there is a danger that will that will go away,” Ilan Goldenberg, a former state and defense official, told the Guardian. “You can see it all going haywire pretty quickly.”
These tensions come amid a dizzying series of military and political moves across the Middle East that threaten to further destabilize an already volatile region. Iran fired its own missiles into ISIS-controlled Syria in retaliation for an attack on Tehran last week. Saudi Arabia said it has captured three Iranian Revolutionary Guards that it accuses of planning a terrorist attack. The U.S. Navy conducted military drills with Qatar over the weekend as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson races to resolve a diplomatic crisis between the small petro-state and its neighbors—a crisis Trump previously inflamed. The president’s deepening ties with Riyadh have emboldened King Salman’s war in Yemen, a blockade of Qatar, and moves against Tehran. Amid the mounting chaos, Trump has dispatched his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to begin peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whom he has endeavored to enlist in a Saudi-backed Sunni alliance that threatens to exacerbate sectarian conflict in the region.
As the U.S. role in the Syrian conflict becomes further enmeshed in this array of complex, combustible issues, there is a discernible lack of leadership coming from the White House. After insisting throughout his campaign that he knew more than America’s “embarrassing” generals, Trump has since turned over nearly all military decisions to regional commanders and outsourced much of his policy-making to Secretary of Defense James Mattis. When he has deigned to preside over military strategy, the results have been contradictory at best, confused at worst. Trump, who spent much of 2013 tweeting that any intervention in Syria would be a disaster, luxuriated in the bipartisan plaudits he earned with his missile strike on the Al Shayrat airbase. But his administration declined to articulate any broader plan when Assad, with the help of Russia, quickly repaired the runway and resumed its aerial campaign. As the crisis metastasizes, it remains unclear where the U.S. has laid down red lines.
Trump, politically inexperienced and presiding over an escalating standoff between Saudi Arabia, Iran, and their proxies in Syria, Qatar, and Yemen, is now having to reconcile his inward-leaning vision of what he thinks America should be with the reality of its international standing. The result is worryingly inconsistent. Forcefully aggravating Iran in a recent trip to Saudi Arabia, and sporadically bombing Syria and Afghanistan, there is rising concern that the president is making impulsive decisions not grounded in any overarching agenda.
This is not only shown is the seeming lack of strategy surrounding Syria, but in the recent, major decision to authorize more troops in Afghanistan—a decision the president did not personally announce but came from a press release via the Pentagon last week. In fact, Trump has barely addressed America’s longest-running war at all, except in another bout of skeptical tweets. “It’s time to get out of Afghanistan,” he wrote in 2012. “We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It’s not in our national interests.” Having handed over much military decision-making power to the Pentagon, it would appear—publicly, at least—that the president is not focused on, or committed to, rolling out the necessary political agenda to bolster the injection of troops with any broader plan to curb Afghanistan’s endemic corruption, address the rocky leadership in the Afghan military, or curtail the proliferation of extremist havens across the border in Pakistan.
As Trump marches further into his presidency, bellicose and beleaguered by the Russian investigation, his administration is being forced to engage with America’s convoluted involvement with the Middle East, on both a military and political level. The White House’s rudderless response could unintentionally lead to wider conflict which, as Trump himself has repeatedly tweeted, is not his desired outcome. For now, however, it seems the president is adhering to another mantra he tweeted, presciently, in 2013: “If we are going to continue to be stupid and go into Syria (watch Russia), as they say in the movies, SHOOT FIRST AND TALK LATER!”
