Eli Lake, Columnist

How Erdogan Backed Trump Into a Corner on Syria

The U.S. president has essentially conceded that he has no power to deter Turkish aggression against the Kurds.

October 7, 2019 at 7:00 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

Who’s in charge here?
Photographer: TATYANA ZENKOVICH/AFP

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President Donald Trump, according to his Twitter feed, has made a deliberate policy decision to cut America’s losses and withdraw U.S. troops from Syria. “The endless and ridiculous wars are ENDING!” he tweeted Monday. “We will be focused on the big picture, knowing we can always go back & BLAST!”

Like a lot of the president’s tweets, that’s not entirely accurate. The new U.S. posture in northeastern Syria is a response to the obduracy of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, U.S. officials tell me, who was unmoved by the pleading and pressure of U.S. diplomats and generals to forgo a planned invasion.