Eli Lake, Columnist

Trump Courts Catastrophe in Syria

Islamic State is not defeated, and a U.S. withdrawal would be an abandonment of Kurdish allies.

December 19, 2018 at 6:35 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.

Does the U.S. really want to abandon them?
Photographer: Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images

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President Donald Trump is on the verge of making a spectacularly bad decision. The White House is soon expected to announce its plans to remove the 2,000 U.S. troops now serving in northeastern Syria.

This is not totally unexpected. Trump ran for president in part on the idea of smashing the Islamic State, but he also said there was no point in trying to stabilize the country after the terrorists were defeated. Since getting elected, he has regularly signaled that its time for U.S. forces to leave Syria. In March he promised the U.S. would be getting out of Syria “like, very soon.” In June, he floated a plan for an all-Arab army to replace the U.S. in a meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah.