Did President Trump make a mistake in announcing that he will be withdrawing troops from Syria? Andrew Klavan isn’t so sure that’s the best tactic to take, and he explained why on Thursday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show.”
“Is it in America’s interest for us to risk our sons keeping the peace in some of these places,” he asked. “Here’s my problem: we don’t know who we are about this. And we never do, so what we constantly do is we see a crisis and we send troops in with a mission, and a new president comes in with a completely different idea of who America is, and everything changes. And who gets screwed? The troops get screwed, our allies get screwed, the world gets screwed again and again.”
“Here’s what I think,” Klavan said. “I am kind of an Imperialist. I actually believe that America is a de facto empire that doesn’t take the benefits of empire, which is control of the countries that we have to fight with, and getting some kind of profit out of them. We don’t do that, but we take on all the responsibilities of an empire that are what bring empires down. Which is the military’s responsibility to fight things out. To me, we’re in there. We have an interest. Our interest is that if ISIS spreads again, and it’s not just Isis in Syria, Al-Qaeda is still there if they spread again to take territory, they inspire and invite terrorists to act on their behalf.”
“Do we have a responsibility to keep Iran back? And to keep Russia from using its influence? Russia has a naval base over there I believe, they certainly want influence in that territory. Look, there’s no walking away from history. There just isn’t. I think Israel and Saudi Arabia are more responsible for taking care of Iran than we are, but two-thousand troops? I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like such a big investment. It seems to me like a mistake.”
Video and transcript below:
Is it in America’s interest for us to risk our sons keeping the peace in some of these places? Here’s my problem: we don’t know who we are about this. And we never do, so what we constantly do is we see a crisis and we send troops in with a mission, and a new president comes in with a completely different idea of who America is, and everything changes. And who gets screwed? The troops get screwed, our allies get screwed, the world gets screwed again and again. President G.W. Bush, after 9/11 basically came up with a huge, I think maybe an over-huge, policy where we were going to spread democracy in the Middle East. It wasn’t a senseless policy. The idea was if we spread democracy, terrorism won’t take root and all these terrible versions of Islam won’t get radicalized and we won’t be the villain anymore. So now we’ll have democracies over there.
In some ways, it came close to working. The Arab Spring was a tremendous upsurge in the call for more freedom in the Middle East. G.W. Bush almost pulled it off. What was the problem? The problem was that he was gone. He didn’t do it fast enough. He was gone and a new president came in with an utterly different idea of what America should be.
You know, they’re comparing what Trump is doing, pulling out here, with what Obama did in pulling out of Iraq. That might be a fair comparison tactically, but it’s not a fair comparison philosophically. The two men have utterly different visions of what America should be. What Obama saw in the future, because he always knew what the right side of history was, was that we were just going to become another state in the world nation. He said it himself: it’s not fair for one country to be ahead of everyone in the world, and we apologize because we’ve been arrogant and all this stuff. So that’s why he was pulling out. He was doing the same thing that Trump is doing, but not for the same reason. Trump has a different vision. Trump’s vision is that we live in a great big world of competing nations in which we are the best. Our responsibilities stop at our boundaries.
The New York Times, a former newspaper, attacked him today, or kind of dug at him today, by saying that he’d rather use his troops on the American borders than in Syria. He would! He would, and that’s his philosophy. That’s absolutely right. Most people don’t know where Syria is, they don’t know why we should be in Syria. He won’t pay any political price right now for pulling out. The problem is, the next time these guys turn up, and they will, the next time you turn on your TV or your phone and you see guys dressed in black beheading people who you’re sympathetic toward, whether it’s Yazidi women being sold into slavery or some American guy who’s over there for some reason who gets beheaded. When you start seeing that stuff, what are you going to do? The same people who are saying America first will be saying, “we’ve got to go in there! We’ve got to do something about this.” The same Democrats who said what a wonderful guy Obama was, keeping his promise to pull out, are going to say what a terrible guy Trump was keeping his promise to pull out. We don’t know who we are on the world stage.
Here’s what I think. I am kind of an Imperialist. I actually believe that America is a de facto empire that doesn’t take the benefits of empire, which is control of the countries that we have to fight with, and getting some kind of profit out of them. We don’t do that, but we take on all the responsibilities of empire that are what bring empires down. Which is the military responsibility to fight things out. To me, we’re in there. We have an interest. Our interest is that if ISIS spreads again, and it’s not just Isis in Syria, Al-Qaeda is still there if they spread again to take territory, they inspire and invite terrorists to act on their behalf. We remember people killing people saying they are acting on behalf of Isis. They were inspired by this dream they have of an Islamic Caliphate. It seemed to be coming true. We have a responsibility to that.
Do we have a responsibility to keep Iran back? And to keep Russia from using its influence? Russia has a naval base over there I believe, they certainly want influence in that territory. Look, there’s no walking away from history. There just isn’t. I think Israel and Saudi Arabia are more responsible for taking care of Iran than we are, but two-thousand troops? I don’t know. That doesn’t seem like such a big investment. It seems to me like a mistake.