have to let them fight like two kids.
Then you pull them apart.”
Trump and Erdoğan share a crude
egotism and a paranoia about deep states
trying to undo them, but Erdoğan deftly
gamed Trump. On October 9th, Trump
sent a remarkably puerile letter to the
Turkish leader, warning him not to go
too far. History, he wrote, “will look
upon you forever as the devil if good
things don’t happen.” He added, “Don’t
be a fool!” Erdoğan reportedly tossed
the letter into the trash. The same day,
he launched Operation Peace Spring,
to destroy the S.D.F.
Erdoğan’s perfidy dates back years.
His government allowed thousands of
jihadis to cross the Turkish border and
join the caliphate. With Turkey as a part-
ner, the Obama Administration spent
millions of dollars training and equip-
ping Syrian Arabs to fight the jihadis;
those militias failed. Obama turned to
the Kurds as a last option, in 2014. Over
time, two thousand Special Forces sol-THENEWYORKER, OCTOBER 28, 2019 15
COMMENT
RETREAT
M
uch of the world watched aghast,
last week, as President Donald
Trump shattered any notion of an in-
formed or sane U.S. foreign policy. He
paved the way for President Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, of Turkey, to invade Syria, aban-
doning America’s Kurdish partners in
the Syrian Democratic Forces, who had
eliminated the Islamic State’s caliphate
in March, after five years of gruelling
warfare. (The S.D.F. lost eleven thou-
sand soldiers; the U.S. lost six.) Erdoğan
views Kurds—the world’s largest ethnic
group without a state—as terrorists, be-
cause of a Kurdish separatist campaign
in Turkey. After a phone call with Er-
doğan, Trump ordered the withdrawal
of a thousand U.S. Special Forces sol-
diers, who had been backing the S.D.F.,
even though ISIS sleeper cells are still
waging an insurgency in Syria and Iraq.
The retreat was so abrupt that the U.S.
had to bomb a depot full of arms that
it didn’t have time to remove.
Trump’s ignorance of the world has
never been so blatant—or produced such
bipartisan opposition. The House of
Representatives voted 354–60 to con-
demn the pullout. On the Senate floor,
Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, re-
buked the President for leaving “a blood-
stain on the annals of American his-
tory.” Yet Trump seemed delighted with
his decision to let the Turks and the
Kurds—both U.S. allies—fight it out.
“It was unconventional, what I did,” he
told the crowd at a campaign rally in
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDADallas, on Thursday. “Sometimes you
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
diers were deployed in Syria. Erdoğan
has long pressed Trump to remove them.
Last December, he persuaded him to do
it, even though the caliphate had not yet
been defeated. The Pentagon called for
leaving half the soldiers in place, and
prevailed. To forestall an invasion, the
U.S. agreed to get the S.D.F. to with-
draw up to nine miles from the Turkish
border. In August, U.S. troops super-
vised as the Kurds destroyed their own
military posts along a sixty-mile stretch
of the border; meanwhile, Turkey de-
ployed more troops and matériel. “The
real salt in the wound,” a U.S. official
said last week, is that “we told the S.D.F.
not to worry. ” He went on, “Turkey was
building up for an invasion the whole
time. We made it easier for them.”
Last Thursday, Vice-President Mike
Pence, after a hastily arranged trip to An-
kara, announced a five-day ceasefire. The
terms of the agreement give Erdoğan ex-
actly what he wanted: Turkey claims that
the S.D.F. has to retreat twenty miles
along three hundred miles of the Turk-
ish border, in order to create a buffer—a
“safe zone”—for Turkey. Trump took a
kind of perverse credit for the ceasefire.
“What Turkey is getting now is they’re
not going to have to kill millions of peo-
ple,” he said. Where exactly the Kurds
would go—or whether Turkish troops
would stay—remained unclear.
The deal immediately appeared ten-
uous. The Turkish foreign minister said
that Turkey had agreed only to a “pause”—
not a ceasefire—“for the terrorists to
leave.” General Mazloum Kobani Abdi,
the S.D.F. commander, said in an
interview that his troops would begin to