For once, there is some good news coming out of Syria—the Islamic State group, a terrorist organization that surprised the world with its territorial sweep through the Levant and its medieval system of justice, is on the ropes. Its loss of territory in Eastern Syria, particularly the group’s withdrawal from Raqqa, has largely killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s near-term aspiration to establish an Islamic caliphate—one of the very motivating factors that drew tens of thousands of foreign fighters to Syria to join ISIS’s ranks.
Even this good news, however, has come with complications. Tactical victories against ISIS in Syria over the past several months have opened up a new set of problems for the United States in the region.
The Trump administration’s decision to actively review lethal aid to Syrian Kurdish units on the ground and the extreme disappointment that Kurdish fighters have greeted the move serve as a perfect metaphor for U.S. involvement in the Middle East more generally—that whatever Washington does or doesn’t do in the region is bound to anger someone, somewhere, at some time.
Even on a threat that every power in the region agrees is dire to the security of their own country (ISIS), geopolitics, decades-old historical rivalries, and centuries-old ethnic grievances are so prevalent in the Middle East that any decision the U.S. approves will be seen by the people who live there as a boon or a bust to their own ambitions.
When Washington announced the provision of direct lethal assistance to YPG Kurdish fighters this May, the Turkish government quickly reacted to the move with a combination of anger, depression and scorn. To the Turks, a disagreeable NATO member state that nonetheless permitted the U.S. Air Force to launch anti-ISIS bombing operations from the strategically placed Incirlik air base, sending weapons to the YPG was no different than furnishing weapons to ISIS. Ankara has viewed and continues to view the YPG as indistinguishable from the Kurdish PKK group—classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department—that has fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. Indeed, Turkish officials were livid that the Trump administration would even think about providing military aid to the YPG, let alone actually authorizing it. Reacting to the prospects of a U.S.-YPG military partnership, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan remarked that to do so would essentially mean that the White House chose to side with a terrorist organization over a NATO ally.
In Erdogan’s calculations, a U.S. relationship with the Syrian Kurds would be detrimental to Turkey’s national security and a strategic gain for Kurdish separatists in southeastern Turkey. Ankara made no bones about it: Even if the YPG was effective against ISIS, Kurdish expansion in Syria would not be tolerated. In April 2017, Erdogan demonstrated just how seriously the Turkish government perceived a Syrian Kurdish buffer zone to be by launching air strikes on YPG positions. When Turkish-backed Arab militias in northern Syria—supported at times by Turkish artillery—attacked Kurds in Aleppo province this July, he sent one more signal to the U.S. that Ankara would not hesitate to act if Kurdish fighters attempted to solidly themselves along Turkey’s southern border.
Now that the Pentagon is reportedly adjusting the amount of military assistance it offers to the Syrian Kurds, the tables have turned. The Turks are now applauding the United States for coming around to their position and adopting some wisdom. It was Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu’s turn to express Ankara’s happiness with Washington’s change in approach.
Rivalry, of course, is not unique to the Turks and the Kurds. The Middle East is a region dominated by an “us vs. them” mentality. Examples abound: the U.S. enters a nonproliferation agreement with Iran and Israel; Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates label it as a betrayal or an epic U.S. blunder. Calls from the State Department to eliminate the naval embargo on Qatar are interpreted in Riyadh as pro-Qatar; President Trump’s support for Riyadh’s position is criticized in Doha as a capitulation to the Saudis. Any comment a senior U.S. official makes is scrutinized by Arab leaders and framed as a victory or a defeat, an act of American wisdom or surrender.
For Washington, there is a critical lesson to be learned. In the Middle East, American involvement in the region’s sectarian and inter-state problems does not advance U.S. interests, and it does not result in good feelings and debts of gratitude.
This doesn’t mean the U.S. should ignore what is happening in the region. The U.S., after all, still has national security interests in Middle East, including strengthening productive and constructive counterterrorism relationships with the Arab governments, ensuring that crude oil keeps pumping into the market, and maintaining a U.S. diplomatic presence in the most combustible part of the world.
What it does mean, however, is that U.S. foreign policy officials cannot afford to close its eyes to the costs in bilateral relations that will inevitably arise with every decision a president makes. The machinery in the Beltway owes American taxpayers and those wearing the uniform a foreign policy decision-making process that weighs every conceivable consequence of a proposed course of action before that recommendation is approved by the president and executed by the national security bureaucracy. This is not a new or groundbreaking thought—the decisions made since 9/11 strongly suggest that a cautious common sense too often gets lost in the shuffle to an urge “to do something.”
U.S. foreign policy should instead be guided by a realistic grand strategy that enhances American security, prosperity, and our way of life.
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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities.