Speaking of interests and threats at RealClearDefense Bonnie Kristian argues that we don’t have much interest in Syria and the best thing we can do is get the heck out of the way there:
The United States’ military intervention in Syria is a dangerous game indeed, creating a real risk of great power conflict with Russia and her allies. If that hazard was not obvious before last week, it is glaring now.
It is also unnecessary, for the United States has no vital national interest at stake in Syria. View the situation without the world police glasses the Washington establishment has worn for decades, and this becomes evident. The conflict in Syria is a monstrous fight, but that does not make it our fight, a point President Trump once realized. “What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long-term conflict?†he asked on Twitter in 2013 with insight that seems to be missing today.
Nor is there a plausible path to anything resembling “victory†for the U.S., even the unlikely best-case scenario—a tidy defeat of ISIS and ouster of Assad achieved without tipping into war with Russia—would come at enormous human and financial cost; produce a new, debt-funded nation-building commitment of massive proportions; and, if recent misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are any guide, settle into a destabilizing morass of power vacuum, proxy fighting, insurgency, and surge.
Turkey and our other NATO allies do have vital interests in Syria and I wish them well in pursuing them. Our present course of action which largely consists of trying to prolong the agonizing Syrian civil war is immoral, illegal, and against our national interest not to mention increasingly risky.
I’ve come to agree with Andrew Basevich’s view that we no longer intervene because it’s in our interets, we intervene to prove we are a country to which limits do not apply. No one is bigger, no one is stronger, no one “stands taller and sees further” as one fool put it.
I wish Bill Clinton hadn’t surrounded himself with people who were so short. It reminded me of Peter the Great and it was embarrassing. While not all short people have chips on their shoulders a lot do.