Of the President’s decision in Syria, Pat Buchanan writes at his blog (abridged): President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria. Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences. A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to […]

Doug Bandow explains at The American Conservative why President Trump should ignore the “carping,” of the foreign policy establishment, and trust his instincts about getting America out of Syria. Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, suggests leaders “Consider Uncle Sam’s disastrous record in foreign civil wars.” That disastrous record should be enough evidence […]

Pat Buchanan strikes hard at the neocon branch of the Republican Party in a recent piece published on LewRockwell.com. Pat hits out at critics of President Trump’s decision to pull back from Syria, namely Lindsey Graham, Liz Cheney, Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, and Mitt Romney. Graham and Romney are old school neocons, while Cheney, Rubio, […]

Walter Russell Mead says the Middle East’s “economic and social conflicts,” destabilize the region. Despite America’s power, says Mead, the U.S. can’t resolve the region’s problems. He writes (abridged): Iraq isn’t the only country in the region that is trapped in a cycle of dysfunctional governance and blocked development. The forces that produced the Arab […]

Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi is the leader of Daesh, aka ISIS. He is a mysterious figure, having rarely been seen in public. Armies fighting in Syria have claimed his death a number of times, only to be proven wrong. I wrote of two of these rumor, once in 2014, and again in 2017. Now, new video […]

Last week, Kurdish-led forces in Syria defeated ISIS in a battle over the terrorist organization’s last stronghold. The victory ends ISIS’s territorial hold, but the battle is ongoing as remnants of the group’s army faces Iranian backed militias in the country’s south. Sune Engel Rasmussen reports for The Wall Street Journal: The SDF released videos […]

At The Federalist, Daniel DePetris explains that “the usual suspects,” and the “national security blob,” are fighting the attempt by President Trump to exit Syria. DePetris writes that further involvement in Syria is “unnecessary, costly, and dangerous for the United States since it prevents us from focusing on higher priorities.” He writes (abridged): At the […]

At The American Conservative, Scott Ritter defends President Trump’s criticism of the American intelligence community’s controversial Threat Assessment Report. The report contradicted the policies of the president, and opened him up for jibes from his opponents, but Ritter reminds readers that the intelligence community has a checkered history, and that presidents who have maintained their […]

David C. Hendrickson, a professor of political science at Colorado College and the author of Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition, explain in The American Conservative that it will be difficult for President Trump to fulfill his promise to leave Syria while maintaining pressure on the Iranian regime. He writes (abridged): Lost in […]