The cease-fire agreement reached with Turkey by Vice President Mike Pence amounts to a near-total victory for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who gains territory, pays little in penalties and appears to have outmaneuvered President Trump.
The best that can be said for the agreement is that it may stop the killing in the Kurdish enclave in northern Syria.
But the cost for Kurds, longtime American allies in the fight against the Islamic State, is severe: Even Pentagon officials were mystified about where tens of thousands of displaced Kurds would go, as they moved south from the Turkey-Syria border as required by the deal — if they agree to go at all.
And the cost to American influence, while hard to quantify, could be frightfully high.
In the 11 days between Trump’s fateful phone call with Erdogan and the trip to Ankara by Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today, the United States has ceded ground in Syria — including American bases — to the Russian-backed Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad.
And it has shaken the faith of American allies that, in a time of stress, Washington will have their back.
“This just looks like a complete cave-in by the United States to everything the Turks demanded,” said Eric Edelman, a former ambassador to Turkey and a senior Defense Department official in the George W. Bush administration. “I don’t see what the Turks gave up.”
In fact, if the sanctions imposed against Turkey by the Trump administration are lifted, as Pence said they now would be, the Turkish leader would pay a far lower price than Russia did for its annexation of Crimea in 2014.
But there are other winners in addition to Erdogan, who has routed the Kurdish groups he views as terrorists who were living in an American protectorate.
Chief among them is President Vladimir Putin of Russia, who gains vast influence in a strategic corner of the Middle East where, until 2015, he had almost none.
Now, he is a player, and already is filling the territorial and political vacuum that Trump left after he agreed to get out of the way of the Turkish invasion of Syria, which a small contingent of American Special Operations forces were there to prevent by their very presence.
Iran was also a winner.
It has long used Syria as a route to send missiles to Hezbollah and flex its muscles across the region.
That, in many ways, is the most perplexing part of the president’s decision to withdraw, because it runs so counter to his “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran’s clerical leaders and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
And Assad, who was barely clinging to power after the Arab Spring in 2011, and whose military facilities Trump bombed in the opening months of his presidency in 2017, has a new lease on life.
The Americans are gone from the one corner of his country they once occupied.
Trump has a different view — no surprise, given the bipartisan critique of his failure to stop Erdogan during their phone conversation, or threaten sanctions before the invasion, rather than after the facts had changed on the ground.
“I’m happy to report tremendous success with respect to Turkey,” Trump told reporters after his vice president and secretary of state announced the deal. “This is an amazing outcome. This is an outcome, regardless of how the press would like to damp it down, this was something they were trying to get for 10 years.”
Trump’s joy may reflect a very different worldview than that of his military, his diplomats or the Republican leaders who say he has damaged America’s reputation and influence.
While his party, and Democrats, accused him of betraying allies and aiding Russia, Trump insisted he was simply making good on a campaign promise to bring troops home from “endless wars.”
Republicans challenged the agreement reached in Ankara.
“The announcement today is being portrayed as a victory. It is far from a victory,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said on the Senate floor Thursday.
“Given the initial details of the cease-fire agreement, the administration must also explain what America’s future role will be in the region, what happens now to the Kurds and why Turkey will face no apparent consequences.”
And Romney noted, “The cease-fire does not change the fact that America has abandoned an ally.”