President Donald Trump expanded America's military presence overseas in 2019, well beyond the size of the footprint he inherited, while both US political parties opposed White House plans to reduce troops in Syria and Afghanistan
WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 02nd January, 2020) President Donald Trump expanded America's military presence overseas in 2019, well beyond the size of the footprint he inherited, while both US political parties opposed White House plans to reduce troops in Syria and Afghanistan.One of Trump's main campaign promises during the 2016 presidential race was ending US involvement in foreign wars. During his State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress in February, Trump reiterated this objective.
"Our brave troops have now been fighting in the middle East for almost 19 years. In Afghanistan and Iraq, nearly 7,000 American heroes have given their lives. More than 52,000 Americans have been badly wounded. We have spent more than $7 trillion in the Middle East," Trump said. "As a candidate for president, I pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars."
Trump also said it was time to give US troops in Syria "a warm welcome home" as the military and its allies work to destroy remnants of the Islamic State terrorist group (banned in Russia).
A month prior, Trump argued that it was time to exit the region now that IS was defeated and claimed that Turkey, Russia, Iran and Syria have been the beneficiaries of the US presence in the region.
"It is now time to bring our troops back home. Stop the ENDLESS WARS!" Trump said via Twitter on January 13.
However, Congress has fought the US president every step of the way, evidenced by a bipartisan Senate resolution passed at the beginning of the year opposing Trump's withdrawal plans. Remarkably, the measure was approved by a majority of Senate Democrats, most of whom favored removing troops from overseas during President Barack Obama's administration.
Democratic voters also overwhelming supported bringing troops home during the Obama administration. Yet this all changed after Trump took office and, in 2019, this shift in worldview became even more pronounced.
In January, a Politico/Morning Consult poll revealed that nearly half of Democratic voters opposed Trump's plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. Ten months later 66 percent of Democrats surveyed by the University of Maryland said they were against US forces leaving Syria.
The Democratic Party's attitudinal shift has also infected the 2020 presidential Primary. All the Democratic candidates had called for bringing American troops home before Trump announced plans to leave Syria and Afghanistan.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, for example, during a debate in September voiced support for bringing troops home. Yet after Trump announced a plan to immediately withdraw from Syria in October, Biden changed his tune, and slammed Senator Elizabeth Warren for proposing a complete drawdown from the Middle East. Biden claimed that "leading the free world requires us to show up, have some skin in the game."
Moreover, Hillary Clinton accused Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of being a Russian spy simply because the lawmaker met with Assad during a visit to Syria in 2017 and has been critical of US military adventurism.
In addition to simply opposing Trump's policies, many Democrats have argued against withdrawing troops from both Syria and Afghanistan based on moral grounds. They fear a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan will reverse gains in areas like women's rights and believe the US military has a duty to remain in Syria to protect the Kurds from Turkish forces.
Foreign policy experts Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald believe it is time for the Democrats to abandon such "nonsense" humanitarian doctrines.
"The Democrats are stuck with their ideological wars... the way they got stuck in Vietnam," Fitzgerald said. "They're just continuing to believe their own propaganda."
However, after taking a closer look at Trump's best-laid withdrawal plans, and considering new deployments to the Persian Gulf, the president's rhetoric has not matched reality.
In January, Special Envoy Zalmay Khalilzad announced that US and Taliban officials reached a framework deal calling for the withdrawal of American troops in exchange for counterterrorism assurances. However, the Trump administration halted talks in September and again in December after Taliban attacks targeting US troops and Bagram airbase.
US Congress has tried to hinder the peace process by proposing legislation that, if passed, would not allow Trump to remove US military forces from Afghanistan without congressional approval.
Gould and Fitzgerald believe the current US occupation of Afghanistan is not unlike Washington's support for the mujahideen during the 1980s in that both are a continuation of Britain's age-old "Forward Policy," which dates back to the 19th century.
"Afghanistan is still the old Great Game. It's easy to take but too expensive to hold," Gould told Sputnik.
Yet Trump despite claims of wanting to end the war in Afghanistan, still plans on leaving a sizeable footprint behind.
Trump after taking office boosted US troop levels in Afghanistan by 3,000. In October of this year, around 2,000 troops came home while media has reported that the administration is close to announcing the withdrawal of another 4,000, which would still leave 8,000 to 9,000 troops on the ground.
But this figure also does not even factor in private contractors. In September, former Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney told Sputnik that the number of American private defense contractors nearly equals the number of US military in-country.
Moreover, the administration has considered expanding the presence of the CIA in Afghanistan to offset the drawdown, the New York Times reported in September.
On October 7, Trump announced that he would withdraw US troops from Syria ahead of a Turkish offensive which sparked outrage and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including self-described progressives, accused the president of betraying America's Kurdish allies.
Just over a week after Trump's announcement, the US House by a 354-60 vote passed a non-binding bipartisan resolution opposing the administration's decision "to end certain United States efforts to prevent Turkish military operations against Syrian Kurdish forces in Northeast Syria."
Shortly after announcing the withdrawal, Trump abruptly decided to leave a few hundred troops in Syria to control the country's oil fields while the Pentagon admitted many of the troops would likely be redeployed to Iraq to fight against IS.
At the NATO summit in early December, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said American troops in northeastern Syria had finished remaneuvering as needed. He also announced that the total number of US troops on the ground would remain around 600.
Trump during the same summit credited US forces with protecting oil from falling back into the hands of terrorists.
However, a couple weeks later, Syrian President Bashar Assad told China's Phoenix Television media outlet that the United States was selling oil to Ankara from the oil fields it captured.
Moscow also accused the United States of looting the country's energy resources and has urged Washington to return control of the oil fields to the Syrian government.
Virginia State Senator Richard Black, who traveled to Syria twice to meet with Assad in 2016 and 2018, has characterized Trump's decision to seize the Syrian oil fields as an "act of piracy."
"It's stealing, plain and simple," Black told Sputnik. "The oil belongs to all the people of Syria. It doesn't belong to the Kurdish minority, and it doesn't belong to American oil companies."
From May through the end of the year, the United States had deployed a total of 14,000 troops to the Persian Gulf due to a series of attacks and security incidents Washington and its allies blamed on Iran.
Tehran, meanwhile, has repeatedly denied the allegations as yet another effort by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel to fabricate a pretext for war.
In addition to forces, the Trump administration also deployed a carrier strike group, B-52 bombers, air defense systems and armed drones.
The United States also established an international naval coalition to monitor the Strait of Hormuz.
As a result of the new deployments to the Gulf, the size of America's military presence abroad has actually grown under Trump.
By the end of 2019, the US military footprint overseas will exceed 200,000 troops, a 10 percent increase over the number of troops Obama left behind, according to figures published by the New York Times based on Pentagon manpower reports.
Trump may have let down his supporters, but he has certainly delivered for the US foreign policy establishment.
"He [Trump] has given the Pentagon everything they wanted and more... I'd say his 'bring the troops home' meme is just camouflage for his real ambitions," Fitzgerald concluded.
