Less than three months since he ordered the full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, he has told members of Congress that he is “100%” in favor of a continued military presence there:

Two months after declaring all U.S. troops are leaving Syria, President Donald Trump wrote to members of Congress that he now agrees “100%” with keeping a military presence in Syria. A bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives wrote to Trump on Feb. 22, applauding his decision to keep a small residual force in Syria.

Even when Trump might initially make a defensible foreign policy decision, he is so malleable, unprincipled, and easily swayed by his hawkish advisers that he always backtracks and gives in to much or all of what they want. I didn’t expect that Trump’s announced withdrawal from Syria would be complete, and I assumed that the Iran hawks in the administration would prevail on him to keep some token force there. As I wrote in December:

It won’t take much for the president’s arbitrary whims to change again, and he is easily influenced by his hawkish advisers. I assume that the withdrawal still won’t happen because it would mean breaking with the GOP’s Iran hawks on a major issue, and so far he has done whatever they wanted.

In the end, Mattis resigned for nothing, and Bolton managed to get most of what he wanted on Syria policy while seeing off one of his internal rivals. Inasmuch as Mattis’ exit frees Bolton to wield more influence in the administration, the Syrian “withdrawal”-that-wasn’t could end up paving the way to much worse and more aggressive policies down the road. The latest Syria episode is another useful reminder that Trump can’t be trusted to follow through on what he says he will do, and advocates of restraint and non-intervention should be extremely wary of giving the president credit for policies that he hasn’t actually carried out yet.

The residual force that the U.S. is keeping in Syria won’t be able to achieve much of anything, but it will put them at unnecessary risk in an ongoing illegal mission in a country where they should never have been sent. Congress never voted to send U.S. forces into Syria, the mission there has never been seriously debated, and we have no business being there. Withdrawing from Syria should have been a lay-up for Trump, and he has managed to botch even that.