All bewail the commander-in-chief.

It is a mug’s game, trying to identify one presidential role for which Donald Trump is least fit and at which he has most spectacularly failed.

So much to pick from across the spectrum of malignant incompetence.

But as the top military authority in the land despite repeatedly ducking conscripted service, with America the top military force on the planet, Trump’s wilful ignorance about strategy and consequences has plunged a very hot corner of the world into dire peril.

Withdrawing U.S. troops from northern Syria is a betrayal of crucial Kurdish allies almost beyond measure, if predictable. Washington has a long history of stiffing Kurds and other fighting factions that have done pretty much all the heavy lifting in widespread conflicts.

In displacing the Islamic State over the course of protracted combat in Syria and Iraq — routing the geographic Caliphate — Kurds died so that Americans would not have to. Some 11,000 Kurdish fighters were killed shouldering the bulk of ground operations, compared to about 100 of the U.S. special forces embedded with them for tactical support, mentoring, training and pinpoint strikes.

But Trump, with his scattershot attention span, is sick of complicated foreign “endless wars,” with confirmation on Sunday that a thousand troops would be withdrawn from the “safe zone” that Turkey entered last Wednesday, three days after the president ordered the bug-out of a smaller attachment of U.S. forces from the security zone. Even as the Pentagon announced deployment of an additional 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia to counter security crises created by Iran — to deter aggression, to defend, and to protect American interests. The Saudis, of course, wield tremendous power and spend gazillions on U.S.-made American weaponry, top weapons buyer with a $350-billion bill-owing over a 10-year period, extending to 2027. Thus, the Kingdom can get away with — literally — murder.

Keeping up with events on the ground as Turkey seeks to carve out a purported buffer zone against the Syrian Democratic Forces — the Kurdish-led coalition that had been backed up by U.S. forces — is near impossible from a distance, with reliance on humanitarian organizations, civilian SOS calls and the tiny troupe of intrepid foreign correspondents striving to report from midst of it. Artillery rounds on Saturday landed a few hundred yards from a U.S. Special Operations outpost, their presence well-known to Turkey.

A NATO member, Turkey — simultaneously facing both the West and the East — is by definition an American ally. But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an autocrat unrestrained by any geopolitical leashes, certainly not empty threat comeuppance from Washington. And Trump has an affinity for autocrats, envious of their unilateral flex.

Journalists reported Sunday that northern Syria was collapsing into chaos while Kurdish authorities said upwards of 800 detainees — wives and children of Islamic State fighters — had escaped from a camp in Ain Issa after it came under attack from Turkish shelling. ISIL inmates “attacked the camp guard and opened the gates” while Kurdish forces were under fire, the authorities said.

It’s well-known that Islamic State sleeper cells continue to operate in the region, emboldened now by the disarray created by Turkey’s breech of the border, an incursion green-lit by Trump, despite furious opposition from within his most stalwart Republican enablers, the Department of Defense, and the State Department. “Impulsive,” “short-sighted” and “irresponsible,” as Senator Lindsey Graham angrily condemned Trump’s abrupt shift away from the loyal Kurds.

The SDF has been guarding some 20 small prisons that hold about 10,000 detainees accused of being Islamic State members, including some of its most hardcore fighters. Kurds also control and operate several camps that contain 70,000 Islamic State family members.

The Kurds have long demanded these detainees be repatriated whence they came, including Canada. There have been few takers. The U.S. last week scooped precisely two high value detainees. As Turkish forces continue encroaching — penetrating far deeper, the pummeling offensive would suggest, than the 32-kilometre “security zone” Ankara professed to be seeking — Kurdish forces have been redeployed to confront invading Turks, leaving those camps feebly defended if not outright abandoned.

The only finger Trump lifted to constrain Turkey, as tens of thousands of civilians flee the area, has been a threat to impose severe economic sanctions against Ankara if, you know, Erdogan goes too far. In a typically deranged tweet, the president vowed: “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (as I’ve done before).”

As if Erdogan has ever trembled before the helter-skelter wrath of Washington.

“Let them have their borders,” Trump said Sunday. “But I don’t think our soldiers should be there for the next 50 years, guarding a border between Turkey and Syria when we can’t guard our own borders at home.”

Thereby preposterously conflating a made-up domestic crisis with a genuine foreign crisis that he’s all but engineered.

Turkey, with the second-largest military in NATO, loathes the restless Kurds. It has tried, for decades, to crush the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant group that has regularly launched attacks across the country in the name of Kurdish nationalism. For Erdogan, who sees the SDF as an extension of the terrorist PPK and an existential threat to Turkey, pulverizing the Syrian coalition takes precedence over annihilating the Islamic State, even if the outcome could be resurrecting the Islamic State.

At the moment, Kurds are also politically handy to deflect from Turkey’s economic travails. Erdogan has threatened to dump at least a million Syrian refugees on territory the Kurds had held — and the rest of Europe — returning them to a conflict zone in violation of international law. Further, the purported “safe zone” flooding is viewed by many as s thin façade for ethnic cleansing of Kurds.

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So, a one-two reckless campaign: Slaughtering Kurds and breathing life back into the dormant Islamic State, thousands of jihadists potentially returning to the battlefield. Also alarming is the scenario — bruited about on the Sunday morning political talk shows — of the isolated SDF turning to Russia for protection, retreating American forces trapped between Syrian Russian troops moving north and Turkish troops moving south. Indeed, in another alarming development, shunned U.S.-allied Kurds announced late Sunday they’ve reached a deal that would allow forces loyal to Russia and the Iranian-backed Syrian government to return to areas the Kurds have controlled for the past seven years, deepening the disarray.

What’s in it for the Russians, apart from antagonizing Washington? Ready access to oilfields in Kurdish territory.

All because an American president under the shadow of impeachment, whose had a bellyful of foreign wars he’s too witless to comprehend, is content to watch the world burn.

Striking a match to it, like the wanton arsonist that he is.

Rosie DiManno is a columnist based in Toronto covering sports and current affairs. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno

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