Ilan Goldenberg is director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He previously worked at the Pentagon, State Department and Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria is a mistake. But unlike so many of his other ill-considered moves, this one is completely conventional and consistent with the bad choices of past presidents.

For the past 20 years, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East has resembled a yo-yo diet. We declare we have gotten too heavy in the region and need to spend more time on what really matters – China and, to a lesser extent, Russia. We announce we are leaving the region. We start to reduce our military presence and senior leaders spend more of their time on other topics.


This strategic decision is reinforced by politics. The American public is sick of fighting wars in the Middle East that make no sense, cost a lot of money and have nothing to do with their daily lives.

But inevitably we go too far. We diet too heavily too quickly in a way that is not sustainable. We leave ourselves vulnerable, most notably to terrorist attacks but also to other problems that jump to the front page of the news and create a political outcry at home to act. And so we respond by again binging on the Middle East until it’s time to try another extreme diet.

President Barack Obama campaigned on ending the Iraq war and promoted the 2012 “rebalance” to Asia. But withdrawing fully from Iraq and not getting militarily involved in the early years of the Syrian civil war created an opening for the Islamic State. YouTube videos of Americans being brutally slaughtered by ISIS combined with the takeover of Mosul generated irresistible pressure. The United States put troops back on the ground because of the very real security threat, but also due to the overwhelming political pressure at home to respond.

President George W. Bush ran in 2000 on a foreign policy platform of focusing on great power competition and rogue regimes instead of insignificant failed states and terrorism. His administration famously did not hold a Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism in its early months.

The 9/11 attacks changed all of that and reshaped the entire Bush presidency. The United States toppled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and spent the next 8 years mired in Iraq and Afghanistan spending trillions, losing thousands of American troops, and crowding out most other priorities.

Trump has repeated the same pattern. His administration’s National Defense Strategy and National Security Strategy both emphasize the importance of focusing on great power competition – again arguing for less of a focus on the Middle East. And he has been promising to finish ISIS and get out of the Middle East since the 2016 campaign.

But a full withdrawal of the roughly 2,000 American troops stationed in eastern Syria will not end well. It is just the latest American crash diet in the Middle East.

ISIS pockets remain in the eastern parts of Syria and there have already been signs that they are regenerating. They could take advantage of the vacuum created by the American departure and reconstitute.

We could see a return to the days of ISIS terror attacks in Paris or Brussels that have a deeply negative impact on European politics and were part of the reason for the rise of nativist right wing parties and phenomena such as Britain’s calamitous exit from the European Union.

Russia, Iran, and Turkey may try to step into the breach. But it is not clear they have the capability to retake broad swaths of eastern Syria without an ugly fight that creates precisely the type of environment in which ISIS could thrive.

And even if they do manage to contain ISIS, the message the Trump administration has been sending to America’s Arab and Israeli partners that we are all in on countering Iran will be completely undercut.

Our partners in the Middle East are far from perfect (see Khashoggi, Jamal—assassination of), and the United States should not subordinate its interests to theirs. But when they see an unpredictable and unreliable American partner, their behavior just becomes more erratic and aggressive, creating new headaches for us. And who can blame them.

Finally, and most importantly, in the face of all these negative consequences—especially the greater likelihood of high-profile terrorist attacks—is President Trump or the next president just going to sit back? Of course not. Even if it is the strategically right thing to do, it will be politically impossible to stay America’s hand. And so the United States will just go on another future binge in the Middle East.

The biggest challenge for U.S. policy in the Middle East is how to get out of this yo-yo diet and find a healthy consistent way to stay in the region without being overcommitted. How, most urgently, can we develop a sustainable strategy that can address the threats posed by terrorism and failing states that serve as terrorist safe havens? The past 15 years have taught us that having 150,000 U.S. troops on the ground conducting traditional counterinsurgency operations has little political support at home and is too costly. However, simply withdrawing leaves us exposed as evidenced by the U.S. pullout from Iraq in 2011 and the rise of ISIS.

The good news is that the model the United States has pursued in recent years started by the Obama administration in response to ISIS and other security vacuums and continued by the Trump administration seems to be working. The United States provides: (1) a small number of forces that can train local actors; (2) certain types of military support such as logistical enablers or sustained airpower; (3) political weight behind the effort to build international support; and (4) investment in reconstruction and local governance structures. This approach has been more successful than either full U.S.-led counterinsurgency or complete withdrawal.

To make this approach sustainable in the long-term requires a number of changes. The United States must accept that it cannot end the civil wars and security vacuums afflicting the region. But it can do enough to manage and contain the conflicts and keep the worst effects of transnational terrorism and refugee flows from spilling over not only to the Middle East but causing major political dislocations among our closest European allies whose political health is vital to the Western Alliance.

We also need to shift how our force is constructed to recognize that we are going to stick around in the Middle East for the long term but in a cheaper, more manageable way. This means burnout problems caused by repeated deployments that have taxed all branches of the military, but especially Special Operations Forces (SOF), who are the centerpiece of this approach. This can be done by increasing the number of troops who focus on this training and advisory function instead of leaving it almost exclusively with SOF – a decision the Pentagon has made by creating Security Force Assistance Brigades specifically designed for this mission.

Finally, the United States should find ways to reduce the costs of the weapons systems we use to support this approach. For example, we do not need incredibly expensive platforms such as F-22s or F-35s that were built to take on peer competitors like China to whack three guys in a truck driving from Mosul to Raqqa. We can do that by investing in platforms that are less costly to procure and operate and dedicating them to countering what is ultimately a low-tech threat in the Middle East.

And we cannot have so many of our satellites, drones and other platforms that keep an eye on the situation on the ground dedicated to the Middle East at the cost of focusing on Asia and Europe. On that front, we might just have to deal with more risk in the Middle East.

Ultimately, the answer in the Middle East is to stay, but in a smaller more sustainable and cheaper way. We may need to have a few thousand troops in some of the various trouble spots in the region such as northeastern Syria for years to come. Their job will not be to “win” but simply to muddle through. That is OK as long as casualties stay low, costs can be reduced and we can manage this problem while focusing on the greater challenges that the United States faces around the globe.

This approach is far from perfect, but much healthier than the alternative of repeating the pattern of the past 20 years by pulling back too aggressively only to have to return later. Just ask any dietician.