During a phone call last Friday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it seems, conducted a master class on how to interact with President Donald Trump. Erdoğan said that he could not understand why two thousand American troops were still in Syria, arming and advising Kurdish forces who were battling ISIS. Playing to Trump’s ego, Erdoğan pointed out that Trump, himself, had announced that American forces had defeated ISIS. Playing to Trump’s desire for NATO allies to do more, Erdoğan offered to have Turkey’s powerful Army eliminate any remaining ISIS fighters.

“You know what? It’s yours,” Trump reportedly said, of Syria. “I’m leaving.”

On Wednesday, Trump, dismissing the advice of his civilian and military advisers, tweeted that all two thousand U.S. troops would be withdrawing from Syria. Erdoğan had achieved a goal that had eluded him for years: the halting of American support to Kurdish fighters whom Turkey views as a threat to its own security. The call was a triumph for Erdoğan, who was hailed as a hero in his nation: a leader who got his way with a superpower.

The next day, in response, James Mattis resigned as the Secretary of Defense, sparking fears of more seemingly impulsive national-security decisions by the President. Hours later, the White House announced that it was withdrawing half of the fourteen thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The coverage of Trump’s announcement has rightly focussed on how the President makes his decisions. His pullbacks blithely ignore the view of American intelligence and military officials that both countries still represent a terrorist threat to the United States. A former senior intelligence official told me that the President is uninterested in information that contradicts his own beliefs, such as evidence that North Korea is continuing to build nuclear weapons or that Saudi Arabia’s crown prince sanctioned the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “Well over a hundred thousand people—bright and gifted people—are trying to describe reality as best we know how,” the official, who asked not to be named, said, referring to the combined staffs of U.S. intelligence agencies. “They’re just doing their level best to help the President of the United States make better decisions. And he’s just not interested.”

The twin decisions also mean that Trump is taking a political risk that George W. Bush and Barack Obama carefully avoided after 9/11: being perceived as weak on terrorism. For the past seventeen years, a major terrorist attack on American soil has been seen as a mortal political threat to an American President. “Trump is exposing himself to some brutal recriminations if there’s a domestic ISIS attack months from now,” Michael Crowley, an editor at Politico and a longtime foreign-affairs writer, tweeted last week. In short, Trump is betting that the war on terrorism has been won.

Many Americans continue to see that war through the prism of the ground invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2001 and 2003, American ground troops invaded those countries, respectively, and then struggled to keep the peace. Today, the nature of the American military involvement in Syria and Afghanistan is different. American troops, mostly Special Operations Forces, primarily arm and advise local forces, who do the vast majority of the fighting and the dying. During the past four years in Syria, four Americans have died. The main Kurdish militia that the United States supports, the Syrian Democratic Forces, reported nine hundred and sixty-eight deaths in 2017 alone.

The same pattern has emerged in Afghanistan, but the death toll there is vastly higher. Since 2015, Afghan forces have assumed the primary responsibility for security in the country. During that time, fifty-eight American soldiers have died. In the same period, 28,529 Afghan security forces have been killed—nearly five hundred Afghans died for every American. Trump’s announcement has sparked particular alarm in Afghanistan, because it is likely to derail peace talks that recently began between American diplomats and the Taliban. Trump Administration officials had argued that increased American military pressure would cause the Taliban to agree to a peace settlement. Now the American withdrawal is expected to embolden it. Haroon Mir, an Afghan analyst in Kabul, told the Washington Post that the Taliban would simply wait for the Americans to fully withdraw, and then seize control of the country, as American-backed fighters did when the Soviets withdrew their troops, in 1989. “A U.S. military drawdown will strengthen the Taliban’s position in the peace negotiations and precipitate political chaos in Kabul,” he said. “Ultimately, history will repeat itself.”

An American military officer who has served two tours in Afghanistan warned that Trump’s surprise announcement could lead other countries to withdraw their military advisers. The officer, who asked not to be identified, also predicted mass desertions if the United States stops funding Afghan security forces and soldiers and the police are no longer paid. “It would decimate their forces,” the officer told me. “They would just quit.”

Many Americans, though, agree with Trump that the United States has lost too many lives, and spent far too much treasure, fighting terrorism. To date, forty-five hundred Americans have died in Iraq. Twenty-four hundred have died in Afghanistan. Figures vary widely, but a new report from the Watson Institute at Brown University estimates that the cost of post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan totals nearly six trillion dollars. Trump’s message that the war on terror, essentially, has been won sounds reassuring. It is the latest promise from the we-can-have-it-all candidate and President: America can enjoy security without sacrifice or allies.

Trump’s impulsiveness, his dismissal of fact, and the steadily growing American political divide that he has come to embody suffocate debate. He is asking a legitimate question about the war on terror, but his penchant for distorting facts and making exaggerated claims fuels confusion. Hard questions are not being asked or answered. How large is the terrorist threat from Syria and Afghanistan? Should the less than one per cent of Americans who serve in our volunteer military have to endure seventeen years of war that the rest of the country largely ignores? Is it moral to allow so many more local soldiers to die than Americans and then abandon them?

Trump’s gamble, for now, enthralls his supporters. In March, at a Make America Great Again rally in Ohio, he promised an enthusiastic crowd that he would bring American troops home from Syria. “We’re knocking the hell out of ISIS,” he said, to cheers. “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now.” Trump will see if they can, and face the consequences.