Donald Trump remains determined to take US troops out of Syria “as rapidly as possible” despite his decision last week to launch missile strikes against government targets, a senior Republican senator has said.



The president reportedly told his generals this month that he wanted the roughly 2,000 US soldiers in Syria to wrap up their counter-Isis mission immediately and return home, in line with his pledge at a rally that the withdrawal was imminent.

Trump was persuaded to wait a few months longer by US commanders, who pointed out that dislodging Isis from its remaining strongholds along the Euphrates valley would not be straightforward.

Within days of Trump’s demand for an abrupt US departure, he was ordering the biggest military operation in Syria to date: a salvo of 105 missiles from American, French and British ships and planes, to punish a chemical weapons attack attributed to Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

Speaking to reporters earlier this week, however, Bob Corker, the chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, said he did not think last weekend’s air strikes would temper the president’s desire to extricate US troops from the conflict.

“The president, I think, is very committed to getting out of Syria as rapidly as possible. I don’t see anything changing that,” Corker said. The Tennessee Republican has clashed repeatedly with Trump and is not seeking re-election this year, but says he still talks to the president frequently on foreign policy.

“I don’t see this administration trying in any way to shape what’s happening on the ground as it relates to the regime,” Corker said. “When we invited Russia in … to help with chemical weapons, we basically turned the country over to Russia. It’s Russia’s and Iran’s [call] to determine what is going to happen in Syria. When you’re not helping shape what’s on the ground and you’re in diplomatic meetings, you’re just talking.”

Corker argued that faced with the burden of stabilising and rebuilding Syria, Russia and Iran would come around to the US point of view that this is not feasible while Assad remains in power.

Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, made a similar argument this week, noting that the Trump and Obama administrations had faced similar dilemmas in Syria and come up with similar policies. The capacity of the US and its allies to finance the reconstruction of Syria would give Washington leverage at the negotiating table that it did not have through boots on the ground, Rice said.

“Without our money, Russia and Iran, neither economic powerhouses, will be left holding the bag on a costly failed state,” she wrote in a New York Times commentary.

As the US has found in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the complex civil wars of foreign countries, once entered, are very hard to quit. There is little reason to believe Syria will break that pattern, however reluctant and instinctively isolationist the American commander-in-chief.

Trump has sought to limit US war aims in Syria to two: resoundingly defeating Isis and deterring the use of chemical weapons. Even with such tightly defined objectives, US withdrawal is likely to be messy.

Both goals, however concrete, could still prove elusive. Even after last week’s air strikes, Trump has left his red lines on chemical weapons blurred. It’s not clear if the US will intervene again if only chlorine is used in an attack, or whether the use of nerve agent would be necessary to trigger further punitive strikes. The Assad regime, which has used chlorine to clear rebel-held pockets, can be expected to test that boundary.

Defeating Isis could also prove to be one of those tasks the US and its allies are perpetually on the brink of achieving. The group’s propaganda talks of a dormant phase, with sleeper cells ready to regenerate whenever the military pressure lets up.

“Based on recent trends of increased attacks and Isis’s apparent push to fully revitalise sleeper cells, we can expect further increases in the group’s activities in the coming months,” Hassan Hassan, a senior fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy in Washington, wrote in the National.

Extremist groups like Isis also mutate in ways that make them hard to destroy outright. In southern Syria, an Isis offshoot called Jaysh Khalid bin al-Waleed (JKW) is on the rise and has not so far been targeted by either the regime or the US-led counter-Isis coalition.

JKW’s ascent is due in part to Trump’s decision to cut off an Obama-era train-and-equip programme for the Free Syrian Army in the south, which is now being squeezed by the regime and the new extremist group. Keeping Isis from regenerating in the north is likely to require sticking with Kurdish allies there. US Central Command has conceded that the Turkish offensive against the Kurds has crippled efforts against Isis strongholds in the mid-Euphrates valley.

Corker said he could envisage a reduced US contingent helping in those areas with “on-the-ground governance”. That could in turn imply indefinite military support for Kurdish forces in the north, who are under pressure from all sides, including Turkey, a Nato ally.

Another alliance could pull the US back in for reasons quite unconnected with its present war aims. An Israel-Iran conflict is simmering, as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) establishes airfields and bases ever closer to Israeli territory. It is hard to imagine the US standing on the sidelines of such a conflict, if it erupts.

Staying out of that fight will be all the harder if Trump goes ahead with his stated intent of taking the US out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran next month. If Tehran responds by stepping up uranium enrichment, the Gulf is likely to slide once more to the brink of a major new war, in which Syria can be expected to be a central battlefield.

Trump has never shied away from contradictions and his Syrian policy is no exception. The president seems bent on a stand-off with Iran over its nuclear programme, at the same time as he seeks to duck a confrontation with Iran in Syria. It is going to be increasingly difficult to to do both at the same time.