President Donald Trump’s decision to pull U.S. commandos out of northern Syria ahead of Turkey's incursion will further destabilize the Middle East and empower Russia, his former National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, warned Thursday.

“Our forces there served as a useful means of preventing what we see now, which is a Turkish-Kurdish civil war that has profound political as well as humanitarian consequences,” the retired Army lieutenant general said at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.


“What we have in the Middle East right now is the potential for four simultaneous crises,” McMaster told the think tank, where he is chairman of the board of advisers at the Center on Military and Political Power.