The president soon relented to these concerns, at least rhetorically, and revised his “now” promise to something that looked more like a decent interval, one that might leave space to negotiate terms with the powers remaining in Syria. “Now” would instead be a “proper pace,” allowing for continuing the ISIS fight and “doing all else that is prudent and necessary,” in the president’s words. That, The New York Times reported, meant about four months.

Dominic Tierney: The U.S. isn’t really leaving Syria and Afghanistan

America’s Syria policy has been a confusing mess ever since the revolution broke out in 2011. Barack Obama retreated from enforcing his so-called red line against the use of chemical weapons when Bashar al-Assad crossed it in 2013, but he later bombed ISIS targets in the country.

It fell to Trump, who was even more blunt than Obama in his skepticism of American involvement in the Middle East, to intervene with air strikes against Assad’s forces twice, retaliating against the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons.

All the while, though, the primary American mission in Syria was to defeat ISIS, and with declarations that the group had been crushed and some 98 percent of its territory retaken, the question naturally arose what U.S. troops were still doing there.

If anything, their mission looked set to expand. In September, National-Security Adviser John Bolton told reporters that the United States wasn’t leaving Syria “as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.” Trump advisers such as James Jeffrey, the special representative for Syria engagement, and Brett McGurk, then the special envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, kept reinforcing the message into December: As long as Iran was in Syria—which seemed an indefinite timeline, given the entrenched presence there of Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah and how much Iran invested in keeping Assad in power even as its own economy suffered—the United States would be there to confront it.

Except that no one convinced the president to sign on. About a week after McGurk told reporters at the State Department that it would “obviously” be “reckless if we were just to say, ‘Well, the physical caliphate is defeated, so we can just leave now,’” the president posted a video to his Twitter feed saying pretty much that. McGurk resigned soon after Mattis did.

The ensuing outcry forced the president to revise his announcement, again on Twitter. His advisers were dispatched to briefing calls and to Middle East reassurance tours, where they claimed that they were saying nothing inconsistent with the president’s own changing statements. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s effort to manage the dissonance was to say the goal hadn’t really changed, just the tactics being used to pursue it. He continued to insist that the United States aimed to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria. If there was no obvious way for the United States to do this with 2,000 troops, it would eventually have to try with none.