Read: Baghdadi’s final humiliation

Even though American troops have in the past few weeks retreated from certain positions in northeastern Syria, the president detailed how the arm of the U.S. military was still long enough to reach into perilous ungoverned space elsewhere in the country and execute a highly successful operation with the support of a bizarre, transitory array of allies and adversaries alike. “I want to thank the nations of Russia, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq,” said Trump, in a statement likely uttered by no previous American president ever.

Even though he’s effectively ditched the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, who lost roughly 11,000 of their fighters in the battle against ISIS in Syria, the president noted that the Syrian Kurds had provided the U.S. with “some information that turned out to be helpful” in taking out Baghdadi. (The SDF’s commander has suggested this was an understatement, stating that the raid was the result of five months of intelligence cooperation between his militia and the Americans.)

Even though Russian and Turkish forces, who place much less of a priority on combatting the Islamic State than the United States and its allies, have rushed into the void left by American troops in northeastern Syria, Trump observed that the United States had cooperated with Russia in advance to allow American Special Forces to fly over “Russia-held areas” on their way to Baghdadi without having to inform Moscow of the precise nature of the mission, and with Turkey, which “knew we were going in,” so that its forces didn’t “start shooting” in the midst of the operation.

The Donald Trump who addressed the nation today was a supremely confident commander in chief, not the president besieged by impeachment proceedings one might have expected. He boasted of how he’d predicted the 9/11 attacks and disastrous Iraq War, and reveled in divulging the gory details of the raid.

“We are out” of the business of keeping the peace between dueling factions in Syria and Turkey, Trump crowed, going so far as to declare that exposing his Kurdish partners to slaughter for several days made it “much easier” to deal with them and that he was glad to help the Turks carve out a “safe zone” by attacking and forcibly removing Kurdish elements from northern Syria. “I want our soldiers home.”

“We are 8,000 miles away” from Syria, Trump continued, tellingly exaggerating the distance. “Russia is right there, Turkey is right there. Syria is there … Iran is right there. Iraq is right there. They all hate ISIS.” He also called out European nations as a “tremendous disappointment” for their unwillingness to take in ISIS prisoners from their countries. “They can walk back [to Europe]. They can’t walk to our country. We have lots of water in between our country and them.”