Opinion | Trump’s Gut, and the Gutting of American Credibility

LONDON — President Trump has given a master class in the unhappy link between his “gut” and the gutting of American credibility. His flippancy over the fate of the Kurds in northern Syria has been criminal in its disregard for human life, America’s friends and American interests. From Trump’s sort-of green light to Turkey’s assault on northern Syria, to his threat to “totally destroy and obliterate” the Turkish economy, to his Chamberlain-like dismissal of Kurds’ fate (“We are 7,000 miles away!”), he has played the clown in chief.

America’s word is worth less today than at any time since 1945. Trust is not an easily recoverable commodity. Solemn accords entered into by the United States, like the Iran nuclear deal, are ripped up — and replaced by empty threats. Friends like the Kurds who have shed blood to inflict great harm on the Islamic State are betrayed. Day after day a president for whom facts don’t matter dismantles the idea of truth.

The postwar American-led order was based on treaty undertakings convincing to allies. That’s dead. What will take its place is unclear. Under President Trump “foreign policy” has become an oxymoron. Foreign theater has replaced it — and people die on the bloody stage of Trump’s whims.

Europeans now shrug when they don’t laugh. The consensus is the United States has lost it. There’s nobody home. A child-president in the Oval Office writes a letter to the Turkish leader who appropriately tosses it in the garbage. That’s where we are this week. Next week is anybody’s guess. Trump and uncertainty are synonymous. A rough compass indicates presidential derangement is pointing north.

Where are we in the Middle East? The short answer is nowhere good. Hard-liners in Iran are exultant, having attacked major Saudi oil facilities with scarcely a whimper from the Saudis or Trump. Moderate Iranian reformists are in retreat. Bashar al-Assad, the gasman-henchman of Vladimir Putin, is ascendant, moving back into northern Syria with Russian help.

Even the Saudis have begun questioning Trump in the light of his yo-yoing behavior toward President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and the resultant mayhem that saw ISIS prisoners walk free. A recent report from Patrick Wintour in The Guardian quoted the Saudi ambassador to Britain calling Trump a “tweet monster” and saying the abrupt American troop withdrawal from northern Syria “does not give one incredible confidence.”

There are mutterings about Trump in Israel, too: The Kurds are about the best Middle Eastern friends Israel has. Jared Kushner’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan was always a sick joke. Turkey continues its freelance strategic drift out of the European orbit and NATO responsibilities toward Putin. Those mortal enemies (at least supposedly), Iran and Saudi Arabia, are putting out feelers to each other, having concluded that Trump is all hat and no cattle.

Besides, Trump is several thousand miles away.

A Middle East in which strongmen are reinforced, reform is stillborn, Islamist radicalism thrives, and pluralism is a pipe dream hardens under a president who doesn’t know a moral principle from a Big Mac. Well, you might say, what else is new? American credibility began to erode when Barack Obama abandoned Syria and his red line there.

Sure, but this Middle East demeans the sacrifice of the thousands of Americans who died for something better, and makes a nonsense of the trillions of American dollars spent to that end. Trump is not cutting losses; he’s perpetuating them. Iran could not have asked for American chaos more conducive to its interests. Nor could Putin, al-Assad and Erdogan.

The Kurds, with their fledgling democratic institutions and sympathy for the West, have offered something more hopeful in this bleak landscape. But few rules in history are as ironclad as KAGS: Kurds always get shafted. Being a minority in the Middle East is never fun. Being a minority in Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria is as bad as it gets.

Promised a state after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in World War I, the Kurds emerged with nothing. Turkey, Iran and Iraq have long made common cause in quashing Kurdish national aspirations, no matter what. Turkey has proved particularly assiduous in this regard, as any visitor to Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey knows. The prominent Kurdish human rights lawyer I spoke to there in 2015, Tahir Elci, was killed a few weeks after I interviewed him. In 1991, the United States urged the Kurds of Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein, only to allow many to be slaughtered.

Still, Trump’s abandonment of the Kurdish forces that died by the thousands fighting the Raqqa ISIS caliphate in northern Syria ranks high for sheer perfidy. Trump folded to Turkey’s Kurd Derangement Syndrome. Even the plankton known as the Republican Party were so appalled that some lawmakers developed sufficient backbone to protest.

It’s the Age of Impunity, in the phrase of David Miliband, the chief executive of the International Rescue Committee and a former British foreign secretary. Still, I have a hunch some dim tide of reprisal will return to haunt Trump for his recklessness.

“Foreign policy is what I’ll be remembered for,” Trump has said. Damn right.

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