When Donald Trump ordered U.S. forces to retreat from their peacekeeping posts defending U.S.-allied Kurdish regions of Syria, allowing the Turkish military to sweep in with an operation to violently "secure" the region, one of the few defenses offered to explain Trump's baffling move was his supposed opposition to U.S. military involvement overseas to begin with.
Those claims, too, are wearing thin: The Wall Street Journal reports that the Trump administration is contemplating sending up to 14,000 additional troops to the Middle East. That is a far, far larger potential deployment than the one protecting the Kurds was, and it's unclear at the moment where precisely they would be stationed.
The purpose, say the Journal's sources, would be to act as defense and deterrence against Iran, aka the nation Trump has been itching to initiate an armed conflict with even as he condemns U.S. policy and deployments aimed at deterring Russian and North Korean aggression. (It also is coincidental with, if not part of, a broader Pentagon effort to get Trump to commit to less piecemeal, seat-of-his-pants deployment strategies, and good luck with that, pals.)
Be that as it may, it again raises the question of just what the purpose of Trump's sudden Kurdish retreat really was. It's not because the administration loathes the idea of having troops in the Middle East. It is because the Turkish president apparently asked him to, which for some reason trumped all other U.S. policy in the region and our alliance with one of the few groups in the Middle East that had still been willing to ally themselves with our own notoriously fickle government.