A Foreseen Calamity in Syria

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 October 2019

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The presence of U.S. troops in northern Syria was designed to protect America’s allies and keep its enemies there in check. President Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the region quickly, and predictably, unraveled a tenuous peace on the volatile border between Syria and Turkey. His decision handed a gift to four American adversaries: Iran, Russia, the Syrian government and the Islamic State. David E. Sanger of The Times explains why “the worst-case scenario is even worse than you can imagine.” Guest: David E. Sanger, a national security correspondent and a senior writer at The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background coverage:President Trump lashed out in defense of his decision to remove U.S. troops from northeastern Syria in response to rare bipartisan condemnation from Congress.Russian troops have already occupied abandoned American outposts in Syria as Moscow moves to fill the power vacuum.“Don't be a fool! I will call you later.” Read the letter President Trump sent to Turkey’s leader.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is the deal.
0:09.2	Today, the presence of US troops in Northern Syria was designed to protect America's allies
0:16.9	in the Middle East and keep its enemies there in check. David Sanger, unjust how quickly and
0:24.8	predictably, that has all unraveled. It's Thursday, October 17th.
0:34.8	David Sanger, good to actually sit across from you in a studio.
0:38.2	It's good to see you down here. So it's been a little more than a week since President Trump
0:42.6	is on the phone with Turkey's president, Reggie type Erdogan, and says, if you want to conduct
0:48.8	this big military operation that you have been contemplating for a while inside Northern Syria,
0:53.8	I'm not going to stand in your way. In fact, I'm going to clear the way by removing some of the US
0:58.6	troops there. And you have been tracking the aftermath of that phone call. What has been your
1:04.4	biggest takeaway? Well, I guess my biggest takeaway is sometimes the worst case scenario is even
1:11.1	worse than you can imagine. And in this case, there were a series of predictions by generals,
1:19.5	by foreign policy experts, by Middle East experts, by regional studies experts, by diplomats,
1:28.3	by people surrounding the President of the United States, that if he removed the small force that
1:35.6	was sitting on the border between Turkey and Syria, that really bad things would happen.
1:41.5	It's going to destabilize the region once again. It's going to reinvigorate the civil war,
1:45.7	and it's going to give strength to some of the most reactionary and showvinistic forces in the
1:50.1	region. We will see everything from the release of ISIS prisoners to humanitarian catastrophe.
1:55.6	It will damage US relations with Turkey. And it turns out those predictions were almost all right.
2:02.6	All this is playing out exactly as we predicted. This was the predicted fallout after you.
2:07.2	Things in Northern Syria are developing exactly as expected in the sort of worst case scenario for
2:11.3	the US. The only surprise so far has been they've happened much faster than we anticipated.
	...

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