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This is a Cato Special Podcast. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, a military presence

that was never authorized by Congress and has put the U.S. in the

uncomfortable position of allying itself with some fairly unsavory groups.

Cato's John Glazer and Chris Preble explain why getting out of Syria is the right move.

Give me the quick picture of how the United States became embroiled in this multi-sided Syria conflict?

Well, it depends on how far back you want to go.

We'll say 2010, 2011.

Yeah, I mean, so the most recent violence in Syria goes back to the uprising, one of the several Arab

uprisings in 2011, the one in Syria against Bashar Assad's government

was quickly sort of augmented within a few years by the Islamic State, which of course originated in Iraq, but then made use of the poorest border between Iraq and Syria to grow and organize and it really was a sort

of transnational in the sense that it was clearly, you know, crossing both Iraq and Syria.

And I think various stages of US involvement

reflect initially, it was initially driven

by concerns about Vishar Assad's government, him staying in power,

and so the early moves were against that, and then also in response to Assad's use of chemical weapons against some of the

...