[The National Interest] The naïve assumption of interventionists that U.S.-orchestrated forcible regime change would usher in new, democratic political systems was evident in Iraq, Libya and Syria.The hostile reaction among most members of Washington’s political and media elites to President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria involves several factors. One is simply a knee-jerk (largely partisan) rejection of any policy Trump proposes on any issue, foreign or domestic. Another is policy inertia that makes it difficult to dislodge a military commitment once undertaken. The United States still has military forces in such places as Germany, Japan and South Korea decades after the original rationales disappeared. Such inertia also helps account for the resistance to Trump’s planned troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. Still another element in the case of Syria policy is the lobbying effort by foreign powers (primarily Israel and Saudi Arabia) determined to keep the United States heavily engaged in the Middle East.
There is one other reason for the entrenched resistance to ending the Syria mission: a reluctance to acknowledge the failure of any high-profile U.S. foreign-policy venture, regardless of the accumulating evidence. That unhealthy attitude goes back at least as far as the Vietnam War. The survival (and increasingly likely victory) of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad is a graphic reminder that Washington’s strategy of forcibly ousting targeted secular dictators in the greater Middle East (what George W. Bush described as America’s “freedom agenda”) has been a fiasco. The architects of and cheerleaders for Washington’s regime change crusades stubbornly resist acknowledging how badly their cherished policy has flopped. In all three cases, though, it is clear that U.S. policy made already bad situations much worse.