An example of the way in which domestic factional battles in the Trump era weaken the US as a state is the on/off withdrawal from Syria in 2019. Trump touched off the crisis on 3 October with a tweet greenlighting the Turkish invasion of northern Syria, announcing the immediate pull out of US troops. The timing of the withdrawal was a surprise and its implementation shambolic, maximising the likelihood of the Syrian Kurds being ethnically cleansed by Turkish-led forces. Yet the decision to withdrawal US troops was more realistic than it was given credit for at the time because the US was a small and vulnerable player in north-east Syria at the mercy of decisions taken by leaders in Ankara, Moscow, Tehran, and Damascus, not to mention the Syrian Kurds themselves. Proponents of keeping US troops in Syria argued that this was necessary to protect the Kurds, deter the Turks, weaken Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and curb Iranian influence. These may or may not be good things for the US to do, but those advocating them never admitted that to carry out such an ambitious agenda successfully would require a large field US army with tens of thousands of soldiers, as in Iraq in 2003, or, at the very least, a prolonged air campaign in support of dubious jihadi allies on the ground, as in Libya in 2011.
Looked at from the point of view of cold-hearted American self-interest, a US retreat from Syria after the final defeat of Isis in early 2019 was justifiable. But it was announced and carried through with grotesque ineptitude so that the Syrian Kurds, who had lost 11,000 fighting Isis in alliance with the US, found that they were being left to the mercy of Syrian Arab jihadis who acted as the vanguard for the Turkish advance. Soon there were 132,000 refugees on the roads, while those who tried to keep their homes were menaced on every side. And even the US did not make a clean break with what Trump himself had called the Syrian mess. Opposition from the Pentagon, State Department, Republican senators, and media got the decision partially reversed. Trump ordered 500 US troops with armoured vehicles to remain in or to re-enter Syria to occupy the Deir Ezzor oil fields. They did so ostensibly to stop Isis taking them over, though there is no reason to suppose this would happen, and in practice to prevent Assad seizing them back. This weird policy is to be carried out with the US in de facto alliance with the Syrian Kurdish fighters of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), who are themselves newly dependent on Syrian government and Russian goodwill to defend them from the Turks. Through such comic opera manoeuvres, the US had ended up with the worst of all possible worlds, having betrayed the Kurds by the manner of its withdrawal, but still failing to extract itself from the Syrian morass. Two months after Trump had announced that US troops would be leaving north-east Syria, the US commander in the Middle East, General Kenneth McKenzie, was quoted as saying: “I don’t have an end date [for his troops’ departure].”
Debate about how far the Syrian crisis affected US interests and what should be the degree of US engagement there long predates the Trump presidency: Obama and Trump both deciding, in their very different ways, that the risks were high and US interests low. But neither Obama nor Trump had any doubts about the importance of Saudi Arabia to the US, even though Obama had chilly relations with its rulers and Trump warmly embraced them. It is this that makes the Iranian/Houthi attack on the Abqaiq and Khurais oil facilities, and the lack of a US military response, such a political and military turning point.
The success of the Iranian air strikes in hitting such valuable and supposedly well-defended targets gave disconcerting proof to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf oil states that their US security guarantee is not what it used to be. They are vulnerable to new generations of missiles and drones and vast sums spent by them on air defence systems, mostly sold by US companies, had failed to provide the promised protection. The Pentagon, with an annual budget of $750 billion, and the intelligence services, with a budget of $85 billion, knew nothing about the attacks until they were over. Saudi Arabia was due to spend $58 billion on its military in 2019, but drones costing tens of thousands of dollars had inflicted devastating damage.
If the US and Saudi Arabia are hesitant today to retaliate against Iran, it is because they know, contrary to what they might have believed a year ago, that such a counter-attack might not be the cost-free exercise it once was. Iran has become a “drone superpower” and oil and gas production facilities, along with desalination plants producing much of the fresh water in Saudi Arabia, provide conveniently concentrated high-value targets for precision guided drones and small missiles.
In other words, the military playing field will be a lot more level in any future conflict between a country boasting a sophisticated air force and air defence system and one that lacks them. The trump card for the US, NATO powers, and Israel has hitherto been their overwhelming superiority in airpower over any likely enemy. In the first Gulf War in 1991, the US air force was able to destroy much of the Iraqi infrastructure without fear of retaliation. But this long-standing calculus has been fatally up-ended because drones allow almost anybody to be a player on the cheap when it comes to air strikes.
Anthony Cordesman, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, succinctly sums up the importance of this change, writing that “the strikes on Saudi Arabia provide a clear strategic warning that the US era of air supremacy in the Gulf, and the near US monopoly on precision strike capability, is rapidly fading.” He explains that a new generation of drones, cruise missiles, and precision strike ballistic missiles are entering the Iranian inventories and have begun to spread to the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
These changes in the military balance are significant, but so too are their political counterparts. As events in the second half of 2019 demonstrated, the US is no longer willing to or capable of defending a small temporary ally, like the Syrian Kurds, or big permanent ones like Saudi Arabia. Trump’s strain of American nationalism is genuinely isolationist in the sense of suspecting foreign alliances to be costly entanglements. His inaction after Abqaiq should not have been a surprise because it had been telegraphed ahead over the summer as Iran engaged in pinprick attacks on Saudi Arabia, UAE, and their allies. Over the course of a few months, Iran placed limpet mines on an oil tanker in UAE waters, hijacked a UK flagged ship in retaliation for the UK seizing one of its vessels, and most tellingly of all, fired a surface-to-air missile to shoot down a $130 million US surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz on 20 June. It is fair to assume that the Iranians orchestrated all these attacks, calculating carefully what they could get away with without provoking massive retaliation or an all-out war. Transparent though their responsibility was, they sought to retain deniability and avoided killing anybody, the intention being to send a warning message rather to inflict maximum damage. They got their calculations wrong in the end, but it remains unclear how the US would respond to a resumption of attacks on US allies as opposed to US troops or embassies. In the wake of the Soleimani assassination, Iran might be less aggressive, but in the long term this type of irregular warfare is Iran’s main counter to the US policy of “maximum pressure” on Iran—effectively a tight economic siege—and will not be abandoned while sanctions continue.
21 November 2019
America’s first act in the war on Iraq was an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein. In the early hours of the morning of 20 March 2003, forty cruise missiles were launched and bunker-buster bombs dropped on a compound on the outskirts of Baghdad where US intelligence wrongly believed him to be staying. Three years later a US air strike succeeded in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, the organisation that would become Isis. Neither Saddam’s survival nor al-Zarqawi’s death had much impact on the course of events, but the White House remained convinced that eliminating leaders and other high-value targets was a war-winning strategy. There is little evidence to support this theory; but still, the assassination of demonic opponents is clearly good politics, allowing American presidents to impress voters with decisive action amid what have been messy, inconclusive wars.
The death