This is the season of light and hope. We dared to dream that we were past the worst. The pardoning of Hunter Biden looked like the last act of the senile and corrupt President Joe Biden. The peevish race-baiting of perma-President Barack Obama is confounded, the Democrats’ antidemocratic schemes hoist by their own petard. President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees vary by ideology, but all of them want to fix a broken federal bureaucracy and regain the trust of the public.
The “Trump effect” has been at work since the night of Nov. 5. In the month after the November elections, investors pumped more than $140 billion into U.S. equity funds, the largest inflow in any month since 2000. The herd of independent-minded commentators has suddenly decided it knew all along that the 2016 election result was a watershed. You are no longer a conspiracist if you say that COVID-19 was manmade in Wuhan and that federal agencies funded much of the research and then hid their tracks.
Suddenly, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is ready to negotiate with Russia. NATO allies are talking about spending more on defense. The duplicitous Qataris have expelled the Hamas leadership. Israel can defend itself without the White House tying one hand behind its back. Iran is exposed as a hollow bully, the Obama-Biden policy of indulging a terrorist empire exposed as the danger to world peace it always was.
The “Trump effect” also accelerates negative factors. Nature abhors a vacuum, but power loves one. The Biden administration exploited the vacuum between the presidential ears to impose an imperial power trip on the public. Abroad, the Democrats used their power to create a vacuum. The worst-educated mandarinate in the history of government believed that words alone shape reality, that laws on paper are the same as customs in life, and that all national interests are reducible to material interest and status games. The world understood that the American eagle had turned chicken. Our friends did nothing, our enemies whatever they felt like.
We nearly got through. Our luck might have held, were it not for the congressionally mandated insanity of an 11-week limbo between elections and Inauguration Day. The fruitiest banana republic manages a change of incumbent faster. Even the British do it overnight. Being a world power is not the same as being a federal employee. You cannot work from home. If you go AWOL for three months, all hell will break loose. Look at Syria.
The Turkish-sponsored campaign that began in early December and the sudden flight of nepo dictator Bashar Assad confirm what has been obvious for years. Syria ceased to exist as a state more than a decade ago. Our diplomats will continue to talk about “Syria” as if it were a state, not a void of chaos. The media will talk about “rebels,” as if Ahmed Hussein al Sharaa is Robin Hood, not a third-generation al Qaeda jihadi who killed Americans in Iraq, and Hay’at Tahrir al Sham are the Merry Men on a flatbed Toyota, not rapists and murderers.
“Diversity is our strength,” al Sharaa said after taking Damascus, as if setting up a kinder, softer caliphate on the campus lawn. In a reflex like the twitch of an amputated limb, Biden promises to send money to the Syrian state that no longer exists. The wraithlike Antony Blinken begs “our ally” Turkey not to massacre too many Kurds. No one in Washington, D.C., or the media admits the truth. As usual, it falls to Trump to say the unsayable about the unspeakable. As usual, he has it half-right.
“Syria is a mess, but is not our friend,” the president-elect said in a Dec. 7 social media post, before geopolitical urgency sent him all-caps. “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
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The U.S. is already involved, along with everyone else. American intervention in Iraq led to the rise of the Islamic State, first in Iraq and then in Syria. The Obama policy of nonintervention in Syria collapsed into bombing campaigns and familiar absurdities such as the Pentagon-backed Kurds of the Syrian Democratic Forces fighting CIA-backed al Qaeda types. This is not our fight, but the realities of geography and politics make it a war whose outcome should favor us. Letting it “play out” means chaos. So let’s talk Turkey.
The U.S. should stop indulging the neo-Ottoman Islamists who run Turkey. It should support the Kurds who, like the Israelis, are an island of decency in a sea of murderous stupidity and actually like the West. The U.S. should also support the Druze and Christian minorities in southwestern Syria, buffer American allies in Israel and Jordan, and keep Hezbollah bottled up in Lebanon. The alternative is that a Turkish Islamist empire replaces the Iranian Islamist one. Neither of these is in the American interest.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
