The Syria troop-withdrawal muddle and why it shows it's a mistake to consider the Trump-Pence foreign policy non-interventionist

It's not as though the Democratic Party, or the left and center-left more generally, have had a general consensus on foreign policy controversies any time in the recent past. Broadlly speaking, there is probably general agreement on large questions like the need for nuclear arms control or support for NATO. The most dramatic case of major disagreement came in 2002, when Democratic Senators like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry all voted to support the Cheney-Bush Administrations's invastion of Iraq. Given the scope of the disaster that resulted from that, their position looks even more irresponsible in retrospect than it did at the time. And it did look irresponsible at the time and was heavily and widely criticized by Democrats.

Glenn Greenwald is generally known as a progressive critic of US politics and parties. But he also has a "libertarian" streak which shows itself in some civil-liberties positions that may sometimes put him on the side of conservatives. And also in foreign policy positions that can look like some uneasy combination of antiwar left restraint and Old Right isolationism. He has been particularly skeptical of the "Russiagate" claims of Russian influence in the US elections.

In his article As Democratic Elites Reunite With Neocons, the Party’s Voters Are Becoming Far More Militaristic and Pro-War Than Republicans The Intercept 01/11/2019, he takes the opportunity to tweak Democrats for indulging hawkish temptations around Trump's foreign policy.

I would say that in this piece, he overstates the significance of poll results showing that Democratic voters seem to be more hawkish at the moment than Republicans. The fact that Democrats currently show in polling as more concerned about pulling troops out of Syria than Republicans reflects the news the last couple of weeks in which Trump's surprise announcement that he was pulling US forces out and the subsequent confusion about what he's actually doing have been in the news. US media coverage of foreign policy, including Middle East issues, is often sadly deficient. In a moment like this, where there is a sudden flurry of reporting about a particular decision relating to a complex situation that previously has not been at the center of political controversies in the media, many people will initially take their lead from their own political party's leading figures. Trump cultists are especially inclined to back the Orange Leader on anything without being especially concerned about consistency. And in this case, even left-leaning noninterventionists who favor pulling US troops out of Syria have expressed concern over the spastic way the Trump-Pence Administration has been going about it. (And, in an unusual twist, some American anarchists - and there aren't many American anarchists! - are in favor of leaving US troops there to support the Syrian Kurds.)

I'm sympathetic to Greenwald's more general criticism of Democrats' embrace some very dubious neoconservataive warmongers as part of the anti-Trum "Resistance." Even though he overhypes the point, including in the first sentence quoted here (internal links not included here):

A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he’s willing to allow the Bad Countries to take over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.

At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives, even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. By far the most influential liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents, while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a “national security liberal” who was “all about counterterrorism”). [my emphasis]

Paul Pillar (Syria Policy: The Hawks’ Talons Sink Deeper into Trump The National Interest 1/08/2019) warns everyone not to mistake Trump-Pence for a peace-oriented Administration:

The episode involving withdrawal and non-withdrawal of U.S. troops in Syria should be a lesson for those who mistakenly placed hopes in Trump for a more restrained and less militaristic U.S. foreign policy. Applause lines on the campaign trail have been mistaken for deeper thought. Behind the candidate’s rhetoric there never was enough strategic sense, necessary knowledge, or even caring about foreign affairs to ward off the maneuvers of a determined hawk like [National Security Adviser] Bolton once he was in position to do damage.

James Gelvin reminds us that the noninterventionist criticism around US policy in the Greater Middle East was also directed at the Obama Administration. (No, Trump is not like Obama on Middle East policy Informed Comment 01/08/2019) But he focuses on the important differences in the two Administrations on Syria. "While both presidents have advocated decreasing America’s footprint in the region, I believe their policies are comparable only on the most superficial level. Understanding why enables us to see the fundamental flaw underlying the current policy." And he describes the Big Picture version this way, "Unlike Obama, Trump does not have a Middle East strategy, grand or otherwise. He has impulses."

I also want to mention here Jeanne Morefield's critical look at the broad assumptions of US international relations scholars and practictioners, Trump’s Foreign Policy Isn’t the Problem Boston Review 01/08/2019. For one thing, she brings up the aspect of the "realist" outlook that gives me such a conflicted attitude toward it, its amoral ring that can easily be adapted to justify morally repulsive foreign policy decisions. And she particulary calls attention to the racial assumptions in US policy, a factor that is an imporatant perspective as we look at the aftermath of the First World War, of which I hope we see lots of discussions around the 100th anniversary of the Versailles Treaty this year:

... the norm against noticing prevents foreign policy analysis from even acknowledging -  let alone grappling with - the relationship between race and imperialism that has characterized U.S. international relations from the country’s earliest days. This regime of politely un-seeing - of deflecting - connections between U.S. foreign policy, race hierarchy, and colonial administration was clearly not in effect when Foreign Affairs was released under its original name: the Journal of Race Development. This began to change, however, in the 1920s. Among other contributing factors, World War I, the rise of anti-colonial revolutions, and the emergence of liberal internationalism as a popular ideology helped convince foreign policy experts in the United States and Europe to adopt a policy language oriented toward “development” rather than imperialism or racial difference. ... For liberals, this involves a studied erasure of the imperial origins of twentieth-century internationalism in the League of Nations’ Mandate system and the complicity of Woodrow Wilson in preserving, as Adom Getachew puts it, “white supremacy on a global scale.” [my emphasis]

Morefield includes some criticisms of one of my favorite sources on foreign policy issues, Über-Realist Stephen Walt.