by John Bolton;
As the discussion moved on, LaCamera said that the al-Asad base was also critical to keep pressure on Iran. Trump asked quizzically, “Staying in Iraq puts more pressure on Iran?” US Ambassador to Iraq Douglas Silliman answered, “Yes,” emphatically, and LaCamera and others agreed. Trump began to bring the meeting to a close by saying he wanted “a vicious withdrawal” from Syria and that he saw a continuing US presence in Iraq as being “a lynchpin” for a number of reasons. I decided to press my luck, asking LaCamera and Caine about the value of the At Tanf exclusion zone. LaCamera was saying, “I haven’t briefed my bosses yet—” when I interrupted, pointed to POTUS, and said, “You are now.” LaCamera, to his credit, recovered quickly and said we should hold on to at Tanf. Trump responded, “Okay, and we’ll decide the schedule on that later.” Trump and the First Lady shortly thereafter moved off to a mess tent nearby to meet service members, and Stephen Miller, Sarah Sanders, and I stayed back with LaCamera, Caine, and the other commanders to draft a statement we could release publicly. We wrote that the President and the commanders “discussed a strong, deliberate and orderly withdrawal of US and coalition forces from Syria, and the continuing importance of the US presence in Iraq to prevent a resurgence of the ISIS territorial threat and to protect other US interests,” which all agreed was a fair summary of the meeting.18
I thought the outcome was fantastic, not because we had a final decision on US military activity in Syria, but because Trump had come away with a very different appreciation for what we were doing and why it was important. How long it would last was a separate question, but I planned to move while the impression was strong. And why had Trump’s advisors not gotten him to Iraq or Afghanistan earlier? We had all collectively failed on that score.
By the time we finished drafting the statement, it was clear Prime Minister Abdul Mahdi was not coming, a big mistake on his part. His advisors convinced him it was unseemly for Iraq’s Prime Minister to meet the President on an American base, notwithstanding that our facility was completely surrounded by an Iraqi base (which had once been ours as well). They had a good phone call instead, and Trump invited Abdul Mahdi to the White House, a positive sign. We rode to a hangar, where Trump addressed the troops, receiving an enthusiastic reception. Even Americans callous about our country and indifferent to its greatness would be moved by the enthusiasm, optimism, and strength of spirit of our service members, even in the middle of the Iraqi desert. This really was America’s “inherent resolve” in the flesh. The rally ended at about 10:25 p.m., and we motorcaded in the dark back to Air Force One to fly to Ramstein Air Base in Germany to refuel.
I called Pompeo to report on the Iraq visit and then talked to Shanahan and Dunford (who was in Poland, having just left al-Asad the night before). We landed at Ramstein at one forty-five a.m. German time, met with the US commanders there, and then rode to a hangar with a large crowd of service members waiting to greet the Commander in Chief (at two in the morning!). Trump shook hands and took selfies with many service members along the rope line the base had fashioned. Then, back to Air Force One, headed for Andrews, where we landed at five fifteen a.m. on December 27, all of twenty minutes behind the original schedule.
Trump called me later in the afternoon to urge moving forward quickly with “the two-week plan” to finish off the ISIS territorial caliphate in Syria. I said I had heard “two to four weeks” from LaCamera and Caine, which he didn’t contest, but he said anyway, “Call it ‘the two-week plan.’ ” I briefed Dunford in more detail, having found almost immediately after Mattis left that Dunford could handle the confused, often conflicting array of Trump’s Syria priorities (withdraw, crush ISIS, protect the Kurds, decide how to handle At Tanf, don’t release the prisoners, keep the pressure on Iran). These were presidential outbursts, off-the-cuff comments, knee-jerk reactions, not a coherent, straight-line strategy, but bits and pieces we needed to thread our way through to get to a satisfactory outcome. What Dunford and I feared, along with many others, was ISIS’s making a comeback in regions it had formerly controlled, thereby once again threatening to become a base from which to launch terrorist attacks against America and Europe.
I also wanted to minimize any potential gains for Iran, something Mattis never seemed to prioritize but which Dunford understood better. He and I discussed developing a plan to accommodate all these priorities, which was difficult but far superior to the Mattis style, which veered from insisting we had to remain in Syria indefinitely to saying, in effect, he would spite the President by doing exactly what he said: withdraw immediately. Since Erdogan appeared to believe that “the only good Kurd is a dead Kurd,” big rallies notwithstanding, Dunford thought Turkey’s immediate military objective in Syria would be to expel Kurds from the area along the Turkey-Syria border and then move hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees from Turkey back across the border into the now-largely-depopulated border zone. He suggested creating a NATO-based monitoring force, supported by American intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; air cover; and a “dial 911” capability to intervene if elements of the monitoring force ran into trouble, with minimal US forces on the ground.19 I was also happy when Dunford quickly agreed on keeping US forces in At Tanf, which Mattis had not. Perhaps there was a way ahead.
Dunford suggested he join the early January trip I was planning to Turkey and then stay afterward to talk to their military, which I agreed to. This way, the Turks would hear a unified US government message, thereby lessening their ability to exploit differences among the various American players, always a favorite foreign-government strategy. I briefed Pompeo on these discussions, saying we had prevented a very bad outcome in Syria and were verging now on constructing something adequate and doable. Pompeo wanted to be sure the State Department envoy handling Syria was present for the Turkey meetings, which I agreed to reluctantly. That’s because Pompeo himself had told me two days before Christmas that Jim Jeffrey, a former US Ambassador to Turkey, “had no love lost for the Kurds, and still saw Turkey as a reliable NATO partner.” Those were clear warning signs of an advanced case of “clientitis,” a chronic State Department affliction where the foreign perspective becomes more important than that of the US.20 Pompeo, Shanahan, Dunford, and I agreed to draft a one-page “statement of principles” on Syria to avoid misunderstandings, which Defense thought was particularly important.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called on January 4 as I was leaving for Israel, my first stop before Turkey, to say, “I had you on my mind,” about Syria and Afghanistan, noting there was “a high level of alarm” around the Senate over recent developments. I said the key objective of my trip was to get straight exactly what we were going to do in Syria. Indeed, in an on-the-record meeting with the press traveling with me on Sunday, January 6, at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, I said, “We expect that those who have fought with us in Syria, in the Opposition, particularly the Kurds, but everybody who’s fought with us, is not put in jeopardy by the coalition withdrawal. It’s a point the President has made very clear in his conversations with President Erdogan of Turkey.”21 That is in fact what Trump had said, and it was correct when I said it in Israel. Later in the day, Washington time, asked by a reporter about my remarks as he was boarding Marine One for Camp David, Trump said, “John Bolton is, right now, over there, as you know. And I have two great stars. And John Bolton is doing a great job, and Mike Pompeo is doing a great job. They’re very strong and they work hard… We’re coming up with some very good results.”22 It is also true, of course, that Trump changed his mind again when the Turks pushed back after reading this and other comments I made in Jerusalem, meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu. But’s that’s where we were at the trip’s start.
Trump called me at about eleven forty-five p.m. on January 6, saying, “You’re awake, right?” which I assuredly was not. Someone had told him the Turks were unhappy with various of my remarks reported in the press. Of course, I hadn’t said anything Trump hadn’t said to Erdogan. Nonetheless
, Trump said several times during this brief call, “My base wants to get out [of Syria],” which meant visiting Turkey would certainly be fun. Indeed, the next day, as we flew from Jerusalem, the embassy in Ankara was hearing Erdogan was so irritated that he might cancel the meeting scheduled with me. In diplomatic circles, this was seen as a slight, but I saw it as proof our Syria policy was right on the mark, from the US perspective, if not Turkey’s.
After I arrived in Ankara at 4:35 p.m. local time, Pompeo called to report Trump was unhappy with a New York Times story, filled with even more than the usual quota of mistakes, recounting contradictions in our Syria policy, citing statements from Administration officials.23 Of course, many of the contradictions came from Trump himself, and Pompeo agreed he had made a few statements tracking mine (such as saying we would not allow Turkey to “slaughter the Kurds,” which had not received widespread media attention but which certainly irritated the Turks).24 We agreed our embassy should not plead for a meeting with Erdogan and that we had perhaps reached the moment we knew was inevitable, where Trump’s desire to exit Syria came crashing into his statement about protecting the Kurds. That was something Erdogan would not tolerate. Trump called me about an hour later. He didn’t like the reporting on internal Administration disagreements, but he was mostly worried whether the Defense Department was still working hard on “the two-week plan” to defeat the ISIS caliphate. I urged him to call Shanahan to reassure himself and said I was seeing Dunford shortly in Ankara, and would also follow up with him.
Ironically, the next day, the Washington Post reported unhappily that Trump and I were actually on the same page on Syria25—unhappily because the Post was contradicting its own story from the day before.26 All this confused press coverage reveals both the inconsistencies within Trump’s own thinking, and reporting based on second- and third-hand sources, exacerbated under a President who spent a disproportionate share of his time watching his Administration being covered in the press. It is difficult beyond description to pursue a complex policy in a contentious part of the world when the policy is subject to instant modification based on the boss’s perception of how inaccurate and often-already-outdated information is reported by writers who don’t have the Administration’s best interests at heart in the first place. It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine, not the West Wing of the White House.
In the meantime, contrary to the statement of principles, Jim Jeffrey circulated a color-coded map showing which parts of northeastern Syria he proposed to allow Turkey to take over and which the Kurds could retain. Dunford didn’t like what the map showed at all. I asked if our objective should not be to keep the Turks entirely on their side of the border with Syria east of the Euphrates River, and Dunford said that was certainly his position. I said I wanted to see northeastern Syria look much as it did now, but without US troops being present; I knew that might be “mission impossible” but thought it should at least be the objective we sought even if we couldn’t reach it. Dunford agreed. At this point, Jeffrey finally wandered in, and we went through the draft statement of principles we could give to the Turks. I added a new sentence to make clear we didn’t want to see the Kurds mistreated and took pains to show we didn’t accept a Turkish presence, military or otherwise, in northeastern Syria. Dunford and Jeffrey agreed to the draft, which, along with the map, in light of developments after I left the White House, is now purely a matter of historical interest.
Not surprisingly, Erdogan let us know he was canceling his meeting with me because he had to deliver a speech in Parliament. As we learned later, Erdogan’s speech was a preplanned attack on what I presented as the US position. Erdogan had not moved an inch from his insistence that Turkey have a free hand in northeastern Syria, which we could not allow if we wanted to prevent retribution against the Kurds. Erdogan essentially gave a campaign speech (just prior to nationwide local and provincial elections, in which Erdogan’s supporters would soon fare badly) saying “no concessions,” and that it was “not possible… to make compromises” on the point.27 On the way back, I spoke with Pompeo to brief him on the Turkey meetings. We agreed our views on the Kurds were “irreconcilable” with Turkey’s and they needed to be “really careful.” Pompeo said Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu was trying to reach him and that he planned to say: “You have a choice. You can either have us on your border, or the Russians and the Iranians [who would almost certainly move into northeastern Syria when we withdrew]. Your choice.” I said that sounded right to me.
Next, I called Trump to report in. He thought the Turks had been ready months before to cross into Syria, which is why he wanted to get out to begin with, before Turkey attacked the Kurds with our people still in place. He continued, “Erdogan doesn’t care about ISIS,” which was true, and said the US would remain capable of hitting ISIS after we left Syria, also true. Trump was focused on his speech that evening on the Mexico border wall, the first of his Administration from the Oval Office, and he added, “Just don’t show any weakness or anything,” as if he didn’t realize I was describing things that had already happened. “We don’t want to be involved in a civil war. They’re natural enemies. The Turks and the Kurds have been fighting for many years. We’re not getting involved in a civil war, but we are finishing off ISIS.”
Meanwhile, I learned that Dunford thought Turkish military commanders were a lot less interested in going into Syria than Erdogan and were looking for reasons they could use to avoid conducting military operations south of their border, while simultaneously saying they were protecting Turkey from terrorist attacks. To them, said Dunford, “this is our Mexico border on steroids.” Dunford had proceeded consistently with the statement of principles, proposing a twenty-to-thirty-kilometer buffer zone, from which Kurdish heavy weapons would be removed, and which would be patrolled by an international force consisting largely of NATO allies and the like, who would ensure there were no Kurdish incursions into Turkey, and vice versa, as we had discussed earlier in Washington. The US would continue to provide air cover and search-and-rescue capabilities for the international force, which Dunford and I believed would also allow us to keep control of the airspace over northeastern Syria. Although Dunford didn’t stress it, because we were staying at al-Asad in Iraq, under Trump’s direction, we would also be able, if the need arose, to return to northeastern Syria quickly and in force to suppress any serious reappearance of an ISIS terrorist threat. Since Erdogan’s real priority was domestic politics, in my view, this arrangement might be enough. We now had to convince the Europeans to agree, but that was a problem for another day. While we played this string out, or developed a better idea, which might take months, we had a good argument for maintaining US forces east of the Euphrates.
As for the Kurds, Jeffrey would present the idea to their commander, General Mazloum Abdi, to see how he reacted. Dunford was fatalistic, believing that Mazloum’s options were quite limited, and that he might as well consider some insurance now. I then spoke with Pompeo, who thought this the proper line to pursue and that others in the region would support it. The Arab states had no love for Turkey, and they had financial resources that could make it easier for NATO allies and others to justify participating in a multinational monitoring force. Getting more equitable burden-sharing from our allies, NATO in particular, was a constant Trump theme, and a correct one. In the 1990–91 Persian Gulf conflict, George H. W. Bush had financed our war efforts by soliciting contributions from the beneficiaries in the region, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and also other, more distant beneficiaries, like Japan. It was done with a tinge of embarrassment, referred to lightly as “the tin cup exercise,” but it had worked, and no one suggested it was dishonorable. There was no reason it might not work again.
I continued to explain this approach in Syria to Trump. In the Oval for another issue on January 9, Dunford made a more detailed presentation on why an international force in a buffer zone south of Turkey’s border was doable, allowing us to extricate ourse
lves without profoundly endangering the Kurds and our other anti-ISIS allies, not to mention our international reputation. Dunford now vigorously defended staying in At Tanf, which Jordan’s King Abdullah had also pressed on Pompeo during his visit, noting that the longer we stayed in At Tanf, the more secure Jordan was against the risk of the conflict in Syria’s spilling across the border into his country. Trump was pleased the “two-to-four-week plan” was under way, although he still expected results in two weeks, which wasn’t happening. He seemed satisfied, but it didn’t stop a long digression on Mattis’s failure to win in Afghanistan and Syria. Then he was off wondering why, after having fought the Korean War in the 1950s, we were still there, as well as critiquing the freeloading and ingratitude of sundry allies around the world. Just for the record, I did discuss with Trump several times the history of the “temporary” 1945 division of the Korean Peninsula, the rise of Kim Il Sung, the Korean War and its Cold War significance—you know, that old stuff—but I obviously made no impact. We endured this cycle repeatedly, always with the same outcome. Every few days, someone would inadvertently press a button somewhere, and Trump would be repeating his lines from the same movie soundtrack.
Dunford did a good job defending himself, and with minimal interference-running by me, because I thought it was better to let Trump hear it from someone else for a change. Others in the room (Pence, Shanahan, Coats, Haspel, Mnuchin, Sullivan, and more) largely remained silent. This was the longest conversation between Dunford and Trump I had seen, the first one without Mattis present. Dunford handled himself well, and I wondered how different things might have been if Mattis hadn’t acted like a “five-star general,” commanding all the four-star generals, but a real Secretary of Defense, running the entire, vast Pentagon machinery. Watching Dunford perform, it occurred to me there was a hidden wisdom in the statutory prohibition against former general officers becoming Secretary of Defense. It was not fear of a military takeover, but, ironically, that neither the civilian nor the military side of the Pentagon’s leadership performed so well when both were military. The Secretary’s broader, inevitably political role ill suited someone with a military background, leaving Mattis just to supervise Dunford and the other Joint Chiefs, who really didn’t need more military supervision. It also underscored how unpersuasive Mattis was in meetings in either the Sit Room or the Oval. He may have established a reputation as a warrior-scholar for carrying with him on the battlefield a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, but he was no debater.
