Foreign Correspondent: Trump Blows it Big Time in Syria

by Reese Erlich In less than two weeks, President Donald Trump has managed to create a massive and avoidable crisis in Syria. By greenlighting the Turkish invasion of northern Syria, Trump’s policy forced more than 160,000 Syrians to flee their… Continue Reading

If At First You Don’t Succeed

by Derek Davison On December 14, 2018, Donald Trump spoke by phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Though U.S.-Turkish relations have been strained in recent years over disagreements around the war in Syria and Turkey’s increasing closeness with Russia,… Continue Reading

Avoiding a Free-for-all in Syria’s North East

by International Crisis Group What’s new? President Trump’s surprise decision to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria followed previous warnings that he justified their presence only as part of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State (ISIS). Trump said the mission… Continue Reading

A Sustainable US Policy for North Syria, the Kurds, Turkey, and Damascus

by Joshua Landis and Matthew Barber This article is a “part-two” to the previous article “U.S. Policy Toward the Levant, Kurds, and Turkey,” which warned that the United State’s decision to back Kurdish nationalism in Northern Syria in an uncompromising… Continue Reading