“President Trump said Monday
that a limited number of U.S. troops will remain in Syria to man a
garrison on the southern border with Jordan and ‘to secure the oil’
elsewhere in the country. ‘I don’t think it’s necessary, other than we
secure the oil,’ Trump said of the U.S. military presence. ‘We need to
secure the oil.’ A ‘small number of troops’ would also remain in
southern Syria at the request of Israel and Jordan, he added in remarks
to reporters at a meeting of his Cabinet in Washington. The decision to
leave more than 20 percent of the U.S. force in Syria behind was the
second time in less than a year that Trump announced a complete
withdrawal, only to walk it back under heavy bipartisan criticism from
lawmakers and disquiet within his own administration.”
Comment:
With regard to what we charitably describe as “foreign policy,”
President Trump’s values are in the first place “productivist” (i.e.,
they pivot on and around an outmoded and ecologically catastrophic model
of capitalist industrialism), which is in keeping with his quantitative
valuation of virtually everything. Such (crudely extrinsic) values
invariably trump (alas, pun intended), as they do in this case, more
fundamental and humane values, be they of ethical, legal, or democratic
provenance, for example. In the most recent instance, they serve to
crowd out our country’s comparatively longstanding military allies in
the fight against ISIS (and not only in Syria), the Kurds, the President
resorting to all manner of contradictory, incoherent, and implausible
rationalizations by way of feebly attempting to justify abandoning them
to hostile Turkish, Syrian, and Russian armed forces (hence regimes
perfectly willing to achieve their geopolitical goals through ethnic
cleansing, torture, and flagrant violations of international
humanitarian law*), as well as motley Arab militias in the region,
including those of a radically militant “jihadist” motivation. This is
the geopolitical triumph of “materialism” of the crassest sort inasmuch
as it shamelessly places one of the most important strategic commodities
on our planet: crude oil, over and above human beings—the Kurds (but
not only them)—thus in effect giving priority, yet again, to capitalist
productivism in the expression of U.S. foreign policy interests so as to
smother a vivid incarnation of the more generalized concern with human
dignity and human rights as these are essential to human welfare and
well-being.
* Please don’t infer from this that I think the U.S. by contrast is virtuous in this regard!
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