Nibras Kazimi

22. What this portends to me is that if a new crisis zone emerges in the region, the reaction from this president would be further disengagement. And there won’t be much that can be done about it.

21. The backdrop was that Trump began to question Bin Salman’s judgement even before Khashogchi (...Qatari lobbying worked, for eg).So this reinforced Trump’s sense that the experts and seasoned hands around him may not have a firm handle on this, trusting his own instincts more.

20. One implication is that it makes it much harder for those who talk to the president about the Middle East to sell him on new courses of action, not after getting their assessments of Bin Salman so fundamentally wrong. This especially goes for the Israelis.

19. Trump reportedly turned to Kushner and asked, “so that’s your guy?” There seems to be hard evidence placing Bin Salman at the center, and it will out eventually. The implications of Trump’s double take are massive and far reaching.

18. In the essay I predicted the ‘event horizon’ to manifest in Saudi Arabia in 2019. I thought I was being gutsy by making such a bold assertion. I was wrong: it came earlier. It manifested as a writer’s murder in Istanbul. It revealed to Trump how flimsy the policy edifice was.

17. Just so that this is clear: leaving Iraq become an inevitability too. Trump never bothered to memorize Abadi’s name, unlikely that he recalls the current PM’s. If it’s just the Ain al Asad base that impressed him, then there’s not much permanence there keeping him committed.

16. And those betting on Trump’s sentimentality towards the Kurds, for example, as a deterrence against leaving abruptly, well, two words come to me: Otto Warmbier.

15. What’s worse that the previous iterations is that regional actors have figured out this dynamic and that is why they are more likely to push matters to clarity, and to resolution, in their favor.

14. The DC establishment doesn’t seem to have absorbed this lesson: undermining or working around Trump’s inclinations re: the Middle East will prove to be ephemeral and transient. 300 or 400 troops is not a reprieve. It is a delusion.

13. Trump could also see that the Iranians were nowhere near relenting. This was the context of the Dec 2018 decision. Erdogan came back into the picture with the same old offer, and Trump jumped at it.

12. Erdogan never gave up on the goal of becoming Trump’s best and indispensable pal on the world stage. The choreography of the Khashogchi leaks almost seem to have been designed to impress Trump with Erdogan’s media manipulation skills. It worked, Trump paid attention.

11. Within those six months, Muhammad Bin Salman revealed himself to be a “mad king” in the making re: Khashogchi. Quite a setback seeing how 90 percent of Washington’s plan for going forward in the region was modeled with Bim Salman at its center. This was Erdogan’s opening.

10. The next time Trump made noises about Syria, in April 2018, Pompeo sold him on the idea of holding out in Syria as part of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran; Trump was told that the Iranians would cry uncle and begin negotiations within six months.

9. For Trump, it was always about safe zones and having regional partners pick up the slack on the ground in Syria. During that call early on in his presidency, he got just that sort of pledge from Erdogan. The DC establishment thought otherwise, and actively sabotaged this path.

8. The Dec 2018 phonecall between Trump and Erdogan, the one that precipitated the former’s decision to withdraw from Syria, picked up from their first call in Feb 2017. In a sense it wasn’t a snap decision but a course correction to what Trump had wanted all along.

7. The set of answers that Trump would be willing to sign on off are unlikely to impress upon Soleimani, Erdogan, the PKK, and a host of other predators/adventurers that this is a time to tone things down. When Syria, Kurdistan and Iraq seem up for grabs, why would they?

6. Yet again, policy-crafters seem unwilling to think through the options/agency of those who seek to push America out. Soleimani can orchestrate an Iraqi demand of U.S. withdrawal through legitimate political action. What's a superpower's answer to that?

5. When the window of opportunity closed shut, partly due to the agency of actors such as Soleimani, policy-crafters were left with a Kabuki-like pretense at strategy against Tehran, leading to this presently ridiculous mannequinization of U.S. power.

4. The overarching point of the August essay was to highlight America's strategic collapse in the northern tier of the Middle East. Its first irreparable crack can be traced to the summer of 2017, following Trump's visit to Riyadh--ambitious decisions should have been taken then.

3. At worst, they will challenge it directly, the risk of a limited U.S. backlash is manageable if the eventual prize is clarity as to who gets to claim regional supremacy.