That’s how President Trump yesterday justified his shameless betrayal of Syria’s Kurds, who for years have been the sharp end of the spear in our fight against the Islamic State.
“The Kurds are fighting for their land,” Trump told reporters at the White House during an event in the Roosevelt Room.
“And as somebody wrote in a very, very powerful article today, they didn’t help us in the second World War, they didn’t help us with Normandy as an example. They mentioned names of different battles. But they’re there to help us with their land and that’s a different thing.”
There’s a lot of stupid that we could unpack here. I mean, how many Turkish battalions landed alongside American GIs at Omaha or Utah Beach? (And as an aside, Kurds did in fact fight on the side of the Allies in World War II, helping to stymie a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq then serving under British command in other theaters.) But then, the historical accuracy or inaccuracy of Trump’s justification is really beside the point.
What his comment shines a bright spotlight upon is his overarching tendency to view all relationships in purely transactional terms. The question isn’t what have you done for us before, or even lately, but what are you doing for us right now? The idea of loyalty to an ally is completely irrelevant in this calculus.
By Trump’s entirely self-serving logic, stabbing the Kurds in the back is the perfectly natural thing to do. When they were fighting for us on the frontlines in the war against ISIS, losing nearly 11,000 of their own people in the process, keeping Turkey at bay was the smart play. But now that Trump has declared the caliphate “100% defeated” we don’t need them anymore. So the Kurds are on their own.
As Elliot Hanlon explains at Slate:
The Kurds were an ally worth defending when we had a common strategic interest in defeating ISIS, the argument goes, but now that the U.S. feels it has accomplished that, there’s not much use for the Kurds anymore.
Meanwhile, heavy fighting continues on this second day of the Turkish offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria. But it’s not that Trump bears the our one-time allies any ill will. Far from it:
“With all of that being said, we like the Kurds.”