James Campbell: Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds isn’t a surprise
US President Donald Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds in Northern Syria is just another example of the US betraying its allies, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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Scott Morrison gave a lecture last week to the Lowy Institute in which he reassured the nation that “our alliance with the United States is our past, our present and our future”.
In what would have been an uncontroversial statement for any Australian Prime Minister since the ANZUS treaty was signed in 1951, he added it was the “the bedrock of our security”. Uncontroversial, that is, until recently.
On the other side of the world we got a glimpse this week of the way America is these days. On Sunday, President Donald Trump’s press secretary released a statement announcing Trump had been on the phone to President Erdogan of Turkey.
The outcome of the call was Turkey “will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into Northern Syria” and American forces would not be involved in the operation and “they will no longer be in the immediate area”.
There followed a snipe at “France, Germany and other European nations” of the sort we are familiar with from Trump, in this case claiming they weren’t pulling their weight in dealing with the ISIS prisoners, who were to be left to the tender mercies of the Turks.
Of America’s Kurdish allies in Northern Syria, there was not a word from POTUS.
Now, with Trump you can’t always be sure he understands what he is saying. But not on this occasion. In this case Trump knows well what a Turkish invasion of Northern Syria will mean.
In June he brought up the matter — unprompted — at a press conference in Japan: “President Erdogan: he’s tough, but I get along with him and maybe that’s a bad thing, but I think it’s a really good thing because, frankly, he wanted to wipe out — he has a big problem with the Kurds, as everyone knows — and he had a 65,000-man army at the border, and he was going to wipe out the Kurds, who helped us with ISIS … and I called him and I asked him not to do it.
“They are, I guess, natural enemies of his or Turkey’s and he hasn’t done it. They were lined up to go out and wipe out the people that we just defeated the ISIS caliphate with, and I said, ’You can’t do that. You can’t do it’. And he didn’t do it.”
Unfortunately, betraying the Kurds has been an American pastime since World War II. In the 1950s it armed them in Iraq then dropped them after the 1963 coup which brought the Ba’ath party to power.
In the 1970s it armed them then dropped them as part of a peace deal between Iran and Iraq.
In the 1990s George Bush Sr encouraged them to rise against Saddam Hussein after Operation Desert Storm then did nothing to help them.
They were saved from genocide only because British PM John Major insisted on a “no fly zone” in Northern Iraq.
Returning to form, however, in 2007 the US allowed the Turks to bomb there.
So Trump is just another in a long line of US presidents who have used the Kurds and discarded them. Even so, none of his predecessors insulted them as they did so.
Sure, they had fought with us, Trump tweeted on Monday “but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so”.
As the awful reality of Trump’s betrayal sank in, he returned to Twitter the next day: “As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey.”
Everything you need to know about Trump is in those two 280 character messages: grandiose narcissism married to a venal obsession with money.
And it is, of course, an empty threat. For all his huffing and puffing, Trump has shown a remarkable meekness in dealing with people who can actually shoot back.
Last month Saudi Arabia’s oilfields were attacked by Iran. Not my opinion, but the US government’s. The US response was to tighten sanctions. That followed Trump’s decision in June to pull back on attacking Iran after it shot down an American drone.
The Saudis sniffed the wind: they know their great ally is not up for a fight with the Islamic Republic, which is why we are reading this week that they have asked Pakistan to open talks for them with the Mullahs.
Who can blame them? If Trump is defeated next November, the Democrats won’t be any better. Indeed from the Middle East’s point of view, one is struck more by the continuities between the Trump and Obama administrations than the divergences. Like Trump with the Iranians, Obama baulked at using force against the Assad regime after it gassed its own people.
That followed on from the insouciant way Obama threw America’s long-time ally President Mubarak of Egypt to the mob during the so-called Arab Spring. As Israeli writer Jonathan Spyer pointed out this week, Trump, like Obama, “is in the business of managing imperial decline”, only with tougher rhetoric.
Now it might be America is prepared to pull back in that area in order to get ready for the big conflict that’s clearly coming with China.
But when you witness the craven behaviour of US businesses towards Beijing and then remember that the business of America is business, you wouldn’t want to bet on it.
And that’s why Scott Morrison’s reassuring words about our great ally, the bedrock of our security, don’t quite reassure as they might have done in the past.
James Campbell is national politics editor.