We understand the alarm people felt last week after President Donald Trump precipitously withdrew about 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. But in the longer view, it still seems like the best course. To see why, it helps to go back to 1945.
That year, President Franklin Roosevelt was returning from the Yalta conference in the Soviet Union, traveling on a Navy warship, when he stopped in the Suez Canal and met with Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz.
Abdul Aziz had founded his kingdom 13 years earlier, encompassing what would be the largest nation in the Mideast by area, population and, after the discovery of oil in 1938, economy. He had consolidated his Islamic empire by defeating austere fundamentalist Sunni rivals, who were suspicious of the West and its corrupting influence.
“The king and the president got along famously together,” an observer recalled.
America wanted Saudi oil. And there was another point of leverage: The kingdom could be extreme, inhumane, on the wrong side of nearly every right, but it was the royals alone, the U.S. believed, who could keep the fundamentalists from taking over and making everything – including American access to oil – worse.
The other great power in the region was Iran, on the other side of the Persian Gulf, which followed a similar trajectory with oil, the West and its Persian royals.
In 1950, the U.S. agreed to evenly share revenue from Saudi oil with the Saudi kingdom. The British refused a similar move in Iran. In 1951, Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh nationalized British and American oil interests.
Mossadegh was deposed in a 1953 coup, by the CIA with the help of the British — and Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament and leader of the fundamentalist Shia Islamic party.
In 1979, Shia fundamentalists overthrew the Persian royals. One of the revolution’s guiding principles was that America is the Great Satan. This was the outcome the Saudi royals had warned against.
Ever since, U.S. policy in the Mideast has backed the Saudis against Iran. It is sometimes portrayed as a split between Sunni and Shia, which is true but overstated. It is a split between two regional powers that vie against one another as the British and the French once did, or as the Blue and Green charioteers did in the Byzantine Empire. Iran supports the Houthi rebels in Yemen; the Saudis bomb Yemen.
Syria and Iraq have the misfortune of lying between Iran and Saudi Arabia. In 2011, the Arab Spring swept out a despot in Egypt. The Saudis kept their kingdom by suppressing their Sunni fundamentalists at home, but the Sunni majority in Syria wanted to be rid of the hereditary dictator, and ophthalmologist, Bashar al-Assad. He kept his place and his head just barely, with the support of Russia, which has contracts for Syrian oil, and Iran and its allied Hezbollah Shia militia, while the Saudis have backed Sunni rebels.
Sooner or later the U.S. was going to have to find a way to exit the Middle East without having resolved this rivalry to the advantage of its allies. If it could be peaceably settled, it would not happen with American arms on one side.
It is true that the U.S. has abandoned the Kurds again and that Trump has acted impulsively. But, said Robert Ford, U.S. ambassador to Syria under President Barack Obama, “Looking out from a high distance, it’s the right decision.”
Sometimes those are made even for the wrong reasons.
