We Can't Keep the Oil

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/trump-syria-oil-kurds-graham.html

We Can’t Keep the Oil
Trump’s new rationale for keeping troops in Syria makes no sense.
By Fred Kaplan
Oct 25, 20192:17 PM


President Donald Trump’s new rationale for keeping troops in Syria—that they’re needed to protect the nation’s oil—is, not to mince words, preposterous.

First, Syria doesn’t even rank among the world’s top 60 oil producers, pumping out only about 0.05 percent as much petroleum as Iraq—just half as much as Cuba, which isn’t known as an oil power.

Second, its oil fields aren’t America’s to protect. They are owned by the Syrian government, with some venture capital provided by China, Russia, and India. No American oil companies are keen to step into the fray. In any case, the cease-fire agreement that Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed with Turkey—the deal that Trump has touted so proudly—pretty much removes the United States as a political, economic, or military power in the entire area. As Joshua Landis, editor of the Syria Comment website, notes, the Russians and Turks will in effect control the oil.

Third, the new rationale—even if it had merit—contradicts Trump’s claim that his abandonment of the Kurds in northern Syria was the first step of a broader pullout from the “endless wars” of the Middle East. He had already reversed that policy a few days later, when he announced the deployment of 1,800 troops to Saudi Arabia, saying that the Saudis would pay for their expenses in full, as if that meant the U.S. government wouldn’t be involved in the mission. (Everything to Trump is a monetary transaction; in this case, he was basically declaring the U.S. military to be a mercenary force.) Then the Pentagon announced that the troops withdrawn from Syria won’t be coming home; rather, they’ll redeploy to western Iraq, at least for a while. And now, Trump is saying that some of the troops will stay in Syria too—not to protect the Kurds or to keep ISIS from recovering territory or to help stabilize that corner of an incendiary region, but to preserve oil.

Fourth, as a result, he has to reinforce the notion that the United States is a rapacious imperial power—and a feckless one at that, since the oil, for which he’s willing to send troops to fight and die, doesn’t belong to America in the first place.

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Graham, Keane, and many others wanted to keep some U.S. troops in Syria. Trump did not. So they made up a phony argument to get him to change his mind. It worked. Now even Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is going along with the game. At some point, will Trump ask how the campaign to defend the oil fields is going? Esper, Graham, Keane, and the others probably assume he won’t. They know, from experience, that, ultimately, he doesn’t care.