Former vice president Joe Biden, in a written statement released Monday, went right after Trump’s incoherent strategy. “It’s been reported that Trump’s reckless decision to withdraw our troops from northern Syria forced the planning for the mission to be accelerated and the timeline compressed,” Biden declared. “His erratic behavior made it harder and more dangerous for the special forces carrying it out. And they had to fly through territory that is now hostile to the U.S., taking fire along the way — including territory we controlled just weeks ago.”

Biden added, “Trump has also made it less likely we will be able to successfully replicate a mission like this in the future. The operation leveraged a limited presence of U.S. counterterrorism capabilities in the region, which he keeps trying to dismantle.” He continued, “It was made possible by the work of intelligence professionals, who he has relentlessly attacked. It relied on allies he has belittled, undermined, and in some cases betrayed and abandoned.”

As a number of experts have pointed out, Biden argued, “His fixation on keeping troops in the region to defend the oil fields betrays his true priorities — profit seeking — and will surely serve as a tool for future terrorist recruitment.”

He then distinguished himself both from Trump and the “bring everyone home” crowd on the left. “There is a difference between deploying hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to the Middle East indefinitely, and keeping small numbers of special operations and intelligence assets in place to maintain local partnerships and keep pressure on terrorists,” he explained. “That’s the smart, strong, and sustainable strategy we pioneered during the Obama-Biden Administration. That’s the effective policy we put in place, which laid the groundwork to end ISIS’s territorial caliphate.”.