Donald Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria has drawn widespread scorn from Republicans and Democrats alike, and with good reason: The U.S. has betrayed an ally and ceded influence to a gallery of rogues — Bashar Assad, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Vladimir Putin and Qasem Soleimani, to name a few — in exchange for a hollow talking point about ending endless wars.
But give Trump this: He’s turning a remarkable number of foreign policy liberals and progressives into born-again neoconservatives.
That’s a thought worth pondering as the president pursues a foreign policy that, had it been undertaken by a Democratic administration, would likely have been met with considerable approval on the left.