The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Calls Syria Cease-Fire 'Permanent,' Lifts Sanctions on Turkey

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

President Trump says he is lifting sanctions on Turkey after the country agreed to what he called a permanent cease-fire in northern Syria, ending Turkey's military offensive that began after the U.S. pulled troops from the area. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, White House correspondent Tamara Keith, and national security editor Phil Ewing. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Aaron. I'm a bicycle messenger and architecture student in San Francisco, California, and I am currently standing outside of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where I just got done delivering some packages for the Guy Ross Summit for NPR. This podcast was recorded at... It is 210 Eastern on Wednesday, October 23rd. Things may have changed by the time that you hear this. Another great summit for how I built this. I guess podcast goals would be a summit. We do live shows. The NPR Politics Podcast Summit sounds kind of more important than a live show,

but you know, we have live shows coming up. We do, including one in a few weeks here in Washington, D.C. I don't know why I muffled that. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Phil Ewing, National Security Editor. So, according to President Trump, the temporary ceasefire in northern Syria the administration had helped put together

is now a permanent ceasefire. Now Turkey, Syria, and others in the region must work to ensure that ISIS does not regain any territory. It's their neighborhood. They have to maintain it. They have to take care of it. Phil, how did we get here?

What does it mean? A couple of weeks ago, President Trump ordered American forces in northern Syria to pull away from the positions they'd occupied for about the past five years and let Turkish military forces come in across the border. This is something the Turks have been wanting to do for a long time because they consider the Kurds in northern Syria who have been fighting alongside American forces to be terrorists in some cases. And what the Turks want is a safe zone inside of Syria, outside their border to keep what they consider to be these terrorist Kurds away from incursions of their own. That led to some fighting. There's been some discussions about innocent people being killed, and there's been a lot of confusion in Syria. And so Vice

President Mike Pence flew to Turkey and negotiated this ceasefire. And what the president said on Wednesday is the ceasefire is going to be permanent. The American withdrawal is going to go forward. And the status quo in Syria with Turkey, the Kurds, the Syrian government, Iran and another power, the Russianss is something that President Trump was just eviscerated for by Republicans, by Democrats, by a lot of people in the foreign policy world. Today, the president argued this was actually an enormous success. Why is he making that argument? Right. So what he is basically doing is he did one of these addresses to the nation from the White House where he's looking directly at the camera. And and he said, look at this.

Basically, all of you people who said that I messed up, I didn't mess up. Now we're doing something that we wouldn't have been able to do before. And so he is saying that this is a tremendous, wonderful outcome, that the Kurds are grateful, that Turkey is grateful. But the success is what exactly? That the U.S. has a smaller footprint? Is that the success? No. The success, I think, is that the fighting that started after a phone call that President Trump had with President Erdogan a couple of weeks ago, where Erdogan said, I think I want to go into Syria and take out the Kurds. And President Trump said, then we're going to get U.S. troops out of the way, and then this active fighting broke out. Well, the victory is that active fighting has stopped.

So let's shift gears a little bit, because as the president was painting the ceasefire, which is a mix of status quo and exactly what Turkey wants in a lot of ways, as he was painting this as an enormous success, the U.S. Special Envoy for Syria, James Jeffrey, was testifying on Capitol Hill. Phil, what sort of picture did James Jeffrey paint today? He described a situation a little bit less clean and orderly than that described by the president. He talked about the hundreds of deaths of Kurds and others in northern Syria, which had followed the Turkish military incursion. He discussed the prospect that war crimes may have been committed. There's been a lot of very

uncomfortable discussion about the prospect for ethnic cleansing by Turks in northern Syria, because they do not care for the Kurds. And there's a flood of refugees that are going to be moving out of this territory, the so-called safe zone, elsewhere into Syria and across the border into Iraq. That's also where a lot of these American forces are going to go. And so the reality is a little bit messier, according to this account than the one given by the White House. And it's also complicated by the fact that all these other regional governments get a vote. The government for Iraq, for example, said that it hadn't agreed to take about a thousand American troops from Syria and host them on its soil. That probably

is going to get smoothed over. But when you change the status quo in the Middle East in the way that Trump's policy has changed in Syria, there's a lot of ripple effects that continue to wobble for many months and years after the fact. One thing that stood out to me from Jeffrey's testimony was there was a question of what has happened to a bunch of ISIS prisoners that were being guarded by Kurdish forces allied with the U.S. And some escaped in the process of this fight between the Kurds and Turkey. And he was asked. I think many escaped.

Yeah, exactly. He was asked how many there are. We would say that the number is now over 100. We do not know where they are. Almost all of the prisons that the SDF were guarding are still secured. The SDF still has people there. We're monitoring that as best we can. We still have forces in Syria working with the SDF, And one of the top priorities is these prisons. So SDF, the Syrian Defense Force, they are Kurdish fighters allied with the U.S. That very small statement from him contradicts the message the president was delivering in a

couple of different ways. One, it's making it clear that these ISIS fighters are outstanding and also is saying that U.S. forces are still working with the Kurds to try to contain these ISIS fighters. Jeffrey's point also speaks to one of the big strategic fears about the war in Syria, which has been on the minds of a lot of people in Washington and Europe for years, not just under the Trump administration. where are these ISIS fighters, these terrorists going to go when the conflict there is over? They had been held in northern Syria, but are they going to try to escape and go back to their home countries in Europe and elsewhere? Are they going to try to go to the United States? Nobody knows. The president in his remarks on Wednesday

said, don't worry about it. The Kurds are going to be responsible for this. And if not, he said, Turkey is going to back them up. We'll see how well that actually works. But the question now is how big of a problem is this going to be if, in fact, this instability means that more terrorists can escape from northern Syria? All right. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about what this means for Trump's relationship with Congress and what this means with the U.S.'s relationship with the rest of the world. Maddie Safaya here, host of a new daily science podcast from NPR called Shortwave. This week, the first all-female spacewalk.

We got to talk to both of those astronauts in space. We have you loud and clear, NPR. Listen for that and subscribe to Shortwave from NPR. And we're back. So, Tam, when this all started a couple of weeks ago, one of the first waves of response we heard from members of Congress, particularly Republicans, was that they wanted to push for incredibly aggressive sanctions against Turkey to punish them for taking this step. Today, the president basically lifted sanctions on Turkey, right? Yeah. So what President Trump and his administration had done is actually impose sanctions last week on Turkey to punish them for going into Syria and going after the Kurds to say, hey, wait, I told you to be a nice guy and you're not being a nice guy right now. Now, though, those sanctions are being lifted as the ceasefire becomes permanent. But Congress, on the other hand, it's not clear that they're

actually going to be particularly satisfied with this outcome. And so I would say whatever track that Congress is on, don't count them out. It's possible that this is not the end of this story. And this happened with Russia earlier in his administration. Congress passed sanctions over the pushback from the White House. Phil, one other result of all of this from a lot of observers is that this is yet another example of the U.S. taking a few steps back and that vacuum being filled by Russia, among other countries. That's right. The Russians are going to play a bigger role in northern Syria than they have because of negotiations they undertook separately with Turkey. They've been a player in the Syrian civil war for many years. They helped the government of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad against anti-government forces, including some that were

sponsored by the United States. Now the Russian portfolio in Syria is going to get even bigger because of the role that they've been able to take as American forces, as we've been talking about, are withdrawing. And let's just say that there is a theme that comes up again and again in this administration. You know, we're talking about Ukraine, for instance. And in Ukraine, the president's actions ended up sort of benefiting the interests of Russia. And in this case, again, this outcome is something that Russia wanted. We didn't have in the grand scheme of things that many troops in Syria. We have a lot more troops in Afghanistan. You know, you may remember 900 news cycles ago or, you know, last month, there was all this talk about a possible negotiation

with the Taliban to end the presence of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Do we have any sense, based on how this played out in Syria over the last couple of weeks, of what this could mean going forward for the Trump administration and how they deal with the Middle East in particular? That's a really pivotal question because the president on Wednesday didn't just talk about Syria. He made a big thesis statement about his view of American power in the Middle East. He's made it before, but he hasn't made good on it in terms of changing the pieces on the chessboard in the way he is in Syria. As you point out, there are only about 2,000 American forces at their peak in Syria, so not that many historically, but there

are about 90,000, more than 90,000 Americans across the Middle East in various other forms. The question now is, will this be act one of a big reshaping of the American presence in the Middle East or not? This has come up a couple of times. The president's former secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, who was working before, resigned over this issue about withdrawing from Syria, but he's got a different team working for him now, a different secretary of defense, a different secretary of state from the one he used to have. Will they go along with this impulse that he outlined to withdraw America's presence from the Middle East? And Tam, that seems like a theme of the last year, especially all of the people in the Trump administration who disagreed with the president, who pushed back on the

president, no longer work in the Trump administration. Right. The president is closer to having the team that he wants. I mean, that said, there are a lot of people still in acting roles all over the administration. But in terms of this core group, he now has a national security advisor who more closely aligns with his worldview, a secretary of state who has been very careful to not allow any daylight between himself and the president and Mark Esper, the new secretary of defense. Okay, that is a wrap for today. We'll be back in your feed tomorrow as we are every weekday with the NPR Politics Podcast. But until then, you can catch up with everything else we're reporting on npr.org or on your local public radio station. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the campaign.

I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. And I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.