President Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on October 16, 2017, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
At tonight’s State of the Union address, President Trump is likely to tout the administration’s supposed foreign policy achievements, but it’d take some especially exaggerated braggadocio to give a positive spin to the past year of his presidency.
For one, the U.S. has suddenly—with little or no debate—embraced an open-ended role in Syria. At a speech at Stanford University on January 17, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared that “the United States will maintain a military presence in Syria” indefinitely as a pseudo-occupying force, for the ostensible purpose of preventing the resurgence of ISIS, but also for a range of other geopolitical objectives: namely countering Iran and placating Israel.
On the one hand, the Trump administration has repeatedly boasted of the decisive defeat allegedly inflicted on ISIS, and on the other, they have continued to invoke the specter of ISIS as justification for limitless U.S. military operations. “There are bands of ISIS fighters who are already beginning to wage an insurgency,” Tillerson warned at the Stanford speech, while simultaneously depicting ISIS as having “one foot in the grave.” This serves the dual purpose of giving the administration the appearance of achieving victory, while also providing an ongoing rationale for foreign policy adventures which have nothing necessarily to do with ISIS, such as countering Iran—a longtime preoccupation of the U.S. foreign policy establishment.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly bemoaned that U.S. treasure had been squandered in pointless overseas conflicts when it could have instead been used at home. And while he always took a bellicose attitude toward combating ISIS, the prospect of establishing a years-long military presence in Syria never exactly featured prominently in his campaign rhetoric.
Should Trump deign to mention Afghanistan, he’d be hard-pressed to spin the developments there as good news. In his August 2017 speech announcing the latest troop “surge,” the benchmarks he invoked were uncannily reminiscent of similar phrasing used by President Obama eight years earlier, despite Trump’s pretense of breaking from the status quo represented by his predecessor. “Our commitment is not unlimited, and our support is not a blank check,” Trump proclaimed in the speech. In 2009, Obama said “the days of providing a blank check are over” when he announced his own Afghanistan troop surge, which resulted in record deaths for U.S. personnel in 2010. Yet what has transpired since Trump’s proclamation seems like nothing if not yet another a blank check for continued U.S. military engagement there—for the 17th straight year—with only marginal deviation from longstanding U.S. strategy, even in the face of obvious signs of deteriorating conditions. According to an independent federal auditor, 44 percent of the country is currently outside Afghan government control, despite U.S. efforts to provide training. (The Pentagon had ordered the auditor to withhold the data, but following a partial release of the information, the Pentagon released the data—following press reports of the initial order to withhold. The Pentagon apologized, attributing the order to “human error.”)
From January 1 through November 26, 2017, the period covered by the auditor report released Tuesday, 11 U.S. military personnel were killed in Afghanistan and 99 were wounded. Although civilian casualties have fallen overall, there was a 52 percent increase in civilian casualties caused by airstrikes in the first nine months of 2017 compared to the same period the previous year, the report stated. Trump presided over a precipitous increase in civilian casualties, based on data from the first half of last year, in virtually every war theater the U.S. military is engaged in—something he likely won’t mention during the State of the Union.
Trump has also virtually ignored the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, save for one nominal request to the Saudis that they ease their blockade. Any notes of sympathy might strain credulity anyway, given Trump’s eagerness to furnish the Saudis with armaments used in the Yemen conflict, which has led to mass death, starvation, and disease. (TYT reported in December that U.S.-made helicopters are playing a direct combat role in Yemen.) So he’ll almost certainly omit the subject entirely tonight.
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