By David E. Sanger
WASHINGTON — The death of the Islamic State’s leader in a daring nighttime raid vindicated the value of three traditional American strengths: robust alliances, faith in intelligence agencies and the projection of military power around the world.
But President Trump has regularly derided the first two. And even as he claimed a significant national security victory on Sunday, the outcome of the raid did little to quell doubts about the wisdom of his push to reduce the United States military presence in Syria at a time when terrorist threats continue to develop in the region.
Mr. Trump has long viewed the United States intelligence agencies with suspicion and appears to see its employees as members of the “deep state.” He also has a distinctly skeptical view of alliances — in this case, close cooperation with the Kurds, whom he has effectively abandoned.
“The irony of the successful operation against al-Baghdadi is that it could not have happened without U.S. forces on the ground that have been pulled out, help from Syrian Kurds who have been betrayed, and support of a U.S. intelligence community that has so often been disparaged,” Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said on Sunday.
“While the raid was obviously a welcome success, the conditions that made the operation possible may not exist in the future,” he said.
To Mr. Trump, the death of the Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was proof of the wisdom of his strategy of defending America at home without committing United States forces to “endless wars” abroad.
To the president and his supporters, the arguments from critics amount to sour grapes, an effort by an impeachment-crazed opposition to play down the success of a focused, successful clandestine operation that echoed the killing of Osama bin Laden.
That, of course, was the 2011 moment that Democrats celebrated as proof that a progressive president with little national security experience could take out the world’s most wanted terrorist. And while it had faded a bit in memory by the time President Barack Obama was up for re-election the following year, it was a talking point for his campaign.
Mr. Trump seemed to be laying the predicate for his own campaign talking points on Sunday, when he recounted telling his own forces that “I want al-Baghdadi," rather than a string of deceased terrorist leaders who were “names I never heard of.” And clearly he is hoping that the success of the raid has a wider resonance: He sees the al-Baghdadi raid, some former Trump aides said, as a counterweight to the impeachment inquiry, which is based in part on an argument that he has shaped foreign policy for his political benefit.
It is too early to know whether any political boost will be lasting. But navigating the complex morass of the Middle East is no less complex for the death of Mr. al-Baghdadi. It is not clear if the president’s decision to pull back American forces in northern Syria in recent weeks complicated the planning and execution of the mission.
And while the raid achieved its goal, it did little to resolve the question of whether Mr. Trump’s instinct for disengagement will create room for new strains of violent radicalism that he and his successors will be forced to clean up.
For Mr. Trump, the aftermath of the Bin Laden killing eight years ago should also sound a warning.
Even without its leader, Al Qaeda evolved and spread. The Islamic State began its killing spree in the vacuum of the Middle East by early 2014, in both Iraq and Syria. Mr. Trump himself, in the heat of the 2016 campaign, accused Mr. Obama of creating the conditions for a new iteration of Islamic terrorism to prosper.
“He was the founder,” Mr. Trump said in August 2016, talking about Mr. Obama and ISIS. “The way he got out of Iraq, that was the founding of ISIS.”
The history of the Middle East is rife with the rise of extremist movements, and there is no reason to believe ISIS will be the last. Long after the cinematic details of the daring raid — from its patient beginnings in Iraq last summer to the tense flight into Syria and the chase down a sealed tunnel where Mr. al-Baghdadi met his end — the enduring question will be whether the Trump administration capitalizes on the moment to address the region’s deep sectarian and political fissures and the underlying causes of terrorism.
Clint Watts of the Foreign Policy Research Institute wrote on Sunday that “al-Baghdadi’s death will dash the dreams of an Islamic State centered in the Levant, but its years of operations recruited, trained and dispatched foreign fighters from dozens of countries that will lead the next generation of jihad to other frontiers.”
He added: “Islamic State-trained foreign fighters will be a future terrorism problem for the decade to come.”
Mr. Obama and his administration grappled with that challenge endlessly, and their memoirs are filled with Situation Room meetings searching for an approach beyond drone strikes. But they never solved the problem.
3:14How U.S. Forces Bombed ISIS Leader’s CompoundThis video shows the bombing attack on the compound where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of the Islamic State, died in northwestern Syria.CreditCredit...Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Trump’s team, in contrast, rarely discusses it. And that is in part because of the president’s very different philosophy of how to secure the country, one that was on display in his sometimes rambling news conference after the announcement of Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death.
Mr. Trump’s approach to the region has never been consistent, but he has struck consistent themes. The first is that the United States does not need to keep forces in the region to reach out and kill its enemies. The high price of occupation, rebuilding and vacuum-filling, he suggests, can be paid by allies, or by Russians, Turks and even the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad.
“That’s why I say they should start doing a lot of the fighting now, and they’ll be able to,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Sunday. “I really believe they’ll be able to.”
All the terrorists need to know, he said, is that the United States will hunt them down, if necessary, even from afar.
But the story of Mr. al-Baghdadi’s demise is more complex. He was living in territory that was essentially ungoverned space, dominated by two different Qaeda groups — Mr. al-Baghdadi’s rivals — and now an emerging territory for ISIS fighters on the run. The Syrians and the Russians control the airspace.
It is exactly the kind of area that American military and intelligence leaders — and the Republican leadership in Congress — have urged Mr. Trump to keep an eye on by keeping a small force in the country.
David H. Petraeus, the former general and C.I.A. director, often says that ungoverned space inevitably becomes extremist space. “Las Vegas rules do not obtain in these locations,” he said this year. “What happens there doesn’t stay there.”
Mr. Trump does not subscribe to that theory. In his view, American surveillance can keep track of the terrorists from above, while the National Security Agency can bore into their networks.
To Mr. Trump, a United States military presence on the ground becomes an excuse for others not to act; it does not bother him, he says, that Russia now occupies an area that was essentially an American protectorate before.
“I’ll tell you who loves us being there: Russia and China,” he said. “Because while they build their military, we’re depleting our military there.”
Mr. Trump acknowledged the help of some of those governments on Sunday, thanking the Russians first for allowing in the American helicopters, saying that the Kurds “gave us some information,” that Turkey was “not a problem.” (He did not give a similar heads-up to the congressional leadership that has been pressing for his impeachment, saying, “Washington is a leaking machine.”) While he declined to say where the operation began and ended, it was from Iraqi territory.
But it is far from clear that, in the absence of American engagement, that access is assured.
The one exception to Mr. Trump’s disengagement philosophy may come over oil.
Mr. Trump said he would not ask American taxpayers to “pay for the next 50 years” of containing mayhem. But in recent days he has indicated he is willing to keep troops around Syria’s oil fields, a consistent exception to the Trump no-troops rule. When the Iraq invasion happened, he noted Sunday, he argued for America to “keep the oil.”
Now he is making a similar case about the oil in Syria. Oil money fueled ISIS, he notes, and more recently it helps feed the Kurds — not mentioning that their access to it is being jeopardized by his sudden decision three weeks ago to abandon the American posts along the Turkey-Syria border.
But in recent days his defense secretary, Mark T. Esper, has indicated Mr. Trump was willing to commit forces to secure the fields, and the president went further on Sunday, saying he intends to “make a deal with an Exxon-Mobil or one of our great companies to go in” and exploit the field properly.
“We should be able to take some also,” he said.
The risk, of course, is that America looks like a force of exploitation, willing to enter hostile foreign lands for two reasons only: killing terrorists and extracting resources. The mission of the American Century — helping other nations to develop their economies and build democratic institutions — is missing from the strategy.
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