Cheyenne, Wyoming Correspondent

My son is in the National Guard, and the Wyoming Guard has sent people to the Middle East on every rotation since 2003, so I will say at the start that I have wanted American soldiers out of Syria for as long as they have been there, that I was glad when the President said last December that they were coming home, and that I was glad again on October 6 when he said it a second time. I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the people in this state who are angry about what happened to the Kurds are, a great many of them, the same people who have been asking for sixteen years why their children are still in those countries, and both of those feelings are real and they are in the same households. So I want to answer the question about consequences honestly, which means saying that the decision I wanted was carried out in a way that has produced consequences I did not want, and that the difference between the two is the entire subject.

Let me do the books. On the credit side, the one real entry is that about a thousand American soldiers are leaving a country where their mission had become undefined. The caliphate was destroyed in March. The troops that remained were there, by the administration’s own statements, to prevent its return, to keep Iran from running a highway to the Mediterranean, and to hold a seat at the table when Syria’s future was decided, and none of those is a mission a thousand soldiers can accomplish and none had an end date. A president who ends an open-ended deployment is doing something that two previous presidents promised and did not do, and I will give him that, because the Guard families here would.

Now the debit side, and I will take the entries in the order a bookkeeper would, by size. The first is the partner. The Syrian Democratic Forces lost something like eleven thousand fighters doing the ground work against the caliphate so that American soldiers did not have to, and they did it on the understanding, never written but never denied, that the United States would not let Turkey do to them what Turkey had been saying for years it wanted to do. On October 6 the President had a telephone call with the Turkish president and the next morning the understanding was gone. Within a week the Kurds had made a deal with Assad and the Russians, because that was the only protection left, and Russian military police were photographing themselves in the American base at Manbij. I have kept books for a lot of small operations and I know what it looks like when a company stiffs the subcontractor who did the hard part of the job. The subcontractor does not sue. He just never works for you again, and he tells everyone he knows. Every potential partner in the world, in every future fight the United States would rather not do with its own soldiers, watched that telephone call.

The second debit is the camps. There were about ten thousand ISIS fighters in Kurdish custody and tens of thousands of their family members in camps that the Kurds were guarding with American support. Several hundred escaped from one camp in the first week of the offensive when the guards left to fight the Turks, and the administration’s position is that Turkey is now responsible for them, which Turkey has not agreed to and which is not a position anyone in my state believes. The whole justification for keeping a thousand soldiers in Syria was to prevent the caliphate’s return, and the decision has made its return easier in the one way that matters, which is by letting its fighters out.

The third debit is the one that cost us nothing in blood and everything in standing, which is the manner. The decision was made on a phone call, announced late on a Sunday night, without notice to the Pentagon, the allies, or the Kurds; the President then said the Kurds had not helped at Normandy, wrote a letter to the Turkish president telling him not to be a fool, sanctioned Turkey, and lifted the sanctions nine days later after Russia and Turkey had divided the territory between them at a meeting in Sochi to which the United States was not invited. The House condemned the decision 354 to 60, with most Republicans voting against the President. Russia now controls the outcome in northern Syria, which it did not three weeks ago, and it got there without a single additional soldier, because the United States handed it the position. I do not blame Mr. Putin for taking a gift.

So here is where the ledger comes out, and it is not comfortable for a woman who wanted the troops home. The decision was right and the execution converted it from a withdrawal into an abandonment, and the abandonment has consequences the withdrawal did not need to have: a partner betrayed in front of every future partner, a prison population loosed, a Russian position consolidated, an alliance in Congress and in Europe shaken, and a small force left behind near the oil fields on a mission even less defined than the one the larger force had. If the goal was to bring the soldiers home, about a thousand are coming home and a few hundred are not, and the few hundred are now guarding oil, which is the one mission the President has described in public and the one I would least want my son assigned to.

I will say the plain thing. There was a way to do this. Six months of notice, a negotiated zone that Turkey and the Kurds could both live with, a handover of the prisoners to someone who would actually take them, and a date. The administration has a Defense Department full of people who could have written that plan and had been trying to. Instead there was a phone call. The consequence of a phone call is that everyone who depends on American word has now priced in the possibility that the word lasts until the next call, and that is a cost that will be paid by the Guard families in this state the next time the United States needs someone else to do the fighting and no one will. I wanted them home. I would have liked them to come home in a way that did not make the next deployment more likely.

Jacksonville, Florida Correspondent

I move freight, and the thing anyone in logistics knows is that getting out of a place is harder than getting in, that a withdrawal has to be scheduled like a delivery, and that the difference between a planned departure and an unplanned one is the difference between a convoy and a rout. I watched a rout this month, on the news, from a Navy town, and I want to describe it as a logistics failure before I describe it as anything else, because I think the strategic consequences follow from the logistics and because the logistics are the part nobody in Washington seems to have thought about between the Sunday-night phone call and the Monday-morning statement.

Here is what an unplanned withdrawal looked like. On October 6 the President spoke with the Turkish president and the White House announced that American forces would pull back from the border. The soldiers on the ground, by their own accounts to reporters, learned of it at roughly the same time as the Kurds they had been fighting beside, which is to say with no notice and no plan. Within days Turkey attacked. The Kurds, with no one else to turn to, made a deal with Assad and the Russians. American units had to leave bases in a hurry; one of them was bombed by its own aircraft on the way out to deny it to whoever came next, and Russian military police were filming themselves inside another within the week. Prisoners escaped from a camp when the guards went to fight. Civilians fled by the tens of thousands. And the small force the President has now decided to keep is being repositioned to the oil fields in the east, with a mission he has described as keeping the oil, which is a mission that no one at Mayport or Camp Lejeune has ever trained for and that I would not know how to write a dispatch for. That is not a withdrawal. It is a terminal being abandoned with the gates open and the cargo on the dock, and everyone in the yard watching to see who takes it.

Now the consequences, and I will take them in the order a dispatcher would, by what was left on the dock. The first thing left was the Kurds. They did the fighting that American soldiers did not have to do against the caliphate, lost something like eleven thousand people doing it, and were told for years, by officers in the field and officials in Washington, that the United States would not stand aside while Turkey attacked them. The telephone call ended that in a night. I have been a dispatcher and a claims adjuster and a state staffer, and in every one of those jobs the thing that mattered most was whether the people you worked with believed you would do what you said, and the Kurds now know the answer, and so does every other group in the world that the United States might one day ask to do its ground fighting. That is a consequence that will not be measured until the next time we need a partner, and the price will be that we do not get one.

The second thing left was the prisoners. Ten thousand ISIS fighters and tens of thousands of family members in camps that the Kurds guarded with American backing. Several hundred got out in the first week. The administration says Turkey is responsible for them now; Turkey has not agreed, and the Kurds are now busy fighting Turkey. The whole reason a thousand American soldiers were in Syria after the caliphate fell in March was to keep it from coming back, and the fastest way to bring it back is to let its people out, and we have made that easier. The sailors here understand this better than most, because the ships out of Mayport have been running the Mediterranean deployments that support the Syria mission for five years, and they know what the caliphate was and how it ended, and they did not expect it to be given a second chance by their own government.

The third thing left was the position. For five years the United States held a piece of northeastern Syria that gave it a say in how the war ended and kept Iran from running a road from Tehran to the Mediterranean through friendly territory. That piece is now held by Assad, Russia, and Turkey, who divided it at a meeting in Sochi on Tuesday to which the United States was not invited, and the American president lifted the sanctions he had imposed on Turkey the next day and called the result a permanent ceasefire. Russia now patrols the border we used to patrol. It got that without a shot. In logistics terms, we vacated the slot and the competitor backed into it before the engine was cold.

I want to give the other side its due, because this is a Navy town and the Navy families here are tired. They have been tired since 2003. The President campaigned on ending these deployments and there is a great deal of support for that in Duval County, among the people who have done the deployments, and I share some of it. A thousand soldiers in Syria with no end date and no congressional authorization was not a sustainable arrangement, and the people now outraged about the withdrawal did not, most of them, propose an alternative that ended with the soldiers home. The House voted 354 to 60 to condemn the decision, and I would ask the 354 what their plan was, because a resolution is not a plan.

But a plan is what was missing, and that is the whole point. There is a way to leave a place. You schedule it. You tell your partners. You negotiate the zone with the Turks while you still have leverage, you hand the prisoners to someone who will take them, you set a date, and you move the units in order with the gates closed behind them. The Defense Department has people whose whole career is that kind of plan and they had been trying to write one since December. Instead there was a phone call, and the consequences of a phone call are what we have: a partner betrayed, a prison population loose, a position handed to Moscow, an alliance embarrassed, and a few hundred soldiers left behind to guard oil on a mission nobody can define. I am not a mascot for staying or for leaving. I move freight. Freight that leaves a terminal without a manifest ends up somewhere nobody chose. That is what happened. The manifest was the strategy, and nobody wrote one.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent

Small peoples who ally with large powers have one question they ask before everything else, which is what happens when the large power’s interest changes, and the Kurds of Syria have just received the answer that small peoples usually receive. I say that without surprise and with considerable sympathy, because the Caribbean has been on both ends of American attention for a century and has learned to read the moment when the attention moves. The strategic consequences of what happened in northeastern Syria this month are, in my view, less about Syria than about that lesson, which has now been taught in the most public manner possible to every potential partner the United States might wish to recruit for a fight it would rather not conduct with its own soldiers. The lesson is not new. The clarity is.

Let me describe what happened in the terms a small state would use. The Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led militia, did the ground fighting that destroyed the Islamic State’s territory between 2015 and this March, at a cost of roughly eleven thousand dead, in exchange for American air power, American advisers, and an understanding that the United States would not permit Turkey, which regards the militia as an extension of the Kurdish insurgency inside its own borders, to attack it. The understanding was never a treaty. It was the kind of arrangement that small peoples accept because it is the only one on offer, and it rested entirely on the continued presence of about a thousand American soldiers whose position between the Turks and the Kurds made an attack impossible without American casualties. On the evening of 6 October, after a telephone call with the Turkish president, the American president removed those soldiers from the border. Turkey attacked within three days. The Kurds, with no alternative, turned to Damascus and Moscow, which accepted them on terms that end their autonomy, and Russian military police now occupy the base the Americans left. The whole sequence took thirteen days.

The first consequence, then, is to the currency of American assurance, and I want to be precise about how it is devalued. No one in the world believed that American protection of the Kurds was permanent; small peoples do not believe such things. What they believed was that it would end with notice, in a negotiated manner, with provision for the people being left, because that is how a great power behaves when it intends to recruit partners again. The manner of this withdrawal, a phone call, a Sunday-night statement, no notice to the partner, a presidential remark that the Kurds had not helped at Normandy, has told every future partner that the notice may be zero and the provision may be nothing. That is a cost the United States will pay the next time it wants someone else’s sons to fight, which, given its own public’s exhaustion with these wars, will be the only way it fights, and the price will have gone up.

The second consequence is the beneficiary, and here I would ask American readers to notice who gained without lifting a weapon. Russia has spent four years in Syria pursuing a single aim, which is to be the power whose consent every party in the country requires, and on 22 October at Sochi it achieved that, dividing the northeast with Turkey, guaranteeing the Kurds’ withdrawal from the border, and assuming the patrols the Americans had conducted, all without the United States at the table. Iran’s road to the Mediterranean, which the American presence in the northeast was meant to interrupt, is now interrupted by nobody. Assad, whom three American administrations declared illegitimate, has recovered the northeast without fighting for it. And Turkey, a NATO ally that bought Russian air defenses this summer over American objection, has learned that it can present Washington with a fait accompli by telephone. Every one of those gains was handed over. None was taken.

The third consequence is the one that will arrive last and matter most, which is the prisoners. The Kurds held roughly ten thousand Islamic State fighters and tens of thousands of their dependents in camps that American support made possible. Several hundred escaped in the first week when the guards left to fight. The American position is that Turkey is now responsible for them; Turkey has not accepted the responsibility and the Kurds are no longer in a position to discharge it. The Caribbean has its own small experience of what happens when a security vacuum releases the people it was containing, and the experience is that they do not stay where they were released. The caliphate was destroyed as a territory in March. Its people have just been given the one thing a defeated movement needs, which is a disordered border and a distracted jailer.

I should say where the administration’s defenders have a point, because they have one and the critics have been reluctant to grant it. A thousand American soldiers in Syria with no congressional authorization, no defined end state, and no partner capable of holding the territory alone was not a policy; it was an inheritance, and the previous administration bequeathed it without a plan for ending it. The American public, by every poll, wants these deployments ended. A president who ends one is doing what two predecessors promised and did not do. The critics in Congress who condemned the decision by 354 to 60 did not, most of them, propose an alternative that ended with the soldiers home, and a condemnation without an alternative is a position, not a policy. The question was never whether to leave. It was how, and the how is where the consequences live.

So my assessment is that the strategic consequences are a devaluation of American assurance in the eyes of every future partner, a consolidation of Russian primacy in Syria achieved without cost, a restoration of Assad and Iran to positions the American presence had denied them, a demonstration to a NATO ally that Washington can be moved by telephone, and a release of the caliphate’s remnant into a border with no jailer. The decision to leave was defensible. The manner converted a withdrawal into an abandonment and gave away for nothing what might have been traded for something. From the Caribbean, where we have watched the American interest move on before, I would say only that the small peoples of the world have long priced the possibility of being left. What they have learned this month is the speed, and speed is the thing that changes the price.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent

I am going to defend the decision, and I am going to do it from the start rather than after three paragraphs of agreeing with the critics, because somebody in this forum should say plainly what a large share of the country believes and what the 354 members of the House who voted to condemn the President have not had to answer for. The United States had about a thousand soldiers in a country where Congress never authorized them to be, allied with a militia that our own NATO ally regards as a terrorist organization, holding territory that we had no plan to hold indefinitely and no plan to hand over, under a mission that changed every time someone in Washington was asked what it was. The caliphate was destroyed in March. The President said in December that the troops would come home and was talked out of it by people who then spent ten months not producing the plan they said they needed. On October 6 he stopped waiting. I would have preferred the plan. I will not pretend the plan was coming.

Let me say what the arrangement actually was, because the coverage has sentimentalized it. The Syrian Democratic Forces are led by the YPG, which is the Syrian wing of the PKK, which the United States has designated a terrorist organization since 1997 for a forty-year insurgency inside Turkey that has killed tens of thousands. Turkey is a NATO ally that hosts American nuclear weapons at Incirlik and has been telling every American administration since 2014 that it would not tolerate a PKK state on its southern border. The United States chose to arm the YPG anyway, because it was the only effective ground force against the caliphate and because the alternative was American infantry, and that was a reasonable choice for the duration of the fight. It was never a reasonable permanent arrangement, because it required the United States to stand between two parties indefinitely, one of them a treaty ally, in a country it had no legal basis to occupy, and every officer and official who told the Kurds otherwise was writing a check the United States Congress had never agreed to cover. The Kurds knew that. They are not children. They made a bet that American attention would last, and small peoples make that bet all the time, and it is a bad bet, and they know it is a bad bet.

Now the consequences, and I will be as hard on the execution as I have been easy on the decision, because the execution was bad and straight talk requires saying so. The decision was made on a phone call and announced on a Sunday night with no notice to the Pentagon, the allies, or the Kurds, and the result was a scramble: bases evacuated in hours, one bombed by our own planes on the way out, Russian military police filming in another, prisoners escaping from a camp whose guards had gone to fight. The President then said the Kurds had not helped at Normandy, wrote a letter to Erdogan that read like a text message, imposed sanctions, and lifted them nine days later after Russia and Turkey had settled the border at Sochi without us. A compliance officer looking at that sequence would say the decision was defensible and the process was not, and that the damage is almost entirely in the process. A withdrawal announced in December with a six-month timeline, a negotiated zone, and a handover of the prisoners would have reached the same place with none of the pictures. The pictures are the cost.

So what are the strategic consequences, honestly stated? First, the Kurds have gone to Assad and Russia for protection, which is where they were always going to end up, because they live in Syria and the United States does not. The American presence delayed that; it was never going to prevent it. Second, Russia has the position, which it would have had whenever we left, because Russia stayed and we did not intend to. Third, the prisoners are a real problem, and the one consequence I will not minimize: several hundred have escaped and the rest are guarded by people who have other priorities, and the administration’s claim that Turkey will handle them is a hope, not a plan. Fourth, every future partner has been reminded that American protection ends, which is true and which they knew, and the manner has made the reminder louder than it needed to be. Fifth, a NATO ally has learned it can move Washington by phone, which is the consequence I like least and which follows from the manner, not the decision.

Here is what I would say to the 354. You voted to condemn a withdrawal that the public supports, from a deployment you never authorized, in defense of an arrangement that had no end, and you did not propose an alternative that ends with the soldiers home. The Senate did not vote at all. If Congress wants American soldiers to stand between the Turks and the Kurds indefinitely, it can pass an authorization that says so and own the result. It will not, because the people who elect it do not want that, and so the condemnation is a way of having the position without the policy, which is the oldest trick in Washington and the one the Guard families in this state have the least patience for.

So my answer is that the strategic consequences are mostly consequences that were coming whenever the United States left Syria, arriving all at once and badly because the leaving was done by telephone: the Kurds to Assad, the border to Russia and Turkey, the prisoners to no one. The decision was right. The execution turned a withdrawal into a rout and gave Moscow and Ankara for free what a planned departure could have traded for something, and that is a real cost and it belongs to the President. But the people who want to keep American soldiers in Syria forever to prevent these consequences from ever arriving should say so out loud and tell the families in Minot and Bismarck how long forever is. They have not. They will not. Until they do, I will take the decision and criticize the execution, which is what I think most of the people I live among actually believe, and what almost nobody in Washington has had the nerve to say in one sentence.

Gastonia, North Carolina Correspondent

I have edited a great many stories about this war in the past three weeks, and the thing that struck me as they came across the desk was not what was in them but who was quoted. The people condemning the President’s decision were, in roughly equal measure, Democrats who had spent three years saying he was a Russian asset and Republicans who had spent three years saying nothing, and the Republicans were angrier. Senator Graham, who is from the state next door and whose every statement I have edited for a decade, called it a disaster and a stain. Senator McConnell wrote a column. The House voted 354 to 60 to condemn the withdrawal, and two-thirds of the Republicans voted with the majority, which is the largest defection from this President on any vote in his term. And the thing I kept thinking, as I cut those stories to fit, was that the polling in the same week showed a majority of the public in favor of bringing the troops home, and that the people most outraged were the people who had never asked the public, and that the gap between the two is the strategic consequence nobody is writing about.

Let me do the facts first, because a copy editor’s job is to make sure they are right before anyone argues about them. On the night of October 6, after a phone call with the Turkish president, the White House announced that American forces would pull back from the Syrian border and would not stand in the way of a Turkish operation. Three days later Turkey attacked the Kurdish-led force that had done the ground fighting against the caliphate and lost eleven thousand people doing it. Within a week the Kurds had made a deal with Assad and Russia, Russian military police were in a base the Americans had left, several hundred ISIS prisoners had escaped a camp whose guards had gone to fight, and a Kurdish woman politician had been pulled from her car and shot by a Turkish-backed militia. The President said the Kurds had not helped at Normandy, wrote a letter to Erdogan telling him not to be a fool, imposed sanctions, sent the Vice President to negotiate a pause, watched Russia and Turkey settle the border at Sochi without an American in the room, lifted the sanctions the next day, and announced that a small force would stay behind to secure the oil. That is the record. It fits in a paragraph because it happened in nineteen days.

Now the consequences, and I will name the ones everyone names and then the one I think is underwritten. Everyone names the Kurds, and they are right: a partner that did our fighting was abandoned by telephone, and every future partner saw it. Everyone names Russia, and they are right: Moscow got the position it had wanted for four years without firing a shot, because we vacated it. Everyone names the prisoners, and they are right: the one reason to keep a thousand soldiers in Syria after March was the caliphate’s return, and we have made its return easier. Everyone names the alliance, and they are right: a NATO member bought Russian air defenses this summer and then moved an American president by phone, and the other members noticed. Those are real and I will not spend more words on them than the wire already has.

The consequence I think is underwritten is domestic, and it is this. The decision was popular and the manner was indefensible, and the political class responded to the manner by condemning the decision, and the public heard the condemnation as a defense of the war. I watched the Republican senators who broke with the President this month, and I watched the Democrats who joined them, and I did not see one of them propose an alternative that ended with the soldiers home on a date. They proposed staying. They proposed it in the language of honor and credibility and the Kurds, all of which are real, and none of which is a plan, and the people in Gaston County who have sent their children to these wars for sixteen years heard a bipartisan establishment tell them that leaving was shameful and heard nothing about when they could leave. That is a strategic consequence, because it widens the gap between the people who make foreign policy and the people who pay for it, and a gap like that is how you get a president who makes decisions by phone in the first place. The manner was his. The vacuum he filled was theirs.

I want to be fair to the senators, because I have edited them for a decade and some of them know this subject very well. Their argument is that a thousand soldiers was a small price for a large position: a seat at the Syrian table, a block on Iran’s road to the sea, a lid on the prisoners, a guarantee to a partner. All true. What they never said, in the three years the arrangement lasted, was how long the price would be paid or what would end it, and a position that has no end is not a strategy, it is an occupation that has not yet been named, and the public has learned to recognize those. The President’s decision was a bad answer to a question the senators refused to ask. The question was still real.

So my answer is that the strategic consequences abroad are the ones in every story this week, a partner betrayed, a position handed to Russia, a prison population loosed, an ally emboldened, and that they follow from the manner, which was a phone call, rather than from the decision, which was overdue. The consequence at home is the one that will outlast the others: a political class that condemned a popular decision without offering the public an alternative, and a public that heard the condemnation as proof that nobody in Washington intends to end anything. I am all over the map, as I keep saying, and on this one the map has two roads and I am on both: the President did a necessary thing in the worst possible way, and the people who condemned him did it in a way that made the next necessary thing harder to do well. The Kurds paid for the first. The country will pay for the second. I will edit that story too, when it arrives. It will fit in a paragraph.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent

I want to talk about the oil, because the oil is the part of this that tells you what the policy actually is, as opposed to what it was announced as. On October 6 the policy was that American soldiers were leaving Syria. By this week the policy is that most of them are leaving and a few hundred are staying in the eastern desert to, in the President’s words, secure the oil, and he has said more than once that the United States should keep it. I am a civil engineer in a county public-works shop, and I know what it looks like when a project’s scope changes in the field without anyone revising the drawings, and that is what happened here. The announced policy was withdrawal. What reached the ground was a redeployment to a smaller footprint with a mission that no one has written down, around oil fields that produce a trickle, in a part of Syria that is more exposed than the part we left. The strategic consequences of the decision are mostly the consequences of the gap between those two things.

Let me take the gap first, because the engineer’s question is always what load the structure was carrying before you removed a member. The thousand American soldiers in northeastern Syria were carrying four loads: they kept the Turks off the Kurds, they kept the Kurds guarding the caliphate’s prisoners, they kept Iran from running a road from Iraq to the Mediterranean through friendly territory, and they gave the United States a seat when Syria’s future was decided. Every one of those loads was real. None of them had an end date, and no one in two administrations had designed the structure that would carry them once the soldiers left, which is why the Defense Department spent ten months after the President’s first announcement in December producing nothing but reasons to stay. A load-bearing member with no replacement planned is a member you cannot remove without a collapse, and the engineering answer is that you design the replacement first. The political answer, on October 6, was to remove it and see.

What collapsed is on the record. The Turks attacked within three days. The Kurds went to Assad and Russia within a week, because those were the only parties offering to carry the first load. The prisoners’ guards left to fight and several hundred prisoners left with them. Russian military police moved into the base at Manbij and Russian and Turkish patrols now run the border under a deal struck at Sochi with no American present, which means the third and fourth loads are carried by Moscow. In nineteen days, every load the soldiers were bearing was transferred to another party, and not one of the transfers was negotiated by the United States. That is what removing a member without a replacement looks like. The structure does not fall down. Someone else props it, and then it is theirs.

Now the oil, because the oil is the redesign that happened in the field. The fields in Deir ez-Zor produce a small fraction of what they did before the war, and the Kurds had been selling the output to Assad through middlemen for years, and the only strategic logic for an American force there is to deny the revenue to the caliphate’s remnants and to Damascus. That is a real purpose. It is also a purpose that a few hundred soldiers in open desert, with the Kurdish partner now reconciled to Damascus and the Russians patrolling to their north, are poorly placed to serve, and it is a purpose that nobody in the administration had articulated before the withdrawal became politically expensive. From where I sit, the oil mission is what an engineer calls a field fix: a change made on site to make the project look like it still has a purpose, drawn by nobody, approved by nobody, and the most likely place for the next failure. The soldiers who were in a defined position with a partner are now in an undefined one without, and the President has described their job in terms that no officer could write an order for.

I will give the decision its due, as I think the question requires. A thousand soldiers in a country where Congress never authorized them, on a mission with no end, is not a sustainable arrangement, and the public knows it, and the people in East Tennessee who have sent their children to these wars since 2001 wanted them home. The President was not wrong to want to end it. The 354 members of the House who condemned him did not, most of them, say how they would have ended it, and a condemnation without a design is just a louder version of the problem that produced the decision. The question was never whether to remove the member. It was whether to design the replacement first, and nobody in either branch did.

So my answer is that the strategic consequences are the four loads transferred to parties that did not have to pay for them: the Kurds to Assad and Russia, the prisoners to no one, the Iranian corridor to nobody’s objection, and the Syrian settlement to a table in Sochi with no American chair. Each of those was going to transfer eventually, because the United States was always going to leave. The decision made them transfer all at once and for nothing, and then, when the pictures got bad, the policy was redesigned in the field around oil fields that cannot carry the weight the administration has placed on them. That is the consequence I would watch most closely, because it is the one with American soldiers still in it: a few hundred men on a mission nobody has drawn, in a position less defensible than the one they left, waiting for the next phone call. I have seen field fixes hold for years. I have also seen the ones that did not, and the thing they had in common was that nobody could produce the drawing. Nobody can produce this one. The county would not let me pour a footing on that basis. The country is letting it hold a desert.

Owatonna, Minnesota Correspondent

The Kurds have a saying, that they have no friends but the mountains, and it is not a saying they invented this month. In 1975 the United States and the Shah of Iran armed the Iraqi Kurds against Baghdad and then, when the Shah made his deal with Saddam at Algiers, cut them off overnight and let Saddam’s army do what it did. In 1991 the first President Bush urged the Iraqi people to rise against Saddam after the Gulf War, the Kurds rose, and American aircraft watched from above while Saddam’s helicopters put them down, until the refugee columns on the Turkish border became too large for the cameras to ignore. I am sixty-two years old and I remember both of those, and I bring them up not to excuse what happened this month but to put it where it belongs, which is in a long record of a large power using a small people for as long as the using was convenient and then discovering a reason to stop. The strategic consequence of October 2019 is not that the United States has done something new. It is that it has done something old, faster and more publicly than before, and the world has a longer memory for the manner than for the act.

Let me take the investor’s view before the historian’s, because they end in the same place by different roads. An investor watching the past three weeks would note that the United States held a position in northeastern Syria that it had acquired cheaply, about a thousand soldiers and some air power in exchange for a Kurdish ground force that lost eleven thousand people doing the fighting, and that the position carried real value: a block on Iran’s land route to the Mediterranean, custody of the caliphate’s prisoners, a seat at the table for Syria’s settlement, and a demonstration to every other potential partner that the arrangement could be relied upon. The investor would then note that the position was liquidated on a Sunday night for no consideration whatsoever. The Turks got their buffer zone, the Russians got the border patrols and the base at Manbij, Assad got the northeast, Iran got its corridor, and the United States got a thousand soldiers home, which it could have had in a negotiated exit six months from now with any of those other parties paying something for it. In my old business we would call that a fire sale with no buyer. The assets did not disappear. They were simply taken by whoever was standing closest when the doors opened.

Now the historian’s view, which is harsher. The American public has wanted out of these wars since roughly 2007, and every president since has promised to oblige and then been persuaded by the Pentagon and the foreign policy establishment that leaving would be worse than staying, and the persuasion has always rested on exactly the consequences that arrived this month: the partner abandoned, the prisoners loosed, the adversary advanced. The establishment was right about the consequences. It was wrong, and has been wrong for twelve years, about the alternative, which it has consistently described as staying a little longer until conditions permit, and the conditions never permit, because the conditions are produced by staying. The President cut through that on October 6 in the way he cuts through things, which is by telephone and without a plan, and the establishment responded exactly as it has always responded, by cataloguing the consequences and proposing to stay. The House voted 354 to 60 to condemn him. Not one of the 354 proposed a date. That is the structural failure, and it is older than this President, and he exploited it rather than created it.

So the consequences. Abroad, they are the ones that every analyst has listed and that I will not dispute: a partner betrayed in front of every future partner, a Russian position consolidated at no cost, a NATO ally shown that it can present Washington with a fait accompli by phone, a prison population partly loosed and wholly unguarded, and a small residual force left near the oil on a mission the President has described in terms no officer could write an order for. Those are serious and they belong to the manner of the withdrawal, which was indefensible. At home, the consequence is the one the historian notices: the only American politician willing to end a deployment did it in the worst possible way, the only politicians willing to criticize the way proposed to continue the deployment, and the public, which wanted neither the abandonment nor the forever war, was offered nothing else. That gap has been widening for twelve years. This month it became a canyon.

I want to say a word for the Kurds, because I think they deserve a word that is neither sentimental nor cynical. They knew. Their leaders have said as much in interviews this month: they knew the American presence was not permanent, they knew the day would come, and they took the arrangement anyway because it was the only one that let them fight the caliphate and govern themselves for five years, and five years of self-government is more than the Kurds of Syria had ever had. They did not expect to be given a Sunday night’s notice. Nobody does. But they will survive it, because they have survived 1975 and 1991 and a century before that, and they will do it by making the deal with Damascus that they have now made, which gives up the autonomy and keeps the people, which is the trade the mountains have always required.

So my answer is that the strategic consequences are a fire sale of a cheaply held position, a devaluation of American assurance in the eyes of everyone who might be asked to fight for it, and a domestic demonstration that the United States has no political mechanism for ending a war other than a president who decides to end it badly. The first two are costs of the manner and belong to the President. The third is a cost of twelve years of a foreign policy establishment that could describe every consequence of leaving and never once produced a plan to do it, and that cost belongs to the 354 and their predecessors. I remember 1975 and 1991. The Kurds remember them better. The thing neither of us has seen before is an American president announcing the betrayal himself, in real time, and then redesigning the policy around oil wells as the pictures came in. The historian in me says the act is old. The investor says the manner cost more than the act ever did. Both are right, and both of them would have sold six months ago.

Long Island, New York Correspondent

I want to begin with the legal fact that everyone in this argument has been standing on and nobody has mentioned, which is that there has never been a congressional authorization for American forces to be in Syria. The troops went in under the 2001 resolution against the perpetrators of September 11, stretched to cover a caliphate that did not exist in 2001, and under the 2002 resolution on Iraq, stretched across a border. Three administrations have relied on those two documents for a war Congress never voted on, and the members of the House who condemned the withdrawal this month by 354 to 60 are, nearly all of them, members who never once voted to authorize the presence they are now defending. I spent ten years in a prosecutor’s office, and I know what it looks like when everyone in the room has been operating on a theory of authority that nobody wants tested, and the moment someone acts on the absence of authority, the room discovers it has no standing to object. That is the position Congress found itself in on October 7, and it explains why the condemnation was so loud and the alternative so absent.

Let me take the consequences through a legal lens, because I think it clarifies them. The first is the partner, and here the question is what the United States owed the Syrian Democratic Forces. Legally, nothing. There was no treaty, no agreement, no statute; there was a working relationship in which the Kurds did the ground fighting against the caliphate and the United States provided air support, weapons, and the assurance of officers in the field that Turkey would not be permitted to attack. Those assurances were not the United States government’s to give in any binding sense, and the Kurds, who are sophisticated people, knew it. But a relationship of that kind, in law as in life, creates expectations that are enforced not by courts but by reputation, and the reputation is what was spent on October 6. Every future partner will now assume that an American assurance given by an officer in the field is good until a phone call in Washington, and will price its cooperation accordingly. That is a consequence with no remedy, because there is no forum in which the Kurds can bring the claim.

The second is Turkey, and the legal position there is more interesting than the coverage suggests. Turkey is a treaty ally under the North Atlantic Treaty, which obliges the United States to defend it if attacked and obliges nothing in the other direction regarding Turkey’s own operations. Turkey regards the Kurdish force as the Syrian arm of the PKK, which the United States has itself designated a terrorist organization since 1997, so the Turkish legal claim is that it attacked a terrorist group that its ally had armed, and that claim is not frivolous. The United States chose to arm that group because it was the only effective ground force available, and the choice was defensible as a wartime expedient and indefensible as a permanent policy, because it placed American soldiers between a treaty ally and a designated terrorist organization indefinitely, with no legal framework for either. The President’s response to Turkey’s attack was to impose sanctions under an emergency declaration and lift them nine days later, which tells you that the sanctions were a reaction rather than a policy, and that the legal instruments available to punish an ally were never going to be used for long.

The third is the prisoners, and this is where the legal consequences are most serious and least discussed. The Kurds held roughly ten thousand ISIS fighters, including something like two thousand foreign nationals from Europe and elsewhere, and tens of thousands of dependents, in facilities that existed because American support made them possible. Those detainees have no clear legal status; they are not prisoners of war, their home countries have refused to repatriate them, and the Kurds had no courts capable of trying them. Several hundred have escaped. The administration’s position that Turkey is now responsible is a position without an agreement behind it, and the European governments whose citizens are in those camps have been asking for two years what happens if the guards leave, and the answer arrived this month. A detention regime with no legal foundation and no responsible custodian is a release program with a delay, and the delay is now being measured in weeks.

The fourth is the residual force, and here I will say what a paralegal says about a document that has been revised without re-execution. The President announced a withdrawal and has now announced that several hundred soldiers will remain to secure the oil fields in eastern Syria, and he has said that the United States should keep the oil. Whatever the strategic merit, the legal foundation for American soldiers guarding Syrian oil against the Syrian government is thinner than the already thin foundation for fighting the caliphate, because the 2001 resolution does not reach oil and the law of armed conflict does not permit a party to seize a country’s resources for its own benefit. The administration will describe the mission as denying revenue to ISIS, which is a defensible reading until someone asks who is receiving the revenue instead, and the question has already been asked.

I want to be fair to the decision, because the legal lens cuts both ways. A deployment with no authorization, no end, and no defined mission is a deployment that any president is entitled to end, and the public that elects presidents has wanted this one ended for years. The members of Congress who condemned the withdrawal had three years to authorize the presence and chose not to, because an authorization would have required them to own a war, and the condemnation lets them own the outrage instead. That is not a legal argument. It is an observation about who had standing and declined to use it.

So my answer is that the strategic consequences are a partner whose only remedy was reputation and whose reputation claim has no forum, an ally that has learned it can act against American partners with a phone call and nine days of sanctions, a detention regime with no legal foundation collapsing toward release, and a residual mission whose legal basis is weaker than the one it replaced. The decision to end an unauthorized deployment was within the President’s authority. The manner converted the ending into an abandonment, and the law, which had never been consulted about the beginning, was not consulted about the end either. Congress had three years to write the authorization that would have forced a plan. It wrote a resolution instead. Resolutions do not bind anyone, which is why they pass 354 to 60.