>> Turkey seized control of a key highway near the border of northeast Syria.
Meaning, US troops in the area may have to rely on airlifts to get out.
Stateside President Trump's abrupt shift in policy has triggered a growing bipartisan
backlash.
>> So Turkey's latest move in northern Syria has complicated the situation for US troops
who are attempting to leave.
And this is of course following Donald Trump's abrupt decision to abandon our Kurdish allies
in the region and allow for Turkey to move forward with its military operation.
Now, there's other news, including the involvement of Russia.
But before we get to that, let me give you the details on what's going on in terms of
Turkey's latest actions.
Trump declared that Turkey's offensive undermines the campaign to defeat the Islamic State of
Iraq in Syria, Or ISIS, endangers civilians, and further threatens to undermine the peace,
security, and stability in the region.
Now part of the reason why US troops were in that region to begin with was to prevent
all of these things from happening.
Now that US troops are leaving, there are ISIS prisoners who are escaping the very prisons
that our former Kurdish allies were keeping an eye on.
Obviously, their priority now is to save themselves, and to save their own lives, as a result of
this Turkish aggression.
But the order that Donald Trump signed is in regards to sanctions.
It's $100 billion trade deal hammered out between Ankara and Washington, raises tariffs
on Turkish steel to 50% and imposes sanctions on senior Turkish officials and the country's
defense and energy ministries.
So with that said, and before we move on to what Russia is doing, I wanted to kind of
open this up to the panel and get your thoughts on it.
>> I mean, it's a predictable consequence of Trump's decision to pull out of northern
Syria.
Turkey would not be doing any of this without the sort of tacit acquiescence of the United
States.
I think Erdoğan himself was probably surprised that Trump agreed to do this move in the first
place.
It's one of those things that Trump himself is such an easy person to read in this sense
because he's very obvious like he just says the thing openly, the thing that past US leaders
would couch in sort of humanitarian terms and sort of slippery foreign policy speak.
He just kind of, I'll right size it, but this has been sort of a ongoing move the United
States has done several times in the past.
I mean, the Kurds are sort of a very easy pawn for the United States, to sort of use
in various different geopolitical chess matches.
And the sort of playbook has always been the same exact thing.
So this shouldn't come as too much of a surprise but it's no less depressing and horrifying.
>> So, can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean by that?
Because I agree with you that Trump isn't subtle as previous presidents have been.
He says the quiet parts out loud.
But what do you mean when you say that, similar things have happened in the past?
>> Well, I mean, there's so many examples, it's almost impossible to go through them
all right now.
But I mean, whether it was in the early 90s, or in the 1980s, or in World War II, World
War I.
The Kurds are kind of this perfect pawn for United States interest because they're a sort
of stateless people that exists across various states where the United States has geopolitical
interests.
Some of them are our friends, some of them are our enemies.
And whatever point in time, our enemies need to be dealt with, we'll arm and support the
Kurds.
But then when our friends who also have to deal with Kurdish minorities in their own
countries, whenever they get a little worried about these uppity Kurds then we'll abandon
them.
And, that just kind of that same dynamic has happened over and over and over again.
>> Yeah, and in this case, you have Turkey and NATO ally wanting to invade northern Syria.
And then Donald Trump decides to abandon our Kurdish allies to make way for Turkey.
Now, he has received so much backlash, this bipartisan backlash that he's trying to make
it appear as though he didn't intend for it to work out this way.
That he didn't give a green light to this Turkish aggression, but he knew what was going
on.
I mean, in one of the original statements released by the White House, they specifically
said, Trump told Erdoğan, if you're gonna do like a mild military operation, we're gonna
keep our troops there.
But if you're gonna do an aggressive military operation, we're gonna pull our troops out.
Yeah, that's letting Erdoğan know, if you wanna go, if you wanna play, we'll play along
with you and pull our troops out.
>> Mm-hm.
>> I mean, anyway, Adrienne.
>> Well, this is very much on par for Donald Trump essentially having him withdraw the
troops from northern Syria.
It really just undoes all the progress that's been done.
And that's essentially what he's done here in the United States.
This is his MO, this is what he does.
He rolls things back, so that anything that's been good, progressive, moving in the direction
of stability is now unfolded, and we see how it plays out.
And then pretending like, oops, I didn't know it was gonna happen.
It's just how this man operates.
>> He doesn't really strike me as someone who really has a plan or a strategy.
It just really depends on the last person who spoke to him.
And this is true of all of his policy, right?
And so he has this conversation with Erdoğan and abruptly he decides, I'm gonna go ahead
and abandon our Kurdish allies after they helped us fight ISIS.
And keep in mind, those ISIS fighters were being watched by these Kurdish allies, now
former Kurdish allies.
And so, again, they're escaping some of these prisons which poses a danger, like what was
the point of trying to fight ISIS?
You're gonna have Donald Trump just undo, you're right, undo all of the progress that
was made there.
Now, let's talk a little bit more about these sanctions because some of our other allies
have gotten involved.
So, NPR reports that US NATO allies have halted weapons exports to Turkey that includes France
and Germany.
And with the US withdrawing from the border area, Russia says its military is now acting
as a buffer between Turkish and Syrian troops.
Also the Kurds have, Spoken, they've spoken to Assad, Bashar Al Assad, he has agreed to
offer some sort of protection.
So we'll see how that plays out.
But, Syria, the civil war that was happening in Syria was very much a proxy war.
And with all of these updates, it's very clear that proxy war continues.
There are all these other world interests that are getting involved, you have Turkey
involved, obviously.
You have Russia, you have Iran, it's not a good situation at all, and it didn't have
to go down this way.
Trump just decided randomly after having a conversation to do this.
>> Although I really do wonder kind of what's in it for him because he doesn't do anything
without having a motivation.
So, I don't know what that conversation necessarily entailed or what conversations he's having
with Putin, or what other foreign leaders to essentially set himself up.
So, maybe there will be a Trump hotel on a new island somewhere.
>> Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised.
You're right.
I mean, everything that he does is based on self-interest.
And also whether or not the person he's speaking to is complimentary toward him.
So, a few more pieces of info that you should be aware of how disastrous has this been for
civilians in the area.
Nearly 70,000 children have been displaced since hostilities escalated last week, and
that's according to estimates by UNICEF adding that 170,000 children may need humanitarian
aid as a result of violence in the border region.
But here's the issue.
Some of the organizations that have been offering humanitarian aid in the area have left because
they're worried about their own lives, given this Turkish aggression.
Also Kurds have announced that deal with the Russian and Iranian-backed government of Syrian
President Bashar Al Assad to back them against the Turkish onslaught.
And finally, I wanna read this quote from Donald Trump.
This is a tweet that he posted.
Let Syria and Assad protect the Kurds and fight Turkey for their own land.
Anyone who wants to assist Syria in protecting the Kurds is good with me,whether it is Russia,
China, or Napoleon.
I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away.
But here's the thing.
This is not an example of us doing an interventionist war.
This was us working with the Kurds to defeat ISIS.
And what Donald Trump did is basically thrown them aside as soon as he got what he wanted.
>> Yeah, and it mean if there's a breeding in that war against ISIS, the Kurds are the
ones who bore the brunt of it.
I mean, I think they lost something like 11,000 fighters in the fight against ISIS.
Obviously, way less than the United States suffered.
And they were really the troops that were at the front lines fighting ISIS day in and
day out, while at the same time doing a sort of very inspiring experiment in radical democracy,
radical gender equality in the region.
They had women were some of their top commanders in the militaries, also in the local governments.
And they sort of radically democratic governments that they established in the middle of this
incredibly brutal and incredibly complex civil war, war against ISIS, Assad, the Turks, everything.
Despite that they were able to sort of build this kind of new type of society.
And you wonder if that is gonna survive now that they're forced to sort of throw themselves
in the arms of Assad.
It's just doubly heinous what the United States did.
And it's one of the more depressing news developments that's happened all here.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So anytime you hear someone on the right but specifically members of Trump's administration
claim that they're concerned about radical Islamic terrorism, or they're worried about
ISIS,-
>> Yeah.
>> It's just so disingenuous.
>> They don't really care about that.
>> Right.
>> Radical Islamic terrorism is a net positive for the American right.
Like it really they don't actually care about stopping it, they love to fight it forever.
>> They look decided as, in their minds, a reason why they're better on national security
and routing out extremism compared to Democrats.
But in reality, just based on Trump's action alone, it's clear that they're disingenuous,
it's clear that they use this and exploit it for their own political gain here in the
United States.
They don't genuinely worry or care about these insurgent groups or terrorism abroad period.
>> And something else that really kind of just resonates with me as we saw those numbers
of children's, the hundreds of thousands of kids that are displaced or in need.
Essentially those kids are gonna grow up, knowing that they were victimized, violated,
essentially left and abandoned because of what the United States did.
And so essentially, it's just creating more enemies.
And that's something that Trump has continued to do, turn our allies into enemies and create
new enemies for the United States that could come back against us decades later