Let's just cut to the chase on this one: Nobody knows what the hell the Trump administration's Syria policy is. We don’t know, Trump’s aides don’t know, Donald Trump himself doesn’t know.
According to the Trump of two weeks ago, he has ordered a full and immediate withdrawal of our armed forces from the failing nation, a decision so precipitous that it led to the resignation of his own defense secretary. According to his ultra-hawkish national security adviser John Bolton on Sunday, on the other hand, we'll only be withdrawing after certain "objectives" have been met and "the defense of Israel and other friends in the region is absolutely assured," which is not likely to happen in our lifetimes. And U.S. officials have indicated that the U.S. will continue to operate from a southeastern Syrian airbase and will "maintain control of airspace" in northern Syria, again with no apparent timetable.
So which is it? Are we withdrawing immediately, or withdrawing slowly, or withdrawing never? We don't know. Nobody knows. It is a mystery, and the answer may be different tomorrow or a week from now.
Reading between the lines, what appears to have happened is that Donald Trump was at some point convinced, by resignations and by alarmed visits from ultra-hawks like Bolton and Sen. Lindsey Graham, to reverse himself on the "immediate" withdrawal, or rather to redefine what "immediate" meant. He now insists that by "immediate," he meant "at a proper pace while at the same time continuing to fight," which suggests that he is not-so-wedded to the details of his decision as his initial, blustering announcement suggested. (Yes, go figure.)
But there is also the distinct possibility that his own advisers might be working against him on this one, either a little or a lot. What John Bolton has been telling the press is so at odds with what Donald Trump has been telling the press that it's impossible to square the two, meaning at least one of the pair isn’t clear on what the actual “decision” was. And given the sitting president's reported incapacities, including his much-reported inability to comprehend intelligence assessments or understand other policy issues presented to him, it's reasonable to ask whether his aides are adhering to his announced policy demands here or are revising them, behind the scenes, into something they themselves like a bit better. What happens if Trump orders a Syrian withdrawal, and his national security aides simply … don’t do it?
Don't think that would be the case? We already have the admission by former White House adviser Gary Cohn that he swiped the pertinent documents from Trump's desk in an effort to keep Trump from scuttling two separate international trade deals, knowing that Trump lacked the attention span to notice they were missing. And in an anonymous letter to the New York Times, an administration official sought to assure the public that they were "working diligently from within to frustrate" the most dangerous parts of his agenda.
So yes, given that we’ve already heard from multiple administration officials that just such trickery is going on to thwart Trump’s most precipitous impulses, it's entirely possible Trump's arch-conservative aides and (cough) allies are crafting an adjusted Syria policy that doesn't look a thing like his original announcement—and are betting on Trump's own inattentiveness and indifference to pull it off.
This is transparently bad, of course. Whatever you may think of the never-competently-articulated American military policy in Syria or of the sometimes-aggressive, just-as-often-halfhearted efforts to eradicate vicious extremist groups such as ISIS that have laid waste to the region, an administration being unable to clarify whether or not U.S. allies can expect American help to be forthcoming or nonexistent in upcoming months is the very definition of "instability." Closer to home, the notion that a sitting U.S. president is, by virtue of inattentiveness and incapacity, a bystander to his own administration's strategic decisions ought to be alarming all on its own.
It is a mess. The modern history of the United States consists in large part of wandering into other people's war zones, picking a side, engaging in just enough murder to ensure a new generation of bitter lifelong enemies, then wandering away again after the original plan, if there was one, predictably goes to hell. It is usually a proxy war involving the United States and some other world power competing with United States interests. It is sometimes for openly materialistic reasons, such as having a good bit of oil that needs to go to our markets rather than someone else's; other times, it is framed as a fight against "extremism" or similarly awkward, abstract notions.
In Syria we seem to have both wandered into that role and possibly back out of it without it ever earning more than glancing public attention, but we are apparently adding a new phase, one in which we will have both "withdrawn from" and "stayed in" in the war zone simultaneously, depending on who you ask and how much attention they're paying. That is … not likely to end in success either, no matter how “success” is defined.