Is the US finally turning back from some of its damage?

Announcing the country's most important policies, decisions and messages over twitter is characteristic of Trump's own style of politics. With this feature he is the subject of criticism to the effect that he is demolishing America's three-century-old political traditions.

Of course this is not the only political tradition he is demolishing. Trump forms a perfect example of what a president can be capable of with respect to ABD's deeply rooted foreign policy and strategies in every field. To be honest, against approaches that attribute to ABD policies or strategies an inviolability and immutability exempt from every kind of day-to-day influence, the style of politics Trump represents pulls our perceptions of politics and reality to a much more realistic level. It humanizes the matter further, even if these policies are not always humane. In this respect, the postmodern character that our valued friend Yusuf Kaplan attributed to contemporary politics in his article yesterday brings us a little closer to understanding today's world. But of course it is not enough for us to understand everything, just as no theory alone suffices to understand everything.

It is very clear that today's world of international relations reflects none of the order characteristics peculiar to a unipolar or bipolar world. A country's own internal democratic dynamics often become the greatest threat to the stability of its foreign policy and prevent a country from pursuing a foreign policy along the same line indefinitely.

Particularly in a country like ABD, where the balance of forces does not remain only among the classical powers such as the legislature, executive and judiciary, and where the business world, families, professional groups, civil society formations, the press and lobbying activities are very influential, foreign policy can become open to every kind of influence.

That is why one must not attribute a single political behavior to ABD and must not expect it to remain fixed on this line indefinitely.

In essence, ABD's policies in the Middle East, viewed from the standpoint of ABD interests, are policies that from the start cannot be fitted into any rational framework. No one threatens ABD more than its own policies do. ABD's invasion of Iraq may perhaps look very profitable to those looking from outside, but when we look at the end of the matter we see the results of an operation whose profit was harvested only by certain arms lobbies, while the rest of the American people and the general national assets had to pay large bills.

ABD's Israel policies are not in ABD's interest either. Policies that make enemies of all the peoples of the Middle East for Israel's sake are doomed sooner or later to make ABD lose across the whole region.

ABD surely has an eye that sees this, too, and this eye from time to time opens and invites it to turn back to itself. However, the dominant and influential view is that of those who do not hesitate to drag a great superpower along for their own day-to-day interests. Because in the current conjuncture their views are more effective, because they are more organized and more familiar with the mechanisms that will determine ABD policies.

The interesting side of the matter is that the mechanisms that influence ABD policies are not closed to anyone. Whoever wants can find a way for themselves within these mechanisms, and this in fact makes ABD, to a degree, a more changeable, more dynamic country. This dynamism has some advantages, and probably the will that designed ABD neglected its weaknesses or disadvantages precisely by aiming at this dynamism.

In the end, whoever the forces are that have persuaded ABD up to now to implement its current policies in Syria, they are not looking and acting in ABD's favor in the long run. Especially, the mind that led ABD, in the name of fighting DEAŞ, as a terrorist in Syria, to form an alliance with another terrorist organization, JPG or PYD, is, from whomever it may have come, not a friendly mind to ABD. It is a mind that will sooner or later drag ABD into a quagmire.

In it there is both an inconsistency such as cooperating with one terrorist organization against another, and an irrational falling out with a seventy-year ally that is a NATO member like Turkey, and, together with all these inconsistencies, being seen as bad in everyone's eyes despite so much trouble, expense and preoccupation in Syria. And again, at the end of the day, when an assessment is made of what ABD has gained from such a policy, one sees nothing but a great nothing in ABD's favor, and moreover a great loss.

Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria, announced over twitter, reflects in this respect the rationality of turning back from some point of the loss. Indeed, as he also stated in his subsequent tweets, what pushed Trump to make this decision were his previous thoughts on the matter. In this respect Trump has, at least on Syria, an approach that displays considerable internal consistency. From the start he had an attitude that questioned what his country was doing in Syria and in fact in the whole Middle East.

This attitude is in fact very much against the general paradigm that prevails in ABD. Although the reflections of this paradigm differ on the Israel and Palestine question, it is an approach that can give ABD a new foreign policy direction, and it seems this approach will find a larger audience among the American people too.

Another dimension of the matter was that ABD, with all these policies, was already beginning to lose the attitude and consistency of acting like a superpower. No one would have raised a voice if it had joined a coalition formed with an international sensibility against a dictator who commits massacres against his own people and used its superpower truly in favor of securing human rights and stopping massacres.

Moreover, an operation that would have stayed within these limits and succeeded would have gathered the necessary appreciation from the whole world, and in this way ABD's superpower quality would have been reconfirmed throughout the world. Yet after entering Syria, ABD swiftly deviated from its purpose in coming and sank into a quagmire of war with a dirty interlocutor like DAEŞ thrown in front of it (by some people or by another calculation within itself).

Truly, wherever one turns back from the loss is profit, and ABD will owe a great deal to Turkey and to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who helped it make this profitable decision. The operation that Turkey is resolutely preparing to carry out east of the Euphrates has without doubt been very effective in ABD's finally noticing its own reality.