Trump’s Team on Syria Weighs Risk

Reports that President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria are not inconsistent with prior messages we’ve heard from the President this year.  In April, The Cipher Brief polled a number of our Experts based on the President’s statements that he wanted to ‘bring our troops back home.’ We asked them how such a withdrawal could impact the region.

In ‘In or Out? Mixed Signals from the Trump Administration on Syria’, published on April 4, 2018, one of the experts we spoke with was Ambassador James Jeffrey, the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and Turkey who went back to the State Department in early August to become the Secretary’s Special Representative on Syria Engagement.

This was Ambassador Jeffrey’s analysis in April:

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