A safe zone is completely unnecessary for U.S. national security, and the Kurdish-Turkish conflict is not ours to solve.
After months of pitched battles and airstrikes against Islamic State fighters holed up in the farming town of Baghouz, Syria, the last few square miles of the group’s territorial caliphate was finally declared liberated last month. What was once a sprawling “caliphate” as about as large as the United Kingdom. has been reduced to a pile of rubble and ash, its exhausted foot-soldiers sent to detention camps.
A safe zone is completely unnecessary for U.S. national security. Indeed, it is outright counterproductive—one more burden on an overstretched U.S. military. Washington should take every opportunity to extricate itself from a region that is decreasingly important to America’s security and economic prosperity. Instead, these talks are making our unjustified entanglement more permanent.
There is no national security benefit for the United States to play referee between the Turkish army and the Syrian Kurds, two forces with decades of adversarial history. Both sides are U.S. partners, but their enmity cannot—and should not—be solved by Americans from Kansas City, Mo., Manchester, N.H., or Boise, Idaho.
Nor was the U.S.-Kurdish relationship in Syria designed to be a strategic alliance. Indeed, just the opposite; the rise of the Islamic State was the glue that held the relationship together. Once the mutual enemy was extinguished, the partnership ran its course.
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