The United States is stumbling into another decade of war

 
Smoke rises after a reported air strike on a rebel-held area in the southern Syrian city of Daraa. (Mohamad

While we have been focused on the results of special elections, the ups and downs of the Russia investigation and President Trump’s latest tweets, under the radar, a broad and consequential shift in U.S. foreign policy appears to be underway. Put simply, the United States is stumbling into another decade of war in the greater

Middle East. And this next decade of conflict might prove to be even more destabilizing than the last one.
Trump came into office with a refreshing skepticism about U.S. policy toward the region. “Everybody that’s touched the Middle East, they’ve gotten bogged down. . . . We’re bogged down,” he said during the campaign. But Trump also sees himself as a tough guy. At his rallies, he repeatedly vowed to “bomb the s--- out of” the Islamic State. Now that he is in the White House and has surrounded himself with an array of generals, his macho instinct seems to have triumphed. The administration has ramped up its military operations across the greater Middle East, in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia — more troops, more bombings, more missions. But what is the underlying strategy?
In the fight against the Islamic State, U.S. forces have been aggressively initiating attacks, resulting in a sharp rise in civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria. And in a dramatic escalation, this week the United States shot down a Syrian warplane, putting Washington on a collision course with Syria’s ally, Russia, with the real possibility of U.S.-Russian military hostilities. Worse yet, it is unclear how this belligerence toward the Bashar al-Assad regime will achieve the sole stated mission of the United States’ involvement in Syria: to defeat the Islamic State. Logically, if Assad gets weaker, the main opposition forces — various militant Islamist groups, including the Islamic State — will get stronger. Compounding the incoherence, the administration said that although it had attacked Assad’s forces, it was not fighting the Assad regime, and that the downing was an act of “collective self-defense.” A few more such acts of self-defense, and U.S. combat troops could find themselves on the ground in Syria.