Eli Lake, Columnist

Trump Said No to Troops in Syria. His Aides Aren't So Sure.

The president campaigned on the isolationism of "America First," but also promised to end ISIS. Now he must choose.

April 13, 2017 at 3:37 PM EDT

Corrected

April 14, 2017 at 9:04 PM EDT

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

The Trump administration is divided on how to support Syrian fighters against ISIS.
Photographer: DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images

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Listening to his campaign rhetoric, the last thing you would expect Donald Trump to do as president would be to escalate a ground war in the Middle East. He won the Republican nomination last year by campaigning against both George W. Bush's war in Iraq and Barack Obama's war in Libya.

But as Trump's young presidency has shown, many of the candidate's foreign policy positions are not as firmly held as his supporters had hoped. It's not just that Trump struck the Syrian regime after last week's chemical weapons attack on rebels. It's not just his recent reversals on Chinese currency manipulation and the NATO alliance. The president's biggest foreign policy surprise may be yet to come.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

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