Retiring American diplomat and Syrian envoy James Jeffrey has created quite the flutter with his interview to Defense One. The parts of the interview that gained the most attention were the ones in which he admitted that US officials lied to sitting President Donald Trump in order to prevent him from withdrawing troops from Syria.
The admission was regarded by people across the board as open insubordination and treasonous with one US Representative calling for the US officials to be punished for lying to the Commander-in-Chief of the US military. The revelation was indeed explosive, however, it threw shade on the numerous compliments James Jeffrey showered upon Donald Trump.
The Syrian envoy said that the manner in which Donald Trump approached Middle-East was vastly better than the previous administrations which brought chaos to the region. Former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama with their ‘transformational approaches’ in the Middle-East have “made things worse” and “weakened us,” he said.
James Jeffrey said that Donald Trump has succeeded in achieving a “stalemate” in numerous hot and cold conflicts in the region which is the best that any administration could hope for. He said that Donald Trump, instead of undermining allies in the region, tried “to build up our alliance system and basically stop nagging at them, show that Washington has their back including their domestic situations — they can do pretty much what they want, but they’re going to have to step up and do things.”
The revelation that would come as a surprise to most of his critics is that Donald Trump is especially liked in the Middle East. “Nobody really wants to see President Trump go, among all our allies [in the Middle East],” James Jeffrey said. “The truth is President Trump and his policies are quite popular among all of our popular states in the region. Name me one that’s not happy.” He went to the extent of saying that if he were to given any advise to Joe Biden, it would be that he should tread the path forged by Donald Trump.
Praising the accomplishments of Donald Trump is hardly ever tolerated. The only occasions on which he garnered immense praise from the Washington establishment is when he bombed Syria and appeared on course for a war against Iran. However, even James Jeffrey admits that Trump and his policies are immensely popular in the Middle-East.
Jeffrey is someone who had signed an open letter in 2016 condemning the then presidential aspirant describing him as “erratic”. By the end of four years of the Trump presidency, the Syrian envoy says that the US President has looked at the Middle-East through a geostrategic lens and focused on Iran, Russia and China while keeping the metastatic “disease” of Islamic terror in check.