The World Is on Fire. And Trump’s About to Be President. Feel Better?

While we whisper our hopes, however, some caution is definitely in order. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, the group that toppled Assad, has been in control of most of Idlib province in recent years, and the 2020 State Department human rights report notes that the UN Commission for the Inquiry of Syria reported that year that HTS “routinely detained and tortured civilians” in territory it controlled. It’s a recurring lesson: One never knows if yesterday’s revolutionaries will round into tomorrow’s statesmen or tomorrow’s tyrants.

The main question here for Americans concerns the fact that in six weeks, Donald Trump is going to be the president of the United States. The surprising events in Syria serve as a harrowing reminder that there’s a big, complicated world out there, and pretty soon, Trump is going to be the single most powerful person in it؅—the
“horse in a hospital” that comedian John Mulaney likened him to, though horses are far less corrupt. And the weird, and worrying, thing is that even though Trump was president before, we don’t really know all that much about his foreign policy instincts because he was never really tested on foreign policy in his first term.

Think about it. There were no major crises during Trump’s term. There were no 9/11 attacks, obviously, but even beyond that, there weren’t any major wars; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine came after he lost re-election. There was no big uprising like the 2014 Maidan Revolution, or the Tahrir Square and Arab Spring revolts of 2011. The Middle East was comparatively quiet, especially to those of us who recall to the fraught part of 2006 or the past year’s conflagration that followed in the wake of Hamas’s attacks in Israel. Assad’s butchery was an ongoing affair, but that’s not the same as a new broad regional conflict kicking off, which forces an American president to decide what moral face the United States is going to present to the world. Compared to Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Trump had it pretty easy—it even fell to Biden to keep the commitments to wind down the war in Afghanistan and honor the hideous commitments Trump made to the Taliban, much to Biden’s detriment in public opinion polling.