Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz recently rallied more than 100 lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to urge the withdrawal of U.S troops from the civil war in Syria.
One of Gaetz’s allies in this fight, Clearwater Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, outlined this week why she backed Gaetz.
Luna penned an opinion article for Newsweek magazine on Monday, in which the U.S. Air Force veteran called the troop pullout “one of many necessary steps to redirect our nation’s foreign policy away from a failed internationalist foreign policy consensus—on both sides of the aisle—that for a quarter century has wasted our resources and carelessly spilled the blood of our soldiers across the globe.”
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“A few hundred troops will not change anything on the ground,” she continued. “The argument that keeping Americans overseas is necessary for stopping terrorist attacks is absurd. Frankly, I’m tired of hearing, ‘if we don’t fight them there, they’ll come here.’ By that logic, the entire planet demands an American forward presence.”
Syria, Luna added, is a “prime example” of the flawed thinking on foreign policy — thinking “kept alive by warmongers on both the Right and Left.”
Her criticism began with former President Barack Obama, whose “naive campaign” for regime change in the Middle East illustrated his inability to understand the region and proved to be a “futile experiment.”
Obama “raised false hopes among a certain section of Syrians that only extended the civil war, and pushed Russia to defend its warm water port in the Mediterranean and get involved militarily,” Luna wrote.
“Worse, it resulted in a civil war which directly resulted in the rise of ISIS. Decades later, Americans are still policing a land that presents no direct strategic interest to the homeland of the United States.”
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“Local terrorism in distant countries is not an existential threat to America and can be effectively managed by long distance capabilities and prudent alliance strategies,” she continued. That means reliance on local allies and their armies, local tribal militias and proxies, intelligence, and an offshore naval presence.
ISIS, she continued, is currently a “minimal” threat, and “if it rises again as a functioning state, it will not take us much time to return and crush it. In short, nothing in the region demands constant troop deployment and endless war.”
Congress, she noted, if lawmakers were genuinely worried about terrorists inside America, would instead focus on “our nonexistent southern border and the influx of terrorists coming into our own country, and the rise of a peer rival in China.”
“Terrorists quite literally walk across our southern border, a national security crisis that our current president’s policies deliberately facilitate. Why aren’t the billions of dollars spent in the Middle East being invested in guarding our own border?” Luna said.
“Why are American forces patrolling distant nations yet not our own, which is under threat? Why was the equipment left behind during our botched withdrawal from Afghanistan not sold or shipped to Taiwan?”
“Peace is accomplished through superior firepower, a sense of realism, an understanding and prioritization of true threats, and prudent leadership. A grand strategy requires a plan, not perpetual blunders of a failed foreign policy consensus repeating itself for decades in every region,” wrote Luna.
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As for U.S. “nation-building” in the Middle East, she said, “All that has resulted from this failed mission is the Middle East emerging as a region of permanent protectorates, with zero upsides and no measurable benefit to the United States. In fact, it has only increased local hostility.”
“Make no mistake — if we take China’s word for it, the main challenge ahead of us is coming from Asia,” Luna wrote in countering the interventionists.
“Chinese government would love to see us bankrupt, militarily vulnerable, wasting our tax dollars, and draining our weapons in Middle Eastern or Eastern European backwaters,” she added. “And while we have been busy policing these countries, China has been harvesting many of their natural resources with our help.”
“The era of utopian foreign policy ideas based on faulty theories is over. We need realism in our foreign policy. America’s job is not to police the streets of Aleppo. It is to focus on American borders, and law and order in American cities,” she concluded.
“Members of Congress don’t swear an oath to the people of Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere else. They swear an oath to the people of the United States.”
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