ISIS/OBAMA/SYRIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT: “‘Welcome to the NBA.’ That was Barack Obama’s Inauguration-Day message to Donald Trump, when the outgoing president laid out the particularly nasty policy dilemma his successor faced in war-ravaged Syria. The question was whether to arm Kurdish fighters battling ISIS in eastern Syria, a seemingly arcane but hugely sensitive question with major implications for relations with Turkey, which hates the Kurds. Obama’s point was that Trump’s days of tossing off campaign slogans and showboating on questions of policy were over. Where candidate Trump had cast Syria as little more than a place to ‘bomb the hell out of ISIS,’ he would now confront a perplexing witches’ brew of religious, ethnic and national conflicts featuring not only Islamic terrorists but Russian mercenaries, Iranian militias and Marxist Kurds. The only thing harder than confronting it was ignoring it.”
–Michael Crowley and Bryan Bender, “Trump’s Syria identity crisis,” Politico, April 14, 2018 7:36 pm