Fourth, as a result, he has to reinforce the notion that the United States is a rapacious imperial power—and a feckless one at that, since the oil, for which he’s willing to send troops to fight and die, doesn’t belong to America in the first place.

Fifth, even if U.S. troops could somehow occupy and take over the oil fields, they would need more troops and equipment to guard the routes and pipelines through which the oil flows—and more troops and equipment still to protect and supply the troops guarding the fields and pipelines. In other words, if the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command take Trump’s new rationale seriously, if it’s translated into an operational order, it will mean much more than keeping the 1,000 troops we currently have in Syria—it will mean having to send thousands more.

So what is this all about? Why is Trump, who has seemed genuinely keen to get troops out of what he calls the “blood-soaked sand” of the Middle East, doing this? It seems that he’s been hoodwinked, and not for the first time.

Trump’s withdrawal from northern Syria drew withering criticism from Republicans, Democrats, and foreign policy analysts, on the grounds that it would expand Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s control over the entire country, strengthen Iran and Russia, revive ISIS’s prospects for renewal, and—by abandoning the Syrian Kurds, the strongest ally in the fight against ISIS—stir doubts about U.S. security commitments among allies everywhere.

These geopolitical arguments didn’t move Trump an inch. So Sen. Lindsey Graham—Trump’s most loyal political defender but also a fervent advocate for the Kurds—shifted tactics to focus on something he figured the president would understand: finances. According to NBC News, Graham and Jack Keane—an influential retired Army general who, back in 2007, persuaded President George W. Bush to order a “surge” of troops to Iraq—brought maps into the Oval Office, showing Trump the network of oil fields across the region, including in Syria.

The argument about oil was flimflam, and Graham and Keane knew it. Citing a defense official, NBC noted that “while the emphasis on oil in Syria is intended to convince the president that the U.S. military is valuable, securing the oil fields is not a military strategy. U.S. troops will not actually be guarding the oil fields.”

The ruse was reminiscent of the time, early in the administration, when Trump wanted to pull all U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, to the alarm of several officials. Trump paid no attention to arguments about counterterrorism or the balance of power, so the officials shifted tactics.
Pentagon officials started talking about “rare-earth metals” in Afghan soil—something that had never been in previous briefing books. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, then the national security adviser, showed Trump old photographs of Kabul in the 1970s, in which young women were seen wearing miniskirts. See, McMaster told the president, Afghanistan hasn’t always been a graveyard of empires; it’s been a “normal” country in the past, and it can be again.

Trump not only reversed his decision to pull out—he doubled the number of troops that President Barack Obama, toward the end of his term, had kept in.

Graham, Keane, and many others wanted to keep some U.S. troops in Syria. Trump did not. So they made up a phony argument to get him to change his mind. It worked. Now even Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is going along with the game. At some point, will Trump ask how the campaign to defend the oil fields is going? Esper, Graham, Keane, and the others probably assume he won’t. They know, from experience, that, ultimately, he doesn’t care.

• Donald Trump
• Energy
• Oil Industry
• Syria
• Turkey
• Lindsey Graham