Is Trump right or wrong to withdraw from Syria?

In PJ Media, Richard Fernandez writes,

...Perhaps more people than were ever aware of the combat presence in Syria are outraged the US is leaving it and that is a good thing. The lack of awareness was the result of the breakdown of the national security debate and the abdication by Congress of its role in war-making. The public is now like a man waking up in a strange city with a 3-week growth of beard with no memory of how he got there.

As the Los Angeles Times noted the US inherited a whole bunch of shadow wars from the past administrations. "Before he took office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to end America’s grueling conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his second term, he pledged to take the country off what he called a permanent war footing. ... U.S. military forces have been at war for all eight years of Obama’s tenure, the first two-term president with that distinction. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan."

But they all went into the back pages. The wars vanished from public sight perhaps for political reasons but also because the nature of war has changed. The LA Times continues:

“The whole concept of war has changed under Obama,” said Jon Alterman, Middle East specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonprofit think tank in Washington.
Obama “got the country out of ‘war,’ at least as we used to see it,” Alterman said. “We’re now wrapped up in all these different conflicts, at a low level and with no end in sight.”

...A recent article in West Point's Modern War Institute argues that conventional war (maneuver warfare) as we knew it is dead and has been replaced by a war-in-peace where the boundaries between diplomacy, economic competition, espionage, proxy conflicts and war itself are blurred.

If you're waiting for war to break out, it has. Except that like victims being hunted by the Predator we cannot see it because it is radiating in a non-visible wavelength. What we see are mysterious things floating about like tariff wars, sanctions, covert ops, collusion, corruption, etc without understanding what they mean. Meanwhile, legacy diplomatic and military programs have led to strategic confusion and stagnation. In our confusion, we continue to do things because we started on them. Who knows the answers to these questions?

What is the end game in Afghanistan (where until recently America was giving billions of dollars in aid to the Taliban's patron Pakistan.)

What should America do in Yemen, where the unsavory Saudis are locked in conflict with the unsavory Iranians?

What is the strategic goal in Syria besides keeping the weeds down?

Where does America stand vis a vis Iran? A France eager to see US forces remain in Syria to keep refugees from flowing again is nevertheless committed to the preservation of the Iranian nuclear deal. Iran received billions from the US even though Congress never ratified the nuclear deal any more than it approved military action in Syria.

And to return to the Modern War Institute's unanswered question: should America prepare for a coming war with a near-peer competitor or just more small wars of the kind it has now?

...Trump may be wrong about withdrawing from Syria, or he may be right. The important thing to understand is why.

Read more here.