Joe Scarborough: ‘Donald Trump Is Surrendering’ to Russia and Iran

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough warned that President Donald Trump is seriously damaging U.S. foreign policy by pulling troops out of Northern Syria. The Morning Joe host criticized Trump for ‘appeasing’ Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Reccep Tayyip Erdogan.

“It is devastating,” Scarborough said. “And, of course, you only have to look at this one country, Syria, to see what Vladimir Putin did when, of course, it seemed the entire world, the United States, rightly wanted Assad gone, Putin stood by his side.”

“Putin brought Russian troops into the Middle East into Syria for the first time since 1973. Putin has been a steadfast ally of Assad even when he shouldn’t have been. Here, you have the United States cutting and running on a whim.”

“And that’s the most dangerous part of this, on a whim Donald Trump decides, on a phone call, once again without talking to anybody, without going through the channels of talking to advisers who have spent their entire life working this — working this out, he just does it on a whim. And our allies across the globe are left saying, wait a second, Russia stands by their allies even in the darkest moments, the United States can’t even do it through a phone call.”

Council on Foreign Relations’ Richard Haas said the U.S. would now be seen as an unreliable ally and make weapons proliferation more likely.

“Well, and the great tragedy is, after stumbling through the past 19 years, 18, 19 years in this new century or the 18 years since September 11th, you can talk to the greatest minds of this generation, the greatest military strategists of this generation and they can recount chapter and verse what we got wrong in Afghanistan, what we got wrong in Iraq,” Scarborough said.

“But to a person they will tell you that we got Syria right in this respect, in defeating ISIS. We have a small footprint there. It is a sustainable footprint. And we’ve used a limited number of men and women, and our Kurdish allies in such a way — think about this. With this small footprint, we’ve thwarted Iran’s expansion. We’ve thwarted Russia’s expansion in the area. We’ve thwarted Syria’s expansion. And we have continued to crush ISIS. And now Donald Trump is surrendering.”

“He’s appeasing — he’s appeasing Putin, he’s appeasing Erdogan, and the consequences of this are going to be deadly.”

Watch the video above, via MSNBC.