Donald Trump’s plan to ‘secure’ Syria’s oil is a meme come to life

It is a scene so heavy with symbolism that it almost seems staged. An American flag flutters in the foreground. Behind it, the pump of an oil derrick silently bops up and down. And in between the two, in the desert landscape of northeastern Syria, a dozen US soldiers listlessly take their position.

This is what the latest mission given to the most powerful military force in the world by President Donald Trump looks like. It is one that has stoked as much confusion as it has controversy.

In the space of a few short weeks, the US military presence in Syria has been transformed from a locally popular peacekeeping and anti-Isis operation into a financially motivated and potentially illegal occupation of Syria’s eastern oil fields.

After the defeat of the Isis caliphate earlier this year, some 2,000 US troops stayed behind to ensure the terror group could not rebuild. They also acted as a deterrent for a Turkish attack against Syria’s Kurds.

But the president saw little benefit for the US in protecting the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a key ally in the fight against Isis, and promised to bring the troops home. The oil, however, was a different matter.

Mr Trump has spent years lamenting the fact that the US did not “take the oil” during its years-long occupation of Iraq. It was the opportunity to do just that in Syria that led him to reverse his decision to withdraw US troops.

Last week, the president set the plan into motion by approving an expanded mission to secure Syria’s eastern oil fields. The precise details of that deployment are still being worked out, but officials say it would require some 800 US soldiers, who would also play some role in working alongside the SDF in anti-Isis operations.

But the new mission has prompted confusion, not just from Mr Trump’s opponents, but troops on the ground. One US soldier questioned by a local Kurdish TV channel near an oil field this week appeared entirely unfamiliar with his new brief: “We’re just finding all this information out right now, and we’re gonna continue our presence up here,” he said.

The president justified the betrayal of a close US ally by declaring it is his aim to “end endless wars” and bring the troops home, and then shortly after sent them back into a warzone to protect a relatively insignificant collection of oil fields.

Some analysts have speculated that securing the oil may have been an incentive offered to Mr Trump by US military leaders in order to keep troops in Syria to continue anti-Isis operations and counter Iranian influence in the region.

Either way, it has conjured up some imagery that will be hard to shake.

The emphasis on America’s thirst for oil as a way of explaining US adventures in the Middle East was so prevalent in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq that it became a meme. The premise of the joke was that any mention of the word oil, be it in a frying pan or from a tin of tuna, would be enough to provoke a US military intervention.

It was a riff on a widespread perception of Washington’s true motivations for its military presence in the region. But with his latest Syria mission, Mr Trump has made brought the meme to life.