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Sen. Warren: Time for U.S. to Get Out of Syria, Afghanistan

But says pullout should be done with allies and foreign policy should not “be conducted by tweet.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said late Wednesday that she thinks it’s “right” to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and Afghanistan, but expressed concern with the way and speed President Trump has gone about doing so. When asked by MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow if she was “troubled by the nature of the president’s process” regarding how the Trump administration has handled affairs in Syria and Afghanistan, Warren said, “Are you asking me whether or not I think foreign policy ought to be conducted by tweet? The answer is no, it should not.” Warren—who announced this week that she will form a presidential exploratory committee, a major step toward a bid for the White House—went on to say that any pullout from the region requires careful planning “with our allies.” “The pieces need to be coordinated, and they need to be coordinated not just in our activities, but this is why we need allies. This is why we build alliances,” she said, adding that the U.S. should build a plan with allies on how to ensure more “safety and stability” in the region. “But the idea that the way we’re going to do that is just to continue to keep troops and more troops forever and ever and ever in that part of the world is not…it is not working, and pretending that somehow in the future it is going to work by some unmeasured version of it,” she said. “It’s a form of fantasy that we simply can’t afford to continue to engage in.”

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