I think it was the last Thanksgiving that a bright young family member told me about his fear that President Donald trump would start world war III.

He watched trump, the infamous counter-puncher, retaliate during political debates and tiffs with celebrities who cheek to challenge him, and he saw a man who always gave harder than he got. So this young man was afraid that trump would file nuclear weapons on some scrappy little country that wasn’t welcoming when trump took the stage.

I told him that he was wrong, when I saw trump as an arsonist the arsonist.

Trump campaigned for U.S. troops to pull out of”endless wars.” He was one of the first critics of President George W. Bush’s push to land American boots on the ground in Iraq. Having shied away from military service in Vietnam, trump does not want to preside over modern Vietnam.

Yes, trump loves the military – or at least he did last year, before defense Secretary Jim Mattis left, rather than command the removal of American troops from Syria and John Kelly, a straight one-time marine General, tried to assert some discipline in the nothing goes trump White house.

But trump doesn’t like war. Of course, he enjoyed bombing Syria because Bashar al-Assad had dispossessed his own people – as he did once in 2017 and once in 2018, with no boots on the ground. Trump saw bonus points when he told Chinese President XI Jinping about the attack on a chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago.

But sending young Americans to die on foreign soil, fighting a war with no clear path to victory … to trump, this is the definition of stupidity. It was part of his appeal.

In the past few weeks, as trump has talked about the burden of notifying military families that they have lost a beloved child, it has become clear that trump does not get joy out of such moments. But that doesn’t mean trump can’t do any harm.

What you have to fear, I told my esteemed relative, is that trump could do long-term damage to US national security by doing too little, as the world sees with Turkey’s invasion of Syria.

Trump is too smitten with strongmen like North Korea’s Kim Jong UN and Russia’s Vladimir Putin. They know how to play the insecure trump, a President who strangely craves their approval. Every time the tough guy President coos over the letters Kim sent him, the national security solons shudder.

That’s what happened earlier this month when trump actually gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the green light to invade northeastern Syria. Trump argued that Erdogan is going to send Turkish troops across the border regardless of whether trump has moved fewer than 50 U.S. troops from sin to sin away. Trump considers his decision to save lives in the United States.

But it’s hard to believe Erdogan would allow his military to engage with – let alone fight and kill-a NATO ally that has proven to be the most formidable superpower on Earth.

At the moment, that is.

I hear trump’s base jumping in to defend his phone conversation with Turkey because it shows trump is serious about the campaign promises that put him in the Oval office. It sticks to the weapon. Even when they’re empty.

This episode, alas, exposes the arrogance shared with his predecessor, Barack Obama. Both presidents despised Bush for sending American troops into a war that could not have a satisfactory ending, and thus they decided to act as if they could turn the clock back with the flourishing of the pen. Yes, both men were going to show their critics how it could be done, how they themselves could change history.

When Obama ordered U.S. troops out of Iraq, he made the middle East a more dangerous place as he dishonored the sacrifices made before he took office. Trump mimicked the same bad game on October 6, despite countless warnings about the consequences.

Russia is now patrolling Syria, and trump does not mind. “Syria can provide some assistance with Russia, and that’s fine,” trump told reporters on Wednesday. “It’s a lot of sand.”

Trump has no qualms about strengthening Putin’s hand in the middle East. He rejected the sacrifices made by the Kurds, as well as the connection felt by the American troops who fought ISIS alongside THEM.

Fox News national security correspondent Jennifer Griffin tweeted: “I just spoke to a distraught us special forces soldier who is among 1,000 us troops in Syria today who is serving alongside Kurdish SDF forces. It was one of the most difficult phone calls I’ve ever taken. “I’m ashamed for the first time in my career.”

With this story, trump risks alienating young soldiers and older veterans who thought he understood their pain. But if he had, he would never have opened the gates to Turkish troops.

Contact Debra J. Saunders by phone [email protected] or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.

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