On Dec. 19, President Trump announced the pullout of 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria. “Our boys, our young women, our men, they’re all coming back and they’re coming back now. We won,” Trump said. His decision, made impetuously after a conversation with Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan, caught his own advisers by surprise. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis tried to change the president’s mind and, when he failed to do so, quit in protest. Next out the door was Brett McGurk, the long-serving U.S. envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition. Administration officials told reporters that U.S. troops would be gone within 30 days — i.e., by Jan. 18.

After a storm of protests from critics who pointed out that the Islamic State hadn’t actually been defeated — a fact that Trump now implicitly concedes — the president tweeted on Dec. 31 that “ISIS is mostly gone, we’re slowly sending our troops back home to be with their families, while at the same time fighting ISIS remnants.” Administration officials said this meant the Pentagon now had four months for the withdrawal.

On Sunday, national security adviser John Bolton seemed to lift the timeline altogether. He said that U.S. troops would remain in Syria as long as certain “objectives” remain to be met — namely the need to completely defeat the Islamic State and attain assurances that the Turks will not slaughter the Kurds. “The timetable flows from the policy decisions that we need to implement,” Bolton said, suggesting that there is no timetable at all. Trump, for his part, denied on Sunday that he had ever announced a rapid timeline (“I never said we were doing it that quickly”) even though he had. It’s on video.

I think I speak for the entire world in responding: “Huh???” As veteran diplomat Aaron David Miller tweeted: “In 40 years of living in Washington 25 working at State, never seen anything like this. Makes Marx Bros. movie look organized.” Of course, one’s sense of befuddlement has to be tempered by the grim knowledge that this how this administration habitually operates....