Trump said US troops’ presence in Middle East was ‘single biggest mistake’ in country’s history

American President Donald Trump described the decision to send US forces to the Middle East as “the single biggest mistake” in his country’s history.

In an interview with Australian journalist Jonathan Swan for the Axios news website, Trump defended the way his administration handled the Covid-19 pandemic and he criticized past administrations’ decisions to “go to the Middle East.”

Responding to a question by Swan about the “US troop level in Afghanistan” being “roughly the same” as it was when Trump first took office, the president said that the number of US troops in the country will soon be reduced to 8000, and eventually to 4000.

“We’re negotiating right now. We’ve been there for 19 years,” he added.

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While insisting that his administration has made successes in the Middle East region by killing Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani and Daesh/Isis leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, Trump added that American troops “should have never been in the Middle East.”

“The decision to go to the Middle East and get into the Middle East was the single biggest mistake made in the history of our country. That’s my opinion.”

Last June the U.S. president told the graduating class of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that he was “ending the era of endless wars,” adding that American forces’ job is not “to solve ancient conflicts in faraway lands that many people have not even heard of.”