Trump says U.S. lifting Turkey sanctions as cease-fire holds

President Donald Trump said he is lifting recently imposed sanctions against Turkey after the country complied with a cease-fire agreement with Kurdish forces in Syria.

“The sanctions will be lifted unless something happens that we’re not happy with,” Trump said Wednesday morning in a statement from the White House.

Trump said the penalties would be reimposed if Turkey resumes attacks on the Kurds. The U.S. imposed sanctions on Turkey on Oct. 14, including penalties against three government ministers. Trump also raised tariffs on steel imports from Turkey to 50%.

The lira gained against the euro after Trump’s remarks on Wednesday.

Trump says that the cease-fire’s persistence shows his “unconventional” foreign policy approach paid dividends after his widely criticized decision to remove American troops that served as a buffer between Kurdish and Turkish forces. Shortly after the U.S. pulled out of the region, Turkey invaded and attacked Kurdish fighters, prompting condemnation and sanctions from the White House.

Trump then dispatched U.S. Vice President Mike Pence for meetings in Ankara, where the two sides struck an agreement for a five-day truce intended to allow Kurdish fighters to evacuate an area 120 kilometers long and 30 kilometers deep between the border towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn. The U.S. said it would hold off on planned sanctions against Turkey if a permanent deal was achieved.

Critics have charged that the agreement is a functional victory for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has long sought to push Kurdish fighters he considers terrorists from his country’s border, at the expense of the Kurds, who assisted the U.S. mission against Islamic State in Syria. But Trump said in a tweet on Wednesday that the Kurds “are safe and have worked very nicely with us.”

On Tuesday, Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to a separate pact that would clear Kurdish fighters from a northeastern zone in Syria also bordering Turkey. The agreement between Russia and Turkey has prompted further bipartisan criticism of Trump’s withdrawal.

“The only people who benefit from more violence and more chaos are America’s adversaries: Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, the terror sponsoring dictatorship in Iran, and Islamist extremists in the area and around the world, as shown by the deal that Erdogan struck yesterday with Putin,” Representative Michael McCaul, the senior Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said at a hearing on the Syria situation on Wednesday.

“The Russians and Assad and Iran are going to fill the vacuum” left by the U.S. withdrawal, McCaul told Trump’s Syria envoy James Jeffrey.

And Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is usually a close Trump ally, called the Turkey-Russia pact “a non-starter” on Tuesday. “That’s not a sustainable solution.”