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The high-level US officials who stepped down from their posts in December, evidently in protest against Donald Trump's Syria military-pullout order, would be wrong to assume their work is done. They should consider their resignations as merely the first act in a sustained campaign to undo the damage the president has inflicted on Washington's reputation as a global power on which partners and allies could depend for political, economic, and military leadership.

On top of their pre-eminence as public servants, James Mattis and Brett McGurk have earned the respect of legislators on both sides of the aisle by serving the administration (respectively as the Pentagon chief and anti-ISIS point man) with honour – and departing with dignity instead of blindly implementing presidential decisions they considered detrimental to the national interest and the safety of America's most steadfast allies.

However, instead of taking up lucrative positions in the private sector or disappearing into the groves of academe, these generals and diplomats should make use of their undisputed high standing, complete integrity, wealth of experience, and clarity of vision to ensure that for the rest of his time in office, Trump does not continue to mistake Washington's strategic rivals for personal friends or compound the problems he has created with more blunders.

In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, Mitt Romney, the incoming senator from Utah and former Republican presidential nominee, rightly scolded the Trump presidency for making "a deep descent in December." Trouble is, every time a US presidency has made a "deep descent," it is not Americans but their allies, partners, and civilians in some remote corner of the world that have ended up paying the biggest price.  

Even though the most dire predictions about the US troop withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan have mercifully not come to pass, the fate of great swathes of territory in the two war-torn countries hangs by a thread. 

The dissonant chorus of noises emanating from the administration may be sowing doubt and confusion equally among Washington's friends and foes, but that is small comfort for American soldiers and their partners who lay their lives on the line every day to "assure the survival and success of liberty."

In his resignation letter of December 20, Mattis sounded a warning that he now cannot afford to ignore. 

"My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues," he wrote. "We must do everything possible to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values, and we are strengthened in this effort by the solidarity of our alliances."

The void created by Mattis' exit will be difficult to fill as long as Trump does not abandon his erratic leadership style or at least allow his national security team free rein to pursue robust policies all the way from the Mediterranean to the South China Sea. 

As retired US army General Stanley McChrystal said in an interview to ABC, "If we have someone who is as selfless and as committed as Jim Mattis, resigns his position walking away from all the responsibility... we ought to stop and say okay, why did he do it?"

While Mattis' resignation letter broadly expounded the reasons for his departure, McGurk has of late written opinion pieces and given TV interviews debunking the arguments that have been offered, as it were, in favor of a withdrawal of the 2,000-strong US contingent from a part of the Middle East that until recently constituted the physical caliphate of ISIS, or the Islamic State group.

As McGurk told CNN's Christiane Amanpour in the context of Trump's Syria decision (which reportedly followed a telephone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan), "...to help design a campaign plan that was succeeding, and that was reaching a really critical phase and we were talking about the longer term transition and to have it all upended in a phone call with a foreign leader without any serious consultation with the national security team, with the secretary of defense or others, that's just not the way to run foreign policy effectively."

In hindsight, it was definitely due to the influence of such competent officials as Mattis, McGurk, John Kelly (former White House chief of staff), and HR McMaster (former national security advisor) that US foreign policy, until December, did not stray too far from the straight and narrow despite the isolationist mentality of their impulsive boss.

However, with their departures, the burden of ensuring coherence and consistency in the administration's message has fallen on National Security Advisor John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and their accomplished supporting staff. It is hard to predict for how long Bolton et al, who have their own internal critics to contend with, will be able to protect the president, the country and its partners from his own worst instincts.

To be sure, Mattis and McGurk no longer have a say in policy and decision-making that comes with being a part of the administration, but the fact that they are now outsiders, with an unfettered right to speak their minds, has its own advantages. 

To their eternal credit, they did not countenance Trump's betrayal-by-tweet of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, whose commitment and sacrifices made possible the defeat of ISIS in Syria's Raqqa and surrounding areas. 

That being said, northeastern Syria is just one of several regional hot-spots that could benefit from an assertive American approach to problem-solving.

There are few international figures more qualified than Mattis, McGurk, and other White House departees to publicly identify, on the one hand, the "malign actors and strategic competitors" and, on the other, champion the rights of "stateless" ethnic Kurds, everyday heroes of Syria who challenged Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship, beleaguered Christian and other minorities, and socially liberal sections of Iraq's deeply divided polity.

The crowded catalogue of problems in the Middle East should not be an excuse, though, for overlooking the causes of justice and free expression in Turkey and Iran or the case for reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In parallel, for a more nuanced understanding of the political dynamic of multi-sectarian countries such as Lebanon and Yemen, idealistic liberal American legislators could do worse than turn for advice to Mattis and McGurk.

The war in Syria and the attendant unrest in Iraq have demonstrated that all it takes for self-interested authoritarian leaders and their local proxies to sow fear among defenseless peoples and dash hopes for reform is for Western powers to be paralysed by disunity and defeatism. Now, just as the US was finally taking the bull by the horns, Trump's shock orders for troop withdrawal from Syria (and Afghanistan) have made it a delicate challenge for the administration's "grown-ups" to deal with America's foes and commander-in-chief at the same time.

Against this backdrop of tension and dysfunction, Mattis, McGurk, and others should see their role not as former senior White House officials who did their bit for allies, but as keepers of the nation's collective conscience. Their active participation in America's political discourse, eloquent yet tactful advocacy of its international commitments, and candid delineation of security challenges, are essential if the Trump presidency is to behave wisely, without the need to exhaust all other resources.

Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and commentator on the Middle East.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.