At this time last year, I thought we were headed for an agreement among the strong men–Trump, Assad, Erdogan, and Putin–that would permit Assad to remain in power, send the Iranians and Hezbollah home, and authorize the Turks to do whatever they needed to do with the Syrian Kurds. This approach would, of course, have left our erstwhile allies in the lurch, but it had something important to offer everyone else, and a cynic might have welcomed it.
I guess I gave Trump too much credit for having a stable and coherent policy. Instead, we are in a situation where the Turks are bombing the Kurds in areas close to American troops. The new plan appears to be to create an enclave of American allies in Syria under the pretense of continuing to fight IS and use it to extract concessions from Assad and the Russians in the peace negotiations. What it is really doing is driving a deeper wedge between us and the Turks, to Putin’s obvious delight.
Operating in the gray area between the Turks and the Kurds was always very difficult, but Obama managed to do it with some success. Do you have faith in Trump to do the same? Me, neither.