The United States? Well, it has Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, al-Nusra ("bad" al-Qaeda), Jabhat Fateh al-Sham ("good" al-Qaeda), ISIS, the Free Syrian Army, the Army of Conquest, the Kurds, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, the rest of "Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve," Refugee Nation, and Croatia? It's complicated.
Whose Timeline would you want to get involved in?
To be more "successful," the U.S. will have to drop all the doo-dads that are dressing up the imperialism, and be more explicitly ruthless. It will have to drop the pretension of fighting for democracy and humanitarianism or respecting international law, and just be, like: "Let's just take the oil." Precisely what our new president promises.
We've exhausted the Smooth Operator; time to try the Huckster. Different salesman, same product.
But that shift will introduce further political weakness, at home and in the world, forcing more reliance on dangerous military aggression, undermining further the "world's bestest, diversest, peace-lovingest democracy" political-ideological foundation that's absolutely crucial for stable imperial rule. The United States will start losing Europe, and from there, even Hamilton won't save it. That's exactly the conundrum you hear John Kerry struggling with in that remarkable audio tape.
It's increasingly clear that the United States can achieve nothing but destruction, in Syria or anywhere else.
But it can achieve that, and as a failing and flailing enterprise, it may double and triple down on its destructive impulse. Even if, and precisely because, it has now met some effective resistance in Syria, it may engage in dangerous provocations designed to put those international actors capable of military resistance--Russia and China--back in their assigned places.
Sorry, there is nothing very hopeful in this scenario. It's nouveau great-power geopolitics in which there is no left or progressive force of any significance. We are going to have to do some unfriending, and make a lot more bad and unfortunate choices.
Jah rule.
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