Who am I to prognosticate on strategy in the Middle East, but from my comfortable armchair it has always been blindingly obvious that this would be the outcome. There was always precisely zero chance of the regional players allowing a Kurdish state to establish itself, and not much more of a chance for an autonomous region. If that wasn’t as obvious to policy makers a few years back then the train wreck of the Iraqi Kurds’ referendum should have made it so. It was good strategy to partner with the Kurds to clear out IS but it should have always been with a view to allowing the Syrian regime to re-establish sovereignty over its former territory, with a settlement over regional government that gave just enough to the Kurds for the west to be able to say it hadn’t thrown them to the wolves. What other credible end state is there besides Syrian sovereignty that doesn’t involve permanent western military presence, propping up an unsustainable position at huge expense and toxifying relations with a crucial player (the Turks)?
Sorry if this is too obvious for idealistic and over-academicised foreign policy wonks. Call it ‘realism’ with a curled lip if you will, but for me the clue is in the ‘real’...
Edit: I wondered at the time whether Mike Pompeo’s comments about the recent Russian expedition to Venezuela being a gross waste of taxpayers’ money would give Trump food for thought in precisely the opposite sense to that Pompeo intended, both on the funds the US is pouring away in what amounts to a futile attempt to interdict one of several possible Iranian supply lines to Hezbollah, and on how expeditionary operations are perceived from the other end of the telescope. Maybe I wasn’t too far out on that either.