Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 1

President Trump's most coherent foreign policies are on his lips, so it is a huge wonder that he is presently tongue-tied as Turkey sends tanks and troops to attack the only slice of influence the US has left in Syria: the sliver of territories controlled by Kurds in the eastern margins of the country. Putin and his Iranian allies call all the shots now in wider Syria, committing men and materiel to underline an influence growing by leaps and bounds every hour while the US has been hiding in the deserts of eastern Syria. Right from Obama, the country didn't even have a plan A in Syria, not to talk of a plan B or C. In other words, Russia had a focus it was going to enforce with a trenchant ruthlessness now yielding immense results while the US simply did not know what to do, looking back fearfully at an American public that had grown so weary of war.
But the US was lucky, so to say. It did not have to move in thousands of troops or an aircraft carrier brimming with warplanes. Like in Afghanistan during the invasion, all it needed on ground was a proxy army. And no proxy army could ever be more reliable than the Kurds, sturdy individuals with fighting skills and resilience that easily put to flight the famed capabilities of the Northern Alliance. Their heroics in Kobane is well known, a battle that showed everyone that the Islamic State was not an invincible evil horde before which every resistance must melt. The Islamic State impaled itself on the chimneys of Kobane and once they were defeated there, their days were numbered, just as Nazi Germany days were numbered after Stalingrad. The Kurds, under their YPG militia, were to later play the crucial role in driving the IS out of their fiefdoms in Raqqa, Manbij and several other towns and territories in eastern parts of the country, aided by Arab allies and US airstrikes. Without the Kurds, maybe IS would have been defeated but there was little doubt it would have been a very protracted conflict: infinitely sapping on morale and public opinion.
Faithful and largely peaceable individuals the pugnacious, rabble-rousing Erdogan now label as terrorists despite the fact that not a single instance of terrorism on Turkish soil, whether tenuous or even contrived, has ever been linked to the YPG. The border crossings now controlled by the YPG used to be manned by the evil IS fighters and not a single shot was fired by Turkey into Syrian territory then. Naturally, Erdogan would be more comfy with Daesh. Convoys of trucks laden with fuel stolen from Syrian oilfields were crossing the Turkish border in broad daylight on a daily basis, driven by IS terrorists while they held sway in areas now controlled by Kurds. Perhaps Erdogan feared a bullet would ignite one of the trucks and set off a fearsome conflagration.
So it is easy to understand Erdogan's contrived animosity towards the Syrian Kurds. What is far more nebulous is the US silence and inaction. Save for a couple of rhetorics that do not even qualify for a whimper, Trump and his Secretary, Tillerson, have watched with soporific eyes as Turkey rolls its tanks deeper and deeper into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria.