The more I think about this Turkish rejection of US troops the bigger a deal it looks like.
Perhaps it can be salvaged next week, though that seems unclear.
But if you want some evidence of this administration’s diplomatic incompetence, consider this. We publicly sold out the Kurds to get this deal. We really should have made sure we had a deal before we tipped our hands to the Kurds about the price we were willing to pay for it.
Now we have no deal and no Kurds. I don’t think we should have sold out the Kurds regardless. But if we were going to do so we should have been clearer with ourselves about who we were in bed with, the Turks or the Kurds.
The administration has a stiff wind of anti-anti-Americanism at its back which has thus far allowed it to weather each of these storms. Every one of the administration’s diplomatic debacles is the fault, not of the administration, but of our conniving friends: the Germans, the French, the Turks, the Canadians, Gerhard Schroder, Noam Chomsky, Bono, Elmo, you name it. (The dog ate my homework, and so forth.) But the list of #$&@-ups is really becoming mind-boggingly long.
