The consequences of Most Equal Comrade's non-policy on Syria

There's a good chance Aleppo, Syria's largest city, held by a loose conglomeration of anti-Assad forces since 2012, is going to be retaken by the Assad regime, with much help from relentless air pounding by Russia.

The UN "peace" talks that had gotten underway in Geneva have been suspended.

Remaining rebel forces - some jihadist, some "moderate - fear an Alamo-style bloodbath as the final encircling commences.

But post-America has faded as a player in the situation.

U.S. officials have no plans to help Assad’s opponents, even those they have backed in the past to stop the Syrian army’s advances. Rather, U.S. military officials condemned Russia for working to prop up the Assad regime, while saying U.S.-led coalition airstrike campaign has one aim—to pound the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS.

Those who, unlike the Most Equal Comrade, make a point of understanding the full dynamics of conflict situations, see a mishmash where a consistent policy should have been:

[Some Pentagon officials] call the potential fall of Aleppo a result of a failed U.S. approach.
“Russians understand war. Americans understand managing conflicts to get unsatisfactory results,” one official familiar with the U.S. military campaign told The Daily Beast.  The approach of both nations “tells the region who the players are. America is feckless and Russia and Iran are reliable allies.”
Either way, the lack of U.S. action was the strongest signal yet that the Obama administration has moved far away from its own stated position that Assad must go, said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Aleppo “leaves the United States in a complicated situation and tilting much towards the position that Assad will stay. Full stop,” Gartenstein-Ross said. 

Now, is there anything compelling about the argument that Syria was never so strategically important that the US should have weighed in as a major stakeholder? I think it merits a hearing anyway, but when you have a chain of position twists and turns dating back to Hillionaire calling the Assad regime a force for stability, and her successor at State, Global-Test, while he was still a Senator, going over there to dine with Assad, and then the Most Equal Comrade (and G-T), after Syria became an Arab Spring nation, pronouncing that "Assad must go," and now this, it sends signals throughout the world.

Iran, one of our mortal enemies, and Russia, our most formidable adversary, are, along with an obviously grateful Assad, the main players shaping events in the Middle east.

Well, also ISIS, which still has its caliphate.

As well as thousands of fighters in Libya, another failed Arab Spring state that had a chance to weather that episode, but for the Most Equal Comrade's let's-you-and-him-fight / lead-from-behind position switch to an insistence that Gaddafi also had to go.

Well-played, if your goal is to diminish post-America's influence in the world as part of an overall program of planned decline.