Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated on January 8, 2026, that Israel aims to free itself from U.S. military aid within a decade. It was a striking admission, not because it was new, but because it reflected a broader reality: The United States is no longer the reliable security guarantor it once claimed to be. The America many in the Middle East relied upon has increasingly behaved in un-American ways: transactional, erratic, indifferent to the fate of its partners. Few have learned this lesson more than the Kurds of Syria.
Consider the record. The United States intervened in Afghanistan and failed. In Iraq, it again failed. In Libya, it became a disaster. Then came Syria. Washington spent nearly $500 million on a train-and-equip program that produced roughly fifty fighters, many of whom eventually defected to Al Qaeda–linked groups. By 2014, the Islamic State had emerged as a global existential threat, filling the vacuum left by these failures.
The United States is no longer the reliable security guarantor it once claimed to be.
It was not the United States and its NATO allies that stopped the Islamic State. In fact, NATO member Turkey and U.S. ally Qatar supported and funded the Islamic State. It was the Kurds of Syria and Iraq and the Iraqis who supported the Global Coalition to Defeat the Islamic State. Between 2014 and 2017, Kurdish-led forces dismantled the Islamic State’s territorial “caliphate” in less than three years. For the first time in decades, a U.S. military intervention was broadly supported across ideological lines, from people like Bernard-Henri Lévy to Noam Chomsky, from Marxists to liberals to conservatives. Aside from Turkey and the current Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, no serious actor opposed U.S. support for the Kurds in the fight against the Islamic State.
And yet, once the Islamic State was defeated, Washington did what it has done repeatedly: It walked away. Under both Trump administrations, the United States abandoned the Kurds. The message was unmistakable: Battlefield sacrifice does not translate into political protection.
Then in 2025 and 2026, Tom Barrack, the U.S. presidential envoy to Syria, threw the Kurds under the bus to appease a former U.S.-desginated terrorist. In January 2026, the U.S. government pushed the Kurds to accept a fourteen-point plan, a ceasefire and integration agreement between the Transitional Syrian Government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. It was a choice between a deeply flawed peace and the possibility of ethnic cleansing. History is instructive here. The Iraqi Ba’ath regime took fourteen years before carrying out its first large-scale massacre of Kurds. In Syria, under the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-led Syrian Arab Army and interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, Druze, Alawites, and Kurds were massacred in less than a year. The agreement does not meet even the minimum Kurdish demands, but it may prevent mass bloodshed. The Kurds chose survival over illusion.
What comes next remains uncertain. If the reassertion of the Syrian state leads to the consolidation of a Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham-dominated order, it will not succeed. But if the state’s return is symbolic and Kurdish-led institutions are integrated, it could mark a genuine, if fragile, step toward inclusion. In Arab-majority cities like Raqqa and Deir Ezzor, state re-entry is less contentious. In Kurdish-majority areas such as Hasakah and other Kurdish territories, however, governance must be led primarily by Kurds themselves. This is the least the Trump administration should assert before the Kurds completely lose hope with the United States.
Al-Sharaa appears pragmatic enough to tolerate limited Kurdish autonomy in the short term, at least until his power is consolidated. But decrees are not rights. A presidential decree can be undone overnight, just as authoritarian rule renders constitutional guarantees meaningless, as Iran’s constitutionally-recognized but practically nonexistent mother-tongue education demonstrates.
Al-Sharaa appears pragmatic enough to tolerate limited Kurdish autonomy in the short term.
The risks are substantial. Many members of the Syrian Democratic Forces are likely to be excluded or criminalized in the integration process Barrack is proud of. The women’s forces, in particular, face near-certain marginalization or humiliation within Islamist-led military structures that still view them as infidels. More dangerously, the possible integration of former Islamic State fighters who have been imprisoned in Al Hol camp for about a decade, many guilty of crimes against humanity, poses a direct threat to any future stability.
This brings us back to the central lesson. There is a popular Arab saying: “Whoever covers himself with the United States is naked.” The Kurds have now learned this truth multiple times. The damage is not only Kurdish. America’s credibility in the region is eroding, pushing states and non-state actors to seek protection elsewhere. If Beijing wishes to expand its influence, Washington is making the path easy.
The Kurdish issue in Syria is not a separatist problem. It is a question of recognition, justice, and human rights. Without political acknowledgment of Kurdish rights and the rights of Druze, Alawites, and other minorities, Syria will not stabilize. Replacing a clean-shaven dictator with a bearded one is not transformation. Normalizing jihadists today only strengthens them elsewhere. And next time, the regime that falls may not be an enemy of the West, but an ally. History will not be kind to those who failed to learn this lesson.
