Eurasian dictators are now playing America like a cheap fiddle

As Turkey's incursion into northern Syria blatantly uses ISIS as a pretext to primarily attack the Kurds instead, it's increasingly clear that Ankara is blackmailing Washington: since we don't forgive your unwillingness to extradite Fetullah Gulen (the cleric blamed for masterminding the July 15 putsch), if you still want us in NATO and not fall outright into Russia's orbit, we can't have you nitpick how we press our legitimate security interests in Syria, especially vis-à-vis the Kurds.

That sounds like just the kind of cynical deal Erdogan would have concluded (admittedly roughly) with Putin when they met at the Kremlin August 9. The common denominator is unmistakable: play the US like a cheap fiddle, using Washington's fear of loss of influence in the region and broader peacemaking credibility worldwide, to bamboozle it into doing Ankara's and Moscow's respective authoritarian biddings.

So Obama is looking more like the naive fool in the region, almost like the "JV team" he once derided ISIS as: just as the Russians have extracted from him the price of non-interference with their brutal bombings of the opposition, so the Turks have now extracted the price of plausible deniability when it comes to betraying Syrian Kurdish aspirations.

It all works just fine for the dictators: they get to whack the malcontents they want to whack - provided they've agreed on how to divvy up the hit jobs - and they can count on the good ole US of A to bear the humanitarian burden of cleaning up the mess, even as they can still keep just enough facade of being a "partner" of America to wash their own bloodied hands when the dirty work is finished.

It's hardly a wonder the Iranians have been so fired up against US naval patrols lately: the Shia jihadists smell the stench of a weakness borne of a deep sense of confusion over just what in the world the US mission has become. And of course it's the same with the Chinese: Beijing's aggressively uncompromising arrogance towards its smaller neighbors these days isn't ultimately about China's evolving relationship with them - it's about proving their association with Uncle Sam is the root of their insecurity.

If this trend persists, before long America's remaining undemocratic allies, notably Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchies, have to wonder just why on earth they're still deferring to Washington's preferences and prejudices. And even democracies with firm sense of national interest and unflinching autonomy - think India - will draw closer to the US for purely utilitarian reasons, not humanitarian ones.

Shame, just a shame...America has become the timid sheriff who relies on the local gangster bosses to keep their neighborhoods relatively orderly (or simply from becoming even more chaotic)...if not even the toothless judge in a mob-ruled society whose verdicts are valued only for the moral certification they give the oligarchs.