Putin and Erdogan are ever more obviously carving up Syria into respective Russian and Turkish zones of security dominance; the question now becomes just how they'll proceed to eventually stabilize what remains a highly tense and volatile situation.
From Russia's perspective, the divided city of Aleppo will be key: its shrinking and besieged eastern sector, even if eventually cleared of the former Al Nusra Front and affiliated radical jihadists, will still be under threat by such militants who will have been reconcentrated in adjoining Idlib province. Moscow would thus love to see Ankara exert its influence and leverage over virtually the entire spectrum of rebel factions in the Aleppo theater to reshuffle the strength and alignment of these groups such that they'll settle for a frozen front both in the city itself and in the surrounding countryside, thus securing the government-held western districts of the former in what would be a Jerusalem or Berlin-style partition arrangement.
Since Erdogan has already offered some token agreement to Putin on the importance of separating Al Nusra from "moderate" opposition groups still under the nominal banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) - precisely the pledge that the US has chronically failed to deliver on - it follows that his interest is to negotiate the withdrawal of extremists from Aleppo city so that they can be replaced by more Russian-palatable FSA. These units would then quit their dream of conquering the government-held western districts, thereby securing said frozen front for Assad which the dictator in Damascus can plausibly accept as the restarting point for the diplomatic peace process.
Mr. Erdogan should realize that this partial victory is the best he can hope for with regards to Aleppo: any more aiding and abetting of the hardcore jihadists in their drive to conquer the whole city is likely to ultimately backfire, i.e. meet such determined Russian-backed Syrian regime resistance that it will only further squeeze the rebel eastern pocket in the city proper while expanding the buffer zone of the government siege ring. If he's serious about his new rapprochement and collaboration with Putin, he should know with crystal clarity that this is where the Kremlin draws the red line: the immediate radical jihadist (i.e. Nusra and allies) threat to Aleppo must be removed permanently, else Russia will eventually switch allegiance to the Kurds, realigning with Damascus to unleash the YPG peshmerga against what's certain to be an escalated Turkish incursion against ISIS via Operation Euphrates Shield.
Stripped of its Nusra allies, the FSA will pose little threat to conquer Aleppo, and indeed its very presence in the city will be at the mercy of Assad's forces which control all supply routes into and out of it; though Assad would probably personally want to exact some measure of vengeance on them, he'd have no qualms about tolerating them for the sake of a more relaxed Aleppo sector that would free up precious manpower and resources for operations against Nusra and ISIS further afield. This uneasy coexistence founded upon Russo-Turkish security understanding will then be the basis for what can finally be a meaningful local power transition process with enforceable teeth on both sides; if a federated self-rule arrangement can be worked out for the remaining rebels of eastern Aleppo, it could be a template for the rest of the country.
Of course, all this could still be wishful thinking. While it makes sense for Putin and Erdogan to treat Aleppo as a demarcation line, it remains to be seen just how much leverage they truly exercise over their Syrian clients - especially in the latter's case. One way or another, it's the Russo-Iranian-Syrian regime-Hezbollah coalition - the Axis of Fatima - that has scored a major strategic victory which seemed all but impossible with Assad on the rocks not even a year and a half ago. The real wild card could now be whether the remaining "free" Syrian opposition - under the umbrella of the FSA - can truly be wrested away by its Turkish sponsors from the broader coalition of the Saudi-dominated Syrian High Negotiations Committee (HNC), which probably has if anything only further hardened its stance of full regime change against Damascus.
Ankara of course has the strategic and logistical advantages over Riyadh should the two find themselves at loggerheads on the matter of compromise on Assad's fate: specifically, if Erdogan finds himself wrangling with hawkish young crown prince Muhammad bin Salman. And optimistically, with the latter's war in Yemen going badly off the rails as well, the inexperienced 31-year-old hothead will finally be cornered to back down by his older relatives, who have long been smarting from his becoming de facto head of state in lieu of a senile octogenarian father. Sensibly, it's time to finally concede that the region-wide proxy war against Iran has failed - period.
But finally, that leads us back to Washington: since a factional power struggle is sure to only intensify as Saudi foreign and security policy under prince Salman continues to crumble, the ultimate trump cards in determining Riyadh's orientation in the whole region are held by the deep state of the defense, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatus of the Beltway - the so-called "blob" of the DC policy elite. As the blob becomes ever more assured of a Hillary Clinton victory two weeks from today, it's clamoring ever more loudly to finally go all in on Syria by committing to a new course that can only escalate into an all-out regime change operation which it merely thinks is long overdue.
It's not that Washington has to be crazy enough to actually start a shooting war with Damascus which it knows will depend on nuclear peer Moscow basically bluffing about its vital interests in the Levant - not to mention nuclear-cajoled Tehran's: the mere fact that these lunatic proposals are still being given far less-than-lunatic treatment (let alone increasingly vociferous in their tone) betrays the depths of humiliation and rage now driving the American foreign and security policy establishment. They're the ones whose empire is crashing down like a house of cards right before their very eyes, on the watch of a lame-duck president who to them has simply thrown in the towel as opposed to very intensively determining that proposed direct American intervention can easily make things even worse.
That empire may have been purportedly based on superior morality and values, but it was always ultimately underpinned and validated only by superior application of military force and armed blackmail. The blob will starve to death without new organisms to swallow: to Washington, not going to war at this point must be even less tolerable than blundering into a losing (even suicidal) one, because at least in the second case it's actually putting its expensive tools and toys to use, whilst in the first it's merely condemning itself to obsolescence and irrelevance. You can't expect a gun and weapons nut to not prefer a stupid firefight to the ignominy of sitting on the fence. And even if you manage to constrain him, the very fact that he's still loading and cocking his wares as openly and brashly as ever sure doesn't give your dogs in the fight a reason to heed even your own requests to back down. If the next president - assume that's Hillary - is serious about peace, she'll have to silence and effectively dismember this monster once and for all: else it's damned if you do (plunge into a no-win war), damned if you don't (lose anyway because you won't kill the blob to secure a compromise with the enemy).
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