On a chilly weekend at the end of January, I stepped out of a hotel in Montreal and set off briskly down the street. I was in town for a Model UN conference and, as a San Diego native, I found that I was woefully unprepared for the city’s frigid temperatures. Having ensconced my hands as deep as they would go into my coat pockets, I was plotting the quickest way to a hot meal when I heard a booming voice from across the street.
A crowd of protestors had gathered in the snow-covered park facing the hotel and were calling out chants in a language I didn’t understand, led by a man with a bullhorn. A dozen Kurdish flags rippled in the cold wind above the protestors’ heads. They carried a banner sporting text I couldn’t read, but the message was clear: they wanted the Canadian government to support Rojava, the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in Northern Syria. Of course, the West’s history of interfering in the Middle East is a bloody one — but for once, I found myself wishing that the Canadian government would listen.
Rojava, officially known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), has long been one of the principal actors in the Syrian Civil War and was once an instrumental U.S. ally in the fight against ISIS. Now, Syria’s new government has pushed Rojava out of previously-held territory and is set to integrate what remains of the Kurdish government in the coming months. Such a fate might seem surprising for a former U.S. ally, but the history of U.S. interventions suggests that it is anything but.
The U.S. made a rare moral decision when it originally decided to support Rojava and its military, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). This decision, however, was not motivated by a desire to defend “American” or “democratic” values. Though Rojava embraced democratic confederalism, environmentalism, and gender equality, the U.S. lent its support to the Kurdish region primarily to preserve its strategic interests. The 2013 rise of ISIS in Syria threatened U.S. dominance in the Middle East, and the U.S. needed a regional ally to combat the Islamic terror group. Thus the alliance between the United States and Rojava was forged.
Amidst the unpredictable foreign policy of the first Trump term, there were discussions of U.S. support for Kurdish fighters in Syria. From what I can recall of watching CNN in eighth grade (half-understanding the events flashing across the screen) the Kurds were portrayed as staunch American allies, and absolutely pivotal in the defeat of ISIS in 2019. This alliance was, as is obvious in hindsight, entirely conditional. While the U.S. may have supplied and trained the Kurdish SDF, it did so only as long as Rojava’s stability remained integral to preventing an ISIS resurgence. With the SDF administering numerous prisons holding former ISIS fighters, the U.S. could not afford to entirely abandon the Kurdish government.
Still, the U.S. was happy to allow Rojava to be invaded by Turkey in 2019, withdrawing its troops from Rojava’s northern border while the Turkish Armed Forces committed numerous human rights violations against Kurdish civilians. Seven years later, the U.S. has completed the trend by totally abandoning its former ally. In the Syrian transitional government led by President Ahmed al-Sharaa, the U.S. found an ally more pliant and more suited to its needs. The Trump administration allowed Al-Sharaa to invade Rojava last January, during a period of conflict between the two governments over an agreement to integrate Rojava. When Kurdish leaders asked for guarantees such as local self-administration, the new Syrian government outright refused. After launching a series of attacks against Kurds in the city of Aleppo, the interim government began advancing into Rojava’s territory. The U.S. sat back and watched.
The U.S. is a self-serving government and has been for decades. This vicious realpolitik is not some new invention of the Trump administration — it is the continuation of a policy that has persisted since World War II. America destroys those which it considers to be threats to its rule, props up dictatorships around the world, and abandons allies when their usefulness has run its course. In theory, it does this to further the cause of democracy, but that logic is circular. The U.S. is more than happy to lend its support and allyship to authoritarian regimes, or to illegally infringe upon other nations’ sovereignty. The U.S. supports what is most advantageous for its economy and its military presence and nothing else. While that might be standard fare for most countries in this day and age, it does reveal the lie in the constant refrain that the U.S. was “fighting for democracy around the world” before Trump. It certainly isn’t now.
The history of Rojava-U.S. relations is the perfect case study for this American tendency. Rojava, a truly democratic government espousing progressive ideals, was protected only so long as it was useful. Once it could be replaced, it was discarded. The same is true of other American allies, such as Denmark. When Trump began to see Greenland as strategically valuable, Denmark found itself on the chopping block. Though the Nordic country retains its hold over Greenland, its relationship with the U.S. has suffered extraordinary strain, and it may be only a matter of time until America makes another grab for its territory. Regardless of whether Trump truly ever intended to take control of Greenland, the incident demonstrated that the U.S. is perfectly willing to intimidate former allies by threats of military force. That Denmark has the honor of being a NATO member further demonstrates how unreliable U.S. allyship now is. With Trump pulling away from this alliance, even the U.S.’s most cooperative stalwarts may find themselves threatened.
It also seems likely that this same fate awaits Ukraine. As the U.S. has sought to bring the Russian war in Ukraine to a close, it has been more than happy to suggest that Ukraine give up parts of its territory to Putin. Of course, Ukraine is not a NATO member, making its case a more perfect analogue for Rojava’s situation. Ukraine theoretically upholds values that the U.S. wants to protect — but more importantly, it’s a drain on Russia’s resources. So long as America benefits from the continuation of the Ukraine war, it will keep supporting Ukraine. But it seems likely that this support will eventually run out.
The U.S. also regularly intervenes in sovereign nations around the world. Just this year, the U.S. illegally kidnapped the president of Venezuela — murdering Cuban and Venezuelan civilians as he did so. Historically, U.S. interventions claiming to promote “democracy” have ended in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq, the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the suffering of 11 million Cubans under an oil blockade. These are not the actions of a government protecting freedom. Any genuinely democratic movement hoping to align itself with the U.S. would be better served by turning away. When the moment is right, the U.S. will betray an ally without hesitation if it has something to gain.
Rojava has learned that lesson all too well. But future democratic movements may not have to share its fate. Trump may be continuing U.S. policy when it comes to pragmatic selfishness, but he is still certainly changing what is perceived as beneficial for America. Instead of seeking to preserve a world entirely dominated by U.S. strategic interests, Trump appears ready to consolidate U.S. control over various spheres of influence.
This shift towards a multipolar world might provide opportunities for movements like Rojava to succeed where it failed. Instead of facing abandonment by the U.S., such projects may be able to eke out success on their own terms, even if doing so runs counter to U.S. strategic interests. With the end of the U.S.-led international order, projects like Rojava — now forever relegated to the status of a doomed experiment — might not be so doomed after all.