“Geopolitics is a contest of bad ideas, with winning defined as implementing the least-bad ones. Letting Turkey take control of Kurdish territory falls somewhere between ‘very bad’ and ‘extremely bad’ in this range … To leave the Kurds to Turkey amounts, first of all, to the total betrayal of an American ally, a group whose members have died in the desert by the thousands, so that we Americans didn’t have to revisit our bad dreams of the Iraq War by fighting in large numbers. The Kurds had their own reasons to despise the Islamic State—their ideology is Marxist and atheist, and ISIS would have slaughtered them all—but anyone who prefers Arlington National Cemetery to remain uncrowded owes thanks to the Kurds who died in our soldiers’ place. Letting our allies get annihilated is a fast way to ensure that we never have allies again.” Graeme Wood in The Atlantic with what sure seems to be a (rare) bipartisan take: Trump’s Sickening Betrayal.

+ “It’s a recipe for chaos—and ISIS, which has always taken a long-term view of its struggle with America and its allies, couldn’t have written the script for its second act any better itself.”