Somewhere north of the rotting heart of Aleppo, where the roads are just suggestions and the sky is the same dull gray as the mortar dust, the Pentagon’s militia went to war with the CIA’s boys. It wasn’t news to anyone on the ground, least of all the fighters pulling triggers with American ordnance, but it sent a shiver through the air-conditioned rooms in Washington. Two branches of the same machine grinding each other down in the dirt—another bad punchline in a war with too many setups and no real payoffs.

The fighters had names that sounded like half-remembered slogans from a dream—Knights of Righteousness, People’s Protection Units, Syrian Democratic Forces. Maj. Fares Bayoush of the Knights summed it up with the kind of grim, practical poetry that thrives in these places: “Any faction that attacks us, regardless of where it gets its support, we will fight it.” He didn’t need to say where the Knights got their support. Everybody already knew.

The CIA had its own thing going, smuggling antitank missiles into the hands of its favorites like party favors at a disaster. The Pentagon, meanwhile, kept trying to reinvent the wheel, dropping ammo and advice to Kurdish fighters from the sky while telling Ankara it was all under control. It wasn’t under control. It was never under control. The chessboard had flipped into three dimensions, the rules rewritten by people who didn’t have to play the game.

Marea was a postcard from the apocalypse. Its streets were once a pipeline for supplies and dreams smuggled in from Turkey, but the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had stormed in like they were reading from a script no one else had seen. The locals called it betrayal. The Turks called it treachery. The Americans called it a misunderstanding. Somewhere in the chaos, the MOM—Musterek Operasyon Merkezi, if you were feeling formal—kept pretending it was still in charge.

“The MOM knows we fight them,” said a fighter from the Suqour Al-Jabal brigade. He didn’t want his name in print, didn’t need it. Names had a way of disappearing out here, like faces in a sandstorm. “We’ll fight all who aim to divide Syria or harm its people.”

This wasn’t the war anyone thought they’d signed up for, but it was the war they got. Rebels fought rebels. Friends became enemies over nightfall and a fresh cache of American munitions. The whole damn thing was fracturing, splintering into something raw and unknowable. Every bullet that flew seemed to have a U.S. serial number, and nobody back home wanted to admit what that meant.

It wasn’t just Aleppo. It wasn’t just Syria. It was the way these wars always unfolded—covert plans unraveling in the open, alliances crumbling under their own weight. In Washington, they called it a “challenge.” On the ground, they just called it Tuesday.

So I guess this is our way of sticking it to Russia for winning in Ukraine and to Iran for being Iran, nevermind some of the groups we’re supporting look a lot like a Riyadh Langley Caliphate but I guess I should catch up on that

It’s like a geopolitical spitefest disguised as strategy. We’re playing a convoluted game of payback, doubling down on fronts that don’t actually hit our rivals where it hurts, just where it feels satisfying in the short term. Russia holds its ground in Ukraine? Fine, we’ll bog them down by funneling money and weapons into Syria, turning it into a simmering proxy war where the casualties are somebody else’s problem. Iran flexes in the region? Cool, let’s arm their enemies, even if those enemies’ ideologies look like they were drafted in a Riyadh boardroom and edited in Langley’s basement.

The “Riyadh-Langley Caliphate” bit is spot on—some of these groups might as well come with a Saudi flag in one hand and a CIA playbook in the other. But it’s all transactional, no vision. We’re not building alliances or stability; we’re just putting Band-Aids on bullet holes while making sure the right warlords get paid. The problem is, those warlords don’t stay bought. They’re just waiting for the next weapons shipment to declare themselves the new sheriff in town—or sell half of it to the highest bidder.

The State Department wants its “rules-based order” fantasy to survive in a region where rules are written in sand and blown away by the next power vacuum. They throw their weight behind “moderates,” which often means anyone who doesn’t explicitly fly a black flag. But they don’t have the boots or the budget to make it stick, so they’re constantly trying to wrangle the Pentagon and CIA to prop up their preferred factions.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, doesn’t do finesse. They like a chain of command, not a band of militias who play by their own rules. The Pentagon’s ideal partner is predictable, disciplined, and already armed to the teeth. Enter the Kurdish groups—the closest thing to reliable soldiers in the region. Never mind that arming them pisses off Turkey, a NATO ally, or that they’ve got their own agenda. The Pentagon sees an ally who can hold ground, not a future political crisis.

And then there’s the CIA, the chaos agent. They’re covertly funneling weapons to groups whose resumes look like a greatest hits album of the bad guys we’ve been fighting for the last 20 years. Why? Because they’re obsessed with keeping the pressure on Assad and, by extension, on Iran and Russia. It doesn’t matter if their militias shoot at Pentagon-backed fighters or destabilize the State Department’s carefully crafted alliances. To the CIA, it’s all a game of leverage. If one group doesn’t play ball, they’ll just find another.

And sure, we can talk about sticking it to Russia and Iran, but who’s really feeling the pressure here? Russia is happy to see us bleed resources in a war that’s already lost its narrative. Iran? They’ve been playing the long game since before we even knew what the game was. They know we’ll spend billions trying to counter their influence while they just keep grinding away with their own militias and proxies. Meanwhile, the chaos makes the Gulf states nervous, and nervous Gulf states mean more arms deals, more U.S. bases, and more “partnerships” that amount to holding the bag for another generation of regional instability.

So yeah, catch up, but don’t expect it to make sense. It’s less a coherent policy and more a bad habit we can’t break—spending our credibility, our cash, and our soldiers on conflicts where even the best-case scenario leaves us asking, “Wait, what was the point of this again?”

It’s Thucydides rebranded, with less glory and more collateral damage. Athens versus Sparta, State versus CIA versus the Pentagon, all fighting proxy wars inside a collapsing empire of influence. But the irony is that this isn’t some clear-cut battle for supremacy. It’s a battle to see who can avoid blame long enough to survive the next budget cycle. Meanwhile, the real winners are watching from the sidelines, playing the long game while the U.S. plays whack-a-mole with its own institutions.

China? They don’t even need to fight. They’ve mastered the art of letting America outmaneuver itself, one ill-conceived intervention at a time. Russia? They’re running the chaos playbook like it’s a greatest hits album, knowing they don’t need to win outright—just muddy the waters enough to keep the U.S. distracted.

And here we are, fighting ourselves in the shadow of our own decline. State wants stability but can’t resist tinkering with regime change. CIA wants control but keeps outsourcing it to militias they can’t manage. The Pentagon wants to stay out of the fray until they’re dragged in, at which point they carpet-bomb the chessboard and call it strategy. Nobody’s coming out on top because the fight isn’t for dominance anymore—it’s for relevance.

The result? A “Riyadh-Langley Caliphate” Frankenstein monster—funded by the Gulf, armed by Langley, and tolerated by State as a necessary evil. It’s a total clusterfuck, with the U.S. essentially funding a regional civil war where our own proxies fight each other over scraps of influence. And while the agencies duke it out, the real winners—Russia, Iran, Turkey, even ISIS remnants—watch from the sidelines, taking notes on how America burns billions to make its own problems worse.

It’s not just a fight against Assad or Iran or even terrorism. It’s us versus us, competing to see who can win the ugliest, dumbest, most Pyrrhic victory of them all. If that’s not the perfect metaphor for modern U.S. foreign policy, I don’t know what is.