This is John Batchelor.

Syria, conversation with colleague Jonathan Shanzer, he's traveling in Israel in the Middle

East.

About Syria, what is to become of the Russian contingent in the east, in the West, the American

contingent in the East, the Israeli deployment in the South, and the Turkish deployment all across the north,

and then the Kurds, the Syrian Kurds, what is to become of the Russians, of the whole of the failed state?

Jonathan Chancer here guides us to look to Erdogan, the strong man of Turkey, the neo-Ottomanists.

Bring back the Ottoman Empire in 1914.

Here's Jonathan Shanzer on Syria.

What is to become of the powers right now inside Syria's borders. More of this later.

Well, right now, the fate of the Russians is very much in doubt. They had a number of bases.

They had a warm water port in the town of Tartus on the Mediterranean. Right now, that is all up in the air. A lot of it

is going to be determined by Erdogan and Putin, hashing this out and likely coming up with some

kind of a new arrangement, perhaps one where there is remuneration involved for Syria or for the

Erdogan government itself. As for the U.S., we still have our deployment

in TANF, which is along the border with Iraq and Jordan. It's a crucial place for American forces to be

if the goal is to sustain a modicum of stability in the Middle East. But it's unclear whether

Donald Trump is going to want to stay the course. There's certainly isolationists within his

government that are counseling against such a move. It will be, I think, a very consequential

decision coming up by the Trump administration about whether to leave or not,

especially as we see the Russians trying to get back in. That should be a message to Trump that

we do not want to leave this country, a strategic country in the Middle East. We don't want to

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