Kissinger. He probably wouldn't have stopped the Turks either. . . but he wouldn't have gone into Syria in the first place and he wouldn't have offered the Kurds false hopes. Shoot, he'd have made it look like we were doing the right thing, even if we weren't.
Turkey has been our ally since 1945. Technically, but fairly hypocritically, Turkey became an American ally when it declared war on Germany in February 1945.
Turkey never fired a shot in World War Two (making Donald Trump's line about the Kurds not being with us in Normandy all the more odd). And Turkey was courted for most of the war by the Germans. Turkey didn't enter World War Two as it guessed German chances correctly, which didn't mean that it was our pal. Rather, Germany had been close to Turkey since the Imperial German and Imperial Ottoman days. The fall of the Kaiser and the Emperor hadn't disrupted that.
And Turkey both had designs on Turkish Central Asia and feared the Soviet Union, which it had good reason to do. There's little reason to doubt that if the Germans had entered Moscow in 1941 and pushed the Soviets over the Volga at Stalingrad in 1942 the Turks would have entered the war and crossed the Soviet frontier, taking Soviet Central Asia. But Ataturk and his men had a better historical memory than Hitler and his cronies, and the Turks weren't convinced that the Soviets would fall.
They also weren't convinced that they wouldn't cross the Turkish frontier in 1944 or 45, so they threw in with the Allies at the bitter end to help avoid that.
After the war the Turks sided with the west as it feared the Soviets, and rightly so. Turkey fought with the United Nations in Korea. It was a steadfast NATO and American ally against the Soviet Union. It allowed the US to position nuclear missiles on its territory in the late 50s and early 60s. It allowed U2 flights to take off from its airfields and cross its frontier into the USSR.
And it might be a useful ally against the Russians today.
All of that is highly cynical. Turkey has gone from being a country basically ruled by its military, which possessed a veto power over its civilian government, to a shaky democracy with an Islamist prime minister. As its done that, it's been less and less friendly to American positions in the world, but the relationship remains.
Presuming that Turkey doesn't fall into being an Islamic republic, and take the same path as Pakistan or, worse yet, Iran (and it probably won't), the alliance between the two nations could remain useful.
But that means that the United States has to accommodate itself to Turkish suppression of the Kurds. Or at least it might.
Playing both side of an alliance; being an ally of a sovereign nation and opposing its armed foreign positions can be done, but it's really tricky. Dwight Eisenhower followed by John F. Kennedy did that in regard to the French in Algeria, whom we did not support even though they were a NATO ally. Eisenhower also managed that in regard to Israel, France and the UK during the Suez crisis, telling those nations close to us not only that they were on their own but that they had no business intervening in Egypt. And the US sort of managed that with the UK in Ireland, although never in any official sort of way.
Maybe we could pull that off in regard to the Kurds, who deserve their own state, and a state that would make Turkey a smaller one. But that would be really tough. That worked in regard to Ireland only because the British were headed in that direction anyhow, and they judged an ongoing relationship with the United States something not to be disrupted.
Which is part of the reason that you need to think out your interventions before you get in.
When we went into Syria, there was no way that we weren't going to end up supporting the Kurds there. After all, we had done that very thing with the Kurds in Iraq.
And that was always going to make Turkey highly uncomfortable.
So at that point, you really have to ask, do you value Kurdish liberty over Turkish support against the Russians, if you need it?
If you don't ask that question, you're going to end up blowing something. Either the Turks become enraged with the US, or the Kurds do.
Make no mistake about it. We have betrayed the Kurds. And we didn't even do it in the Machiavellian Kissinger way of selling somebody out while pretending we aren't. We've done something wrong.
And that error started when we didn't think out Syria well in the first place.
And perhaps now, all the damage that can be done, has been. We've betrayed the Kurds and the Turks have already started to become a shaky ally. So nothing has been achieved.
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