Will Trump contain Iran in Syria?

This year has seen enormous advances by the Syrian Arab Army. Firstly, in January, Syria seized the key city of Aleppo. Since then, rebels have been either accepting the open invitation of the government to lay down their arms and rejoin Syrian life, or they have relocated to the province of Idlib, or they have remained, waiting for the Syrian Arab Army to mop them up.

Iran has been using Assad's Syria as part of a Shi'ite crescent from Tehran, Iran's capital, to Beirut, the capital of Lebanon. This crescent is a formidable challenge for the Trump Administration. How does Trump protect Israel if the anti-Israeli Assad government regains control of Syria?

Trump will not protect Israel by overthrowing Assad. Neither will Trump set up a military base in eastern Syria to stop supplies flowing from Iran to Hezbollah. It would take too many men, weapons, allies and money that the US does not currently have in Syria.

More likely is that the US will let the Assad government stay in power, but consolidate air bases in western and north-western Iraq, in the largely Sunni Arab areas. This will do several things. First, it will prevent Iranian weapons from reaching Syria through Iraq, because the US would destroy them on sight. Second, it will prevent Iranian-backed militias from attacking Sunni Arab Iraqis. Third, it will prevent ISIS from returning to Iraq in force, as the US will target them as soon as they are spotted.

Trump will likely contain Iran, but not by battling Iran in Syria, but by working together with the Iraqi government, to curtail Iranian influence there. Like Obama before him, Trump does not want to see the United States get in another quagmire after the two Bush-era quagmires of Afghanistan and Iraq, and unlike in Syria, in Iraq there is support for a continued, minimal US presence.

Afghanistan is the other area which, in the immediate future, will be used to help contain Iran. Afghanistan has an enormous amount of potential resources. Rather than fighting Iran in Syria, Trump is more likely exert pressure to stabilize Afghanistan to make it strong, independent and anti-Iranian. An anti-Iran Afghanistan would go some way to curtailing Iran's dominance in the region.

Trump will also continue to support Saudi Arabia. The US will support the Saudi war on the Houthis - though this is unlikely to benefit anyone in the region, especially Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has additionally shown signs of supporting the Kurds in independence in Syria and Iraq, which would also go a way to containing Iranian influence. However, Trump's hands are tied. If he supports the Kurds too loudly in either Syria or Iraq, he would lose the Iraqi government as an ally. And that would be more disastrous for the US than maintaining the status quo.

All in all, these strategies of containing Iran do not include overthrowing the Assad government in Damascus. This strategy, which is trumpeted so loudly by National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, is likely to fall on deaf ears, as neither James Mattis nor Trump nor Steve Bannon have any desire to be sucked into the unwinnable quagmire of Syria.

Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and Kurdish areas are more likely to be utilized by Trump than overthrowing Assad in Syria.