Suddenly, It’s America That Needs the Kurds and the Ukrainians

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, March 05, 2026

 

The United States, while dominant in the skies over Iran, is not without the need of support from its partners and allies. And we’re not talking just about NATO or Israel. Even America’s most embattled partners abroad, some of whom the president’s allies were willing to cast off as so much deadweight just months ago, are finding America shuffling up to their doorstep, hat in hand.

 

According to public reporting, the United States has been cultivating Kurdish elements for months, with the goal of introducing them into northwestern Iran to foment insurrection and tie down Iranian domestic security and armed forces. “Trump was clear,” one official told the Washington Post of a call between the president and a Kurdish militia. “He told us the Kurds must choose a side in this battle — either with America and Israel or with Iran.”

 

Likewise, the president has suddenly become quite solicitous of Ukraine.

 

While U.S. and Israeli air defenses have been effective against Iranian ballistic missiles, its low-cost drones have managed to evade anti-air networks, striking targets across the Gulf region. The Ukrainians have ample and unenviable experience being on the receiving end of the Iranian Shahed drones that have supplemented Moscow’s stockpiles.

 

Volodymyr Zelensky has heard the call:

 

 

What a difference a war makes.

 

Last month, the administration was happy to abandon the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces — a key partner in the fight against the Islamic State and the custodian of thousands of ISIS militants — to the Turkish-aligned government in Damascus. We don’t have to review the fraught course that the Trump administration’s relations with Ukraine followed throughout much of the first year of the president’s second term. Suffice it to say that the president’s outlook toward Kyiv was summarized neatly in the scolding to which he treated Zelensky in the Oval Office: “You don’t have the cards right now.”

 

America’s foreign policy hasn’t changed. The president has merely joined fights that he had hoped to avoid. America’s frontline partners have always been impressively adept, inventive, and dogged in their resolve. The president has merely recognized it, belatedly.

 

In the future, Trump should reconsider the value of the advice he gets from those in his orbit who have tried to convince him that America’s partners abroad were a drag on it and a liability in the pursuit of its interests. They were wrong.