During his election campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly said that he considers the fight against the Islamic State (IS) to be America’s biggest challenge in the Middle East, not the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. He made it clear that he was willing to cooperate with Russia to meet this challenge. At the same time, we will only really be able to speculate on the possibility of a new ‘meeting on the Elbe River’ between the US and Russia, this time somewhere on the Euphrates River, after the new president has taken office. Yet the assumptions about such a possibility themselves are impacting on the nature of military operations in the region and the behaviour of those involved, allowing certain predictions to be made...
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