The New Axis of Evil

The New Axis of Evil | commentary:
The U.S. is not just being defeated in Iraq and Syria.
It is being humiliated.
On Sunday, the administration was taken by surprise for the umpteenth time when Russia, Iraq, Iran, and Syria announced an agreement, ostensibly to share intelligence about ISIS.
This is part of a widening role for Russia in the region, Moscow having already established a new airbase to go along with its existing naval base in Syria.
It is also a sign that Iraq is getting pulled further into the Russia-Syria-Iran axis — a new Axis of Evil — that is far more determined to keep Bashar Assad’s murderous regime in power than it is to fight ISIS.
It is telling that Russia has started drone surveillance flights in Syria over areas controlled not by ISIS but by other rebel groups. 
In fact the more this Axis keeps Assad in place, the stronger that ISIS gets because ISIS feeds off the understandable resentment that ordinary Sunnis feel towards a regime that has been responsible for the vast majority of the killing in a conflict that has claimed over 225,000 lives.
...While Russia appears to be purposeful in pursuing an amoral, anti-Western policy, the U.S. looks simply lost, bewildered, defeated. 
It’s not clear what policy the U.S. is pursuing anymore:
Are we for or against Assad?
For or against Iran?
All we know for sure is that we are against ISIS but that we are not doing much to “degrade” and “destroy” it, as the president claimed a year ago. In fact the latest intelligence estimates suggest that it is drawing in more than 1,000 foreign fighters a month, more than replenishing its losses from U.S. air strikes.
I cannot remember a more confused or dispiriting moment in American foreign policy since the 1970s."