It is not surprising that there was hardly a mention of Syria — US President Donald Trump’s land of “sand and death” — in the State of the Union address. A war that once commanded the attention of US policymakers is the all-but-forgotten stepchild of US interests in the Middle East.

Since the assassination of Iranian Major-General Qassem Soleimani, US forces have been more concerned with force protection than the campaigns against the Islamic State and Syrian President Bashar Assad. More broadly, US Secretary of Defence Mark Esper observed that he worries more about Russian advances in Egypt and Saudi Arabia than in Syria.

Esper was reflecting the views of his boss. Trump set the tone for the new look in US policy when, on October 25, he tweeted: “COMING HOME! We were supposed to be there for 30 days. That was 10 years ago. When these pundit fools who have called the Middle East wrong for 20 years ask what we are getting out of the deal, I simply say, THE OIL, AND WE ARE BRINGING OUR SOLDIERS BACK HOME, ISIS SECURED!”

In Trump’s world, the United States has nothing to look for in Bilad al-Sham.

Syria is a strategic backwater, where, as in Afghanistan “good enough” must suffice in place of a US victory… or defeat.

Washington hopes that its retreat east of the Euphrates stabilised the situation by territorial defining limits on Turkey and Russia and enabling the continuation of another “forever war” at acceptable cost and largely out of public view. This is far from an ideal outcome but for Washington it is “good enough.”

“[The US] is not going to be here for 100 years,” explained US Marine Corps General Frank McKenzie during a recent visit to the Green Village military outpost, east of Deir ez-Zor. “I frankly don’t know how long we’re going to be here and I have no instructions other than to continue to work with our [Syrian Democratic Forces] SDF partner here.”

As of mid-December, US forces, numbering around 750, were deployed at 11 bases and military posts in north-eastern Syria, including five in Hasakah province, four in Deir ez-Zor and two in Raqqa. There is a garrison manned by 200 or so troops at Al-Tanf near Syria’s south-eastern border with Iraq.

The SDF controls only 30% of the territory it held before the US withdrawal. The Syrian Army, along with Russia and the SDF, controls most of the rest, including the east of the Euphrates border zone with Turkey, which itself is deployed along a small zone south of the border.

Trump hopes that the Pandora’s box that is Syria has been shut and the “pundit fools who have called the Middle East wrong for 20 years” silenced.

It is true that the Washington policy establishment that Trump so abhors long ago gave up any dream of defeating its enemies in Syria or removing Assad from power. In place of such an elusive victory, the Obama administration and now Trump have been forced to slash their definition of victory to a bloody stalemate.

Even this pinched objective eludes them. The Assad government, with critical assistance from Moscow, Tehran and a wink from Baghdad, is on the march. Assad cannot long survive the stalemate. He has always had a simple objective — crushing the opposition and “liberating every inch of Syrian territory — and that includes Idlib as well as east of the Euphrates.

Referring to this issue, Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said during a news conference January 30 that “the Syrian government and its allies from the resistance front will go from Idlib to the eastern Euphrates to expel the Americans.”

This is not idle talk and it has caught the United States flat-footed.

At no time since the outbreak of war in 2011 has Washington’s desire for a debilitating stalemate that will prevent the government’s and the “resistance axis’s victory worked. Syria is a dynamic environment, where those hoping to simply run in place have always been outmanoeuvred by a regime and, most important, an ally in Moscow determined to move the battlefield and the diplomatic arena in their favour.

The US retreat in October opened a new arena in which the contest between Russian expansion and the United States’ unrequited hope for an uneasy status quo are being played out.

Russian forces accompanying Syrian national forces seeking to expand military and administrative control over areas abandoned by Washington regularly bump up against US troops, who control vital areas accessing the border with Iraq and the Conoco oilfields near Deir ez Zor. On several occasions during the past few weeks, US forces blocked the advance of Russian military police patrols.

James Jeffrey, Trump’s Syria envoy, initially minimised disputes such as the ones near the Rmelan oilfields along the critical M4 highway as mere “dust ups.”

A few days ago, Jeffrey adopted a more urgent tone, explaining that: “The vast majority of these incidents… represent the Russians trying to move into the far north-east where they do have the town — the city of Qamishli, where there are Russian and Syrian forces… The Russians have legitimate needs to move their forces into that area, but we have deconfliction agreements and we find them violating them to one or another degree in there.

“Now, more serious is we have seen a number — a limited number of occasions… where they have tried to come deep into the area where we and the SDF are patrolling. Those are the ones that worry me.”

As with the successful policy “deconfliction” in the air, adopted after Russia’s entry into the war in September 2015, these confrontations have been regularly and professionally defused. Washington is content to hold what it already has and hope for the best.

However, Russia and its allies are on the march. For them “good enough” is not enough.