(Above: Donald Trump made his "America-first" foreign policy the keystone of his inauguration but for a while there it looked like he was wavering on his promise to end regime-change efforts in Syria. But last week he made a major move by ending the training and arming of insurgents seeking to topple the Syrian government.)

My fellow members of the mainstream media spent last week turning the Trump presidency into a soap opera. Tune in each day and see how the Donald turns.

Overlooked in all the fun was what may well be the most significant foreign-policy development since 9/11: The president moved to keep his campaign promise to drop the policy of regime change.

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that President Trump "has decided to end the CIA's covert program to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels battling the government of Bashar al-Assad."

This clears the way for what is looking like a negotiated settlement in the Syrian civil war between Russia and the U.S. that will likely permit Assad to stick around for a while.

It looks like the post-9/11 policy of imposing regime change on the Mideast at gunpoint is ending not with a bang but with a whimper.

It began in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when Americans were a whole lot more optimistic about our ability to remake the Mideast. The term entered the lexicon thanks to speeches like Vice President Dick Cheney's February 2002 address to Congress.

"Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits to the region. When the gravest of threats are eliminated, the freedom-loving peoples of the region will have a chance to promote the values that can bring lasting peace."

Cheney added, "Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of Jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart."

The flaws in that theory became obvious a mere two years later when the extremists in Iraq began a jihad against their liberators.

The lesson was obvious, but somehow the geniuses inside the Beltway failed to learn it. When the Syrian civil war started heating up in 2012, the Republican candidate for president, Mitt Romney, proposed arming the rebels to bring about regime change. That led one of the few realists on the Mideast, former CIA agent Bob Baer to offer this apt analogy:

"Its like a barroom brawl and he's saying, 'I've got an idea. Let's throw some baseball bats in and hope that it goes better.'"

Romney lost, but Barack Obama armed the rebels anyway. This is what's known as "bipartisan consensus" inside the Beltway: Both parties were united in their opposition to reality.

Also among the realists is Pat Lang, a former Vietnam Green Beret with a couple decades experience living in places like Yemen - where we're backing the Saudis in yet another pointless war that the American media have largely ignored. (Visit Pat's site here.)

When I called Lang the other day, he recalled going to seminars in D.C. a few years ago with "all these political science guys and think tankers" who would repeat the mantra of the moment: "Assad must go."

"I would ask at these conferences, 'What if he doesn't go? What if they fight their way through this?'" Lang recalled. "They'd say, 'Oh it's not gonna happen. He's gonna go. He's a terrible man. There's no support for him.'"

In fact there was plenty of support from the minority Christians, Alawites and Shia Muslims who feared they'd be slaughtered by Sunni jihadis if the government fell - not an unrealistic fear given the actions of ISIS in the parts of Iraq and Syria it controlled.

By the time the 2016 campaign got going it was obvious to anyone paying attention that the strategy of regime change should have died with the Bush 43 administration. Yet the Republican who aspired to be Bush 45 was still backing regime change, as was the eventual Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.

They were the establishment favorites. But The Donald outraged the establishment by coming out against the idea of toppling secular dictators.

The big question was whether President Trump was going to be seduced by the Beltway crowd into reneging on his promise.

It looked dicey for a while there, but it now looks like The Donald is willing to accept a negotiated settlement with the Russians that would leave Assad in power for three or four years until elections were held, said Lang.

There's still the problem of the Turks and the Kurds, he said. They've each grabbed a good chunk of Syria during the chaos and may not want give it back, he said.

"We have screwed this whole thing into a cocked hat," he said. "Before, we had a reasonably stable system of government by secular dictators and princes and kings who at least kept the fanatics under control because they feared them. But then we took up the idea of democracy at all costs."

The rest is history.

Unfortunately my fellow members of the mainstream media seem to find the soap opera more interesting.

ADD: The failure of the so-called "neo" conservative/liberal internationalist foreign policy of the Bush-Obama years was entirely predictable. I know because in a services of columns going back to the Iraq War, I cited experts like Baer and Lang who predicted it.

If you're wondering why the establishment is so desperate to impose regime change on the Trump administration, wonder no more. It's because he is defying them on their efforts to get even more involved in the Mideast.