These are surely disorienting times for Donald Trump, who has endured endless controversy over his steadfast commitment to more obliging relations with Vladimir Putin. As multiple investigations continue into the Trump-Russia affair, tension between Moscow and Washington has spiked, further complicating the bleary entanglement between the two. On Sunday, the U.S. shot down a Syrian warplane, alleging it dropped bombs near its allies, who were engaged in fighting ISIS militants. Damascus claims the plane was itself on an anti-ISIS mission. And now Russia, a keen supporter of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, has retaliated, suspending a military hotline used to avoid clashes in Syrian airspace and declaring on Monday that any U.S.-flown plane venturing west of the Euphrates River could be a target.

Speaking in Washington, General Joseph Dunford sought to allay reports of escalating friction. “I’m confident that we are still communicating between the coalition operations center and the Russian operations center,” he said. “I think the worst thing any of us could do would be to address this with hyperbole.” America, he added, would work “diplomatically and militarily” to re-establish the so-called “deconfliction channel.” Indeed, this is not the first time that Russia has threatened to shut the channel, nearly cutting communication after President Trump ordered a strike against a Syrian air base allegedly involved in a chemical weapons attack in April.

The most recent round of sparring between the U.S. and Russia, however, feels particularly weighted in the wider context of the evolving Syrian conflict—and Trump looks increasingly out of his depth. Recently, both military forces and their respective allies have made headway in ousting ISIS militants from their de facto capital of Raqqa. The U.S.-led coalition has stepped up its aerial bombing offensive and entered several districts of the city, while the Russia-backed Syrian army has won territory in the western Raqqa countryside. Russia and the U.S.—alongside a varying mosaic of powers, from the Kurds to Turkey to Iran—are united in the mutual aim of defeating ISIS. But as they gain ground, and possibly edge closer to their goal, their brittle union threatens to collapse into a toxic mess of competing interests and discordant perspectives over control of contested territories—a geopolitical brawl that could unfurl, perilously, within a political vacuum. “As ISIS disappears off the map . . . this tolerance that Shia Iranian-supported groups and American-supported groups have shown for each other—there is a danger that will that will go away,” Ilan Goldenberg, a former state and defense official, told the Guardian. “You can see it all going haywire pretty quickly.”

These tensions come amid a dizzying series of military and political moves across the Middle East that threaten to further destabilize an already volatile region. Iran fired its own missiles into ISIS-controlled Syria in retaliation for an attack on Tehran last week. Saudi Arabia said it has captured three Iranian Revolutionary Guards that it accuses of planning a terrorist attack. The U.S. Navy conducted military drills with Qatar over the weekend as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson races to resolve a diplomatic crisis between the small petro-state and its neighbors—a crisis Trump previously inflamed. The president’s deepening ties with Riyadh have emboldened King Salman’s war in Yemen, a blockade of Qatar, and moves against Tehran. Amid the mounting chaos, Trump has dispatched his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to begin peace talks between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, whom he has endeavored to enlist in a Saudi-backed Sunni alliance that threatens to exacerbate sectarian conflict in the region.