He could begin with Bashar al-Assad, the boss of the crime family that rules Syria. Bashar, who inherited his canny father’s role as president-for-life, started out as a loser. Though some eminent visitors initially fell for the story his courtiers told about a modernizing ophthalmologist, once Syrian citizens went into the streets, calling for Bashar’s goons to stop torturing and killing Syrian children, he let drop the modernizer’s mask. To preserve his power, he has presided over the slaughter of a half million Syrians.

How then explain to Trump the complex conflicts entangling Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, the Kurds, Russia, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia? A briefer familiar with Trump’s penchant for simplification might try to reduce the region’s tangled tales of vengeance, betrayal, and high strategy to a simple ranking of winners and losers.

Pity the poor intelligence officer assigned to brief Donald Trump on national security, particularly across that stretch of real estate specialists call MENA — the Middle East and North Africa. This is where US Special Ops forces, bombers, and drones are enmeshed in at least four wars. What’s more, the shifting alignments across the region may come about so abruptly that even cynical Machiavellians are prone to vertigo.


He remains in power only because the mullahs and Revolutionary Guard commanders who rule Iran have defined the preservation of Bashar’s Alawite mafia as a vital Iranian interest. Since Bashar cannot trust Syrian Sunni soldiers to fight for his family, Iran has had to recruit its subsidiary, Lebanese Hezbollah, to do battle for his so-called Baathist Republic. And with Iranian casualties mounting, the Tehran bosses have recently begun shipping to Syria Shi’ite fighters from Iraq, Afghanistan, and even Pakistan.

If Trump has trouble understanding why loser Bashar seems to be emerging as a winner, the briefer may explain that disparate actors — from Tehran to Istanbul to Moscow to Washington — have conspired to create a stark choice: Either Bashar or the holy warriors of ISIS, Al Qaeda, and their fellow Sunni jihadists. Bashar wins if Trump’s admirer Vladimir Putin can convince President Obama that the Assad mafia is the lesser evil.

It will be no easier to explain how Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan started out as a democratic winner implementing a foreign policy of zero problems with neighbors, but then blundered into dire conflicts with nearly all Turkey’s neighbors. Among those new antagonists were Assad’s Syria, Iran, Israel, Russia, and Hezbollah, as well as the military regime in Egypt, and Kurdish groups in Turkey as well as Syria.


After Erdogan exploited the recent failed military coup in Turkey as an opportunity to purge suspected opponents from the military, as well as from schools, universities, the press, the police, and the judiciary, he incurred criticism from NATO allies. To recover from his regional isolation, Erdogan has sought to reconcile with Russia and Israel. Past proclamations of sacrosanct principles have yielded to the lure of natural gas pipelines and the revenue from tourist vacations in Turkey.

If there is one player in the region who has accumulated a winner’s pile of chips, it is Qassem Suleimani, chief of the Quds Force, the foreign operations branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. He has directed battles against ISIS in Iraq and against Assad’s various enemies in Syria.

Trump, as dealmaker, should envy what Suleimani has wrought. Last summer he flew to Moscow with maps of Syria, meeting with Russian generals to plan a Russian air campaign in Syria. Iran has no air force to speak of today, but US planes are raining bombs and missiles on Iran’s enemies in Iraq while the Russian air force does the same to Iran’s enemies in Syria.

If Trump concludes that the game is over and Suleimani is the winner, his briefer could tell him what Afghans say about their national pastime, in which horse-riding contestants try to deposit a goat’s carcass in a scoring circle: In Buzkashi, they say, only one man wins, and he not for very long.


Should Trump wonder how America stands on the MENA scoreboard, the briefer can explain that Washington has run up large nonmonetary obligations. Trump may grasp the region’s tricky geopolitical reality more readily if things are put in terms he understands: There’s little likelihood the US will repay those debts.

Alan Berger is a retired Boston Globe editorial writer.