Because ISIS is so religiously extreme and brutal toward their enemies and civilians, it’s easy to forget that they are Sunnis fighting on the Sunni side in a sectarian war against the Alawite regime in Syria (which is aligned with the Shiites) and the Shi’a-dominated government in Baghdad. Ideally, the United States should have no preference or favorite in an Islamic sectarian war, but things are complicated.

Our traditional allies in the region are all Sunni or Sunni-dominated. Egypt and Jordan and Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the little Gulf-State emirates are all Sunni. Iran is Shi’a. Hezbollah, in southern Lebanon, is Shi’a. The government we installed in Iraq is Shi’a. And, as I said above, the Alawite regime in Syria is aligned with these Shi’a powers.

This makes it hard for us to be neutral, and it makes it hard for us to shut down support for ISIS or to form a coalition dedicated to destroying them. The solution under Obama has been to try to identify “moderate” Sunnis who won’t turn against us and who will be more respectful of human rights. But it won’t work because real moderates are the least inclined to join the battlefield in a sectarian war.

We could throw our weight more heavily against the Assad regime in Syria, but that would likely result in radical Sunnis taking over the country and then making an even more sustained and aggressive attack against the Baghdad government.

So, we’ve been stuck in a situation where ongoing stalemate is preferable to there being an actual winner, and Obama’s goal has been to focus on rejecting the sectarian winner-take-all nature of the conflict in favor of negotiated settlement.

This is seen as something between weakness and abandonment by our Sunni allies, especially when coupled with Obama’s decision to negotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran. Of late, it’s been exploited by the Russians who are ramping up their efforts to destroy Sunni resistance (“moderate” or otherwise) to the Assad regime in Syria.

But, given the choice between enabling ISIS and other Sunni radicals to take over Syria and menace Iraq and watching Russia and Iran prevail in Syria, the Obama administration has decided that the latter is the least bad option. They aren’t assenting to it, but neither are they doing anything sufficient to prevent it.

This is the cost of not having any acceptable outcome that is attainable at anything approaching a reasonable risk and price.

Everyone’s unhappy about this. Some are focused primarily on the humanitarian catastrophe that has resulted from years of unsettled war, others on the threat of terrorism that has arisen out of the ISIS movement, and others on the implications for the grand chessboard of Russia and Iran besting us on the battlefield. Diminished American prestige is an obsession for some. Others’ hatred of Russia and/or Iran blinds them to every other consideration.

What Obama has done right is refuse to overcommit us to a conflict in which we cannot identify an acceptable outcome that is attainable at any reasonable level of investment, if at all.

What he has done, though, is authorize the CIA to identify, train, and arm the so-called moderates who were supposed to form an acceptable alternative to ISIS, al-Qaeda, and other radical Sunni forces. And it’s these moderates who Trump is selling out in his rush to appease Russia.

Three years after the CIA began secretly shipping lethal aid to rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, battlefield losses and fears that a Donald Trump administration will abandon them have left tens of thousands of opposition fighters weighing their alternatives.

Among the options, say U.S. officials, regional experts and the rebels themselves, are a closer alliance with better-armed al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, receipt of more sophisticated weaponry from Sunni states in the Persian Gulf region opposed to a U.S. pullback, and adoption of more traditional guerrilla tactics, including sniper and other small-scale attacks on both Syrian and Russian targets.

One way of looking at this is to see in it what Obama was buying through his reluctant assent to a plan he saw as mostly doomed. It’s not that these “moderates” would ever really be acceptably moderate, nor is it that our modest efforts to help them would ever result in a decisive victory (which we saw as undesirable anyway). It’s that in having at least enough force in the field that we could support and that could keep things stalemated, we had a chance to negotiate some kind of less than winner-take-all resolution. Obama’s policy was to prevent a sectarian victory by either side and to force some kind of power-sharing agreement.

Trump’s policy is to dismiss all the complexity described above and throw in with the Shiites so that they can route ISIS. But, of course, they will route all the Sunnis, not just ISIS. In fact, Russia and Syria focus the vast majority of their efforts to destroying the non-ISIS elements arrayed against them.

Our Sunni allies can kind of understand our reluctance to back al-Qaeda and ISIS fighters, even if they see it as somewhere between blind weakness and complete betrayal, but only the most conspiratorial-minded of them ever believed that we actually wanted the Shi’a to win.

Here in the United States, it’s most common for our foreign policy elites to see this less as a sectarian war within Islam than as a proxy war between our country and Russia or our country (and our Sunni allies) and Iran. The U.S. Senate just unanimously reauthorized the sanctions against Iran, so that’s an indicator of how our country approaches this complex problem in a very binary way.

Trump’s position, then, is completely at odds with our establishment which has been savaging Obama for years for not getting us more committed to the anti-Shi’a cause.

It’s also likely to be seen as a betrayal within the CIA where they’ve been hard at work trying to get credibility with the “moderates” that Trump is preparing to abandon. It’s always a risky proposition for a president to get that crosswise of our intelligence agencies.

Trump has made clear that his priority in Syria is the separate fight against the Islamic State, ideally in cooperation with Russia and the Syrian government, as well as other allies. While still vague about his plans, the president-elect has rejected the Obama administration’s view that ending the civil war and bringing Assad to the negotiating table are ultimately key to victory over the Islamic militants, and indicated he will curtail support for the opposition.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the rebels, saying, “We have no idea who these people are.”

“My attitude was you’re fighting Syria, Syria is fighting ISIS, and you have to get rid of ISIS,” he told the Wall Street Journal last month, using another name for the Islamic State.

This is one piece of a much large puzzle, and it is widely perceived that Trump is very close to the Putin regime and may even owe his victory to their influence. The thing to watch in the near future is how our Sunni allies react. Trump will seek to appease them in various ways. With Turkey, he may support their internal post-coup attempt crackdown or even turn over Fethullah Gülen, as they have requested. He may have other ideas for Saudi Arabia.

On the face of it, this seems like a policy ideally suited to Russia, as it gives them complete control over Syria and will result in them expanding their influence in both Iraq and Lebanon, while it will alienate us from our allies in the region who will no longer trust us or feel that they can rely on us to protect them against Iran.

It’s hard to see this all happening without substantial pushback from the foreign policy establishment in this country, for both bad and (mostly) good reasons. It will also involve pushback from the right. While a Republican president (no matter how unorthodox) can expect the right to bend to his will, there are limits.

If there really is a Deep State as many people like to imagine, the Deep State may move against Trump as a way of protecting American interests. Of course, these are interests as they see them, but in this case there is a pretty broad consensus that Trump’s position is reckless, bordering on treasonous.