There have been a lot of stunning things associated with Obama’s foreign policy but perhaps none is quite so dramatic as watching the administration  gradually becoming a de facto  client of Iran. You read that correctly. We have be come an Iranian client state because we are carrying out diplomatic and military actions that further Iran’s geopolitical strategy while getting us absolutely nothing in return.

This may have started out with the administration adopting a juvenile “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy in reaction to the self-inflicted wound of ISIS. This wouldn’t be surprising. There is no evidence that anyone involved in setting US national security policy has studied history so their blindness to what happened after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is explainable. (As most of Obama’s national security people are hard core left wingers who where, like Obama’s mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, communists or so damned close to being communist that there was precious little difference, they probably have a mental block in regards to this.) They also seem unacquainted with Cambodian-Vietnamese War and the Sino-Vietnamese War. In fact, often the enemy of your enemy is still your enemy.

The challenge of ISIS has led to American arms being funneled to Iranian militias operating in Iraq. It has also led to the cessation of air strikes directed at Syria, another Iranian client. In what may be the most striking volte face in the history of warfare, Bashar Assad has gone from being a target of airstrikes to asking to help coordinate them.

President Bashar al-Assad has said U.S.-led air strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria should be subject to an agreement with Damascus and Syrian troops should be involved on the ground.

Assad was speaking in an interview with the U.S.-based Foreign Affairs Magazine published on Monday.

“With any country that is serious about fighting terrorism, we are ready to make cooperation, if they’re serious,” Assad said, when asked if he would be willing to take steps to make cooperation easier with Washington.

We’re seeing this preference towards Iran by the administration play out in our nuclear negotiations where Obama is allowing Iran to violate the basic agreement and threatens to veto any action by Congress. Perhaps the most noticeable symptom of this bending to Iranian will is in the administration’s relations to Israel. There is no doubt we are actively or tacitly arming Lebanese Hezbollah for their fight against ISIS, and these same weapons will undoubtedly be used on Israel.

When a Iranian leading group overthrew a US back regime in Yemen, the administration took scarcely a week to move into try to ingratiate themselves with the rebels:

The U.S. has formed ties with Houthi rebels who seized control of Yemen’s capital, White House officials and rebel commanders said, in the clearest indication of a shift in the U.S. approach there as it seeks to maintain its fight against a key branch of al Qaeda.

American officials are communicating with Houthi fighters, largely through intermediaries, the officials and commanders have disclosed, to promote a stable political transition as the Houthis gain more power and to ensure Washington can continue its campaign of drone strikes against leaders of the group al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, officials said.

“We have to take pains not to end up inflaming the situation by inadvertently firing on Houthi fighters,” a senior U.S. official said. “They’re not our military objective. It’s AQAP and we have to stay focused on that.”

This move, while superficially supporting the fight against al Qaeda (though why we are continuing to attack a “decimated” organization does take some explaining).

The administration is also using the Iran nuclear negotiations, which are obviously going nowhere pleasant for the West, as an excuse to unfreeze Iranian funds at a time when they are needed by Iran:

The Obama administration on Wednesday paid $490 million in cash assets to Iran and will have released a total of $11.9 billion to the Islamic Republic by the time nuclear talks are scheduled to end in June, according to figures provided by the State Department.

Today’s $490 million release, the third such payment of this amount since Dec. 10, was agreed to by the Obama administration under the parameters of another extension in negotiations over Tehran’s contested nuclear program that was inked in November.

While any one of these acts can conceivably be explained away by an administration that has no strategy other than reacting to the threat du jour… which is not unplausible… taken together they paint a clear picture of an administration that has decided that its interests are best served by sublimating US strategy to that of Iran. It allows a Potemkin war to be carried on against ISIS and leaves the next administration to deal with Iranian nuclear weapons and a heavily armed Hezbollah on Israel’s borders.