Putin, Assad and Erdogan will continue their ruthless pursuit of the Middle East regardless of the arms embargo

Like the guys at the zoo who have to clean out the elephant house, Mike Pence, US vice president, and Mike Pompeo, secretary of state, have flown in to Ankara to see if they can do something about the mess left behind by their boss. It looks as though they’ll need a bigger shovel.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quick to let them know that their call for an immediate ceasefire by Turkish forces in Syria had already been rejected.

Russian troops will take over vacant but pristine American military bases, the better to carry out their “peace keeping” mission along the border. In reality, this is about making sure that Turkish and Syrian government troops don’t start fighting. Given that both sides – the Erdogan team and the Bashar al-Assad team – are supposed to be friendly with Moscow, the Russian motive in keeping the peace in northern Syria is not entirely altruistic.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has invited Mr Erdogan for talks in Moscow, and Donald Trump has declared himself determined to “destroy and obliterate” Turkey’s economy through even stricter sanctions. An arms embargo has now been imposed by Turkey’s Nato allies Germany, France and Britain, and the US has refused to sell Turkey its F-35 fighters. Turkey has already started to procure arms systems from Russia.

The defection of Turkey from Nato to a closer relationship, if not a formal alliance with Russia, seems almost complete. Even by Mr Trump’s standards, losing Turkey is an extraordinary diplomatic blunder. It is also, no one should forget, a humanitarian disaster for the Kurds, friendless once again, with no homeland and a bleak future.

It is a week since Mr Trump “green lighted” Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria and punishment of the Kurds. Plainly – and no amount of White House spin can camouflage this – the impression was given that Turkish forces were good to go, and American forces, soon to the withdrawn, would not stand in their way. So Turkey wasted no time unleashing its dogs of war on military and civilian targets alike. It continues to do so, whether America now likes it or not.

It should come as no surprise. The Turkish government has long regarded any organised Kurdish entity, be it a political party, labour movement, homeland state, independent or autonomous, peaceful or otherwise, as a terrorist threat, and treated it accordingly. The first war crimes against the Kurds followed within hours of the invasion.

It is already too late to prevent at least some Isis fighters from skipping jail, their Kurdish guards being redeployed to the defence of their homeland. The relatives of Isis fighters, for sure, are on the loose; more may follow. Sooner or later, some of those battle-hardened trained merchants of death, the men who gleefully burnt captured Syrian pilots and forced Yazidi women to be sex slaves, will find themselves in European cities inflicting random acts of slaughter.

As Mr Trump, tastelessly but accurately, observed, it is unlikely they’ll travel all the way to America to conduct armed jihad, but the price will be paid in the blood of the citizens of America’s supposed partners and allies in the Middle East and Europe.

America’s inexplicable decision to pull its small but symbolic force of 1,000 troops out of Syria has contributed to geopolitical instability in the region. The Kurds, incredibly, have been forced to conclude a makeshift battlefield alliance with President Assad, which means that they are, uncomfortably for all concerned, allied to Iran and Russia as well as the regime in Damascus for the duration. Hence Russia’s dual role as “friend” to all sides (except the beleaguered Kurds, of course). As is evident, Mr Putin is a smarter geopolitical operator than Mr Trump.

The result is another of the Middle East’s many proxy wars. As with the other proxy wars, it is the weakest people in the region, in this case the Kurds, who will suffer the most, on top of all the hardship they have thus far had to endure. As with the pitiless and cruel war still being waged by Saudi Arabia in Yemen, with Iran funding and arming the other side, there seems to be little the west wants to do to bring it to an end.

The UK arms embargo on Saudi Arabia seems to be rendered useless by incessant memory lapses on the part of the Department for International Trade, absent-mindedly sending weapons to Riyadh in defiance of its own policy. Liz Truss has yet to fully account for how these “mistakes” have arisen.

Still, for now, the UK has made some gesture that British-supplied arms should not be used in war crimes and acts of aggression in Syria, for what it is worth. Yet Turkey has plenty of arms to fight its dirty little war against the Kurds, and, in Mr Putin, a willing salesman for anything more it might need. While Mr Putin, Mr Assad and Mr Erdogan are carving up vast swathes of the Middle East, all Mr Trump can do is look on, and send irate, incoherent tweets.