(Edited from “Syria and the Neo-Imperial Interest“): We seem to have found that the system that works best or at all, in other words practically, is the one in which the nation-state geographically least suited to occupation and for related reasons best suited to power projection – the United States of America – fulfills the role of global hegemon or neo-hegemon, or neo-imperial power, under an equilibrium of nation-state and global-state imperatives. The latter, as “responsibilities,” are partially and unevenly shared with weak, possibly nascent, possibly hollow formal as well as ad hoc international institutions that also provide venues for less well-suited candidates for world chieftain to join forces and adequately (collectively-survivably), if not completely peaceably, establish rough accountability and restraint. The resultant overall world-picture, frozen at any of its moments, will be bloody, complicated, uneven, contradictory, difficult, and, we might even say, absolutely impossible, since it is or would be the equivalent of the administration of all of human history, including future history, as represented in real time, but the only alternative to the system that we, as in Homo sapiens sapiens, have known is an international (or pre-national) state of nature or war of all against all, already often very remarkably savage and destructive even under pre-modern technological and economic conditions, reasonably judged intolerably dangerous under modern ones.
). Go to our There is somewhat of a precedent with the British retreat from Mesopotamia, which empowered the Ilkwan to move up into Southern Iraq, there is some of that, but the field has mostly moved to Syria, with the ISIS and elements of the Nusra front.
It does appear to be a pattern, of ‘redeployment’ with little benefit;
http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2013/12/13/russias-return-to-the-middle-east/