Thomas Donnelly writes about the Syrian regime’s capture of the town of Qusayr:

It would be rash to draw too many conclusions from a fight over a town of just 30,000 residents, but the specter that looms is nothing less than the near-complete collapse of the U.S. position in the Middle East [bold mine-DL].

Fortunately, Donnelly isn’t rash. He’s just being ridiculously alarmist. What needs to be kept in mind here is that the U.S. position in the region is not affected by military reverses for the Syrian opposition. The regime’s capture of Qusayr could be a huge defeat for the opposition, which by most accounts it is, and “the U.S. position in the Middle East” would remain much the same as it has been.

Some Syria hawks insist on pretending that anything less than defeat for Assad and his allies in Syria’s civil war would represent a massive defeat for the U.S., but at worst it would mean that the Syrian government has been still been greatly weakened while its allies have been kept busy wasting their resources to shore up an injured government that doesn’t even control the whole of the country. Iran and Hizbullah won’t have gained anything from their efforts, and they have already alienated the entire region in the process. Meanwhile, the U.S. will have lost nothing and taken on no new commitments in the region.

Last week, Micah Zenko summed up why U.S. military intervention in Syria is so unlikely:

The course and outcome of Syria’s civil war is [sic] simply not that important of a national interest for the United States to take the lead and catalyze a military coalition or weapons-supplying role.

This is also why the outcome of any particular battle during that war also has relatively little importance for U.S. interests.