David Ignatius deplores the U.S. habit of “seduction and abandonment” when it comes to using proxies overseas:

But people in the Middle East have learned to be wary of American promises. One Iraqi Christian leader recently rejected the suggestion of new American help, post-Islamic State. “You’ll walk away,” said the priest. “That’s what you do.”

It is deplorable that our government makes promises that it doesn’t keep, but the solution to this pattern of bad behavior is to stop taking sides in the conflicts of other nations when we have so little at stake in them. The Iraqi Christian leader isn’t wrong that sooner or later the U.S. will “walk away” from whichever group it pledges to support today, but the reason that happens is that there was never a compelling reason for the U.S. to make the pledge in the first place. “Seduction and abandonment” is the flip side of incessant meddling in conflicts that don’t really concern us. We “walk away” at some point because the costs of involvement eventually outweigh the ever-meager benefits, and this is almost always an entirely foreseeable development.

We shouldn’t use and then abandon proxies when we have them, but the better course of action is to avoid taking them on to begin with. One of the main advantages for major powers in using proxies is to limit the costs to themselves, and so it is probably inevitable that the U.S. will keep abusing this or that faction in future conflicts as long as Washington is determined to interfere. The strange thing is that the U.S. record of mistreating our proxies is well-known, but that doesn’t stop the next group from thinking that it will be different this time around. We should know better by now and stop making offers that we know we will eventually rescind.