ALLIES: France becomes Turkey’s newest bugbear as Kurds court Macron.

The new focus of Turkish ire is France, whose president, Emmanuel Macron, has lashed out at Trump’s decision, saying “an ally should be dependable.” The country could play a bridging role between the Kurds, Moscow and Washington that could upset Turkish plans or so many Kurds hope.

Macron was referring to the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), America’s top ally in the fight against the Islamic State and the target of Turkey’s military threats. France has said it will keep an unspecified number of its special operation forces in the Kurdish-controlled zone in northern Syria because, contrary to Trump’s claims, IS has not been defeated. France has been repeatedly targeted by IS and is especially worried about the continued presence of French and other European jihadists in Syria. The militants claimed responsibility for the Dec. 11 shooting at a Christmas market in Strasbourg in which three people were killed and 11 others wounded.

Turkey has long insisted that the jihadis have been vanquished and that they are being used as a pretext for the US-led coalition to protect the Syrian Kurds as they set up their “terror statelet.”

Erdogan says that about all the Kurds, but the truth is the terrorist minority is mostly in the old-school PKK, which has long been an ethno-Communist terror group. More broadly, the Kurds have survived for a very long time in a very tough neighborhood — long before 2,000 American showed up in Syria. I’d still prefer a de jure Kurdish state, but keep them armed and they ought to do fine.