After the initial heightened stages of mobilization and disruption, revolutions usually face emerging challenges and opportunities for survival from both internal and external actors. The revolutionaries in Rojava find themselves today in such a precarious situation. Capturing the attention of a wide range of international actors with its successful fight against the Islamic State and its gains in the struggle for a radical political alternative, the Rojava Revolution faces an increasingly hostile environment. While the Turkish government keeps Afrin and other regions under occupation and constantly threatens the Autonomous Administration (AANES) with further destruction, the Syrian government and its benefactor Russia appear reluctant to strike a deal with the AANES on its own terms. Under these circumstances, the AANES has found itself reliant on the presence of the United States and its forces in the region as a deterrent against invasion. Yet the United States has acted as the guardian of the global capitalist system at least since the World War Two and consistently attempted to stifle any radical alternatives. The reliance of a revolutionary movement on the imperial policeman of the very system it seeks to transcend thus creates a contradiction. Although the revolutionaries cannot be blamed for shunning diplomacy with other actors, this contradiction, as well as the geopolitical situation in the region, has the potential to inflict significant damage. Drawing upon interviews, observations, and documents collected during the fieldwork of my dissertation research, the paper analyzes this contradiction while accounting for the geopolitical reality within which the revolution is situated. In doing so, it attempts to think with the revolutionaries themselves and focuses on questions that are imperative for struggles elsewhere, such as how to sustain a revolution under unfavorable circumstances or how to conciliate concrete conditions with ideals.