Turkey's current wreck of a foreign policy

Simon Tisdale writes of the Turkey-Syria confrontation that "what is happening now in north-west Syria is no longer a proxy war. It is a direct confrontation between the two heavily armed neighbouring states." On top of that, "it threatens to draw Turkey deeper into military conflict with Russia, Assad’s principal ally." (Erdoğan is reaping what he sowed: Turkey is on the brink of disaster in Syria Guardian 03/02/2020)

Tisdale portrays this as the result of a nine-year streak of bad decisions on the part of Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan that has brought Turkey "to the brink of disaster in Syria." Looking toward Erdoğan scheduled meeting Thursday with Vladimir Putin, he views Putin as likely to be fixed on having this be a win for his Syrian ally.

Putin’s price for letting Erdoğan off the hook may be a full or partial Turkish withdrawal from Idlib but also from other Turkish-occupied Syrian territory west of the Euphrates – and from the Kurdish-dominated north-east region that he controversially invaded last autumn. Erdoğan’s always unworkable idea of maintaining quasi-permanent “safe zones” inside Syria to which refugees in Turkey can, in theory, return looks to be dead or dying.

The intrinsic weakness of Erdoğan’s house-of-straw strategy has been further exposed by the inability of the Islamist extremists he supports in Idlib to resist the recent Syrian-Russian advance; and by the refusal of the US and Nato to come to his assistance in any meaningful way. Turkey appealed for support after last week’s convoy calamity. Only limited help with surveillance and intelligence-sharing was offered. [my emphasis]

Whenever it looks like the Trump Administration is doing something more-or-less sensible in a difficult foreign policy situation, I recall the Rick Perry version of the Stopped Clock Rule: even a stopped clock is right once a day. He already makes Erdoğan looks like a canny, astute master of foreign policy.

I've been opposed all along of having US combat troops directly involved in the Syrian civil war. Trump just agreeing on what amounts to a throwing-up-our-hands deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Because the post-9/11 US involvement in the Greater Middle East including Afghanistan has been a remarkable disaster. As we saw in the recent military incidents between the US and Iran taking place in Iraq, the very presence of US troops is providing risky possibilities for expanding military conflict.

But the US is a NATO ally of Turkey. The alliance does not include automatic involvement of NATO partners in any military conflict in which another member is involved. Each case has to be decided separately. And, as Tisdale notes above, the NATO allies have been reluctant to back Turkey's territorial incursions into Syria. The Trump Administration did facilitate the 2019 Sochi agreement between Turkey and Russia that allowed Turkey to move into the Rojava area in northeast Syria to suppress the Kurdish YPG and to drive Kurds out of a "buffer zone" that Erdoğan wants to establish there in which to settle other Syrian refugees that Turkey had been hosting.

It's worth recalling that the US for decades has claimed it as a great Cold War victory that Russia got involved in its own Afghanistan War. It had the dark side of spawning a virulent new brand of international Muslim fundamentalist terrorism. But we don't like to brag about that embarrassing detail.

And the US and Europe do need to be concerned with Russia's involvement in the Middle East. But in light of the American experience, it's tempting to sarcastically tell the Russians, "good luck with that". At a minimum, it would be misleading to assume that Russian entanglements in the Middle East are automacally negatives for the US and NATO.

But the US and its European allies should have been much more actively diplomatically in restraining Turkey's territorial incursions into Syria, in particular. And assume that's basically what Jenkins is suggesting for the immediate situation:

The humbling of Turkey is no cause for cheer in Europe and the US. What it does do is underscore its responsibility – so far shamefully ducked – to intervene directly in the Idlib crisis to protect civilians, halt the fighting, and pursue a wider peace. Leaving it to Erdoğan was never going to work. The western democracies have a last chance to do the right thing in Syria: manufacture and enforce a just and lasting settlement – and tell Putin and his bombers to go home.

And, as usual, the civilian population is severely affected (Linah Alsaafin, 'Impossible task': Aid groups in Idlib struggle to help Syrians Aljazeera 03/01/2020):

More than 950,000 Syrians have been forced from their homes since December, according to the United Nations, in the wake of an intensified military operation by Syrian government forces and their allies to retake the last rebel stronghold in the country.

The vast majority of the displaced - at least 81 percent - are women and children.

Since December, more than 200 refugee camps have been set up in Idlib, along the Turkish border, to accommodate some of the displaced civilians, known as internally displaced people (IDP), according to aid workers. But the camps lack basic sanitation and are far over their capacity, forcing tens of thousands to sleep outside in sub-zero temperatures, resulting in a number of children freezing to death. [my emphasis]