Russian leaders have evidently been shocked by
Turkey's deliberate decision to shoot down one of their planes, which they say
was motivated by Turkey's alleged support for Islamic State and greed for the
proceeds of smuggled terrorist oil. A simpler explanation is that Russia would
have done the same.
Here is the hypothetical: What would President
Vladimir Putin do if civil war broke out in a neighboring country, which had
been part of the Russian empire for centuries before breaking away under
circumstances, and with borders, that Russians still found difficult to accept?
What would he do if, in that war, some of the rebels were ethnic Russians at
risk of being brutally crushed by the armed forces of the neighboring state?
Actually, that's not so hypothetical; it pretty
much describes eastern Ukraine. And we know what Russia did -- it became
heavily involved in a poorly concealed invasion.
Syria was under Ottoman control from 1516 until
the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Russian Empire took over the Donbass
region in the mid-1700s. The "Turkmen" rebels that Russia's Su-24
aircraft was bombing at the time it was shot down are ethnic Turks. They ended
up on the wrong side of the border when it was imposed by a1921 treaty (shortly before the Donbass region was
incorporated into Soviet Ukraine).
Even the strange psychology of how former
empires feel they still have a special right, even responsibility, to intervene
in long-since amputated parts is similar. When pro-democracy protests began in
Syria in 2011, Erdogan said Turkey had to view the turmoil in Syria as
a domestic issue. He was affronted when President Bashar al-Assad refused to do
as he was told.
Since the shoot-down earlier this week, Turkey's
President has all but admitted that his country deliberately targeted the
Sukhoi because of what Russia was doing to the Turkmen rebels. "We have no
intention to escalate this incident. We are just defending our security and the
rights of our brothers," Erdogan said. As aggressive as the Turkish decision to down
a Russian jet over a technical, 17-second airspace infringement was, Erdogan
has not gone as far as Putin to assert his right to intervene militarily to
protect ethnic kin, anytime, anywhere.
Now consider how Putin would react if the U.S.
or North Atlantic Treaty Organization decided to get involved militarily
in eastern Ukraine, placing an airbase and Patriot missile batteries 50 miles
from the Russian border. Picture NATO aircraft providing airpower for an
all-out Ukrainian ground assault against the Russian-backed rebels, aided by
troops from Poland and Chechnya (in Syria's case, that's Iran and Hezbollah).
Imagine Turkish and American jets flying into Russian airspace as they try to
optimize their bombing runs.
Just a wild guess here, but it would not take
Putin three months before he shot down one of the NATO aircraft. Nor would he
take seriously any comment from the President of the United States that it was
obvious the NATO pilots and bombers had "in no way threatened" the
Russian Federation, the words Putin used as he raged that: “We received a stab in
the back from accomplices of terrorism.”
Nor would Putin have been impressed by NATO
claims that the Russian-backed rebels it was bombing in the Donbass were
terrorists. Putin says he is bombing Islamic State in the Turkmen mountains,
yet there are no recorded Islamic State forces in that area or for some
distance beyond. These are rebels fighting Assad.
Of course, there are as many differences as
similarities between the situations in Northern Syria and Ukraine, past and
current -- it is the attitudes of Russia and Turkey that are similar, not the
conflicts. And both Russia's leadership and Turkey's are using the cover of
popular concern for the fate of fellow Russians and Turks to pursue more
strategic, less noble goals.
Among those goals for Erdogan is one that will
be all too familiar to the Kremlin: A determination to show not just Russia,
but also the U.S., France and others looking to agree a common strategy with
Putin that no solution for Syria can be reached unless Turkish interests are fully taken into account. These do not
allow for an alliance with Assad to crush fellow Sunnis, whether Turkmen or
Arab.
The smart thing for Russia to do now would be to
recognize that it misjudged Turkish sensitivities, and adjust
accordingly. Surely Putin has enough hostile neighbors and former friends
already. But it will be tempting to go further, because Erdogan has also
miscalculated: He has a far weaker hand in Syria than Putin has in Ukraine.
To state the obvious, Turkey is not a nuclear
power. In addition, despite huge errors of judgment in supporting Islamist
extremists once they arrived in Syria one to two years after the conflict
began, Turkey did not manufacture Syria's civil war, as Russia manufactured the
one in Ukraine. Nor have the Turks put large numbers of "volunteer"
troops and heavy equipment into the Syrian battlefield. So Turkey's ability to
influence or respond to events in Syria is extremely limited. In the Donbass
region, Putin has been able to turn the conflict on and off, more or less at
will.
For the moment, Russian retaliation is shaping
up as economic sanctions, deploying additional anti-aircraft missile
systems in Northern Syria and, according to some reports, redoubling its bombing campaign in the Turkmen
mountains. Erdogan will be powerless to respond effectively, unless he takes
even more reckless risks in a fight he cannot win.
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