RUSSIA'S DECLINE AS A GREAT POWER ACCELERATES, THANKS TO TURKEY AND ISRAEL IN SYRIA

Despite the West’s borderline toxic efforts to compromise its partners and protect its enemies, a historic process is underway in both the Middle East and in Europe. Leadership is about meeting that moment and making history, not avoiding it.

At the height of the Syrian Civil War, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin should save Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad. The West pursued this course of action and abandoned the Syrian Revolution. An unmitigated disaster, the consequences of this failed policy were felt from Europe to the Middle East to the Sahel region of Africa.

Netanyahu’s reasoning was based on at least two assumptions. First, that Russia’s presence in Syria could contain or reduce Iran’s influence over a weakened Assad. Second, that a weakened Assad was preferable to the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (or Islamists) forming a government in Damascus. To say that his assessment of Moscow was incorrect is an understatement.

Russia’s presence did not contain or reduce Iran’s influence in Syria, but amplified it. Weapons smuggled from Iraq through the Syrian desert still made it to Lebanon, as did armaments that landed at air bases and ports operated by the Russians and Assad. Hezbollah and other Iranian mercenaries also gained valuable combat experience serving as infantry while Russia and Assad reduced Syria to rubble, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and displacing millions more.

Two events likely changed Netanyahu’s perception of Russia, and therefore Jerusalem’s stance toward Turkish-sponsored regime change in Damascus.

First, Iran-backed Hamas invaded Israel on October 7, 2023 – Putin’s 71st birthday – massacring some 1, 200 Israelis and kidnapping more than 250 as hostages back to Gaza.

Second, the rest of Iran’s mercenaries – which include Russian partners like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen – started attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas shortly thereafter.

As far as Tehran is concerned, Israel spent more than a year conducting shaping operations to make ejecting Iran from Syria possible. Despite their diplomatic doublespeak, Jerusalem, Ankara, Washington, and most of the Arab League agreed with this policy.

Unlike Jerusalem, Turkey never wanted Russia in the Middle East or the East Mediterranean. In fact, no country supported the Syrian opposition more than Ankara. Though the West disagrees with Turkey's policy toward Syria’s Kurds and the presence of Turkish soldiers east of the Euphrates River, in the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) zone of Syria, Ankara’s animosity toward the Assad regime was always principled and correct.

Which brings us to Turkey’s strategic competition with Russia.

When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, it destroyed coast guard vessels that Turkey had provided to Tbilisi, bombed an airfield that Ankara had invested in, and occupied Georgian Abkhazia on the Black Sea.

When Moscow annexed Ukrainian Crimea in 2014, Russia reduced the distance to Turkey once more – as Sevastopol is only 300-odd miles away from the Turkish port of Samsun.

From monitoring Moscow’s nuclear submarines to protecting sea lanes, Russia’s control of Ukrainian Crimea and Georgian Abkhazia has been a nightmare for the Black Sea littoral states.

If Russian expansion in the Black Sea and eastern Europe weren’t bad enough for NATO and Ankara, allowing Putin to save Assad in 2015 also enabled Moscow to obtain airfields and naval facilities right next to Turkey’s southwestern border. This was strategically short-sighted for at least three reasons.

First, with Moscow’s military bases in CSTO member state Armenia, Russian soldiers on the Turkish-Armenian border, and Russia’s occupation of Ukrainian Crimea and Georgian Abkhazia, the Kremlin had essentially encircled southern and eastern Turkey – and therefore NATO’s southeastern flank.

Second, Moscow’s presence ensured that pipelines connecting gas fields in the Persian Gulf to Turkey (for transit to Europe) would never be built through Syria. Thus, Russia maintained its dominant position in the European energy market, empowering the Kremlin to blackmail Europe.

Third, Moscow used its military installations in Syria as a logistics hub to build and maintain its operations in Africa. This caused unprecedented damage to western interests on the continent, but also widespread human rights abuses to people living there. Put simply, Russia’s African empire would likely become logistically unsustainable without Moscow’s military bases in Syria.

To make matters worse, the West was also lukewarm, at best, when it came to defending Turkey.

When Ankara shot down a Russian Su-24 fighter jet over Turkish airspace in 2015, the West emphasized de-escalation with Moscow instead of highlighting Turkey’s right to defend itself against Russia’s aggression.

When Ankara wanted to buy a Patriot missile defense system, Washington was reluctant to sell – pushing Turkey to purchase a Russian-made S-400, ejecting Ankara from the F-35 fighter jet program, and then imposing CAATSA sanctions against it.

When Russia killed 3 Turkish soldiers at Al-Bab in 2017, the West did nothing. When Russia killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib in 2020, the West did nothing. When Ankara called for a no-fly zone to be imposed over northern Syria, the West did nothing.

The West didn’t take Turkey’s security concerns regarding the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led SDF seriously either. In fact, despite the risk to both Ankara and NATO, then-President Trump allowed Russian soldiers to be deployed on Turkey’s border with Syria instead of deploying American or Allied troops to prevent clashes between our Kurdish and Turkish allies in 2019.

The West’s policy was detrimental both to the security of what is, admittedly, an imperfect NATO ally, but also to our own interests. It failed to account for geopolitical realities too. Namely, that Turkey is a regional power, shares a 900-plus kilometer-long border with Syria, experienced the Syrian Civil War more acutely than any of its western allies, and still hosts more than three and a half million Syrian refugees nearly fourteen years into the conflict.

All these years later, it seems the West prevented the Turkish-backed Syrian opposition from winning the war against Assad, incited Ankara to build its own domestic defense industrial base to compete against us, helped Moscow complete its encirclement of eastern and southern Turkey, then drove the Turks into Russia’s arms, and prompted Turkish President Erdogan to pursue a non-sensical policy of tactical entanglement in the context of strategic competition with Russia.

So, what are some of the countermeasures Turkey took against Moscow?

Ankara founded SADAT as an alternative to Russia’s Wagner mercenaries in Africa; expanded its presence in Central Asia through the Organization of Turkic States; helped Israel and Baku dismantle the Russian-backed separatist statelet in Nagorno-Karabakh and restore Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity; closed the Bosphorus and Dardanelles Straits to military vessels of belligerent nations as per the Montreux Convention; and provided military support to Ukraine, enabling Kyiv to sink or disable roughly one third of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and push the remaining two thirds away from Crimea back to Novorossiysk.

In Syria, Ankara built the Free Syrian Army and aligned with Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) – two groups that spent years fighting against Russia, Iran, and Assad. After nearly 14 years of war, it took less than two weeks for the HTS-led coalition to liberate Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus and topple the dictatorship.

Now, Assad has fled to Moscow, Iran has withdrawn from Syria and abandoned its mercenaries, and most of Russia’s remaining soldiers are isolated in the Assadist strongholds of Latakia and Tartus – where its main military installations are located.

Since Ankara is preventing Russian military vessels from transiting through the Turkish Straits, Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is incapable of rescuing its Mediterranean counterpart. Moscow is unlikely to dispatch the Baltic Fleet for reinforcements either, because it would have to circumvent the European continent from Kaliningrad and Saint Petersburgh.

In other words, Russia will likely be withdrawing from a second country this year – the first being Azerbaijan this past August – again thanks to Turkey.

Though only time will tell how all this develops, two things are certain. First, that Russia’s decline as a great power continues unabated due to Turkey and Israel’s operations in Syria. Second, that Ankara is now the most influential foreign power in Syria other than Washington.

If this isn’t the best time to negotiate a just and lasting peace between the West’s Turkish and Kurdish allies, in the context of Syria’s reconstruction and the emergence of a new Middle East, then I don’t know if that day will ever come.

Originally published by The Hill on December 10, 2024.