Page 57 - bne magazine March 2017 issue

bne March 2017
Opinion 57
that sought to liberalize interstate conduct. Even at the height of Great Britain’s ocean-spanning empire, London never commanded either the full dominance or brash idealism that characterised US hegemony. Meanwhile, there is little reason to believe the US’ only credible superpower successor, China, has any ability or intention of single-handedly upholding the Western-crafted liberal system from which it has long ben- efited – or replacing it with anything comparable. Instead, the rules aren’t being rewritten so much as tossed out altogether. China – and other major, revisionist powers like Russia, Turkey and Iran – instead appeal for an order based on multipolarity, where great powers set the rules in their own neighborhoods, most small states are consigned to roles as tributaries, and might makes right.
But multipolarity is an inherently unstable arrangement, and the interregna between the fall of one order and the estab- lishment of the new are typically chaotic. An international relations truism is that power abhors a vacuum, but the period between vacuum and stability can extend for years, and
even decades. While a stable multipolar world may someday emerge, the intermission between the old world and the new will likely be defined by an extended period of jostling, competition and conflict between states and groups over the boundaries of power and influence.
This is why the Syrian civil war, already five years old, is still a long way from a conclusion; why the conclusion of that
civil war will not end the geopolitical tectonics quaking along Eurasia’s western circumference; and why powers like Turkey, Iran, Russia, and a multitude of other states and non-state groups will have roles to play in the widening tide of competi- tion and conflict.
The Turkish knot
With the obvious exceptions of Syria and Iraq, perhaps no country is so drawn into the morass of the ongoing conflict as Turkey. With Turkish troops sprawled across pockets of north- ern Syria and Iraq, host to millions of Syrian refugees, and itself a kind of secondary battleground among Syrian rebels and terrorist groups, Turkey has remained at the mercy of a conflict that has always remained just beyond its control.
It was not always this way. Before mass anti-government pro- tests in 2011 gave way to civil war, Syria had been the crown jewel of Turkey’s “zero problems” foreign policy agenda. Under the once dynamic Justice and Development Party (AKP), which broke decades of nationalist rule after winning power in 2002, Turkey pursued an ambitious foreign policy to undo the entrenched enmities that old guard Kemalists had institution- alised in its extended tenure in power.
Yet at least some Kemalist biases were grounded in a hard- nosed view of the region. Despite a brief dalliance, Iran contin- ued to undermine Turkish interests in the Middle East; Russia, though an eager economic partner, had little interest in seeing Turkey become an independent power in its own right; and
little Israel, though a domestically unpopular ally, was a far more fruitful friend than adversary. Meanwhile, the frater- nity that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cultivated in Damascus seemed to amount to little after Syrian popular unrest was met with regime brutality, sparking a conflict that continues to rage. Before long, Turkey turned on the Syrian regime, and joined Western calls for the removal of President Bashar al-Assad.
Despite a string of rebel and Islamist victories, Assad would not relent. And a series of timely interventions by Russian forces – first covertly, and then more openly by September 2015 – as well as the meteoric rise of the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham (IS) in 2014 pulled Damascus from the edge of capitulation. Western leaders were long on rheto- ric, but remained ultimately unwilling to commit the level
of assets to theatre to match their stated desired outcomes: sufficient arms or advisory in the earliest stages of the war; forceful air support to neutralise regime air superiority that blunted rebel advances; or the far more daunting prospect of a concerted campaign to dislodge joint Russian-Iranian-regime battle groups that had established a string of anti-access area denial bubbles across eastern Syria by 2015.
In all of this, Turkey’s position shriveled from field marshal for a theorised unified Western response to a beleaguered, isolated state left to fend for itself, all while managing rising tensions with Russia (capped by the downing of a Russian jet in late 2015) and spikes of internal unrest (some of its own making) – domestic protests, Kurdish crackdowns, IS terror- ism, and a horrifying coup attempt in July 2016.
“If the unipolar world describes US international primacy, ‘unpolarity’ might be defined by a decided absence of preponderant power”
This was the context in which Russian Ambassador Karlov
was murdered. While an embarrassment to the AKP’s renewed push for normalisation with Russia, the perpetrator – report- edly invoking Russia’s role in the Syrian regime’s stampeding offensives – likely voiced the sentiments of a non-insignificant segment of the Turkish population dismayed by Ankara’s dis- tancing from the anti-government Syrians it once called on the world to protect. From this vantage point, the Turkish govern- ment’s volte face from anti-regime obstinacy to quiescence amid the unfolding horrors of Aleppo smacks of a kind of duplicity. The Turkish government have certainly mishandled affairs to some degree. But it is hard not to conclude that their greatest sin regarding Syria was trusting in a Western consen- sus that would never materialise.
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