The greater the need for Turkey to make reasoned strategic adjustments to its Syria policy, the more befuddled its policies have become.
With the geopolitical realities in the region changing rapidly, Turkey’s rationale and rhetoric are remaining roughly the same. Only the jargon seems to be changing.
Nowadays, the new buzz-word is “cocktail”.
Not surprisingly, the first one to coin the phrase was the Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, the architect of an earlier, now discredited, buzz-word “zero problems with neighbours”.
Mr Davutoglu blamed the 10th of October massacre in Ankara on both the PKK and ISIS. “We became the target of a cocktail terrorism,” he said.
A week and a lot of incriminating evidence of intelligence and security failures later, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has reiterated the “cocktail” theory.
Except, this time, he added a few more ingredients to the mixture.
“The Ankara bombing is a collective terrorist act, in which Daesh [ISIS], the PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party], the Mukhabarat [Syria’s military intelligence] and the PYD [Democratic Union Party] in northern Syria each played a role,” Erdoğan said.
A few days earlier, a top level official gave an off-the-record briefing to some leading journalists in Istanbul.
The Yeni Safak columnist Ali Bayramoglu was there. From his account of the briefing, we have learnt that ISIS was also seen by the government as a “successful project by Iran”.
All of these cocktail variations were before the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union party (PYD) delegation met Russian officials in Moscow to discuss opening a representative office there.
Wıth the Times quoting Asya Abdullah, the PYD co-chairman praising the Russian airstrikes in Syria and calling for closer relations between Russia and Kurds, the brew became even richer.
While Turkey’s leaders were stirring their Martinis, the rest of the world was shaking theirs.
Mr Putin has appealed to the US for a joint campaign against Islamist radicalism and militancy in Syria. He said this was an opportunity for Russia and the West to work together.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said that he is ready to talk to armed opposition groups if they are genuinely committed to dialogue and to fighting ISIS.
The Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister declared that they were working together with Russia to fight terrorism.
Syrian Kurds have already said they were looking to Russia as an ally against extremists.
The priority for the US is clear. They want ISIS stopped. They are no longer sure that al-Assad’s rapid fall would be a good thing. With no obvious replacement for him, a power vacuum would make the civil war even worse than it is now.
The Russians could not care less for the fate of al-Assad but they, too, want to protect their interests in Syria and the region. More importantly, they do not want another Middle Eastern regime change engineered by the west.
Turkey, too, has moved on the Assad issue. As long as there is a guarantee he will depart, they say they are prepared to put up with him for a transitional six-month period.
When the foreign ministers of Russia, the US, Turkey and Saudi Arabia get together to discuss the Syrian crisis in Vienna on Friday, it is not likely that regime change will be the subject of contention.
Where Turkey really differs from both Russia and its NATO allies is what to do with ISIS and the force that has proven to be most effective against ISIS on the ground- the Kurds.
Fighting a bitter war with its own Kurdish militants following the breakdown of a two-year ceasefire in July, Turkey does not distinguish between the PKK and the PYD and threatens to declare the PYD a “legitimate target” if they make further territorial gains against ISIS.
Less than two weeks to a tense general election, there may be enough people to swallow any old concoction in Turkey. But in the elegant meeting rooms of Vienna, Turkey’s crude cocktail recipes are more likely to taste like a witch’s brew.
This post is also available in: Turkish
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