As the largest Russian naval deployment since the Cold War flaunts Western impotence by sailing provocatively past the North Sea and English Channel en route to Syria, the US-equipped Turkish air force has launched a barrage of airstrikes on US-backed Kurdish rebels in the northwest of that country - a clear warning to Washington not to use the Kurds as the spearhead of any assault to recapture ISIS capital Raqqa to the east.
What's striking about the apparent collusion between Putin and Erdogan is how effectively and completely it marginalizes the West and especially the US from the coming realignment both within Syria and more broadly in the region. While Washington and Western capitals continue to haggle and babble about diplomacy and human rights, it becomes ever clearer that they have no interest whatsoever in joining the only obvious potential solution to the long civil war which has spawned ISIS and unleashed a flood of refugees which has destabilized Europe itself: a de facto partition of the country into zones of security dominance.
Since Erdogan - still nominally a US ally and NATO member - speaks Putin's language rather than the West's, he wants hard physical power on the ground (and in the air) in Syria more than anything else at this point, even if that means bargaining with the Iranians and the Assad regime itself (under the table, of course). Publicly, he can point to his stepped-up support of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) "moderate" rebels in northern Syria - advancing impressively against stiffening ISIS resistance in the two-month-old "Euphrates Shield" operation - as proof that he hasn't renounced his goal of eventually ousting Assad in Damascus; privately, he has all but conceded the failure of the Syrian revolution and is almost certainly already in indirect talks with Assad about how to trade the latter's recapture of Aleppo for a longer Turkish and Turkish-backed rebel presence further north and east at the expense of the Kurds (and by extension, their US sponsors).
The steadily progressing surrenders of moderate rebels and jihadists alike in residual resistance pockets around Damascus, Homs, and elsewhere in the firmly regime-secured southwest and south-central sectors - enabling them to redeploy to the insurgent-jihadist stronghold of northwestern Idlib province while resettling their families there too - point to a template that Moscow and Damascus are now beginning to try to apply to Aleppo. As the resistance pocket in the east of that crucial city is ever more tightly constricted, Putin and Assad have been increasing their windows of "humanitarian pauses" to their aerial bombardment in the past two days to facilitate a piecemeal withdrawal of the less diehard opposition to their eventual pacification, leaving little doubt that they're leveraging Erdogan's influence over some groups to speed it up.
Of course, even with the Turkish-backed militants gone, that still leaves plenty of the Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) terrorists and other hardcore Sunni fundamentalist affiliates for the next wave of assault, spearheaded by the Russian naval air group of Moscow's only aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, to pound to a pulp with incendiaries, bunker-busters, and thermobaric missiles. With fewer residents left, though, they'll have fewer human shields in some sections of eastern Aleppo's ruined cityscape, reducing their potential strongholds even as it creates pockets of vulnerability for regime loyalist forces to prospectively exploit.
Ideally for Putin and Assad, they can get the whole Aleppo business over with by the US presidential election on November 8, but this is farfetched. Realistically - but even more cynically - they may see fit to time the ferocity of a renewed assault to correspond with the final 48 to 72 hours of the campaign for the White House. If this coincides with a stalled US-led effort to recapture Mosul as ISIS resistance stiffens against the predominantly Shiite Arab Iraqi national army (from the south) and Kurdish peshmerga (from the north), it would bode ill for what was supposed to be president Obama's outgoing foreign policy bright spot.
The Turks now hold the trump cards with respect to ISIS both in Syria and Iraq: in both countries, they enjoy more rapport with Sunni Arab fighters who must be the backbone of any eventual pacification of former caliphate territory than the US, whose Syrian ground coalition is dominated by Syrian Kurds while the Iraqi one is a partnership of Shia Arabs and Iraqi Kurds. In collusion with the Kremliln, Ankara now has a chance of making the most of a crisis that really blew up in its face starting about a year ago, when the Russian intervention in Syria reversed the fortunes of its regional power play in which it underhandedly employed ISIS as a foil against the Kurds and Iranians - with Saudi and Gulf Sunni Arab support.
And despite pro-Russian reports that Saudi Arabia and its subsidiary Gulf kingdoms have shifted their ISIS proxies from the Mosul region westward across the Syrian border, this is unlikely to have substantial sustained impact on the overall situation in the two fractured states: the Saudis surely can't relinquish their influence over one flank of ISIS simply to bolster the other - not when both are slowly but surely crumbling.
As it becomes clearer to even the Saudis that the Turks are securing their interests far more effectively by sticking their thumb in lame-duck Obama's nose, Riyadh too will be increasingly tempted to do likewise: turn to Putin, the new sheriff on the Mideast block, and invite him to broker better collective security arrangements with the other regional players. This of course will be largely contingent on just how badly the whole proxy war against Tehran continues to deteriorate, as even the Saudi-led Gulf campaign in Yemen stalls against the determined Houthi rebels, further exposing Riyadh as the big regional loser and weakening the hand of its hawkish young hothead, crown prince Muhammad bin Sultan, against his jealous older relatives.
The common denominator in all this will be as stark as it is undeniable: a sidelined US security role in a region it utterly dominated for about four decades. Whether Washington realizes it or not, its still substantial investments of military and diplomatic resources in the Middle East are ever more clearly serving the interests of "partners" which don't quite line up with its own interests anymore. The way things are going, a smaller US footprint could be the outcome even as the scourge of ISIS is finally removed. If that's not impetus for a fundamental rethink and reset of US policy, what is?
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