Presidents have more latitude in foreign affairs than in domestic policy, and the trend over the past two administrations has been for presidents to be more hawkish than their campaign pledges led voters to expect. George W. Bush promised a “humble foreign policy.” Instead, he gave us the Iraq War. Barack Obama was elected in part to end Bush’s wars. But he too pursued regime change, with Pyrrhic success in Libya and abortively in Syria.
The recent carnage in Ankara comes at a good time for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has been demanding that the United States and other NATO allies support him in his war against the Kurds of Syria, who are, incidentally, regarded as allies by Washington in the war against ISIS. The Turks have been bombarding Kurdish positions and staging special ops raids, warning the Kurds against the dangers of becoming too successful in their drive to occupy territory vacated by a retreating ISIS.
If you want our take - and let’s face it, you must because that’s why you’re here - we wouldn’t put too much faith in today’s announced Syrian “ceasefire” agreement.
Although the deal calls for the cessation of hostilities as of Saturday at midnight, you shouldn’t expect the Russians and the Iranians to halt their advance on Aleppo and likewise, you shouldn’t expect Turkey to stop shelling the Azaz corridor in a largely transparent effort to keep the supply lines to the rebels open.
NATO has warned Turkey that it will not support the country if they choose to go to war with Russia. As tensions between the two countries continues to escalate, Turkey has begun deploying ground forces across its border with Syria in order to oust Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – a move which threatens a world war with Russia. Sputniknews.com reports: “The armed forces of the two states are both active in fierce fighting on the Turkish-Syrian border, in some cases just a few kilometers from each other,” one NATO official told Der Spiegel.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has said that relations between the West and Russia have deteriorated so badly that a new Cold War has been launched in 2016. “On an almost daily basis, we are being described the worst threat – be it to Nato as a whole, or to Europe, America or other countries,” Medvedev said. “Sometimes I wonder if this is 2016 or 1962,” he went on. BBC News reports: The Cold War was a period of ideological confrontation between the former Soviet Union and Western countries.