Introduction

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has warned Russia’s President Vladimir Putin not to “play with fire” over his country’s downing of a Russian war plane.Russia demands an official apology from Turkey over this incident , a demand that Turkey is not ready to accept. Neither Turkey’s Erdogan nor Russia’s Putin show any sign of backing down.The growing fissures between the two sides-Ankara and Moscow,do complicate the regional situation,thereby making the western challenges more tricky to collectively fight against ISIL.

Background

Russia and Turkey have long been at odds over Syria, with Moscow backing President Bashar al Assad and Ankara supporting the opposition to overthrow him.  Tensions increased dramatically with the start of the Russian air campaign on September 30.  The Turkish shoot-down of a Russian combat aircraft on November 24 is an escalation in this tense stand-off between Russia and a NATO member.  Although both sides may refrain from additional aggressive activities at once, tensions between Russia and Turkey have been continuously growing and are likely to expand, further testing the strength of the US commitment to its NATO partner.

These tensions will also severely hinder efforts to build a “grand coalition” including Turkey and Russia.

Turkey’s decision to fire on a Russian Su-24 that briefly violated its airspace resulted from more than concerns about the integrity of its borders.  Russian airstrikes have been helping Assad, Hezbollah, and Iranian proxy forces advance in Turkmen areas near the Turkish border in recent days.  Turkey claims that those airstrikes hit Turkmen villages.

Turkey regards the Turkmen of Iraq and Syria as kin, works to protect and advance their interests, and tries to defend them.  The Turkish shoot-down is probably intended to deter Putin from continuing to provide air support to Assad operations against them, among other things.

The incident highlights the grand strategic implications of American policy in Syria, moreover.

While in many ways close to Russia, Mr. Erdogan is now leaning more heavily on his NATO allies, reflecting the shifting forces buffeting Turkey as it copes with the military, economic and humanitarian fallout of Syria’s war.

Putin ordered air-defense missiles to be deployed at a base in Syria’s Latakia province Wednesday, which would allow Russia to shoot down Turkish jets with more precision. Russia’s Defense Ministry also decided to sever its military contracts with Turkey. Putin  condemned Turkey’s decision to contact NATO members in the wake of the attack instead of reaching out to Russia directly, calling the incident “a stab in Russia’s back.”

The Turkish government says the plane violated its country’s airspace. Authorities “repeatedly warned an unidentified aircraft that they were 15 km or less away from the border,” a Turkish government official told The WorldPost.

But a Russian pilot who survived the attack said Wednesday that the airmen never received warnings from Turkey, and Russia has maintained that the plane was shot down in a “planned provocation” over Syrian airspace.

The summit in Antalya marked their deepening rift over Syria, when Putin showed fellow G-20 leaders aerial pictures of what he said were convoys of oil trucks carrying crude from fields controlled by the Islamic State group into Turkey.

Putin’s move came as Russia, the United State and France all have focused their air strikes on the IS oil infrastructure, seeking to undermine the group’s financial base following the terror attacks in Paris and the downing of a Russian passenger plane in Egypt.

The western leveled scepticism about Russia

The West, led by France, has been drifting in the direction of cooperating if not allying with Putin, whom many wrongly believe is in Syria to fight ISIS. That drift empowers Putin and overlooks the larger objectives of Putin’s maneuvers, as Leon Aron of American Enterprise Institute points out.  Putin aims to disrupt NATO fundamentally as part of a larger effort to recoup Russia’s losses following the collapse of the Soviet Union.  He has been deliberately and aggressively prodding Turkey from his airbase in Syria, just as he has been consistently violating the airspace of US allies in the Baltics and US partners in Scandinavia.  He is counting on Washington to remain so myopically focused on the fight against ISIS that it overlooks and tacitly accepts these assaults on the Western alliance structure.  It would be an enormous mistake if we did so.

EU’s response

President of the European Council Donald Tusk has called on Turkey and Russia to remain “cool headed and calm,” posting on his Twitter account , after Turkey shot down a Russian jet at the Syrian border.

Amid the growing tension in Turkey-Russia relations, NATO is unlikely to be dragged into this bilateral issue between the two countries, Amanda Paul, the senior policy analyst at the European Policy Centre (EPC) said on “This Week in Focus” program.

“This reflects the situation in Syria where there is still hope for broader cooperation in the fight against the IS (ISIL or ISIS),” Paul said.

Speaking about the Turkey-downed Russian Su-24 bomber, the analyst said that judging from the radar picture released by the Turkish authorities immediately after the incident, it was clear that that bomber was in the country’s airspace.

“Russians can be extremely economical with the truth,” Paul said, adding that it is not surprising that Russia said the bomber was in Syria’s territory. At first Russia suggested that its priority was fighting the Sunni militants of the Islamic State, an aim shared by the United States, which is leading an international coalition that for more than a year has waged an air campaign against the group in Iraq and Syria.

Russia’s reaction

But Russia has deployed military equipment, such as ground-to-air missiles and interceptor jets, that has no use against militant groups that do not have an air force. This made clear that Russia’s priority is to buck up Mr. Assad, and it has raised concerns that if a no-fly zone or safe zone were established, as Turkey has pushed for, it could be challenged by Russia.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov announced that Moscow will halt the existing visa-free regime starting Jan. 1, saying that Turkey has become a conduit for terrorists and has been reluctant to share information with Moscow about Russian citizens accused of involvement in terrorist activities.

“The Russian presence has changed the entire parameters in Syria, including a safe zone,” said Mensur Akgun, director of the Global Political Trends Center, a research organization in Turkey. “No one will dare confront Russia.”

Russia has imposed wide-ranging economic sanctions on Turkey in retaliation for the shooting down of one of its jets on Tuesday.

A decree on “measures providing the national security of the Russian Federation and the protection of its citizens against criminal and other unlawful acts, and on imposing special economic measures in relation to Turkish Republic” was signed on Saturday, the Kremlin press service said.

Putin has regretted to attend the phone call from Erdogan because of Ankara’s refusal to court an official apology to Moscow.

Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian prime minister, said “economic and humanitarian measures” could come into force within days, and would include bans on food shipments, investment projects and “works and services provided by Turkish companies”.

Turkey could only have shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet after securing permission from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), charged Lebanon’s Druze leader Walid Jumblatt in an exclusive interview with Breitbart.

“The Turks cannot afford to shoot down a Russian plane, being a member of NATO, without asking the permission of NATO. They have to ask NATO. It’s NATO,” said Jumblatt, a member of parliament and leader of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party. Jumblatt said this so-called new dimension is marked by the Turkey-Russia confrontation.

“From one side you have the Americans and their allies fighting ISIS. And they are at odds with the Russian policy, because Russian policy, from Ukraine to Crimea, there is tension about it. Now there is tension about Syria. Russia favors the Syrian regime. Whereby NATO, theoretically they want to topple the (Bashar) Assad regime.  They want a transitional period in Syria. These are the broad lines.”

Turkey’s response

Being euphorically extolled by its strategic affiliations with Nato,Euromed and the OSCE ,and being largely a supporter of EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy(CFSP), Ankara seems to have adopted a tune of arrogance towards Russia.As for Russia, Turkey’s attitude is beyond diplomatic decorum. And while being a gateway to  West and East,Turkey holds significant strategic importance to Nato. And of course,Ankara has had this back-up confidence while communicating to Moscow.

Nato’s strategy

In a phone conversation with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Nov. 24, Obama expressed US and NATO support for Turkey’s right to defend its sovereignty. The leaders “agreed on the importance of deescalating the situation and pursuing arrangements to ensure that such incidents do not happen again,” the White House said.

Solidarity among allies and protecting Turkish territorial integrity is a clear role for NATO, but the Alliance’s response mechanism in crisis situations should not be exhausted and undermined with small-scale, bilateral disagreements and disputes.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon told in Paris on Sunday that he had urged “the leadership of the two countries first to de-escalate the tension” while they’re fighting against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group in Syria.

This is an incident between the Russian and the Turkish governments. It is not an issue that involves the [US-led coalition operations],”  Steve Warren ,a spokesman for the US-led military campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) told a Pentagon briefing, speaking via video-conference from Baghdad. “Our combat operations against ISIL continue as planned and we are striking in both Iraq and Syria.”

NATO allies and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg were quick to call for ‘calm and de-escalation’ of the situation. But they face a problem: in the absence of a strategy, NATO lacks a mechanism—a form of transparent process for crisis resolution—between member states and partner nations when and if a dispute or disagreement arises.

NATO has three essential core tasks—collective defence (Article 5), crisis management and cooperative security; it does not prioritize one task over the other. Whereas collective defence applies to member states like Turkey, cooperative security involves engagement with partner nations, such as Russia, to assure Euro-Atlantic security. NATO’s role, in this sense, goes beyond protecting a member’s state’s sovereignty.

This aspiration to provide enduring cooperation and cooperative security beyond members lies behind the now-obsolete NATO-Russia Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security, signed in 1997. NATO’s balance between these tasks and its role vis-à-vis partner states is ill-defined, and among the core issues the Alliance must consider at or before its next summit in Warsaw in July 2016.

These discussions must include prioritizing and grouping partner nations—Russia and Sweden, for instance, are clearly not partners in equal terms – and clarifying the role of the NATO-Russia Council (NRC). The NRC is a venue for political dialogue that includes consultation, cooperation and joint action, but does not have a crisis resolution mechanism.

From 2014 onwards, the NRC has not functioned, yet it is the only venue where NATO and Russia could have discussions regarding the future of Syria, focusing on ISIS as a major threat both to the Alliance and to the partner nations. Neither Russia nor the Alliance will benefit from escalation; thus, both sides should bear in mind that a troubling partnership is better than an adversarial relationship.

NATO could move to incorporate a crisis resolution mechanism, in specified non-escalatory terms and processes, between member states and partner states, where NATO member states and Russia meet together as equals in case of a crisis. This could re-establish a communication channel between NATO and Russia in particular, especially when the NRC is not functioning.

When Syria’s future is discussed, as it will be, at the Warsaw summit, Russia will be an unavoidable part of the discussion. But until there is a way to de-escalate these small-scale incidents, it will be increasingly difficult for Russia and NATO to determine whether they do in fact have any scope for cooperation, or at the least collaboration, on shared challenges and threats.

Conclusion

At this moment of crisis between Russia and a NATO member state, there are few if any open channels of communication to resolve questions surrounding the incident.  The potential for reactions to escalate not only along the Syria-Turkey border but also along borders with other NATO member states, like the Baltics, is great.

Washington is not interested in getting deeper into Syria with ground troops or having a conflict with Russia. So cautious are the NATO countries about Article 5 of the NATO Treaty, which calls for mutual self-defense, that when Mr. Hollande declared “war” on the Islamic State after the Paris attacks, he invoked the European Union’s toothless Lisbon Treaty and sidestepped NATO. Mr. Hollande was also, French officials have said, eager not to offend Mr. Putin by making Syria a NATO issue.

The United States has signalled its support for the accession of the former Yugoslav republic, Montenegro. Russia has described NATO’s extension into the Balkans, where Moscow enjoys historically close relations with fellow Orthodox Christians, as a “provocation”.

Therefore, to divulge a  strategy of political correctness, it seems imperative that Nato must not become a direct party to this growing rift between Turkey and Russia, failing of which, the supreme and collective Nato-Russia cause of fighting against ISIL, will be highly jeopardized or compromised.