Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has dismissed US calls to stop
the Syrian offensive, and rejected threats of sanctions, saying that “we will not step back,” and that Turkey’s operation must continue.
A number of US officials are emphasizing their demands for a ceasefire,
and France has also threatened to sanction Turkey if the ceasefire
doesn’t happen. Turkey is still early in an operation they say will stop
at 30 km inside of Syria, and unwilling to consider stopping short of
that.
Pentagon officials say they’ve spoken to Turkey’s military in recent days, pushing them to stop as well. As with Erdogan, the military suggested that they had no indication there was any intention of doing so.
Turkey has been threatening an invasion of northeast Syria, targeting
the Kurdish forces, for years. While the US stopped such offensives from
starting in the past, now that they’re going, Turkey seems determined
to take the operation through to its end.
The US officials were fools to imagine they could push the Kurdish leadership up against the Turkish border, especially in predominately Arab communities.
The US did it out of distrust of the other Arabs who could govern there. They are all connected to al Qaeda or worse, and only loosely used by the US from time to time. (They are not in any way led by Kurds as the US so often says.)
The “solution” looked good only by ignored the gigantic problems with it. Now they have come back on the US foolishness. It really could not be any other way.
Breaking up Syria to create US tools just doesn’t work when there are no people there to be used. The Kurds can’t be used this way, it can’t work. The other Arabs can’t be used.
The only solution any more is Assad. The entire venture is lost, and realistically it never had much chance since a year or so after the Arab Spring collapse took out the Westernized opposition to Assad.
And the losses for this “Syrian War” are not over – because once Trump and Congress alienate Turkey fully, Turkey will leave NATO and formally announce its alliance with Iran and Russia.
Perhaps. For hundreds of years, Russia and Turkey have been primary enemies, see for example the conquest of the Crimea in 1787 and the Crimean War of 1853. It is based on geography, and I very much doubt the immediate events of a moment and the passing personalities of an older Putin and an older Erdogan can suddenly reverse that in any lasting way. They might reduce the hostility and get room to move, but they can’t change the basic structure of geopolitics in the region.