10/16/19
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s land grab in Syria, like his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin’s Crimea annexation, has met with a weak international response. Will that encourage more land grabs? Any nations thinking of doing so should be warned: Such conquests succeed only if they don’t set off full-scale wars. The U.S. has frozen the assets of the Turkish defense and energy ministries as well as those of the defense, energy and interior ministers. President Donald Trump also promised to stop negotiations with Turkey on a trade deal and to raise tariffs on Turkish steel. Turkey will barely notice these sanctions. It’s likely that the ministries and officials have no U.S. assets, and their ability to continue using U.S. financial assets through other branches of the Turkish government is more or less unlimited. The European Union, for its part, agreed that its member states would commit “to strong national positions regarding their arms export policy to Turkey” — not quite an arms embargo, but a recommendation that European nations stop selling arms to Ankara. This is something Germany, Finland, France, the Netherlands and Sweden have already promised to do. Erdogan could have lived with a full embargo, too: Russia is only too happy to sell him more weapons. Like Putin before him, Erdogan can rest easy that his country won’t be hit with anything resembling the harsh UN Security Council-authorized sanctions slapped on Iraq after it invaded Kuwait in 1990. Those included an all-embracing trade and financial embargo. The weakness of the Crimea- and northern Syria-related sanctions undermines the idea of a “territorial integrity norm” that is supposed to have crystallized in the post-World War II era.
All this makes Putin’s Crimea grab a relatively typical success story for modern-day conquest. It involved little violence, and Putin correctly calculated that third-party intervention would be weak. On the other hand, Russia’s interference in eastern Ukraine is more of a miscalculation: It set off a war, and Russia hopes to hand the territories now held by pro-Moscow separatists back to Ukraine if it can get favorable peace terms. In Syria, Erdogan apparently also hoped for a Crimea-style fait accompli. But recent developments on the ground — such as the Syrian military’s intervention on the side of the Kurdish forces, as well as Russia’s insistence that Turkey shouldn’t hold on to any of the invaded territory — show that he may have miscalculated, just as Putin did in eastern Ukraine. The weak Western reaction won’t force Erdogan to retreat. But the possibility of an all-out war might thwart his plan to clear a 30-kilometer “safe zone” in Syria. He may need to make a deal with Putin and Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. This could involve allowing him to resettle in northern Syria some of the 3.7 million Syrian refugees Turkey has been sheltering and no longer wants, perhaps making Russia and the Assad regime responsible for holding back any anti-Turkish activity along the border. When it comes to conquests, it’s not clear whether any kind of operational “rules-based order” has ever existed. Putin and Erdogan are just taking more risk than is customary. The authoritarians play for big stakes. Erdogan’s Syria move is a gamble — but not because he can be held responsible for violating some important norm.
