It’s very fashionable nowadays for people to criticize the Kremlin for incompetency, and its recent history of controversial decisions coupled with the suspected liberal fifth-and-six-column infiltration of key national institutions gives plenty of ground for this, but sometimes people jump the gun, such as when accusing Russia of being ‘duped’ by Turkey. It’s interesting that no such criticisms are publicly leveled against Iran despite Tehran bending over backwards to Ankara during and after the failed pro-US coup attempt against Erdogan, but double standards are the norm when people engage in diatribes, and it’s always been the case that Russia has caught much more flak than anyone else whenever multipolar commentators critique their own camp.
This is the precisely the case with the news that Turkish forces have crossed into Syria, with the most common knee-jerk reaction being that President Putin was manipulated by Erdogan as part of some large-scale Machiavellian plot, though of course, without making any mention that this charge could more rightly be directed against the Ayatollah. Anyhow, the prevailing narrative among multipolar supporters appears to be one of grief and despair, with Facebookers pulling their hair out over how stupid Russia apparently was to trust Turkey and work on helping it pivot towards Eurasia. As popular and trendy as it may be for people to jump on the bandwagon and start railing against Russia, and for as ‘healthy’ as it is for people to let off some steam and vocally vent their frustrations every once in a while, there’s actually countervailing evidence that Turkey’s operation isn’t a unipolar conspiracy but evidence of high-level multipolar coordination.
To explain, as of the moment of writing (11.30am MSK), neither Moscow, Tehran, nor even Damascus has issued any statement condemning Turkey’s military intervention, and the website of the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) is noticeably silent about this development. All of this is very strange if one accepts the assumption that Turkey’s moves constitute an ‘invasion’ of Syria, since while the Kremlin critics might invent all sorts of explanations for why Moscow isn’t saying anything, less people can attribute a semi-plausible reason to why Tehran and Damascus aren’t publicly rabid with fury right now. Though it’s true that Turkey is even coordinating part of its operation with the assistance of US air support, there’s actually a novel, contextual touch to that which needs to be further elaborated on.