Another Step Closer To World War III

Turkey And Its Islamist Allies Move In Syria

Chaos begets chaos. Instability leads to more instability. For almost four years now we have lived with an administration in Washington that has done its best to upset the international order and break down alliances that took us 75 years to build. The consequences are appearing everywhere, most recently in Syria.

Syria has been split for almost a decade now into what amounts to three separate fiefdoms. One part of the country is controlled by what is left of the Syrian government backed by Iran and Russia. One part of the country is controlled by Kurdish forces that are supported by the United States and who host roughly six hundred American military personnel. The remainder of the country is controlled by Islamist groups some of which originally split off from Al Qaida. These Islamists are to varying degrees supported by the Turks, who see them as a counterweight to the Kurds.

This jury-rigged remnant of a nation has struggled along for roughly a decade, and in recent years fighting has largely died down. All that has now suddenly changed dramatically. The Islamist groups backed by Turkey are on the offensive and rapidly gaining ground.

Why? What changed?

The broader strategic context changed. We went from focusing on policies designed to tamp down conflict and maintain stability to a hodgepodge of uncoordinated efforts, some based on radical ideology and some based apparently on the urgent need to maximize the profits of the defense industrial base. We began to generate instability worldwide.

The war in Ukraine which we work tirelessly to perpetuate has sucked Russian military assets out of Syria. Key support for Syrian regime forces, particularly aircraft, has been pulled out and sent to fight in the never-ending war with Kiev. As we pour more fuel on the fire in the Ukrainian war, the Russians are stretched ever thinner. They are no longer able to support the regime in Damascus as they once did.

Iran is also now pressed hard. Our policy of appeasement toward Iran emboldened it. It launched a wide-ranging war using proxies and missiles against Israel. That war spread to Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria. Strikes on Iranian forces by Israel have left the Iranians weakened and unable to support the regime in Syria.

Turkey remains technically a U.S. ally and a member of NATO. In practice, however, its President Erdogan has charted an increasingly Islamist course, providing shelter to Hamas and making noises about leading a war to free Jerusalem from the Crusaders and restore the Ottoman Empire.

At the same time, the Turks have made crystal clear their longstanding opposition to America’s support for the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq. The Turks still face a stubborn Kurdish insurgency on their own soil, and the existence of viable Kurdish principalities on their border only serves to provide hope to groups like the PKK that they can ultimately win independence as well.

All of this has combined to produce a situation inside Syria in which Islamist groups and their Turkish supporters have seen an opportunity worth seizing. As the level of violence and chaos increases, adversaries are weakened and the Americans show no sign of intervening in any coherent fashion, Ankara and its friends have moved.

They are on the march. They are gaining ground. Things are continuing to spiral out of control.

This is how wars spread and conflict broadens. This is a mirror of how conflicts around the globe in the 1930s spread and morphed and ultimately ignited the conflagration we call World War II. The men and women who steered the Free World through that horror understood all this and focused after 1945 on stable alliances, predictable behavior, and careful, deliberate steps in foreign policy and national security. They remembered how Japanese operations in Manchuria, a German move into the Sudetenland, the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, and the Spanish Civil War one day merged and ignited the most destructive conflict in human history.

The people “running the show” in Washington today have absolutely no idea what any of that means. They have taken a wrecking ball to our alliances around the world, emboldened our enemies, and generated chaos worldwide. Right now the Turks are pushing their Islamist allies to seize more territory and likely weighing the possibility of moving on the Kurds in Syria. All over the world, our enemies are watching and thinking of exploiting any number of other situations before the new American President can settle in and have a chance to gain control of the situation.

The Iranians have less than sixty days left in which to make sure Trump is faced with a nuclear-armed Iran and all the implications that go with that.

As the regional situation in the Middle East spirals out of control no doubt in Riyadh the Saudis are contemplating seriously the option of buying a turnkey nuclear weapons program from Pakistan.

In Moscow Putin is no doubt formulating his plans for how to make his threats of nuclear Armageddon serious enough to actually get our attention.

Al Qaida, ISIS-K, and a host of other evil entities are eyeing our open borders and our inability to act in our own self-interest and thinking of how much blood they can spill on our soil.

And, of course, Beijing is weighing its options regarding Taiwan. A blockade of Taiwan right now would mean Donald Trump would be faced on Day One with two choices, either push the Taiwanese to capitulate and accept assimilation or begin his term in office by risking a shooting war in the Pacific.

In Washington, there is no sign of anyone in this administration focusing on any of this. The strategic environment worldwide is worsening every day and in DC they are continuing to hold the same course that has brought us to this juncture. Meanwhile in Syria, emboldened by success Turkey’s Islamist proxies are grabbing more territory by the hour. And, we are all another step closer to World War III.