Israel and Turkey Call Dibs on Syria

Good morning, everybody. Hello from Banff and Alberta, Canada. Peter Zeihan here. Today we’re going to be talking about what’s been going on the last few days in Syria. We’ve seen renewed military activity out of the Israelis and then bombing a number of military assets throughout the northwestern part of the country, a province called Idlib, which was kind of where the civil war turned a little over a year ago. 

If you remember back, we basically had always had rebels in this region, but the Turks became more involved, provided more intelligence and more weapons, and in a series of blitz attacks, basically overthrew the government of former dictator Assad. What’s happened since then is that the Turks and the Israelis are spatting over the future of the country, and so the Israelis are preemptively bombing areas that they think the Turks are about to go in and evaluate with the intent of establishing air denial assets, or maybe even stationed some aircraft. 

The Turks say, of course, that this is nonsense, kind of tend to side with the Israelis on this one, because what we have here is a clash of long term interests. Syria has always been an artificial state. And so the idea that it would preserve as long as it did is kind of a bit of a stretch. And it only did so because of globalization. The United States created a system where everything could be on the water, and when everything was on the water, well, then anything that was on land that relied on land transport roads like Syria, kind of withered. Unless you had a strategic environment where foreign sponsors could get in and support it. So Russia was one of those. Iran was one of those. 

Now we’re in that environment where it’s gone. And so Syria is kind of returning to a no man’s land at this moment. And we’re kind of on the verge of a second stage of a civil war. Well, there are countries in the region who have the power that’s necessary to project throughout this region, and they’ve got some opinions. 

So in the case of Israel, they want to maintain basically the entire country as a no fly zone so that any nascent Syrian state is going to be weak and broken and can never cause a threat to Israel ever again. The Turks, for their part, see a refugee issue on their southern border and also a power projection possibility. And so they would like to establish a bubble over Syria where they can project power without risk, which basically brings the two into direct conflict. Israel doesn’t want anyone to have any air assets or any air defense, and the Turks absolutely want to build specifically that sort of institution. How this will play out doesn’t have to be a military clash, but we’re definitely going to see these two countries struggling over this region. And the Israelis right now coming off of the Iran war are definitely a little itchy on that trigger finger. And that’s before you consider that it’s election season in Israel. And now that Iran is in the rearview mirror, all the Israelis are trying to decide who needs to be toughest on Turkey. Welcome to the Middle East.