ALLIES: Turkey Chooses Russian Missile Defense System.

Turkey’s moves have made the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) apprehensive of a non-NATO missile defense system being deployed in a NATO country. The Alliance’s concerns are that a non-NATO country that sells Turkey its missile defense system—especially China or Russia—could then remotely use that complex to gather information on NATO’s alliance-integrated missile defense system and develop ways to either disrupt the system or develop countermeasures to evade it.

Ankara argues that many NATO countries already employ various Russian weapons. And indeed, this is not for the first time that an Alliance member state has sought a Russian-made missile defense system. Notably, Greece operates the S-300, and the bilateral Greek-Russian partnership in the military sphere has been growing (Strategic-culture.org, November 5, 2016). This is worth mentioning as Greece and Turkey are at loggerheads with each other over a territorial dispute in the Aegean Sea. As a March 2017 article by Colonel (ret.) Andrei Akulov, a Moscow-based international security expert, suggests, Russia could try to insert itself as a mediator between the two countries to resolve the issue. And Russia might then try to use that momentum to create some kind of alliance with Turkey and Greece—two NATO countries (Strategic-culture.org, March 10).

NATO’s southern flank was always troublesome, but now it might be disintegrating. But as I’ve written before, post-Cold War NATO is an unserious alliance — big enough to feed Russian paranoia, but perhaps no longer strong enough to contain it.