Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu is threatening Syria’s Bashar al-Assad again. “If these operations do not stop there will be nothing left to say about the steps that would be taken,” he said.
Walter Russell Mead is right that this looks like a sheep in wolf’s clothing since no threat is even spelled out, but no one else in the region—or for that matter, the world—is willing to go even that far. The Turks do have a serious military and, unlike the Israelis, they can use it without most of the human race going bonkers.
Turkey’s AKP government wants to make the country a regional mini-superpower and has made a modest amount of progress so far. If it succeeds in hasting Assad’s downfall, even if it doesn’t fire a shot, it will become a serious power that Iran will have no choice but to reckon with.
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