Turkey’s Drdogan tried to create a regional economic cooperation zone with Turkey as the core (and being a crossroad between the EU and ME); he failed. Early in his regime he tried talks with Putin; he failed. The two are irreparably split and economic competitors.
Russia wasn’t blameless in the disintegration of the Arab states (Lebanon — although some foolishly deny that Lebanon is Arab — Syria, and Iraq) and plans to cooperate with Iran to keep it that way. This economically isolates and damages Turkey, and militarily Erdogan helped do exactly that when he turned on Turkey’s ally Israel.
Iran likes that set of conditions as well. In the ME, Iran is the only beneficiary of what’s been going on; it has de facto control over Lebanon via its Hizbullah proxy, and the Assad regime is nearly 100 percent dependent on Iran. In Iraq, Maliki displayed too much independence, even though he did suppress Kurds and Sunni; now ISIS is threatening to take over the entire ‘country’, and that will lead to the rise of a more reliable and frankly Shiite proxy, or more than one, with some kind of figurehead gov’t, perhaps with Maliki still in charge.
Iran’s plan to control the Suez Canal via its ally Morsi failed, but it does have missiles in Eritrea, and transships terrorist weapons through Sudan. Egypt and Saudi Arabia cooperate (mostly by looking the other way) when Israel raids Sudan, and E and SA are bound together. Egypt is now an ally of Israel, and will remain that way unless E turns into a rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ fragmented mess like Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.
The Saudis have brought in some Pakistani troops, largely to maintain internal order, because the tribal and religious factionalism in SA renders much of the population unreliable. The Paki army isn’t the best in Asia of course, but is not bad at all, and they have a decent airforce unlike most Arab countries. SA and P have a common adversary, Iran, and Pakistan has a lot of internal de facto autonomous areas, and no friendly neighbors (other than China, just in case they have a common border, I dunno without checking).
Turkey’s best move would be to support free and independent Kurdistan, but until ISIS is crushed, that isn’t going to happen. T just turned down requests to help bomb the living crap out of ISIS. While Erdogan didn’t create ISIS, Turkey is the pipeline for recruits out of Europe, and the porous border is, or was, Turkey’s. Now that the Kurds have to cope with ISIS attacks, that pipeline will close. You’ll notice that the Syrian al-Qaeda is reportedly hemorrhaging manpower into ISIS — that’s the result of their common goals and common source of recruits. Those coming from Eurabia had been using Turkey as the easiest route for some time.
Russia and Turkey are and have been and will continue to be enemies. Turkey will remain in NATO for its own self-defense needs against the neosoviet empire, but will continue to balk at any of its obligations under NATO. And it will continue to play the role of cork in the bottle, a buffer between the ME chaos and the EU, meaning no in in the US or EU will do much against Erdogan’s Islamofascist regime.
There is an old joke about Turkey — that they’d turn communist when Russia turned capitalist. Neither one has happened.
EXCELLENT, thanks!