The Obama Administration only last week doubled down on its policy of limited air strikes against ISIS and no ground troops other than advisers with the Kurds and Iraqi militias, hoping that what happens in the Middle East stays in the Middle East.  The refugee crisis is viewed as an opportunity to get Europe to take a more active role in policing its borders.  The attacks in Paris are someone else’s problem.  There is no existential threat to the U.S. emerging from the conflict in Syria-Iraq, especially since the administration secured and agreement with Iran to curtail its nuclear weapons program.

Now a Russian bomber supporting the Assad regime violated Turkish airspace and was shot down by two Turkish F-16s.  At least one aviator was killed by Turkmen militiamen on the ground just inside Syria and Russia claims that a rescue helicopter sent to rescue the aviators was attacked as well killing a marine.

Turkey is a member of NATO, and NATO has urged calm and to de-escalate the situation.  But Russia does not appear to be in the mood to de-escalate.  According to the regime’s English language mouthpiece, RT, Russia will suspend military ties with Turkey, put its guided missile cruiser in the Med. on alert to shoot down any threat, and will make sure all bombing missions have fighter escort.

NATO, you’ve got your answer.  The Turkish response was the correct one to the repeated violations of Turkish air space by Russian and Syrian aircraft.  In an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, Robert Axelrod showed that a tit-for-tat strategy produces the best outcomes because it punishes defection immediately but lets bygones be bygones.  One of the advantages of tit-for-tat is that rather than immediately escalating to massive force, off-ramps are provided to de-escalate.  Russia appears to be driven by a different logic.

Let’s recap some of the policy goals of the current Russian regime:

• Russia’s intervention is to build credibility with its allies, unlike a fickle Western democracy, Russia stands by its allies; we know this because so far the intervention has been limited to air power and materiel provided to the Assad regime to prosecute the civil war; Russia has replaced capability lost to attrition, not introduced new weapons (except for cruise missiles, see below).
• Russia sees itself as an aggrieved great power whose status has been diminished and is being held down (encircled) by Western democracies/NATO–for example, Georgia’s tilt towards the EU and Ukraine’s tilt towards the EU was the last straw and prompted intervention in both countries to create frozen conflicts that prevent their incorporation into the liberal international system and alliance with Western democracies.
• Conflict is needed to prop up the authoritarian personal rule of Putin; it manufactures patriotic sentiments and lends legitimacy to political repression.
• The conflict allows Russia to demonstrate a renewed military competency after losing the Cold War and its military atrophied; the cruise missile launches from the Caspian are such an example.  They also have the effect of intimidating states in the Caspian region.

Given the policy goals is obvious way Russia is not going to choose the off-ramp.  Russia is not going to let a crisis go to waste.  Russia will use the incident to break NATO by forcing pacific Western Europeans into choosing to support an increasingly odious Islamist regime in Ankara or hang Ankara out to dry.  We’ve already had evidence from last month that NATO intends to hang Turkey out to dry, when NATO Patriot missile batteries were removed from the theater.  Once Russia has proven NATO to be a paper tiger, Russia will peel the Baltics out of the Western orbit and back into the Russian one.

The Obama Administration’s current policy is leaving the next administration a huge mess to clean up, when what was needed in the region was a deterrent, none was proffered and when kinetic action was needed, the administration demurred.  Now, we are faced with a potential NATO-Russian conflict or a fracturing of the most successful collective security system in history.