This Is Not the Start of a Russia-Turkey World War

Matt Purple

Security, Middle East

Assassinations don’t start wars; they provide excuses for countries to start wars.

In 1618, as sectarian tensions heightened in Europe, the Bohemian Catholic King Ferdinand of Styria sent four ambassadors to meet with local Protestants. Their negotiations took a slightly less than diplomatic turn when two of the representatives and their secretary were thrown out a window and fell seventy feet, the second of the so-called Defenestrations of Prague. Though all three somehow survived, the assassination attempt helped spark the Thirty Years’ War, the bloodiest conflict in European history until the twentieth century.

Fortunately, yesterday’s actual assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, who was gunned down by a Turkish police officer shouting “Allahu Akbar” and “Don’t forget Aleppo,” is unlikely to start a world war. You wouldn’t know that from the fainting couches on social media, where the calculus was as follows: Turkey is a NATO member, Russia opposes NATO—ergo, stir for blood. The assassination of an ambassador is a jarring event, a geopolitical cardinal sin that must be taken seriously. Russia will be compelled to respond. But a war with Turkey? East versus West? Let’s not go crazy.

As David Frum pointed out yesterday, assassinations don’t start wars; they provide excuses for countries to start wars. And in this case, it is in neither Turkey’s nor Russia’s interests to fight with each other. The tension between the two nations that thickened after Turkey shot down a Russian warplane near the Syrian border late last year has largely subsided. Turkey, bogged down internally after this past summer’s coup, has slackened its support for rebels in Syria and turned its attention to squashing internal threats, most visibly the Kurds, whose desired Kurdistan state it’s determined to stop. This suits Moscow, which is less fixated on Kurdish aspirations than crushing the Syrian opposition to Bashar al-Assad.