It was a year deep in the Cold War, a time when the world was closer to nuclear war than ever. There were myriad provocations, red lines were violated, airspace was infringed upon and a plane was shot down.
The situation was such that an accidentally fired missile or a submarine captain losing his cool would have been enough to trigger World War III. It was 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis -- an incident the current Russian prime minister finds himself reminded of today. At the Munich Security Conference last weekend, Dimitri Medvedev invoked the danger of a new Cold War. "Sometimes I think, are we in 2016 or 1962?"
Officials in Berlin have likewise been struck recently by a strange sense of déjà vu. The mood is similar to how it was at the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, a time when everyone was reading the new book from historian Christopher Clark, "The Sleepwalkers," about how Europe stumbled into World War I.
Syria is the Cuba of 2016 and the risk of an international confrontation there is growing by the day. For five years now, the country has been engaged in a brutal civil war, but the conflict could now develop into a
larger clash between Russia and the West. Moscow and NATO member state Turkey are squaring off in the Syrian conflict, and the potential consequences for the trans-Atlantic alliance are impossible to predict.
Officials in Angela Merkel's Chancellery in Berlin are concerned about how close NATO has already come to a conflict with Russia. Indeed, Syria could become a vital test case for the military alliance. But the situation is complex: In order to thwart Putin, NATO must make it clear that it stands behind its member states in their moment of need. Yet NATO also wants to avoid a military conflict with Russia at all costs.
Officials at NATO headquarters in Brussels view the situation between Ankara and Moscow as being extremely volatile. "The armed forces of the two states are both active in fierce fighting on the Turkish-Syrian border, in some cases just a few kilometers from each other," one NATO official says.
Intensifying Conflict
Since Russia became a party to the war in Syria at the end of September, there has been a significant risk of open confrontation between Moscow and Ankara. Russia has thrown its support behind the troops loyal to Syria's unscrupulous dictator Bashar Assad while Turkey is supporting the rebels who would like to topple his autocracy.
The conflict intensified at the end of November when Turkey shot down a Russian warplane and now Putin has forged an alliance with the Syrian Kurds, Erdogan's
archenemies. The Turkish president holds the Syrian Kurds responsible for the attack on Wednesday in the Turkish capital, which saw an explosion in central Ankara kill 28 and wound 61. Syrian Kurds have denied responsibility, but the bombing has ratcheted up tensions between Ankara and Moscow even further.
The NATO alliance is not always united, but in this case, nobody is interested in an escalation. How, though, can it be prevented? Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan both have few scruples when it comes to wielding power and the two have previously demonstrated that they are more than willing to use force against their own people in an emergency. Both have likewise experienced the frustration of failed rapprochement with the West. How rational are they? How far might they go?
Turkey too has done its part in recent weeks to ratchet up the escalation. Turkish troops are now firing artillery across the border at Kurds in Syria and Ankara has also been thinking out loud about possibly sending ground troops into Syria to take on the Kurds.
That would be a nightmare for the West: Direct fighting between the Kurds and the Turks could mean that Russian troops would be soon to follow. What, though, would happen were a NATO member state to fire at Russian soldiers? Officials in the Chancellery hope that the alliance wouldn't be directly called on to get involved, as long as the fighting was limited to Syrian territory.
But German Chancellor Merkel is concerned that Putin is doing what he can to provoke Turkey as a way to test NATO. Which is why the German chancellor wants to do all she can to prevent Ankara from realizing its threat to send ground troops into Turkey. "That would likely be tantamount to doing Russia a favor," says one Chancellery official.
Putin's 'Hybrid War'
Putin's aim, the official says, is that of driving a wedge into NATO and destabilizing the alliance. A military federation that openly debates whether or not to support one of its members would quickly lose its credibility -- and that would be a significant triumph for Putin, the official says.
Russia has shown no signs of letting up, either. At the end of January, Turkey reported that a Russian jet had once again violated its airspace. It's a pattern that NATO is familiar with from the Baltic countries, where Russia likewise engaged in a series of pinprick provocations. In Berlin, officials have begun talking of "Putin's
hybrid war against Turkey."
One element in that conflict is the economic sanctions that Putin slapped on Ankara after the Russian jet was shot down. That is also when he began supporting the Kurds. "That is Turkey's Achilles heel," says Moscow military analyst Vladislav Shurygin. "By helping the Kurds, we unsettle Turkey to such a degree that it can think of nothing else."
The confrontation is also taking place against the backdrop of a personal feud between Putin and Erdogan. The two used to be friendly with one another, but sources in Moscow say that Putin felt deeply and personally betrayed by Erdogan following the shooting down of the Russian plane. Erdogan sought several times to personally apologize to Putin, but that wasn't enough for the Russian president. He wants Erdogan to make a public display of contrition.
In an effort to prevent further escalation, NATO has made it exceedingly clear to the Turkish government that it cannot count on alliance support should the conflict with Russia head up as a result of a Turkish attack. "NATO cannot allow itself to be pulled into a military escalation with Russia as a result of the recent tensions between Russia and Turkey," says Luxembourg Foreign Minister Jean Asselborn.
Should Turkey be responsible for escalation, say officials in both Berlin and Brussels, Ankara would not be able to invoke the NATO treaty. Article 4 of the alliance's founding treaty grants member states the right to demand consultations "whenever, in the opinion of any of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened." Turkey has already invoked this article once in the Syrian conflict. The result was the stationing of German Patriot missiles on the Syrian border in eastern Turkey.
