At Foreign Policy, Helena Cobban writes:
From 2003 to 2008, when the Bush White House was working hard to encircle and isolate Syria, with a definite view to overthrowing the Asad regime, Damascus’s strengthening tie to NATO member Turkey provided what regime insiders have described as “almost literally, a lifeline for us.”
Today, Syria’s relationship with Turkey has matured even further. At the official level, Syria now has a “no-visa” open border with Turkey, and just last week Turkey’s large, state-backed company Turk Telekom announced a massive deal to install a 2,500-kilometer, state-of the-art fiber-optic network in Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia that will link those three countries through Turkey to European networks.
At the popular level, Syrians have really appreciated the opportunity to travel freely throughout Turkey, and to trade with it. (Along the way, they even somehow forgot their country’s longtime claim to the lovely seaside province of Alexandretta, which is now Turkey’s province of Hatay.) Many Syrian citizens see their ties to Turkey as providing a valuable counterbalance to their government’s much older ties to Iran. They see Turkey as providing a much more attractive example than Iran for how a traditional Middle Eastern country can successfully modernize.
The Turkish government’s growing activism on the Palestinian cause, and in particular on Gaza, has been more recent icing on the Syrian-Turkish cake.
I watched an interview on the Charlie Rose hour with Mr al Assad last week and was impressed in his presentation of his views for his Country. Turkey, it seems is stepping out of the shadow of the U.S. even though it’s a member of N.A.T.O. Syria forging alliances with other like minded countries, knows the need to modernize the country for the future. I give him credit for his forward thinking, especially when he asks for proof of why his decisions are in the wrong interest of his country. He can see the reasons clearly, where the West can seem to tell the forest from the trees. This not to say I’m agreement with all that goes on there, as I don’t really know that much about the daily life in Syria.
The US-Israel Axis, plus the inability of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt have shaped the disasters of the past 60 years, so it can hardly be anything but a step forward to see the growth of a new centre of balance in the region.