And we didn’t even have to destroy NATO to do it

Turkey seems to have had a change of heart over Kobani:

Turkey’s foreign minister said Monday that the country would facilitate the movement of Iraqi Kurdish forces, known as pesh merga, to the embattled Syrian town of Kobani to join the fighting there.

At a news conference in Ankara, the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said that his government was “helping the pesh merga cross over to Kobani,” an apparent shift from Turkey’s previous refusal to allow any military assistance to Kurdish fighters in the town.

I don’t expect that anybody will take any lessons away from this little bit of international diplomacy, but for the “beatings will continue” crowd there is indeed a lesson to be learned here. Instead of overreacting to Turkey’s invocation of its own national interest by trying to punish them severely, say by kicking (or trying to kick) the Turks out of NATO, which would have potentially splintered the NATO alliance, left everybody involved angry and resentful, and actually done nothing about the problem at hand (Kobani), the Obama administration actually managed to change Ankara’s decision-making calculus in order to get what it wanted. They did this with two moves:

1. Publicly shaming anybody (wink wink) who would refuse aid to the “valiant” defenders of Kobani as “irresponsible” and characterizing the choice to refuse aid to the Kurds there as “morally very difficult,” and, more importantly
2. Presenting the Turks with a fait accompli by taking unilateral steps (over Ankara’s objections) to aid the Kurds in Kobani with or without Turkish help, both by airdropping weapons and supplies into the city and by ratcheting up the air campaign against the city’s Daesh attackers

Once it was clear that the U.S. was prepared to arm and supply Kobani’s Kurds by air, Tayyip Erdogan’s government had to reassess whether it was worth publicly embarrassing themselves, alienating a good portion of their population that has opposed Erdogan’s Syrian policy, and destroying peace talks with the Kurdish PKK that have been years if not decades in the making, when chances were suddenly pretty good that the PYD/YPG were going to hang on to Kobani after all. Ankara’s strategic goal of allowing Daesh to cripple Kurdish control in northern Syria now suddenly less likely, Turkey’s national interests are at this point better served by opening the border and letting reinforcements and supplies flow into the city.

I get that this outcome is not as gut-level satisfying for the neocons as kicking Turkey out of NATO would have been, but it’s a whole lot better for the Kurds, for the operation against Daesh, and, hey, even for NATO, no?