Strange bedfellows: The Russian-Turkish-Iranian axis

Sixty years have lapsed since the Baghdad Pact which grouped together Turkey, Iran, Iraq and the West in an alliance against the Soviet Union and the concomitant Communist danger. Nowadays this Middle Eastern architecture has shifted 180 degrees to where Russia, Turkey and Iran are in an ad hoc alliance against Islamic State but which may turn against the West as well. Still, the new alliance might be termed as a marriage of inconvenience where each of the parties has different motives and is acting at cross purposes in partitioning the Syrian bear.

Russia has fulfilled a long-held dream of reaching the warm water of the Mediterranean and is casting itself as the hegemon in the region. The erstwhile unipolar world where the US was the only power in the Middle East has disappeared and the resulting vacuum enabled Russia to spread its influence in many countries in the region and become the arbiter in the simmering conflict in Syria.

 

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