Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet on the Syrian border on Wednesday has sparked a debate over whether this incident could lead to a full-fledged military confrontation between the two countries. The close economic interdependence that bolsters the current Turkish-Russian relationship would seem an incentive for both sides to keep the situation from deteriorating further, but Turkey and Russia have a long, fraught history of a dozen full-scale wars and other violent clashes. During the Cold War, they faced off across the frontline of the NATO-Soviet Bloc border, and today they find themselves once again on different sides of the …read more
Source: Brookings