David P. Goldman, long a columnist for
Asia Times and a blogger at
PJ Media who channels Spengler,
writes about what is
not going to happen in Syria.
Neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia will send ground troops into northern Syria and fight US-backed Kurdish militia.
Turkey won’t send combat aircraft into Syria to be shot down by Russian air defenses.
The Russian-Iranian reduction of Aleppo will add little to the flood of Syrian refugees.
Russia and the United States will not stumble into a strategic confrontation over a long-since-unsalvageable patch of Levantine desert.
That is his view of Syria, a mess but not one likely to spread. For the regional powers, he doesn't see much future.
Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia will not survive in their present form for another generation. Iran and Turkey face a demographic train wreck that will hit with full force in about twenty years. Depending on the oil price, Iran will run out of money, young people or water first—but it will run out of all three in the foreseeable future. Turkey’s Kurdish minority has twice as many children as ethnic Turks, so that it will become a majority of military-age Turks within a generation. Saudi Arabia will run out of money in five years at the present oil price, and its tumescent welfare state (as I have argued previously) will collapse.
Finally, his Rx for Syria:
The least bad course of action for Syria is to partition the country into ethnic enclaves where civilians will be comparatively safe.
