In a recent statement, the Turkish foreign minister mentioned that he had an informal meeting with his Syrian counterpart last year, in which the two discussed reconciliation between their countries, and ways to resolve the Syrian civil war. This points to a sharp departure from the expressly anti-Assad position Ankara adopted when the war began in 2011, from its support for anti-Assad rebels, and from the direct clashes between Turkish and Assad-regime troops in 2020. But as ever, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s primary enemy remains the Kurdish quasi-state in northeastern Syria. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak puts these recent developments into context:

The Turkish economy’s weakness, its growing reliance on Russia, and a drastic shift in Turkish foreign policy compelled Erdoğan to mend ties with Assad, his former adversary. . . . As a result of the war’s impasse, rising anti-Syrian sentiment in Turkey, and Turkey’s mounting economic burden over the years, Erdoğan wants to reassure his supporters that he was able to resolve the Syrian issue in time for the June 2023 elections.

Despite this strategic and economic imperative, Turkey’s engagement in the Syrian civil war is characterized by accepting Syrian refugees, supplying logistics and ammunition to opposition groups, and deploying Turkish troops into active war zones, limiting Ankara’s maneuverability.

To divert attention away from the antagonism between the two Arab parties, namely the Assad regime and the opposition, Ankara has designated the Kurdish [forces] as the common enemy against which to try to unite all belligerent Arab parties. Ankara expects that by implementing such a policy, it will be able to eradicate the challenge posed by the Kurdish . . . autonomous region along its border.

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.