With the avalanche of news from both America and the Middle East, there are some stories that are easy to miss. One of these is a speech given by the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday, in which he declared that his country must protect Palestinians from Israel, and then added, “Just as we entered Karabakh [in Azerbaijan], just as we entered Libya, we might do the same” to Israel. It’s hard to read this as anything but a threat by a NATO member to send troops to fight against the Jewish state.

I can’t offer a good explanation of Erdogan’s rationale, but perhaps there is some connection to other developments in Ankara’s foreign policy, which Sinan Ciddi explains here:

Recep Tayyip Erdogan spent the better part of the last decade attempting to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. This came after Erdogan cultivated a personal relationship with Assad between 2007 and 2010, an integral part of Ankara’s aspirational policy of “zero problems” with its neighbors. At one point in 2007–08, Erdogan even worked to mediate peace talks between Syria and Israel.

All this ended abruptly when Syria’s civil war began in 2011 and Assad refused to heed Erdogan’s calls to relinquish power. Thirteen years later, Erdogan now, suddenly, wants to make friends again.

Ciddi believes Erdogan’s latest change of course is the result of pressure from the Kremlin. In other words, Turkey could be moving closer to the Russia-Iran-Syria-Hizballah axis, which of course supports Hamas. Examining the possible outcomes of Turkish-Syrian reconciliation, Ciddi observes that the “greatest winners are likely to be Moscow and Tehran.”

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.