Thursday’s visit to Damascus by high-level Turkish politicians presents Bashar Assad with a perfect – and perhaps timely – opportunity to hear the case for pursuing reform and making the difficult but unlikely decision to end the crackdown on protesters across Syria.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stepped out publicly Tuesday to urge Assad to scale back the use of force and to encourage the Syrian president to adopt new measures aimed at fostering greater democracy. Erdogan has spoken with Assad by telephone repeatedly in recent days, and certainly he has delivered a similar message, which would have definitely touched on the fact that such measures have a regional and international impact.

But the message from Ankara could well be carrying much more than the advice of one leader to another. Erdogan spoke to Barack Obama about Syria Monday; the Turkish delegation to Syria was headed by Ankara’s intelligence chief as well as the top official for infrastructure projects, and the meeting officially centered on boosting economic and business ties to assure the regime of fruitful cooperation in the future.
With this in mind, the sojourn to Damascus begins to appear like an offer of carrots to Assad to halt the crackdown and move toward dialogue and reform despite the fact that that decision is becoming harder by the day.
For Turkey, such a mission would make a great deal of sense. Turkey shares a border of almost 900 kilometers with Syria, and Ankara is willing to give Assad concessions in order not to see its southern neighbor fall into turmoil and in the process ensure that the regime remains stable in a volatile region.
While the West is making noise about imposing sanctions on Syria and its leadership, Erdogan would be the ideal choice to play nice cop to Assad. Turkey has already earned a reputation as a credible mediator between all the actors in the Middle East, and it has a clear national interest in Syria’s stability – and Ankara, of course, remains a member and champion of NATO interests.

After all, Western nations have yet to implement any punitive measures against Damascus, so it seems like Assad could well have a brief window of time remaining to choose the path of reform. Last week Assad evidently decided for security instead of reform. But it will not be easy to back down right away, even though force has a ceiling. That decision, however, was a miscalculation – meeting the protests with force will not end the unrest, but spur more dissatisfaction with the regime
If, on the contrary, Assad still wishes to defuse the tension at home, he should listen carefully to his interlocutors from Ankara. Turkey is a friendly nation that is not recommending restraint and reform in the interests of outside parties. Turkey wants a stable Syria, and if Assad switches to a reform-based reaction to the unrest, Europe and other Western states might follow Turkey’s lead and discuss some economic rewards because a prosperous Syria is an asset to all players. On the other hand, Erdogan has made it clear that even an ally as close as Turkey will not be able to tolerate state-backed repression in Syria for much longer.