Turkey’s BRICS alignment has been a slow burn story for years, but this week it collided with something much more urgent. The U.S. ordered diplomat evacuations across the Middle East, and Turkey found itself right in the middle of it all — the State Department told nonessential staff and families to leave the U.S. Consulate in Adana on Monday, a Turkey-U.S. evacuation that underscored just how far the crisis has spread.

Turkey-Iran tensions are no longer background noise, with Iran firing missiles over Turkish cities and the Middle East security threat quite literally reaching NATO soil. Turkey-U.S. war fears are quietly shaping every diplomatic move right now, even as events on the ground kept testing Turkey’s BRICS alignment in real time.

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Turkey’s BRICS alignment has never looked more contradictory — Ankara is absorbing Iranian missile fire as a NATO member while simultaneously lobbying for a seat at the BRICS table.

Turkey’s BRICS alignment looked particularly complicated on Monday morning when a duck-and-cover siren went off at the Adana consulate — and also at Incirlik Air Base, a joint Turkish-U.S. facility less than five miles away. NATO forces intercepted an Iranian missile over Turkish airspace the same morning, with debris falling near Gaziantep, close to the Syrian border. It was the second intercept in six days. The Middle East security threat is visibly moving north, and the Turkey-Iran situation is getting harder to ignore.

NATO SpokespersonAllison Hartstated:

“NATO stands firm in its readiness to defend all Allies against any threat.”

Turkey’s Defense Ministry had this to say:

“We once again emphasize that all necessary measures will be taken decisively and without hesitation against any threat directed at our country’s territory and airspace. We also reiterate that it is in everyone’s interest to heed Turkey’s warnings in this regard.”

The Adana Turkey-U.S. evacuation order fits into a much wider pattern. The State Department had already pushed departure orders for staff in Bahrain, Kuwait, Baghdad, and Irbil. At the time of writing, officials were also coordinating a contingency overland route from Irbil through Turkey, per a State Department cable reviewed by The Washington Post. The conflict killed seven U.S. service members so far, and the State Department ran over two dozen charter flights to move thousands of Americans out of the region as Turkey-Iran friction and Turkey-U.S. war concerns kept growing. Turkey’s BRICS alignment hasn’t shielded Ankara from any of this pressure.

Source: Watcher Guru