"The old adage 'don't cut off your nose to spite your face' would seem to apply to US and Western reluctance to work with Russia in battling ISIL and reducing chaos in the Middle East. If we want to see results, in this polycentric world, we may not have the freedom we once had to choose our partners," Alexander Dynkin and Mathew Burrows observed.
"As the recent debate over China's Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank shows, the international system urgently needs to be modernized to reflect the realities of the global diffusion of power," they insisted.
Dynkin and Burrows maintain that the new world order calls for new mechanisms, which will help to ease tensions and solve potential crises. There is no shortage of examples but Turkey's downing of a Russian bomber in Syrian airspace "should be a wake-up call of the potential for rapid escalation."
"The current crisis in the Middle East provides an opportunity to forge unprecedented cooperation on a pressing shared interest, despite our principled differences on other issues, as a good first step in forging new patterns of cooperation," the analysts underlined.
In fact, Russia has long urged all major stakeholders to join efforts in the fight against Daesh, also known as ISIL, but the United States remains reluctant to take a step in this direction.
