Cooler heads needed

The following Bloomberg View. S ometimes the trite response is also the correct one. So the main thing to say about Turkey’s downing of a Russian jet last week is simple: From here on, cooler heads must prevail.

Ideally, the incident can be a catalyst to rally world powers around a common strategy to end the war in Syria, and to re-engage Russia’s generals with those of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to ensure this kind of miscalculation doesn’t happen again. French President Francois Hollande, who met last week with U.S. President Barack Obama, should be clear on this point.

Getting Putin on board for a coalition that includes Turkey won’t be easy. In the meantime, there are more immediate and concrete steps to take to ensure that tensions don’t escalate.

NATO’s other 27 members should make it crystal clear to Turkey that they will not support the shooting down of Russian planes unless there is a clear intent to attack Turkey. Putin, for his part, must tell his air force to give Turkey’s borders a wide berth.

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In the long term, all sides should be looking for ways to better communicate. It would be a good idea to reactivate the NATO-Russia Council, for example, which became defunct after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. The council could be used to draw up a memorandum of understanding — similar to the one agreed upon by the U.S. and China earlier this year — to prevent military clashes and escalation.

Of course, getting agreement on a Syrian strategy among the various NATO members, on the one hand — and, on the other, Russia — will be difficult. But it’s not hard to see the outlines: The West, particularly the U.S., may have to give up its goal of a quick removal from power of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And Putin will have to drop his opposition to safe zones for anti-Assad rebels. Everyone needs to realize that a post-Assad Syria is not only inevitable but also desirable, and that it may take a while to get there.

After the recent brinkmanship, the risks of allowing the Syrian war to continue should be clearer to the world’s leaders. At the very least, they have to do better than shooting one another’s jets out of the sky.