STRONG HORSE: NATO’s 2nd-largest military is ‘bending’ to Russia — and leaving the US out in the cold.

“This is Turkey bending to Russia,” Aaron Stein, an expert on Turkey and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told The New York Times on Wednesday. “This is putting a fine point on Turkey’s policy of ‘Assad must go’ no longer being the policy.”

The Turkish-Russian rapprochement — which has been ongoing since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apologized to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for Turkey’s shooting down a Russian warplane in November 2015 — is likely to continue after the assassination of Russia’s ambassador to Turkey, Andrey Karlov, in Ankara on Monday.

Statements released by Russian and Turkish officials in the aftermath of Karlov’s death suggested the countries were determined not to let the incident derail their renewed friendship, while Erdogan and Putin said the assassination had only strengthened their resolve to jointly fight terrorism.

Officials and lawmakers in both countries, meanwhile, have implied that the US may have played a role in Karlov’s assassination, an insinuation the US State Department has vehemently denied.

If we’re not the strong horse we might as well play the scapegoat.