I think it's important to remember the tensions between Turkey and Russia predate this jet shoot down by some time. I mean, Russia's long been Bashar al-Assad's strongest backer.

I think it's important to remember the tensions between Turkey and Russia predate this jet shoot down by some time. I mean, Russia's long been Bashar al-Assad's strongest backer.

here are problems with the Turkish products inside Russia and the tourism going down. People are worried about that. But the really big economic weapons, oil and especially natural gas, those have not been brought into play yet - mostly in the form of threat so far. So basically the view from here is that, yeah, things are getting bad, but they could still get much, much worse.

We are trained to ask "What's wrong and how we fix it?" Instead, start by asking - "What works, what have we got, what's possible and who cares?"

We are seeing reports that NATO's sending early warning radar planes and German military personnel to Turkey. That might reduce the chances of another incident like this jet shoot down. And obviously both NATO and the U.S. are pressing their ally Turkey to urgently deescalate the situation.

The unthinkable is not something we are thinking about at the moment.

Turkey's NATO membership is one thing that is forestalling the worst-case scenario - open conflict between Russia and Turkey - because neither Moscow nor the West wants a Russian NATO conflict to erupt.