Syrian Conflict and why no one wants it to spread

Responses to the Syrian bombing of a Turkish village were swift, but Ankara, its neighbours and the west have no interest in war

Fighting across the Syrian-Turkish border is an alarming escalation of the conflict but, on past form, beyond any immediate retaliation for the incident, it still looks unlikely to change the overall contours of the bloodiest crisis of the Arab spring.

The sharpness of Nato's late-night response to Syria's shelling that left five dead in a Turkish village has been backed up by strongly worded public statements from the US, Britain and other member states, which may turn out to be more robust than any reaction on the ground. Intervention will probably be limited in both scope and duration.

Turkey received full backing to retaliate, certainly with artillery fire but without air strikes and only a signal of readiness to cross the border if provoked again. But the clear message from a senior official – fashionably announced not in a diplomatic demarche but on Twitter – was that Ankara has "no interest in war".

The Atlantic alliance wants to stay away from the Syrian quagmire. Tellingly, ambassadors meeting in Brussels invoked the article of Nato's charter that refers to solidarity rather than the one that requires member states to come to the defence of another. Turkey, which was lavishly praised for its "restraint", will not act alone.

In Damascus, the government seemed just as keen to calm the mood, quickly offering "sincere condolences" to Ankara and announcing an investigation into exactly what happened at Alkacale. Russia, its chief protector, urged the Assad regime to apologise for an "accident." Assad's overall strategy, of war to the end the uprising, will continue.

Turkey, along with neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan, has been living with the tremors of the Syrian earthquake for more than 18 months, though the main impact has been refugee flows – 120,000 in Turkey – rather than military action, deliberate or accidental. Parliament's mandate for incursions is a template that has been used before to deal with the Kurds in Iraq. It was intended as a deterrent.

Talk of creating "safe zones" or "humanitarian corridors" in the border area, a key demand of the Syrian opposition, was quick to resurface. The hope is that rebels in the Idlib area could consolidate their position with a degree of international protection they have so far been denied. But the politics of implementing such ideas remains as tangled as ever. Syria's formidable air defences – which would have to be destroyed to create a "no-fly" zone – are still invoked as one good reason not to get involved. There are many others.

At the United Nations, the security council is paralysed by deep divisions between the US, Britain and France on the one hand and Russia and China on the other. UN approval for any kind of Libyan-style military action in Syria seems impossible. And action without UN agreement looks equally impossible. As before, western diplomatic efforts will focus on getting Russia to change tack to hasten Assad's departure and contain the crisis. That won't be any easier than it was before.

The Syrian rebels and their Arab supporters will see an irony in the spasm of international outrage generated by this border incident. Early on Thursday Syria was trending on Twitter for the first time in months – routine killing now passes without much attention.

Assad's enemies say bitterly that despite all the calls on him to step down and end the bloodshed, too little is being done to make that happen. The only "red line" laid down by the US is the use of chemical weapons. Syria has made clear it will not use them unless attacked by an outside power. And no outside party, Turkey included, wants the conflict inside Syria to spread beyond its borders.