The powder keg called “Turkey”

By Tassos Symeonides
RIEAS Academic Advisor

With every passing day, it becomes more obvious that Turkey is hellbent on causing a major conflagration in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Now almost daily, the world is treated to yet another megalomaniac outburst by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist autocrat who’s pushing his country down the slippery path of theocratic dictatorship.

Erdogan’s Turkey lashes out as if there is no tomorrow against all of her true and imaginary enemies, who will be “strangled” by the Turkish army for daring to challenge the descendants of Osman Gazi: one day the enemies are domestic (the Kurds), the next day the enemies are lurking over Turkey’s border (the Kurds again), the day following that the enemy is the United States (which is helping the “terrorist” Kurds), and the day after that it is Greece which attracts the wrath of Erdogan’s Islamist mouthpieces.

This unending semi-psychotic verbal lashing cannot be dismissed as “grandstanding” any longer. In the West, stubborn politico-diplomatic cabals continue to insist that Turkey “must not be lost”—and that we need to do everything in our powers to retain her as “our bulwark” on the rim of the Moslem cauldron to the east.

These pro-Turkey cheerleaders are shrinking in numbers, although a long tradition of kowtowing to Turkish demands for “geostrategic reasons” will be hard to eradicate. The next step should be for the Western alliance to contemplate urgently how to eject the neo-Osmanlis from NATO and prepare to defend against the real possibility of Ankara triggering yet another war in the Middle East or the Aegean (or in both).  

When it comes to Erdogan’s Turkey, Western leaders are called upon to regain their senses and realize the difference between who’s a friend and who’s an enemy. Consider one of Erdogan’s latest directed at the USA over the American arming of Kurdish fighters on the Turkey-Syria border: “Either you take off your flags on those terrorist organisations, or we will have to hand those flags over to you. Don’t force us to bury in the ground those who are with terrorists…Our operations will continue until not a single terrorist remains along our borders, let alone 30,000 of them.”

This is just one example of the intense hostility Erdogan now routinely directs at Turkey’s “partners” in the West. Even a cursory Internet search uncovers dozens of others, and this ugly outpouring from Ankara is unending.

It is, therefore, high time for NATO to set aside its pussyfooting that always attended Turkish membership and begin immediately a re-assessment of Turkey’s true intentions, current unholy alliances, and overt hostility toward the West.

Alliances are organizations that bring friends together in order to face threats in a shared, determined and active way. Alliances are not clubs where unruly “allies” have a free hand in undermining the basic partnership principles or sitting on the fence waiting for the opportune moment to lean this or that way—a practice Turkey has elevated to a form of dark art.

Turkey has been taking advantage of the West’s indecisive and, often, wrong assessment of Ankara’s oscillations, backtracking, and, more recently, unabashed antagonism to Western aims.

Indeed, if NATO has learned anything from the Syrian civil war concerning Turkey’s intentions, the process of reassessing Turkish membership must begin posthaste with the sole question of how to eject Ankara from the Alliance. As one observer, who has had enough of Turkish dangerous antics, puts it:

NATO shouldn’t come to Turkey’s defense - instead, it should begin proceedings immediately to determine if the lengthy and growing list of Turkish transgressions against the West, including its support for Islamic terrorists, have merit. And if they do - and they most certainly do - the Alliance’s supreme decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council, should formally oust Turkey from NATO for good before its belligerence and continual aggression drags the international community into World War III.

Those who still shed tears about a potential rapture with the neo-Ottomans should begin to heed the loud and clear signals Turkey beams in every direction:

1.     Erdogan is buying Russian arms (the S-400 air defense system) and openly flirts with Moscow, with President Putin having the upper hand and obviously working to keep Erdogan on a tight leash and use him as a convenient proxy in his politico-strategic maneuvers against the West. Erdogan claimed the S-400 purchase was dictated by Western suppliers failing “to offer financially effective alternatives.”

2.     Erdogan’s aggressive and provocative rhetoric toward the EU has now become a routine source of disturbing and often vulgar news. His threats to flood Europe (i.e. Greece) with waves of illegal Moslem immigrants are part of a harangue routine addressed to both Erdogan’s domestic Islamic supporters and the “infidels” in Europe. His unending sniping against Germany has come to a point where Berlin either ignores or dismisses out of hand Erdogan’s anti-German cries.

3.     Syria provides the clearest evidence yet that Turkey has chosen to act as a hostile power to the West. Ankara’s not-too-hidden support of Islamist jihadis of all hues, and specifically its support of ISIS, is a well-established fact. Ankara’s latest incursion into Syria to defeat a Kurdish militia allied with the US demonstrates again Erdogan’s alliance with mercenary jihadis he claims he is fighting against.

4.     Erdogan has not hesitated to play with the Iranian mullahs in Syria despite the long-standing traditional enmity separating Iran and Turkey (Shiite vs. Sunni). Such “dancing with the enemy” has not gone down well in the West. And the smooth relationship between Moscow and Tehran, with Turkey playing second fiddle to these two “elephants in the room,” should give further pause to the eternally undecided Western leaders and push them to act decisively to undermine this entente cordial that directly threatens Western strategic interests.

5.     Turkey’s apologists in the West must also contemplate Erdogan’s domestic policies as well providing irrefutable proof as to where the Turkish strongman wants to take his country. Last September, for example, Turkey’s education curriculum took a sharp turn toward Islamism, with Turkish pupils obliged to memorize prayers from the Quran and “infectious” Western subjects, like Darwin’s theory of evolution, scratched from schoolbooks. The Islamization of Turkish society is one of Erdogan’s key targets after his successful dismantling of the Kemalist secular tradition and the crushing of the Turkish army as the guarantor and arbiter of Turkish politics.

Turkey has now become the litmus test of whether endemic Western indecision and faulty strategizing, concerning the vital Eastern Mediterranean region and the lands beyond, can be finally steered toward policies designed to secure Western interests instead of undermining them in the name of faulty “geopolitical security concerns” spurred by the juggling of economic interests that ignore the necessity of iron-clad security in the broader region.

Unless a miracle happens, and Erdogan’s thinly veiled Islamic dictatorship falters, the West will continue to face an unmitigated threat of Turkish aggression capable of igniting a conflict that could engulf the world.

It is thus high time for an urgent Western initiative to promote a “velvet” divorce from Ankara, with a clearly stated warning that any Turkish adventurism will be met with full and immediate NATO force.

Remember Munich.  

Postscript:  Greek opinions on what to do with Turkey are, as always, divided. The “conservative” view suggests that Turkey inside NATO can be “managed” to the benefit of longer term Greek security interests (see this, for example).

An “iconoclastic” approach, on the other hand, can be drawn from the experience of the now defunct Turkish attempt to join the EU. Years of “managing” Turkey via promises of EU membership ended in total failure in the face of stubborn Turkish refusal to meet minimum criteria for membership.

When Erdogan finally concluded the EU play could not serve his political and strategic priorities, with the Europeans balking at Turkey’s dismal human rights record and headlong plunge into Moslem fundamentalism, he made a 90-degree turn and now fans the flames of anti-Europeanism. Europe, it appears, can be dropped without much thought in tune with Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman dreams of imperial grandeur. 

Disengaging from NATO will be harder since the Turkish strongman is well aware of how important it is for Ankara to have a direct plug into Western defense planning. This is exactly the reason for the Alliance to reassess Turkish membership as Turkey, by omission and commission, is turning herself into a candidate enemy state and an agent provocateur aiming at Western interests.

In the end, a non-NATO Turkey would be subject (hopefully) to the full consequences of attacking any NATO member – a fact that Greek policymakers should weigh carefully as part of a radically redefined Greek security strategy in the face of Turkish burgeoning threat (if, that is, they can first alleviate the crippling dysfunctions of the Greek political system).

Copyright: Research Institute for European and American Studies (www.rieas.gr) Publication date: 5 February 2018

Note: The article reflects the opinion of the author and not necessarily the views of the Research Institute for European and American Studies (RIEAS).



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