by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:
President Erdogan’s re-election in Turkey is a monumental failure of Western pressure. Because of it, it’s time to take our eyes off Ukraine and look at a different theater of World War III with equal if not bigger implications.
Turkey is another in a now long string of failed Economic Hitman operations cum Color Revolutions. The last big one to fail was in Belarus in 2020 following the re-election of Alexander Lukashenko.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Turkey has been the subject of a seven-year campaign to be rid of Erdogan, beginning with the 2016 coup attempt organized out of the NATO airbase at Incerlik. Turkey’s been through a persistent five-year brutal devaluation of its currency, the lira, seeing it drop from less than 2 versus the US dollar to nearly 21 this week in the wake of Erdogan’s victory.
I’ve covered this story in detail (see my Turkey archives here) being one of the lone voices out there trying to parse Erdogan’s monetary policy actions which I’ve argued sought to de-dollarize Turkey’s foreign exchange liabilities and forge an independent path.
Erdogan, wily as a fox, has been deftly playing the US and Russia/China off each other for years, positioning Turkey simultaneously as a member of NATO, the gatekeeper to the Black Sea, and the financial and trade crossroads linking East and West.
The West’s campaign to overthrow President Assad in Syria beginning in 2011 couldn’t have gone forward without Erdogan’s help. He went along with it very willingly having been promised Turkey claiming Idlib province in the West and taking most of the north. Vladimir Putin accepting Assad’s invitation for assistance in fighting ISIS and Erdogan’s pets in Idlib (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS) began the unraveling of those plans.
Turkey shooting down a Russian SU-31 in November 2015 was supposed to push Putin to war against Turkey, giving NATO every reason to engage the Russians directly. But Putin and Erdogan came to an understanding over this incident, implying that it wasn’t on Erdogan’s orders the Russian plane was shot down, but rather the usual suspects at Foggy Bottom, Langley, GCHQ in London who did.
If you wonder why I’m never worried by the latest lame attempt to draw Russia into a wider conflict in Ukraine by events like the Nordstream or Kerch Strait bridge bombings it was Putin’s handling of this moment with Erdogan and then later the shooting down of the Russian IL-20 ELINT plane over Syria by someone who definitely wasn’t Syria, who took the blame to avert WWIII.
These were moments where Russia and NATO were being pressed into conflict and Putin refused to follow the ready-made Tom Clancy script prepared for him by the spooks who never seem to run out of at-bats no matter how many times they strike out.
It is against this background that we have to analyze the complete failure that is the West’s campaign to unseat Erdogan and his AKP party from power in Turkey.
The ZIRP years in the West coincided with the big degradation of Turkey’s finances as Erdogan invited Western investment into the country to support his territorial ambitions. But, Erdogan, as pointed out by Baris Doster of Marmara University noted:
“The government at the head of Turkiye is extremely pragmatic, which is expressed in the ability to make a sharp turn in foreign policy,” Doster told Sputnik. “There are many examples of this: these are relations with Israel, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. When relations with the East are not going well, Turkiye turns to the West, and in case of difficulties with the West, it turns to the East. However, in the current situation, I believe that the existing political vector will remain intact.”
I agree. In effect, Erdogan’s pragmatism led him to nearly every move he’s made over the past decade, going along with NATO when they were on the offensive, but quickly pivoting and cutting bait on a policy the minute they were put on the defensive, c.f. my above comments about Syria.
In fact, it’s easy to argue that Erdogan’s breaking point with the West over Syria is what has dominated geopolitical headlines for the past seven years. He relishes the role as the guy with the leverage over all NATO policy in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, whose access he controls thanks to the 1936 Treaty of Montreaux.
