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| The Grand Turk |
| Turkey Has Lost its Biggest Cheerleader: The U.S. Military |
| 2017-08-04 |
| h/t Instapundit Turkey’s relations with the EU and place within NATO have come under increased scrutiny over the past year, especially during Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's campaign to win a constitutional referendum this April, which many saw as a power grab. ...Since the failed coup against Erdogan last year, a new narrative has emerged amongst his supporters that I call "Erdoganism." This "Erdoganist" narrative believes that Erdogan is an historic figure who will make Turks great and Muslim’s proud again, and that you have to support him not because Erdogan needs to be supported personally, but because this is how you put your weight behind this great historical project. By inversion, Erdoganism also suggests that if you do not support Erdogan, you are therefore not a good Turk or not a good Muslim, and you should be prosecuted for that. I would also add that if you oppose Erdogan, you’re more than likely a proxy for foreigners. Here is Erdoganism par excellence: blending political Islam and Turkish nationalism under Erdogan’s persona, whose leitmotif is that Erdogan is protecting Turkey and the Muslim World against foreign attacks. Those foreigners are usually Westerners, which in the Turkish context often means the Europeans. A strong anti-European and anti-Western animus guides the thinking of the pro-Erdogan bloc. ...The view of Erdogan and his supporters is that Samuel Huntington was right, there is a clash of civilizations, but he was wrong because the Muslims will win. Erdogan does not see NATO necessarily as a place where likeminded countries sharing similar values come together, it’s more his security outlet where he goes to buy security, and he needs a lot of that security against Russia. After they gave up Communism as imperial religion, Russians started reviving Russian nationalism and the view of Russia as defender of Greek Orthodox provoslavnia (literally right and glorious) religion. In this view, Russia is third Rome and liberation of the second Rome = Constantinople is a holy grail ...It used to be that in Washington, the strongest advocates for Turkey were people from the U.S. military. They had great impressions from working with Turks in NATO operations in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, they were grateful for Turkey’s part in winning the Cold War by blocking the Soviet Union’s access to the warm seas, and they were just very supportive of Ankara in general. That is now the opposite. I would say that the people who have the most negative views of Turkey in Washington are, unfortunately, in the U.S. military as a result of a series of events, all of which took place under Erdogan’s watch. Turkey’s refusal to join the Iraq war in 2003, the collapse of Turkish-Israeli ties, the Turkish decision to buy Chinese air defense systems (although they backed down on that), Turkey’s recent decision now to buy Russian missiles, and Turkey’s lax policy in allowing radicals to cross into Syria in an effort to undermine Assad, all of these factors have hurt the relationship. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |