International Turkey's Lonely Road to Isolation: The World Looks on as Erdogan Jockeys for a Third Decade in Power

[Rod1]

Moslems and Constantinople...already went wrong.

Moslems only got Constantinople thanks to the crusaders backstabbing the Byzantines after receiving them with open arms, the Konmenos had already recovered Anatolia from the Seljuks.

 

[TehGwarch]

Moslems only got Constantinople thanks to the crusaders backstabbing the Byzantines after receiving them with open arms, the Konmenos had already recovered Anatolia from the Seljuks.

Jeez, go play farmville or something.

 

[Undying Poster]

Jeez, go play farmville or something.

Go start a crusade or something, I'm tired of obese, non-practicing, Christian neckbeards talking about reclaiming Istanbul. Half of these guys are probably atheists but claim a Christian identity now because it is contrary to mainstream Western culture and because Muslims suck so bad. Grab a plane ticket to Turkey and start a revolution, why dontcha?

 

[carlos cadona]

The U.S. still needs to use their airbases to give close air support to the SDF, Turkey just now came around to supporting the SDF against ISIS so we shouldn't do anything to harm Turkey just now unless they either go crazy and invade someone or become hostile to the U.S., after ISIS is defeated here in a year or two then we can start talking about kicking them out of NATO.

 

[MicroBrew]

The U.S. still needs to use their airbases to give close air support to the SDF, Turkey just now came around to supporting the SDF against ISIS so we shouldn't do anything to harm Turkey just now unless they either go crazy and invade someone or become hostile to the U.S., after ISIS is defeated here in a year or two then we can start talking about kicking them out of NATO.

From the article.

" Turkey’s primary military benefit to Washington is access to Incirlik airbase, which is not in fact contingent on Ankara being part of NATO."

 

[TehGwarch]

Go start a crusade or something, I'm tired of obese, non-practicing, Christian neckbeards talking about reclaiming Istanbul. Half of these guys are probably atheists but claim a Christian identity now because it is contrary to mainstream Western culture and because Muslims suck so bad. Grab a plane ticket to Turkey and start a revolution, why dontcha?

That's the plan bucko but let's see what Trump and Putin can conjure up first.

I might need a LITTLE backup. lol

 

[JDragon]

Culturally and from a democracy promotion point of view, Turkey OS done in NATO. And we know it. I mean assume Russia attacks Turkey - would NATO really come to Turkey's aid?

Erdogan is aware.

At the same time: The amount of refugee DID go down in Greece after the treaty with Erdogan. Massively. Ever since the coup attempt though, there are hundreds of refugees arriving on Greek islands daily.

 

[ShinkanPo]

Yes, it's working wonderfully in Europe right now.

If you define "superior" as unmitigated chaos and destruction, refugees raping your daughters at a new years eve festival. lol

Or communist parties popping up and being tolerated to spread false naratives because free speech.

One problem with democracy is it can be easily subverted to turn into something worst.

 

[ShinkanPo]

Jeez, go play farmville or something.

Hehehehe Farmville...

Hey add my farm on facebook. Lets trade pigs..

 

[Madmick]

Pretty sure @Arkain2K and @Zankou were saying this like 4-5 years ago. Probably even further back, but that's when I first remembered them bristling about it.

 

[Valhoven]

What would be the consequences of kicking out Turkey? Immigration seems like an obvious one. I generally support anything that can harm Turkey these days but I wouldn't support it if it would also harm Europe.

By the way, why are we also assuming that kicking them out of NATO means ending a relationship with them? Even where there is tension, if it is mutually beneficial, countries will cooperate. Look at Turkey right now trying to patch up relations with Russia and Syria.

Puppies, ice cream and global destabilisation come to mind; Putin's reaction-time in reaching out to the Ministerial Council of Kreece when EU disfellowship was on everyone's lips here was telling to that effect.

WWs I and II ring any bells? NATO was initially a cork against communism but evolved into today's "keep your friends close, enemies closer" mix of cocktail. Romania? Bulgarien? Turkey? All in tow of the other by a "rationale” of Western world leaders. Anyone who looks at the Nordics and then Turkey sees readily that the two are united only by the fact they both need oxygen to breathe.

"Let's kick them out; no biggie, what's the worst that can happen? Work together with some tension?" Turkey was and is a crucial piece of the world puzzle; talk like this doesn't do their position justice.

Turkey has aces in hand with the refugee crisis and knows it; they are a very dangerous player in the game right now and in a way of theory and perversion, you could say they hold Western civilisation in their hands.

If another Alexander the Great is in the stars for us, I ask Oden for him to be sent down sooner rather than later. And that our folk live again in prosperity.

 

[Harmonica]

Moslems only got Constantinople thanks to the crusaders backstabbing the Byzantines after receiving them with open arms, the Konmenos had already recovered Anatolia from the Seljuks.

What makes you say that? Crusaders sacking Constantinople happened in 1204, some 250 years before Ottomans finally conquered it. You think its impact was so severe that they never fully recovered?

I'd say it was only a matter of time either way. Byzantines were already a fading power by then while the Ottomans were on the rise.

 

[Falsedawn]

The Russians don't want him.

Putin already threatened to smash Turkey and retake Constantinople (istanbul) for the Christians. I hope Trump gives him the green light.

http://awdnews.com/top-news/putin-if-turkey-s-erdoğan-doesn-t-stop-supporting-terrorists-in-syria,-i-shall-restore-constantinople-istanbul-to-christendom



The Ottoman empire must be crushed once and for all. Putin is a fucking Crusader.

The Pentarchy is gone, get over it.

 

[Rod1]

What makes you say that? Crusaders sacking Constantinople happened in 1204, some 250 years before Ottomans finally conquered it. You think its impact was so severe that they never fully recovered?

I'd say it was only a matter of time either way. Byzantines were already a fading power by then while the Ottomans were on the rise.

Byzantines were a rising power when the sacking happened and it was not just the sacking but 60 years of latin rule before the Byzantines recovered Constantinople.

 

[Arkain2K]

NATO does not have the mechanism to expel Turkey
Nov 14, 2014

Turkey's Prime Minister and presidential candidate Tayyip Erdogan addresses his supporters during an election rally in Istanbul


Turkey's foreign policy is becoming more aggressively Islamist by the day. How far can it go before it ruins its relationship with the West? Or perhaps the question should be, what would Turkey have to do to get kicked out of NATO? Quite a lot, it turns out.

Ankara is set to take over the presidency of the G20 next month, and aims to use the opportunity to promote its image as a global economic power and assuage its self-image as a country increasingly isolated on the world stage and buffeted by conflict on its southern frontiers.

According to a Pew Research Center poll released in July, only 19 percent of Turks view the US positively, and 25% feel that way about the EU.

Moreover, seven in 10 Turks have an unfavorable view of NATO.

"The problem is that NATO has no mechanism to kick out a member," Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday.

"Countries have withdrawn before, of course, but once NATO allows a country in, i's stuck with it,"; he said. "No one expected that any NATO member would change direction so radically."

"Even if [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan swore allegiance to al-Qaida tomorrow; NATO wouldn't have any mechanism to expel him short of dissolving the alliance entirely,"said Rubin.

Since the Turkish people gave Erdogan and his Islamist AK Party a first-round victory in the presidential election in August, he has increasingly become dictatorial, clamping down on the press and the Internet, and weeding out his opponents in the police, military and the prosecutor's office.

As Erdogan has consolidated power at home, he has had a freer hand to act abroad.

Ankara has been reluctant to play a frontline role in the US-led military coalition. US officials have said Turkey's open border policy with Syria helped allow radical groups to grow there.

Libya has descended into chaos three years after the toppling of strongman Muammar Gaddafi, with warring factions battling for control and the capital Tripoli currently run by an alternative government partly backed by Islamist groups.

Turkey's appointment last month of a special representative to Libya, who became the first envoy publicly to meet with the internationally unrecognized authorities in Tripoli, is part of Ankara's efforts to promote UN-backed peace negotiations, according to senior Turkish officials.

Unless NATO comes up with a mechanism to expel or suspend members, the whole alliance could be at risk, said Rubin. It could go the way of CENTO, the Central Treaty Organization, which also counted Turkey as a member, but couldn't survive the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran.

"NATO governance by consensus was one of those things that looked good on paper but doesn't work well in reality," asserted Rubin. "It is the Trojan Horse all over again. Turkey can do far more harm from the inside than outside, but NATO is too paralyzed to do much about it."

And the release on Thursday of 12 Turkish nationalists detained after an attack on US sailors in Istanbul can only increase tensions. The men could still face charges for causing insult and injury.

They assaulted three sailors on a crowded street in Istanbul on Wednesday, shouting "Yankee go home", throwing paint and trying to pull hoods over the Americans' heads.

The group, members of the Turkish Youth Union (TGB), were told they faced possible charges of insult, injury and breaching laws on public protests in an Istanbul court before being released by the prosecutor, the Dogan News Agency (DHA) said.

The Pentagon said shore leave had been canceled for servicemen from the US Navy guided-missile destroyer, the USS Ross, which was expected to leave Istanbul on Thursday.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry condemned the attack, branding it disrespectful and "impossible to view with tolerance."

"Turkey's population has displayed for many years anti-American feelings. The US will downplay the recent incident in Istanbul," Prof. Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, told the Post.

"The US actually mulls changing strategy in Syria; going after [President] Bashar Assad to please the Turks and enlist their support against Islamic State," he said. "Obama's Washington still sees Turkey as an indispensable ally."

Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish columnist for Hurriyet and a regular contributor to The International New York Times, told the Post on Thursday that "although most Islamists in Turkey dislike the US, these aggressors were not Islamists, but secular nationalists."

Those that attacked the US sailors represent "a strident synthesis of Kemalism, the ideology of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and "anti-imperialist" leftism, which has its roots in the upsurge of Turkish Marxism in the 60s, explained Akyol.

"In their mind, they were taking the revenge of the "hood incident" of 2003, when some Turkish soldiers in Iraq were arrested by US soldiers," he said.


http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Is-Turkey-heading-for-a-train-wreck-with-the-West-381802

Will Turkey Be Expelled From NATO?
Suggestions that Ankara is endangering its membership in the Western alliance ring hollow.
July 27, 2016

Many analysts believe Turkey and NATO are on a collision course. One end of their argument hinges on the belief — apparently shared to an extent by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish government — that the United States and NATO played a role in the unsuccessful coup attempt July 15.

Minister of Justice Bekir Bozdag, who heads for Washington soon to try to negotiate the extradition of Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Turkish cleric accused of masterminding the coup, has laid Turkey's position on the line.

"The US knows Fethullah Gulen carried out this coup. Mr. Obama knows this just as he knows his own name. I am convinced that American intelligence knows it, too. I am convinced the State Department knows it. … Other countries know it, too, because every country has an intelligence agency," Bozdag insisted during a TV interview.

Bozdag's remarks, which imply that Washington and NATO knew what was coming and did nothing, are being echoed by the pro-Erdogan Islamist media in Turkey, which is essentially anti-Western and sees NATO as the enemy of Islam.

Remarks such as those by Bozdag are eliciting equally harsh responses from the West. Gregory Copley, a strategic analyst, appears to have no doubt that "Turkey has now formally declared the US (and therefore NATO) as its enemy" and is exhorting the alliance to act accordingly.

The other end of the argument regarding a collision in the making between Turkey and NATO hinges on the belief that Erdogan is using the failed coup attempt to initiate a massive purge against his opponents in order to further strengthen his hold on power. It is being suggested that an undemocratic Turkey has no place in an alliance based on democratic principles.

US Secretary of State John Kerry encouraged this view when he appeared to hint that Turkey could not remain in NATO if it strayed from democracy and the rule of law as it seeks those behind the failed coup attempt.

"NATO also has a requirement with respect to democracy," Kerry told reporters in response to a question on Turkey during a press conference in Brussels with Federica Mogherini, the EU's foreign policy chief.

He added that "the level of vigilance and scrutiny" with regard to developments in Turkey would be very significant in the days ahead.

If Kerry's remarks are meant to sound a warning, they are falling on deaf ears in Turkey where a campaign against Turkey's NATO membership is also gaining steam. Former senior officers from the military, like retired Rear Adm. Cem Gurdeniz, are among those questioning this membership.

In an interview with daily Hurriyet, Gurdeniz said there had always been a struggle between "Atlanticists" and the "Eurasia camp" in the military. He said if the coup was successful, Turkey would have become part of "Atlanticist" plans to its detriment.

"The losses incurred would have included the declaration of an independent Kurdistan, autonomy [for Kurds] in southeastern Anatolia and the loss of Cyprus," he said. Gurdeniz said Turkey "should play a balancing role between the Atlantic and Eurasia," arguing that it was patently clear NATO did not serve Turkey's interests anymore.

He went on to question whether NATO's advanced radar systems in Kurecik, in eastern Turkey, deployed under its Ballistic Missile Defense program, was in Turkey's interests. He also asked why NATO was keen to conduct military exercises in the Black Sea and was pressurizing Turkey for a permanent presence there, pointing out that this was something NATO never did during the Cold War.


Gurdeniz's remarks point to the kind of confusion reigning in Ankara with regard to NATO, because it was Erdogan, during the recent NATO summit in Warsaw, who called on the alliance to bolster its presence in the Black Sea to prevent this sea from becoming "a Russian lake."

Turkey being a country of bitter ironies, Gurdeniz — a staunch Kemalist secularist — was among those arrested under the so-called Balyoz (Sledgehammer) case, while still serving in the military, and was convicted to 18 years in prison in 2013 for allegedly plotting to overthrow the government led by Erdogan.

He was released after Erdogan and his onetime Islamist ally Gulen became enemies. Gurdeniz accused Gulen supporters in the judiciary, who are now being rounded up as coup plotters, for his own incarceration as a coup plotter.

Whatever is being written or said on either side of the fence today, the truth is that Ankara's NATO membership was never threatened following successful coups in Turkey in the past, when the Cold War was raging, and NATO could not endanger the strategic advantages Turkey provided against the Soviet Union.

Turkey's place on the map remains equally important today for NATO, if not more so. Retired Ambassador Unal Unsal, a former Turkish permanent representative to NATO, believes it would be difficult for the alliance to turn its back on Turkey at a time when the Middle East and the Black Sea region is in turmoil, when there is the possibility of a Trump presidency and when the EU is struggling with its Brexit debacle.

"The going in Turkey may not be good, but a Turkey out of NATO would cause more complications, especially if Ankara slides toward Russia," Unsal told Al Monitor.

Acknowledging that the NATO charter has conditions regarding democracy in member states, Unsal nevertheless pointed out that this had not prevented Portugal from becoming a founding member of the alliance in 1949, even though it was being ruled by authoritarian Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

Unsal indicated that what is being said today about NATO membership in conjunction with democracy and rule of law in Turkey has to be said for the sake of appearance. He added that expelling a country from the alliance would require consensus in the Atlantic Council, which would be difficult to secure under current circumstances.

Unsal did not discount the possibility, however, that Erdogan, in one of his many huffs, may decide to pull Turkey out of NATO, and suggested that the consequences of this might not be as dire for Turkey as it appears at first glance.

"Maintaining Turkey's strategic ties with the US is what will ultimately remain crucial for Ankara, rather than its ties with NATO, and everyone knows that the US means NATO," Unsal said.

Copley, who claims Ankara has declared the United States and NATO its enemy, nevertheless ended his analysis for Oilprice.com by underlining the alliances dilemma regarding Turkey.

"No one in NATO or the senior member states has actually done the calculation as to how to structure global and regional strategies without Turkey, or how to remove Turkish officers from NATO facilities — how to manage the region without Turkey," he wrote.

The West does not appear to be well-poised currently to do this "calculation," which makes the suggestions that Turkey be expelled from NATO ring hollow, given what is transpiring in the world.

http://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-07-27/will-turkey-be-expelled-from-nato

 

[Harmonica]

Byzantines were a rising power when the sacking happened and it was not just the sacking but 60 years of latin rule before the Byzantines recovered Constantinople.

Empire's current power status is measured in relation to its peak and going by that rule, Byzantine's glory days were over long before the Crusaders sacked their capital.

 

[Bong hits]

Turkey is Nato though, they have the most troops pledged to it and are our greatest allies in the region.

 

[Bong hits]

Get rid of NATO altogether

This is the dumbest post in this thread, its as if you have no idea why nato was created in the first place.

 

[Lonesome Crow]

Isn't it pretty hard to toss a country out of NATO? I seem to remember someone pointing out that it would be easier to dissolve NATO and then reform it without a given country than it would be to expel that country out of NATO.

 

[punky brewster]

This is the dumbest post in this thread, its as if you have no idea why nato was created in the first place.

I know exactly what NATO was created for, and if you think it still functions in any capacity resembling its intended purpose, you can definitely keep your "dumbest post" award.