One of the great challenges the next US president will face is how to manage the decline of Turkey. The Turks under Recep Erdoğan are an unreliable partner and becoming a source of instability in Europe. The great neo-conservative dream of having NATO extend to every country on earth except Russia will not come to pass. Instead, it will either go away entirely or become something else, something that does not include Turkey.
The news that the Germans will prosecute a comic for making sport of Erdoğan, has all focused on Merkel, but that’s not the real story. This is all about Erdoğan and internal Turkish politics at a time when he is not very popular and the Turks face some very serious threats to their south and east. Pushing around Merkel is mostly about Erdoğan looking tough and important. In his part of the world, that is still how the game is played.
The immediate issues are the geopolitical problems the Turks face. Syria has collapsed, sending refugees into Turkey. This further destabilizes the Kurdish regions, which is exactly what the Turks do not want. Kurdish nationalism is probably the thing they fear more than anything. With neighboring Iraq a host for ISIS, their southern border is essentially a state of nature populated by homicidal lunatics with military gear they got from America.
They used to have influence in Syria and Iraq, but that’s no longer the case. Instead, Iran is fast becoming the regional hegemon. The Turks know their history and they understand that the Persians have always been the dominant player in Mesopotamia. The Iranians are not going to be happy just controlling the Gulf. They are not involved in Syria and Iraq as a hobby. The Mullahs of Iran imagine themselves as the heirs of Cyrus the Great, without the philo-semitism.
All of this is why Erdoğan is working the Europeans so hard. First he turns on the migrant spigot and then he makes Merkel grovel to have it shut off. This latest stunt is entirely for domestic consumption. This makes Erdoğan look tough to his people, which makes it easier for him to deal with the problems to his south. The game here is to extract as much from the Europeans as possible so he can be as aggressive as he needs to be with the problems to the south.
The problem for the Turks is they can’t make all of this work. The deal they made with Merkel included a provision for Turkish citizens to travel in Europe without a visa. Every young Turk with anything on the ball will find work in Europe. At the same time, those Syrian migrants are going to keep coming and those Kurds are going to keep breeding and dreaming of the day they have their own country. Turkey has the European disease and the Muslim disease. That’s going to be lethal.
That bit about the Kurds is something the West does not fully grasp. The demographics of Turkey present a very serious long-term threat to the stability of the country and the dominance of the Turks. Turkish TFR is at 1.5, while Kurdish TFR is 4.5. The math says Kurds will outnumber Turks in 20 years. Erdoğan does not talk about this all the time because he is bored. The Turks, unlike the Europeans, understand that the future belongs to those who show up.
It’s hard to know, but the noises coming from Erdoğan suggest he thinks he can solve his European disease by embracing his Muslim problem. The ruling party gets its support from the more rural parts of the country, which is the very Muslim part of the country. Turkey becoming more Islamic means becoming more hostile to the West. History shows these things have a way of spiraling out of control quickly.
Then there is the elephant in the room. NATO is a legacy organization without a reason to exist. The Soviets are no more and there is no threat of the Red Army roaring into Germany. Whether the treaty is scrapped or redrafted, the next president is most likely going to preside over a radical redrawing of America’s military commitments to Europe. There’s a pretty good shot that part of it will include dropping Turkey from the deal.
The irony here is that we have the expression “Sick Man of Europe” because of the Russians. Tsar Nicholas I said of the Ottoman Empire “We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill, it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.” If the West has not thought about this with modern Turkey, they will be thinking about soon enough.
The challenge for the next president will be in letting things play out on their own. Here’s where the lesson of Libya comes in to play. Like Quaddafi, Erdoğan may simply be a guy you do business with because he keeps a lid on the Arabs to the south. That may require bribery and a lot of looking the other way as he suppresses the Kurds, but it’s the cost of keeping millions of migrants flowing into the Balkans. What Turkey will never be is part of Europe.
Don’t forget that the Turkish military has a long and storied tradition of playing politics (wasn’t that one of Ataturk’s “reforms” — the right of the military to step in and “save” the constitution?). If the generals and Erdogan ever seriously get out of step we could see a simultaneous civil and regional war. If the fallout from Syria’s Obama-sponsored “civil war” is bad, the fallout from Turkey’s would be unimaginable. The Turks are already taking potshots at Sovi….errr, I mean, *Russian* fighter-bombers. Could get ugly real fast.
Erdogan purged out the secular top officers. I think the military is loyal to him now, not Ataturk’s tradition.
Unfortunately, Erdoğan has been purging the military officer ranks for some years. The army is no longer capable of controlling the Islamists.
I didn’t know that. Thanks.
“Turkey has the European disease and the Muslim disease. That’s going to be lethal.”
Yes but now most of Europe has the European disease and the Muslim disease. Maybe a better way to characterize Turkey and Western Europe is as a co-dependent relationship– they mutually enable each other. Co-dependency is a tough nut to crack. Worse, their mutual pathology is going to bring them closer together, not drive them further apart.
“The Turks under Recep Erdoğan are an unreliable partner and becoming a source of instability in Europe.”
Frankly you could argue that Germany is the primary source of instability in the relationship. After all, without the Turkish guest worker program, which started back in the 60s, how would the Germans be where they are today? It established the muslim foothold in Germany and gave birth to the retarded logic that importing muslim brown people leads to positive economic outcomes, and that muslims can successfully integrate into western society. The Turks were just happy to follow along, and fifty years later, the relationship naturally evolved to where it is today. It’s like the US blaming Mexico for illegal immigration. If we had just built a fucking wall, and enforced sanctions against the employment of illegals, we would never have had the problem in the first place. Instead, we did the exact opposite, and the Mexicans just followed our lead.
Turkey may not have much future in Europe but your president (PBUH) before he departs is pressing hard for Turkey to be a burden on Europe. Given that we have weak-kneed and weak-headed ‘leaders’ over here they will be bowing to Obumble’s fading wishes as soon as they can.
For me the biggest problem with Turkey (other than I do not want the UK to be part of there EU before the inevitable floodgates open to the Young Turks) as far as I can see they own a chunk of Europe on the wrong side of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. In an ideal world, seas and waters represent borders, but while the Turks have a foothold (literally) in Europe it is hard to eject them from our thinking.
US out of NATO, out of UN.
Long live the Peshmerga.
When Turkey was secular it had a chance of becoming a part of Europe. Now, as with all countries run by religious fanatics, which includes the entire Middle East except Israel, it has begun its slow (or maybe not so slow) descent into madness.
Plenty of religious fanatics in Israel, too.
Possibly, but they have no plans to invade and destroy Western Civilization.
that’s what Julius and Ethel said!
Invade and destroy? No. Subvert and destroy? Hmmmm.
No doubt, but I don’t think they’re running the country.
Jordan, Egypt, and Syria are not run by fanatics.
I take your point, the unelected leaders of all three countries are not religious fanatics in the sense that the Wahhabis are. But Islam is the state religion in Egypt and Jordan, and Syria is disintegrating. All three are police states that are constantly under threat of being taken over by Muslim Brotherhood types.
I checked the CIA World Factbook. TFR = 1.8. They also have a moderate (compared to East Asia) male/female imbalance, probably due to parents selecting a more girls to abort than boys. But as in Turkey, higher Azeri, Kurd, and Baluch birthrates may be masking much lower ethnic Iranian TFR numbers. I think that is what Spengler has been writing about.
The joke (lament?) in Tehran is that there are more prostitutes than young mothers. That’s an exaggeration, but it makes the point.
Once the revolutionary generation heads to the rest home, the whole edifice comes crashing down. It gives me some small solace that, using indicators like abortion, total fertility, and prostitution rates, I can draw a reasonable inference that the Ayatollahs have done a more thorough job of destroying their society than our own Western elites. I guess I’d have to rank it Commies, Ayatollahs, Cloud People.
I think I’ve read that opiate abuse rates are through the rook as well, Z.
they are. thanks Afghanistan!
From your lips to God’s ears.
I had no idea that the Turkish fertility rate was so low. Ouch.
The Persian TFR is 1.8. Demographics is hard so the media ignores it, but the the two “powers” in the Islamic world are on borrowed time, demographically.
I think the Persian TFR is even lower than 1.8, at least according to Spengler. There are other ethnicitys within Iran that may have a higher TFR than the Persian’s.
I glanced past this last week without the context.
https://pjmedia.com/blog/suddenly-irans-regime-demands-a-baby-boom/
You’re probably right. It’s hard to tease out the strictly Persian rate, even assuming one can properly define “Persian” in a biological sense.
Having met a bunch of rich Persians in the US, it’s almost certainly not Persians having babies in Persia.