"Escaping NATO’s Turkey Paradox"
A notable contribution by a Turkish professor teaching at the University of Athens (!)
I never knew there is a Turkish professor who’s teaching at the University of Athens! He must be a courageous and honest fellow willing to endanger his personal wellbeing as the maniacal ersatz neo-sultan Erdogan sends his rabid dogs across Europe (and beyond) to punish those refusing to acknowledge, and kowtow to, his greatness as the neo-Padishah of all Muslimdom. Teaching the giaour? Off with his head!
Prof. Cengiz Aktar, born and raised in Constantinople, is a teacher, author, and commentator of note, who apparently rejects the Erdoganist theory of Turkey, the self-declared world power, having the Allah-given right to expand in every direction via wars of conquest—with the Greek Aegean, plus Greek Cyprus, the immediate targets of the coming Mavi Vatan blitzkrieg grand offensive plan constantly thrown in the face of Greece and the EU (and, to a lesser degree, the US).
NATO has invariably failed to chastise Erdogan et.al. thanks to, primarily, American forever claims of Turkey being “too big” to poke and discipline, an attitude shared by Germany and Spain, to name just two of the EU’s reluctant “Turcophiles.”
The Ukraine war, however, is dismantling the previously cast-iron Euro-American sense of strategic preponderance vis-à-vis neo-Soviet Russia and, inevitably, interferes with the neo-sultan’s dangerous gimmicks as Ankara continues to maneuver to prove herself the (self-appointed) “trusted intermediary” between Putin and NATO.
Professor Aktar is a very brave man.
Escaping NATO’s Turkey Paradox
The more NATO closes its eyes to Ankara’s anti-NATO and anti-Western behavior in order to keep Turkey on its team, the more it jeopardizes its security.
The West’s fear of losing Turkey, a NATO partner, to Russia has led to continued Western appeasement of Ankara. But this approach will not produce the kind of Turkey that the West wants.
For example, after Turkey requested to purchase forty F-16 fighter jets and around eighty modernization kits for its existing fighter jets from the United States, the Biden administration argued that “The United States supports Turkey’s modernization of its fighter fleet because that is a contribution to NATO security and therefore American security.”
This is a fallacy. Such an approach has led the West to tolerate and support Ankara’s bellicose rhetoric and actions which are actually against U.S. interests. The list of such incidents has grown long.
A powerful case is in connection with Ankara’s association with ISIS. On July 12, 2022, U.S. forces eliminated Maher al-Agal, ISIS’ leader in Syria, together with one close aide. The operation took place in Jindires, a Syrian town located in Afrin province, which Turkey has occupied since 2018. Al-Agal was obviously working from there.
Similarly, back in February, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, branded as the second-caliph of ISIS, blew himself up when his house in Turkish-occupied Idlib Governorate was surrounded by the forces of the anti-ISIS coalition. On the same day that al-Qurashi died, UN-listed ISIS leader Amir Muhammad Sa’id Abdal-Rahman al-Salbi was killed in a counterterrorist operation led by the United States in Atmah, Syria, another town within Idlib Governorate near the Turkish border.
The professor has stated his case perfectly. I have been saying this since 2010. My U.S. Army War College thesis was essentially the same as this article, minus the recent events.