- (december 2022)
Turkey in 2022
Turkey is still ruled by Erdogan, the Islamist who first won elections in 2003.
Turkey is a member of NATO but under Erdogan it has its own foreign policy.
It was even sanctioned by the USA when it purchased a multibillion-dollar missile system from Russia, which is not exactly a friend of NATO.
NATO tolerates Turkey's erratic behavior because it is mostly directed against Russia.
Turkey supported Azerbaijan while Russia supported Armenia in the brief border conflict won by Azerbaijan; in the
Libyan civil war Turkey supports the Tripoli-based government while Russia supports the rebel general Khalifa Haftar; in Syria it supports the opposition to dictator Assad who is supported by Russia; and
Turkey has supplied Ukraine with the Bayraktar TB2 drones that have killed scores of Russian troops.
Turkey has taken advantage of Russia's trouble and increased its influence on the Central Asian nations that belong to same Turkic group.
And so NATO is willing to ignore the fact that
Turkey is ignoring Western sanctions against Russia and is openly boasting of a boom in trade with Russia since Russia invaded Ukraine.
Turkey has also increased trade with Venezuela, another country that is not exactly a friend of the USA.
Turkey can afford to play games with the USA because it knows its strategic value: under the 1936 Montreux Convention, Turkey controls passage through the vital Turkish Straits (the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles).
Russian warships cannot leave the Black Sea without going through those straits.
And perhaps, more importantly, the Turkish military is one of the real pillars of NATO, much better trained and equipped than the armies of Germany and Italy.
Erdogan's fierce enemy is Fethullah Gulen, a cleric living in exile in the USA.
Turkey is the remnant of the Ottoman Empire, that used to rule over most of the Arab world, and Turkey's relations with the Arab world remain complicated.
Besides taking a side in the Libyan civil war, Turkey also helped Qatar during
a crisis which pitted Qatar against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Domestically, Erdogan presided over an economic boom that lasted until 2011, but then, especially after the attempted military coup of 2016, which Erdogan blames on Fethullah Gulen, Erdogan turned authoritarian and has steadily shut down independent media organizations, purged the military of anyone even remotely suspected of being disloyal, jailed thousands of dissidents and bombed the Kurds wherever they live.
Over the last few years, Turkey has entered an economic crisis with double-digit inflation, at the same time that Erdogan has turned it into an Islamofascist state.
Before Erdogan seized power, Turkey used to be a model of an Islamic nation with a secularist constitution.
See also Nations in Crisis: Turkey
TM, ®, Copyright © 2022 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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