There's plenty more in the discussion (podcast) but from the John Batchelor Show schedule page what follows are excerpts from a report at Gregory Copley's Defense & Foreign Affairs journal on what's happening right now and projected to happen in Turkey -- and Turkey's relationship with NATO.
The best news for me from Gregory's discussion (not mentioned in the excerpts) is that Erdogan's survival-oriented volte face with Russia bodes well for the Syrian government to wrap up the worst of the war in fairly short order.
The reasoning is that Russia will persuade Erdogan to pull support from terrorist groups in Syria that he's been helping. This would actually work out for Turkey given that Erdogan's highly profitable oil trade with Islamic State in Syria has been wrecked by relentless Russian and Syrian bombings of the oil delivery convoys. And he's buying nothing but trouble in Syria since.
As Gregory points out Turkey's exit from the fray in Syria wouldn't stop the Saudi and Qatar regimes from supporting the anti-Assad forces. But while he didn't discuss this I think there are pressures building on both regimes from the White House -- which is itself under increasing political pressure at home to show 'progress' in Syria. If I read the tea leaves correctly there is a schism opening between U.S. factions that want to continue using terrorist forces in Syria and those who argue the strategy has been self-defeating.
We'll see how things shake out. Meanwhile I'll continue throwing bricks on this blog at the Obama administration using terrorist/salafist groups as 'assets,' a practice which by the way extends to the conflict in Yemen. More on that last later.
Hour Four - John Batchelor Show
Friday 22 July 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs, in re: What are some 'takeaways' from what has happened?
1. Turkey has now formally declared the US (and therefore NATO) as its enemy. Pres. Erdoğan has blamed the US Government for the coup attempt — which many inside Turkey and the Middle East will believe, given the US recent history of advocating “regime change” — and he did so in a way which offers little chance of revision, also publicly crediting Russian Spetsnaz troops with saving his life during the putsch. [How did they get to Marmaris to do this?]
As a bonus to Russia, he also said that the shooting down of the Russian Air Force Su-24 strike aircraft over Syria in November 2015 was done by “CIA pilots”. The Russians know how it happened (Turkish F-16s engaged the Su-24), but listen patiently to the Erdoğan's “big lies”.
2. If logic prevails, the US and other NATO states will have to remove their military and intelligence assets from Turkey or risk them being even more compromised than they have become over the past few years. NATO will have to suspend Turkey from membership, something it has no mechanism, effectively, to do. Instead, as with the EU, it keeps waiting for Turkey to “‘fess up”, say “you got me, copper”, and resign from NATO. Why should Erdoğan do that? He will stay in NATO and the EU negotiations as long as he can extract economic and political benefit, even as he — for his own ideological reasons — undermines those institutions.
And no-one has the nerve in NATO states (particularly during a US Presidential election year and a meltdown in the EU) to initiate “Turkex” (Turkish exit) procedures. And 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. These were things which should have been considered, and the warnings of this journal for many years should have been heeded. (1 of 2)
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2. If logic prevails, the US and other NATO states will have to remove their military and intelligence assets from Turkey or risk them being even more compromised than they have become over the past few years. NATO will have to suspend Turkey from membership, something it has no mechanism, effectively, to do. Instead, as with the EU, it keeps waiting for Turkey to “‘fess up”, say “you got me, copper”, and resign from NATO. Why should Erdoğan do that? He will stay in NATO and the EU negotiations as long as he can extract economic and political benefit, even as he — for his own ideological reasons — undermines those institutions.
And no-one has the nerve in NATO states (particularly during a US Presidential election year and a meltdown in the EU) to initiate “Turkex” (Turkish exit) procedures. And 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. These were things which should have been considered, and the warnings of this journal for many years should have been heeded. (1 of 2)
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