Haretina
@HaretinaK • 2,325 subscribers
I write about geopolitics and finance (Realpolitik). Business Negotiator • Ex security specialist • 5 languages https://t.co/AeaknsYSYY
Videos
NATO went to Ankara this week, and the photograph of the Secretary General holding Erdoğan’s hand is being read as an embarrassment. Read it as a receipt instead, because that is what it is. Start with the location, because the location was the first concession, granted before anyone sat down. Alliances show you their internal hierarchy through hosting rights. NATO convened in the capital of the member that bought Russian missiles, got expelled from the F-35 for it, keeps a standing war threat against Greece on its books since 1995, and occupies a third of Cyprus into its sixth decade. It did this twelve days after the European Parliament recommended sanctions on Turkish officials, and while Turkish police were detaining two hundred protesters, lawyers and journalists, banning all public gatherings until July 10, and refusing accreditation to the country’s own independent press. Not one ally said a word. SILENCE Now the mechanism, because Erdoğan didn’t get here by charm. His leverage has three parts. Geography: the Bosphorus, the Black Sea, the southern flank, the migration valve pointed at Europe. Capability: the second-largest army in the alliance and a drone industry with real export demand. And optionality, the important one: the proven willingness to deal with Moscow, which turns every Turkish concession into something NATO must purchase rather than something it can expect. A member with no exit options has obligations. A member with exit options has prices. Erdoğa spent twenty years converting obligations into prices, and this summit was the invoice. Paid in full, on camera, hand in hand. Here’s the structural problem okay NATO has no way to discipline an indispensable member. The treaty allows withdrawal. It does not allow expulsion. Turkey has been testing the boundary of alliance tolerance for two decades and has located it precisely: there is none, as long as the geography holds. Every smaller member watched this week and learned the lesson. Good behaviour earns a communiqué. Leverage earns a summit. The rational move for everyone is now to acquire leverage, and an alliance whose members are all acquiring leverage against each other is dissolving from the inside, no enemy required. Add the American layer. The president said he came only because Erdoğan is his friend. Think about what that sentence does to every other capital in the room. It tells them the alliance runs on personal chemistry, and personal chemistry reprices at every election. Institutional commitments survive leaders. Friendships don’t. Poland, the Baltics, Finland heard it clearly: hedging is no longer disloyalty, it’s due diligence. Turkey hedged first and got rewarded first. The lesson is not lost. And the money, because the money is the part the communiqué hides. The five percent spending target sounds like resolve. Run the arithmetic. Five percent of GDP across Europe means hundreds of billions reallocated annually, by economies carrying record debt, ageing populations, and energy costs America doesn’t pay. There are only three ways to fund it: more debt into markets already choking on supply, cuts to the welfare states that keep these governments alive, or joint European borrowing, which is fiscal federalism smuggled in through the defence door. The summit named the target and dodged the channel. The channel is the actual decision. Meanwhile Turkey spends thirty-three billion against America’s near-trillion, rides the alliance’s security for free, and sells drones into the very rearmament wave it underpays for, because its weapons are combat-proven and available to buyers the Western giants can’t touch. Cheapest rider in the alliance, and one of the biggest commercial winners of its panic. That is not hypocrisy. That is skill, and it deserves to be named as skill.
Haretina40,498 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Turkey wants a better position .Here is the record of the country asking. The Armenian genocide, denied to this day. Pontus and the Assyrians, denied too. Cyprus invaded in 1974, the northern third of an EU member still occupied fifty years later. Gas drilling inside Greek and Cypriot waters, theft renamed sovereignty. Russian S-400 systems purchased while inside NATO, the alliance built to contain Moscow buying Moscow’s air defence. Sweden and Finland held hostage at the door until the ransom cleared. A standing casus belli against Greece, a fellow member, on the books since 1995, a permanent declaration of war conditions against an ally. And the live conversation in Washington is whether to sell this country the most advanced fighter jet ever built. Genocide denier, occupier, Russian-weapons buyer inside the Western alliance, blackmailer, serial threatener of its neighbours. The proposal is to hand it air superiority over the neighbours it has already invaded once. You hand the matches to the man who keeps burning down the street, then act surprised about the smoke. Everyone in the room knows what Turkey is. The Americans know, the Germans know, the French know. Nobody says it, because Turkey sits on the Bosphorus, hosts the radars, holds the migration tap, and prices its geography with precision. So the West pays, in jets, in silence, in swallowed principles, and calls the payment diplomacy. Geography is real leverage and real leverage gets paid. But there is a difference between paying a toll and arming the toll collector who keeps announcing he might rob you. A member that acts in Moscow’s interest, occupies European soil, and erases its own crimes is a threat with a membership card. We have understood it. We have had enough of paying for the silence. Full breakdown in the video. #Turkey #NATO #F35 #Geopolitics #Greece #Cyprus #ArmenianGenocide #Erdogan #Defense #ForeignPolicy
Haretina16,812 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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