Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Turkey

Andrew Wachtel: Turkey’s Death Spiral…….


 

Turkey began its ‘death spiral’ the moment Kemal Ataturk breathed his last breath:

But Heyd’s own candid words, from the remarkably foresighted 1968 lecture excerpted at length, below, reveal another quality almost entirely absent from our present era’s infinitely less substantial “academic experts” on Islam: self-critical humility, and the ability to express mea culpa. Taking his own measure, Heyd confessed—in 1968,
“Until a few years ago many foreign observers, including, I admit, myself, were inclined to think that this development [Turkey’s re-Islamization] was no more than a renewed expression of sentiments which for a long time could not be freely manifested and that the overall process of secularization was going on very slowly but irresistibly. Today I doubt whether this view is still tenable.”
The fact that 42 years later, today’s far less astute “experts on Turkey and Turkish Islam, etc.” nonetheless, offer no apologies for their distressingly belated recognition of Turkey’s re-Islamization, adds insult to irony.

NOTE: All of these developments could turn into a lemons to lemonade scenario if Europe finally develops a spine, and NATO which ejects Turkey as a member state, draws a line in the sand with the Russian/Iranian/Turkish nexus. It will take decades to wear them down, but it sure beats capitulation.

Turkey’s Death Spiral

BISHKEK – The series of terrorist attacks that have struck Turkey over the last year are sending the country – once viewed as a democratic, secular model for the Middle East – into a death spiral at the very moment when its people are to vote on a new constitution next month. Tourism – which previously accounted for more than 10% of Turkey’s GDP – is withering, and foreign direct investment is set to slow considerably. These outcomes will reinforce each other, producing a vicious cycle that will be difficult to halt.

Turkey’s government-controlled media and large swaths of the population see the nefarious hand of the West in the country’s unraveling. Observers often blame Turkey’s deepening plight on its inability to reconcile traditional Islam and modernizing Western tendencies, as well as on external events, such as the conflict in Syria. But decisions by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have also contributed to Turkey’s vulnerability to terrorism.

Erdoğan’s first such decision, motivated by his desire to see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime collapse, was to allow fighters, including recruits for the Islamic State, to cross Turkey’s southern border into Syria relatively freely. He failed to recognize fully the danger these fighters posed to Turkey’s own security, particularly as many of them joined Islamist-affiliated groups that are as hostile to Turkey as they are to Assad.

Erdoğan’s second fateful decision was to re-launch the on-again, off-again civil war with Turkey’s Kurdish population. In the early years of his presidency, Erdoğan reached out to the Kurds and managed, more or less, to halt active hostilities.

But, in June 2015, Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost its parliamentary majority, prompting the president to resume open hostilities with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) rebels. Erdoğan’s gambit allowed the AKP to retake a parliamentary majority in a snap election that November, but at the cost of reopening the Pandora’s box of civil war.

[…]

Now, Turkey is becoming an economically weakened autocracy, wracked by terrorism and unable to defend itself, much less to help NATO project power. This is a dream come true for Putin. (It is also good news for Russia’s ally Iran, which can only welcome the destabilization of its main non-Arab Sunni rival in the region.) If Turkey’s downward spiral generates a new wave of refugees bound for Europe, further destabilizing the European Union, all the better.

More here

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.