Erdoğan

Blood-curdling proposals for the persecution of Muslims played a central role in Trump’s election campaign. At one moment, he promised to stop all Muslims from entering the US, though this was later changed to “extreme vetting”. The use of torture by water-boarding was approved and applauded, and Hillary Clinton was pilloried for not speaking of “radical Islamic terrorism”.

With relations with Europe rapidly deteriorating, Turkey is threatening to send upwards of 3,000 refugees per day to Greece in what intelligence officials in Greece described as “blackmail” against the European Union. According to details uncovered by Greek intelligence officials and published in The Times (of London), thousands of dinghies and motorboats

This sudden, unplanned visit led some to wonder if there was a rupture between Ankara’s strategic thinking on Iraq and Syria and the United States’ goals in the region. This article will attempt to analyze the factors that prompted the Dunford visit and scenarios of what Ankara may have in mind.

The same forces which "predicted" and encouraged the July coup in Turkey are again in action. Michael Rubin, a neoconservative activist, connected in the past with Turkish Kemalists, has posted an article in the website of the ultra-hawkish American Enterprise Institute titles "Is a new coup in the cards in Turkey". Rubin's "prophecies" may not ne just "prophecies". They constitute also an indirect, still clear threat. Rubin and the AEI are anything but innocent observers. The same author has already written about the possibility of a coup in Turkey in March 2016, encouraging the Turkish army to go on with it.

Like the Russian president, Mr. Erdogan did not shrink from challenging the existing status-quo, claiming for Ankara the status of leader of the Muslim world. From the point of view of the Western elite, both of these politicians have signed their own death warrants with such declarations.

In January 2016, 2,218 scholars from Turkey signed a petition titled “We will not be a party to this crime,” also known as the Peace Petition. Since then the signatories (“Academics for Peace”) have been subject to heavy pressure and persecution. Hundreds of them have faced criminal and disciplinary investigations, custody, imprisonment, or violent threats. Several

Since Turkey launched its invasion of Syria on August 24, mobilizing Syrian Sunni militia funded, armed and trained by the CIA, it has increasingly directed its firepower not against ISIS, but rather against the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Pentagon-backed formation dominated by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG).

So many would like this to happen – to see Turkey go, to leave NATO, to break its psychological, political and economic dependency on the West. Now that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his allies are quarreling with the United States and the EU, there is suddenly great hope that Turkey may thoroughly re-think its position in the world, strengthen its ties

As the heat of the trauma has slowly started to cool down, an analysis of the bigger picture concerning the failed coup attempt of July 15 in Turkey is becoming possible. It is possible to analyze the situation, seemingly unprecedented in the history of coups d’état both on a global and national scale, with reference to three key factors. They are the following:

They were afraid of Greece, under the enormous pressure of its “partners”, turning to Moscow for assistance. They spend an enormous energy to achieve that, especially by controlling, trapping and manipulating the SYRIZA leadership. They achieved it. Only to see the leader of one of the most important NATO member-states search for help in Russia, some weeks only after the failed coup in his country. Now some are even afraid of “Turexit” (from NATO this time).