Tukey « Dr Alf's Blog

Turkey’s Revisionism in the Eastern Mediterranean (Part II)

Flag of Turkey. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This blog is well worth a read. Whilst I do not challenge the observations, it is important to qualify that Turkey’s foreign policies will have economic consequences.

I predict that multi-nationals will now increasingly start to factor in ‘political risk‘ into investment decisions in Turkey.

Also Turkey ranks 55 overall in the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business Report‘. But in terms of the following sub-sets, Turkey is even worse:

Dealing with construction permits 139

Resolving insolvency 109

Trading across borders 90

Getting credit 89

‘Higher political risk’ in Turkey will compound the difficulties of doing business in Turkey.

Of course, as ‘higher political risk’ reduces foreign investment by multi-nationals, this will feed into lower economic growth and fewer jobs for Turkey’s young people.

Thoughts?

The GW Post

By Zenonas Tziarras

Source: Today’s Zaman

Part I:Turkey in the Middle East: The Tacit Revisionist

In the previous article, it was argued that Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East “is obviously, yet tacitly, revisionist.” Specifically, examples such as the Syrian civil war were employed to highlight Turkey’s revisionist goals (i.e. regime change) and its efforts to rely on great powers (U.S. and NATO) in order to achieve them without getting too much involved.

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English: Map showing the territories of the Ottoman Empire in 1914, including nominal and vassal territories. According to the information on the map in http://ottomanmilitary.devhub.com/ (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Dr Alf makes a very good point ,and Dr Kissinger is also right in that he saw (and still sees) Turkey as strategically important.

The mistake Western leaders make, is trying to hold out for Turkey the prospect of EU membership in exchange for Turkey getting involved in Syria and other places.

Already we see that Turkey, whose Sunni Muslim population is moderate, is providing hospital treatment to ISIS fighters who supposedly want to recreate a new Caliphate.

Turkey’s leaders probably dream of recreating the Ottoman Empire, which was destroyed after the loss of much blood and treasure in World War 1.

Both Iran and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki have accused Saudi Arabia and Qatar of funding ISIS. The danger is then that left unchecked Turkey, and other countries, will then carve up, or try to carve up the Middle East, and detach from Russia the primarily Muslim countries on Russia’s southern border.

Turkey up to now, has been refused EU membership because the EU is primarily a “Christian Club”, or at worst a reconstituted “Holy Roman Empire” which Germany sees it’s job as running.

If short-sighted people, like David Cameron, were to have their way, Turkey and the Ukraine would join the EU (he has said as much in recent years). If that were to ever happen, the Turks would probably out-breed and outnumber the indigenous European populations in short order, and we would be inside of a Caliphate over which we would have no control.

Turkey needs to be assisted to become a modern industrial nation in its own right, outside of the EU and not meddling in the affairs of others; David Cameron needs to be replaced; and ISIS needs to be removed.

The oligarchies represented by Saudi Arabia and Qatar may need to be replaced with regimes which are more democratic and in accordance with Western interests; and Erdogan in Turkey needs to be encouraged to stick to his “knitting”.

Western leaders’ current misreading of the situation in that part of the world is creating chaos, which once unleashed will be hard to stop.

It is time, once again, for the US to engage in an “active” foreign policy.

John Gelmini