Bulletins and News Discussion from July 15th to July 21st, 2024 - It's Joever

Complaining to NATO about how you need weapons that you plan to use against fellow NATO members is a real Turkiye moment.

Is there an older animosity than between Greece and Anatolia

Of course they want to genocide Armenia, they’ll go into withdrawal if they don’t feed their addiction at least once per decade.

Do keep in mind that Turkey was requesting those patriots many years ago. Which in today's going rate of decade per week, that's an eternity. They were similarly kicked out of the f-35 programme a long ass time ago. Yes, Greece is a threat in the sense that Greece spends way more money than it probably should laundering weapons for it's military. But that is akin to Egypt receiving as much money in 'lethal aid' as Israel. You have two countries that may have a lot of issues between them but which are, in practice, under the US Empire. So it becomes in the interests of said Empire to keep them in balance, if only to avoid discontent. So I don't think it's really about Greece.

It's also unlikely that Turkey ever peceived Armenia as much of a threat. This isn't just in hindsight. Armenia was always a small country holding onto an unrecognized enclave in Azeri territory. As far as the Turks were concerned the only threats they had to fear from Armenia was maybe if a terrorism situation cropped up in eastern Turkey. Same with Iran, a country with a defensive doctrine that is especially good at asymmetrical warfare and forming/supporting/training militia groups. Iran had and has many other fronts to deal with, one of which is Azerbaijan. Since Turkey is invested in the Azeris, this means that it is the Turks who are on the offensive in that front, not the Iranians.

Finally if either Armenia or Iran managed to create a serious militant group among the kurds or turks of eastern Turkey, the turkish state developed the actual counter insurgency weapon to deal with that. Hunter drones, another tech the americans felt the Turks shouldn't have. The Bayraktars, which sucked in Ukraine for obvious reasons, are being used for projection out of eastern turkey and into northern iraq. By all reports they are very successful there.

Counterinsurgency is not a place where you need AD. If you need air defense against the PKK that means they have a power hold and they aren't just a faction amongst many kurdish cultures and political groups. Now with the benefit of operation prosperity flop we can say, with hindsight, that if that happened the turkish state would be fucked and would need to straight up invade northern iraq. If the situation got any worse we'd see million-people pogroms from Istanbul to Van - something that people forget, the kurdish population is not confined to historical kurdistan or the current areas where they are a majority. The largest kurdish city in the world is Istanbul.

No I think the issue was Syria and Russia. Turkey was a NATO country years before the fragmentation we see today, it was meant to guard the black sea and the straights while looking north towards Russia - and for some reason it wasn't allowed to have american air defence. Even if wargames in the military tend towards paranoia and contingency planning, the fact that Turkey wasn't being fully integrated into the arms side of the alliance was in itself a very strange thing. The Turks were asking for american weapons, unwilling to develop their own alternatives, and being told no. They were being kept at arms length to the same degree as India.

What are the reasons that I think Turkey was wargaming towards Syria and Russia? Well, Syria and Turkey would trade shots by supporting different cross border kurdish factions against one another. So you have a history there. Then, once the West bolstered the Syrian Civil War the Turks went balls deep into Project Assad, mostly to dislodge the PKK and make money on the side by trading with whoever controlled the syrian oilfields.

The way the turks see it, it is in the US strategic interests to bolster turkey as this marcher state for NATO and to cooperate with turkish security concerns. The american brass was at one point inclined to agree, but Turkey has had no lobbying power so nobody in the american political class gave a shit. Quite the contrary, given that Armenia has some lobbying power (which the turks way overblow to Israeli levels) and Greece punches above it's weight in that department (which is a lobby that the turks only overblow slightly, Greece has had strong ties with american politicians for ages - they've been there since the start of the current POTUS' career).

Now everything's changed. We see a Turkey that went through a coup attempt that no doubt had CIA hands in it, the american brass went from hoping that kurdish Kobane burns against ISIS to becoming invested in the PKK as their proxy in Syria. Meanwhile the Turks are seeking BRICS+ membership, russian money and know how, chinese investment, and might even normalize with Assad as soon as they can deleverage themselves away from their own proxies in Afrin. More importantly Turkey is trying to be a moderating power in Ukraine, not really joining the project wholeheartedly. They sold, even donated some weapons to Ukraine. And they've let crazy EU plans for reconstruction to pretend that Turkey will rebuild some of Ukraine's east. But they are becoming Asia's and Russia's transit hub into Europe. Once again they are trying to play all sides to their benefit.