I am willing to devote my column today to the American and European handlers of the opposition in Türkiye so that they wouldn’t continue disgracing themselves in the forthcoming runoff presidential.
Ignoring your ignorance does not make it go away; that is what happened to the U.S. and the European Union regarding their ignorance of Türkiye.
As they say in the halls of justice all over the world, “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” if you are in the business of international politics you need to know about the global community well. Once again, American and European governments have fallen flat on their faces and they have been reduced to the spokesperson’s, “We will continue to work with the Turkish government” remarks, because they operate in their own echo chambers.
Needless to say, the administration of Joe Biden, bureaucrats in Brussels, and those people green as gooseberries in Bonn, London and Rome will continue to work with the winner of elections in Türkiye. They will have to work with whomever the Turkish people deem worthy of power. As a matter of fact, that is not the point. The point is, the Biden team tried to design the Turkish government in a way they wished to work with, and their puppets in some European capitals shamelessly expressed their support of the U.S. scheme.
As has been the case for the last two decades, the U.S. and EU will continue to work with the Erdoğan administration because the Turkish people are going to elect so next Sunday. It is not going to be the artificial alliance Joe Biden’s security and diplomatic team created in his infamous basement before he was even the Democratic candidate. Those people were Bush diplomats and national security people Biden resuscitated and cooped up in his basement. They were the neo-cons embracing the old and new globalist projects.
They didn’t have any original ideas to offer to Biden; so, they contented themselves to the age-old “redesign the Middle East” project with a new sugarcoat: If we help the Kurds create their own country by carving up territory from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Türkiye, we’ll have a secular shield for Israel. That would be a perfect sell point countering former U.S. President Donald Trump’s all-out pro-Israel stance, telling U.S. supporters, “Look, we are as good as Trump when it comes to protecting Israel.”
As far as Türkiye is concerned, the Democratic candidate had a few choices.
“Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time with (President Erdoğan). He is an autocrat,” Biden told New York Times in late 2019.
“What I think we should be doing is taking a very different approach to him now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership. Making it clear that we are in a position where we have a way which was working for a while to integrate the Kurdish population who wanted to participate in the process in their Parliament,” he added.
“We can support those elements of the Turkish leadership that still exist and get more from them and embolden them to be able to take on and defeat Erdogan. Not by a coup, not by a coup, but by the electoral process. The last thing I would have done is to yield to him with regards to the Kurds,” Biden concluded.
There were problems with Biden’s remarks to the New York Times. Firstly, Kurds had become a better integral part of the political process thanks to Erdoğan’s social, economic and political reforms, and secondly, the opposition leadership was not in any position to defeat Erdoğan.
“Those elements of the Turkish leadership” Biden mentioned comprised of six antithetical political entities contradicting each other. The more Biden and his partners tried to “embolden them,” the more incompatible they became.
With the help of hindsight, we now have the results of the first round of the presidential elections last week, and we clearly see that the total vote count of the table of six was 5% less than the votes Erdoğan garnered all by himself; and that’s not including the votes cast in favor of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), which entered the elections under the lists of the Green Left Party (YSP) over fears of closure due to its alleged ties to the terrorist group PKK. The party entered the elections as the de facto seventh component of the coalition.
The Biden team apparently had no in-depth information about the opposition groups in Türkiye; neither had the opposition parties themselves. You cannot get to know Turkish people by simply cosplaying their master on social media channels; you have to be sincerely willing to get acquainted with them.
We can easily assume that the opposition candidate Mr. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu had been cued from overseas to volley Russia claiming that they were intervening in the Turkish elections. Even the FBI lacked any actual evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, but Mr. Kılıçdaroğlu made the audacious attack on the Russians, only to be rebuffed by Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for Russian President Vladimir Putin. His under-the-table deals with the HDP/YSP were so apparent that these parties’ demands for constitutional amendments to create a federation instead of a unitary homeland in Türkiye, bounced back to bite Kılıçdaroğlu. Perhaps Kılıçdaroğlu took his cheerleader about their participation in the political process at the White House too seriously.
In conclusion, your man in Ankara is going to lose this round of elections, again. But we, the people, are starting to find your ignorance of Türkiye a little annoying, after 70 years of a so-called alliance. You should have started getting to know the Turkish people when you had so much time. If Johnny Depp says that he has “no further need for Hollywood,” Hollywood couldn’t care less. But if the Turkish people say they reject closer ties to the U.S., NATO and EU, they all should put their thinking caps on; if they even have one in the attic because they don’t seem using it lately.
Why is that so? Because they did not do any proper analysis on the situation in Ukraine. They never did it about Hungary. They just sat idly and watched when China mediated the tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
All in all, we have to admit that the lack of leadership on the international stage, plus Biden’s deficit in charisma, are seemingly creating an insurmountable obstacle in our so-called alliance.
