The Origins of New US-Turkish Relations

this article correctly explains why President Trump was right to pull US troops out and allow Turkey to solve it's own problems by themselves. Bottom line, as i have posted here before on this subject, Turkey is by far more useful to US interests in the region and against the real threat of Russia and China and to a lessor but still important degree Iran than a bunch of feckless double dealing Kurds.



The Origins of New US-Turkish Relations

https://geopoliticalfutures.com/the-...ish-relations/


By
George Friedman -

October 14, 2019
Open as PDF


For several years, there has been a significant shift underway in U.S. strategy toward the Middle East, where Washington has consistently sought to avoid combat. The United States is now compelled to seek accommodation with Turkey, a regional power in its own right, based on terms that are geopolitically necessary for both. Their relationship has been turbulent, and while it may continue to be so for a while, it will decline. Their accommodation has nothing to do with mutual affection but rather with mutual necessity. The Turkish incursion into Syria and the U.S. response are part of this adjustment, one that has global origins and regional consequences.


Similarly, the U.S. decision to step aside as Turkey undertook an incursion in northeastern Syria has a geopolitical and strategic origin. The strategic origin is a clash between elements of the Defense Department and the president. The defense community has been shaped by a war that has been underway since 2001. During what is called the Long War, the U.S. has created an alliance structure of various national and subnational groups. Yet the region is still on uneven footing. The Iranians have extended a sphere of influence westward. Iraq is in chaos. The Yemeni civil war still rages, and the original Syrian war has ended, in a very Middle Eastern fashion, indecisively.


A generation of military and defense thinkers have matured fighting wars in the Middle East. The Long War has been their career. Several generations spent their careers expecting Soviet tanks to surge into the Fulda Gap. Cold Warriors believed a world without the Cold War was unthinkable. The same can be said for those shaped by Middle Eastern wars. For the Cold War generation, the NATO alliance was the foundation of their thinking. So too for the Sandbox generation, those whose careers were spent rotating into Iraq or Afghanistan or some other place, the alliances formed and the enemies fought seemed eternal. The idea that the world had moved on, and that Fulda and NATO were less important, was emotionally inconceivable. Any shift in focus and alliance structure was seen as a betrayal.


After the Cold War ended, George H.W. Bush made the decision to stand down the 24-hour B-52 air deployments in the north that were waiting for a Soviet attack. The reality had changed, and Bush made the decision a year after the Eastern European collapse began. He made it early on Sept. 21, 1991, after the Wall came down but before the Soviet Union collapsed. It was a controversial decision. I knew some serious people who thought that we should be open to the possibility that the collapse in Eastern Europe was merely a cover for a Soviet attack and were extremely agitated over the B-52 stand-down.


It is difficult to accept that an era has passed into history. Those who were shaped by that era, cling, through a combination of alarm and nostalgia, to the things that reverberate through their minds. Some (though not Europeans) spoke of a betrayal of Europe, and others deeply regretted that the weapons they had worked so hard to perfect and the strategy and tactics that had emerged over decades would never be tried.


The same has happened in different ways in the Middle East. The almost 20-year deployment has forged patterns of behavior, expectations and obligations not only among individuals but more institutionally throughout the armed forces. But the mission has changed. For now, the Islamic State is vastly diminished, as is al-Qaida. The Sunni rising in Iraq has ended, and even the Syrian civil war is not what it once was. A war against Iran has not begun, may not happen at all, and would not resemble the wars that have been fought in the region hitherto.


This inevitably generates a strategic re-evaluation, which begins by accepting that the prior era is gone. It was wrenching to shift from World War II to the Cold War and from the Cold War to a world that many believed had transcended war, and then to discover that war was suspended and has now resumed. War and strategy pretend to be coolly disengaged, but they are passionate undertakings that don’t readily take to fundamental change. But after the 18 years of war, two things have become clear. The first is that the modest objective of disrupting terrorism has been achieved, and the second is that the ultimate goal of creating something approaching liberal democracies was never really possible.


Consistency

The world has changed greatly since 2001. China has emerged as a major power, and Russia has become more active. Iran, not Sunni jihadists, has become the main challenge in the Middle East and the structure of alliances needed to deal with this has changed radically since Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom. In addition, the alliances have changed in terms of capability. The massive deployments in the Middle East have ended, but some troops remain there, and to a section of the American military, the jihadist war remains at the center of their thinking. To them, the alliances created over the past 18 years remain as critical as Belgium’s air force had been during the Cold War.


There is another, increasingly powerful faction in the United States that sees the Middle East as a secondary interest. In many instances, they include Iran in this. This faction sees China or Russia (or both) as the fundamental challenger to the U.S. Its members see the Middle East as a pointless diversion and a drain of American resources.


For them, bringing the conflict to a conclusion was critical. Those who made their careers in this war and in its alliances were appalled. The view of President Donald Trump has been consistent. In general, he thought that the use of military force anywhere must be the exception rather than the rule. He declined to begin combat in North Korea. He did not attack Iran after it shot down an American drone or after it seized oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. After the attack on the Saudi oil facility, he increased Saudi air defenses but refused offensive actions against the Iranians.


Given the shift in American strategy, three missions emerge. The first is the containment of China. The second is the containment of Russia. The third is the containment of Iran. In the case of China, the alliance structure required by the United States is primarily the archipelago stretching from Japan to Indonesia and Singapore – and including South Korea. In dealing with Russia, there are two interests. One is the North European Plain; the other is the Black Sea. Poland is the American ally in the north, Romania in the south. But the inclusion of Turkey in this framework would strengthen the anti-Russia framework. In addition, it would provide a significant counter to Iranian expansion.


Turkey’s importance is clear. It is courted by both Russia and Iran. Turkey is not the country it was a decade ago. Its economy surged and then went into crisis. It has passed through an attempted coup, and internal stress has been massive. But such crises are common in emerging powers. The U.S. had a civil war in the 1860s but by 1900 was producing half of the manufactured goods in the world while boasting a navy second only to the British. Internal crises do not necessarily mean national decline. They can mean strategic emergence.


Turkey’s alignment with Iran and Russia is always tense. Iran and Russia have at various times waged war with Turkey and have consistently seen Iraq as a threat. For the moment, both have other interests and Turkey is prepared to work with them. But Turkey is well aware of history. It is also aware that the U.S. guaranteed Turkish sovereignty in the face of Soviet threats in the Cold War, and that the U.S., unlike Russia and Iran, has no territorial ambitions or needs in Turkey. Already allied through NATO and historical bilateral ties, a relationship with Turkey is in the American interest because it creates a structure that threatens Iran’s line to the Mediterranean and compliments the Romanian-U.S. Black Sea alliance. The U.S. and Turkey are also hostile to the Syrian government. For Turkey, in the long term, Russia and Iran are unpredictable, and they can threaten Turkey when they work together. The American interest in an independent Turkey that blocks Russia and Iran coincides with long-term Turkish interests.


Enter the Kurds

This is where the Kurds come into the equation. Eastern Turkey is Kurdish, and maintaining stability there is a geopolitical imperative for Ankara. Elements of Turkey’s Kurds, grouped around the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, have carried out militant attacks. Therefore it is in Turkey’s interest to clear its immediate frontiers from a Kurdish threat. The United States has no overriding interest in doing so and, indeed, has worked together with the Kurds in Iraq and Syria. But for the Turks, having Kurds on their border is an unpredictable threat. American dependency on the Kurds declines as U.S. involvement in the Middle East declines. Turkey becomes much more important to the United States in relation to Iran than the Kurds.


Trump clearly feels that the wars in the Middle East must be wound down and that a relationship with Turkey is critical. The faction that is still focused on the Middle East sees this as a fundamental betrayal of the Kurds. Foreign policy is a ruthless and unsentimental process. The Kurds want to establish a Kurdish nation. The U.S. can’t and doesn’t back that. On occasion, the U.S. will join in a mutually advantageous alliance with the Kurds to achieve certain common goals. But feelings aside, the U.S. has geopolitical interests that sometimes include the Kurds and sometimes don’t – and the same can be said of the Kurds.


At the moment, the issue is not al-Qaida but China and Russia, and Turkey is critical to the U.S. for Russia. The U.S. is critical for Turkey as well, but it cannot simply fall into American arms. It has grown too powerful in the region for that, and it has time to do it right. So Trump’s actions on the Syrian border will result in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s visit to Washington and, in due course, a realignment in the region between the global power and the regional power.


George Friedman



George Friedman is an internationally recognized geopolitical forecaster and strategist on international affairs and the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures. Dr. Friedman is a New York Times bestselling author and his most popular book, The Next 100 Years, is kept alive by the prescience of its predictions. Other best-selling books include Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, The Next Decade, America’s Secret War, The Future of War and The Intelligence Edge. His books have been translated into more than 20 languages. Dr. Friedman has briefed numerous military and government organizations in the United States and overseas and appears regularly as an expert on international affairs, foreign policy and intelligence in major media. For almost 20 years before resigning in May 2015, Dr. Friedman was CEO and then chairman of Stratfor, a company he founded in 1996. Friedman received his bachelor’s degree from the City College of the City University of New York and holds a doctorate in government from Cornell University.

Turkey's importance has always been clear. Critical location at the juncture of several trade routes in the past. And a critical location nowadays at the juncture of Middle East, Asia (Russia), and Europe.
In the past:
Older times:
Mongolian conquest
Roman conquests
Greek conquests
Egyptian conquests
Etc.
Then, include the Ottoman Empire wars, perhaps 16+/- from the early 1300s to mid 1400s
Then, over 2 dozen from the mid 1400s to early 1600s
Then another dozen through the 1600s
And another dozen through the 1700s
Of course lets not think about about 3 dozen in the 1800s and up to WW1.

Consider yourself lucky I didn't start listing famous warriors that were involved in various wars there.
That would be a couple pages long.

My point? If any country knows war, Turkey can teach it.

Countries are now asking is it better to be a friend or foe of the US.

You do not screw your allies.

Countries are now asking is it better to be a friend or foe of the US.

You do not screw your allies. Originally Posted by Last Ride

we didn't. Turkey is our ally and a NATO member. how is not interfering with an ally going to sow mistrust among our other allies? in fact, it shows the US supports our allies.


but do our allies support the US?

you didn't even read the article, you simply posted an uninformed rant.


your Trump hatred and bias is confusing you, valued poster!

Countries are now asking is it better to be a friend or foe of the US.

You do not screw your allies. Originally Posted by Last Ride

Quit listening to the clowns at CNN and NBC.

EU countries agree to halt arms exports to Turkey

Countries in the European Union on Monday agreed to halt the exportation of arms to Turkey after the country launched its recent offensive into Syria.

(The Hill)

at what point relations with turkey will have to change in such way that they get kicked out of NATO?

there a limit on things U.S. can ignore.

purchase of Russia's missile sam system doesn't quite do it.
Oppression of Kurds doesn't do it.
genocide of Armenians doesn't do it.
support and funding of ISIS doesn't do it.
Invading Syrian territory doesn't do it.
Invasion of North Cyprus doesn't do it.

Turkey has an odd way of showing its usefulness as an ally. they refused to let Bush 41 use Incirlik turkish air base in gulf war II. In gulf war III under Bush 43, they did under a lot of pressure (they didn't want to at first).

what will?

Turkey's importance has always been clear. Critical location at the juncture of several trade routes in the past. And a critical location nowadays at the juncture of Middle East, Asia (Russia), and Europe.
In the past:
Older times:
Mongolian conquest
Roman conquests
Greek conquests
Egyptian conquests
Etc.
Then, include the Ottoman Empire wars, perhaps 16+/- from the early 1300s to mid 1400s
Then, over 2 dozen from the mid 1400s to early 1600s
Then another dozen through the 1600s
And another dozen through the 1700s
Of course lets not think about about 3 dozen in the 1800s and up to WW1.

Consider yourself lucky I didn't start listing famous warriors that were involved in various wars there.
That would be a couple pages long.

My point? If any country knows war, Turkey can teach it. Originally Posted by Unique_Carpenter

Are you proud of being a "sick man of Europe"?

Are you proud of being a "sick man of Europe"? Originally Posted by andymarksman

are you proud of being a Nazi?

You do not screw your allies. Originally Posted by Last Ride

Which is why the U.S. doesn't get into a pissing match with Turkey.

are you proud of being a Nazi? Originally Posted by The_Waco_Kid

I'm proud of not ever being ordered to abandon one military post due to hostile threats by a callous, spineless CIC.

I'm proud of not ever being ordered to abandon one military post due to hostile threats by a callous, spineless CIC. Originally Posted by andymarksman

what did you do while you were in the Waffen-SS?










you've never served in the military.

Originally Posted by matchingmole

neither did this guy






Phillips entered the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves on May 20, 1972.[3] During his time in the military, he was trained as an anti-tank missileman and then served as a refrigerator technician in Nebraska and California. He was not deployed to Vietnam.[9] On May 5, 1976, Phillips was discharged as a private following disciplinary issues.[10] In accordance with the Vietnam Era Veterans' Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974, Phillips is classified as a Vietnam-era veteran.[3]


oh did i step on your point?



BBAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Neither did the moron in the middle..................BBAHAH AHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

who was president in 1978? Jimmy Earl Carter. oh the humanity! he did nothing to stop the bloodshed!



Kurdish–Turkish conflict (1978–present)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurdis...2%80%93present)