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War Looms In The Mediterranean And Threatens To Entangle The Great Powers
America and the United Kingdom would be wise to let Egypt, France, and Greece take the lead in balancing a dangerous and resurgent Turkey.
America and the United Kingdom would be wise to let Egypt, France, and Greece take the lead in balancing a dangerous and resurgent Turkey.
War Looms In The Mediterranean, Threatens To Entangle Great Powers
America and the United Kingdom would be wise to let Egypt, France, and Greece take the lead in balancing a dangerous and resurgent Turkey.
thefederalist.com
With Americans focused on the anarchy in Democrat-led cities, a cryptic tweet from French President Emmanuel Macron on July 20 went out relatively unnoticed. Macron tweeted he had a great discussion with “his friend” Donald Trump about Libya.
Within hours, the Egyptian parliament declared they had voted unanimous support for Egyptian President Al-Sisi to send in Egyptian troops and armor in support of battered Eastern Libyan forces on their back foot due to Turkish intervention. Anyone keeping tabs on the geopolitics of the region should not be surprised that France and the United States have decided to support Egypt against Turkish expansionism — at least tacitly.
Yet the most fascinating balancing act is currently going on in the Aegean Sea, where war may rear its ugly head soon. I wrote recently that Turkey appears to be on a newfound aggressive streak with interventions in Syria and the reconversion of Hagia Sophia. Turkish warships also recently challenged a French warship. It appears they are not planning to stop there.
Turkey just offered moral support to Azerbaijan for a two-day border conflict against Armenia, which was backed by Russia, giving the unfolding situation an instant religious undertone. But while that incident occurred, Turkey dispatched more than 18 warships to accompany an oil and gas exploration mission near Greece and Cyprus. This led the Greeks to ready their warships and fighters, only to be brought back from the brink by a last-moment intervention by Germany’s Angela Merkel.
~~Snip~~
Put simply, this is Turkish expansionism. For more than a decade now, Turkey has been blackmailing Europe and America. Turkish President Erdogan’s decision to restart Islamic prayers in Hagia Sophia was on the anniversary of the Lausanne Treaty, which fixed the boundaries of modern Turkey after they lost their empire during World War I. The symbolism wasn’t lost on Europeans, especially the Greeks. As Michael Rubin recently wrote:
There has never been any love lost between Turkey and Greece, but the danger of war between the two NATO members has not been this high since the Cyprus conflict more than forty-five years ago… For reasons of ideology, economics, and ego, Erdogan now seeks to undo the Lausanne Treaty: Ideology because Erdogan seeks to regain control of certain Ottoman territories and change the demographics of areas outside Turkey’s borders…
Turkish ships in the Aegean would mean an alteration of the status quo, with hundreds of small islands in the Aegean under potential Turkish rule. Likewise, a Turkish client-state in Libya would mean a relegation of Egypt from the position of a premier Middle Eastern power, and the greatest extent of Turkish aggregate power since the fall of the Ottomans. ~~Snip~~
The fact that a shooting war hasn’t started in either Greek waters or eastern Libya isn’t due to Turkish restraint, but logistics and weather. Sooner or later, it is very likely there will be a skirmish.
This all leaves America and the United Kingdom with no decent options. The general Anglo-American silence on Hagia Sophia alienated Eastern Christendom, which still has deep-seated historical memories of Ottoman influence and conquest.
While providing France, Egypt, and Greece with tacit diplomatic support, but staying out of the looming conflict, the United Kingdom and America should let their allies in the region take the lead in pushing Turkey back. After the ghastly mistakes of toppling allied authoritarians in favor of revolutionary and Islamist anarchy during the Arab Spring, a secular authoritarian dictator like Al-Sisi controlling the Mediterranean is a comparatively safer geopolitical bet than a closet Islamist and thug like President Erdogan.
Comment:
It's a never ending story as history has revealed to us.
Those of us that have studied history will agree that Greece/Macedonia versus Turkey/Persian wars have occurred well before the Christain era.
Who can forget the history of Alexander the Great, fight against Persia and his battles up to India, or the Battle of Thermopylae and the defeat of the defeat of the Persian Fleet in the Aegean Sea.
The agression of Persia/Turkey has continued down through the ages. The 19th and 20th Centuries also showed incidences of these continued wars. Why should the 21st Century and a tyrant like Erdogan be any different.
Europe cannot allow this to happen and undoubtedly both these NATO nations will mean that countries will take sides.
The question is how will the the president handle this foreign policy issue. In fact that is an issue for how would the presumptive candidate of the Democrats handle this issue.
Meanwhile surely the UN would essentially be useless as they've been since their inception....
