How to make the EU look pitifully weak and irresponsible: send a few thousand refugees across the border and watch the EU panic

There's a real crisis on the border of Poland to Belarus. It results most directly from Belarus - often called "Europe's last dictatorship" - committing air piracy in May on a flight crossing its territory in order to kidnap a prominent critic of the government and his girlfriend.

The EU understandably imposed sanctions on Belarus for it. Because if the Belarusian government is going to commit air piracy on civilian flights, that not only a breach of international law and agreements, it's a very practical problem for commercial flights in that part of Europe. Although the incident touched on internal Belarusian politics, the sanctions were in response to a very practical problem for international air traffic, not an intervention in internal Belarusian affairs. (The EU had earlier imposed sanctions on Belarus that were directly related to issues involving the 2020 Belarussian presidential election and treatment of the opposition. See also: EU Sanctions Map-Belarus 06/24/2021)

So, knowing that the EU is still pitifully weak in its crisis planning for unexpected refugee flows, Belarus starting flying asylum seekers from the greater Middle East into Belarus and sending them across the border. On cue, Poland freaked out and violated international and EU law with brutal retaliation against the refugees themselves.

This round of confrontation began in May. Which could and should lead regular citizens to ask, why is this only now becoming a prominent story? See my earlier posts, Belarus' aircraft hijacking and its repercussions 05/26/2021; The EU and the political cisis in Belarus 08/14/2020

Turkey cooperated with sending refugees to Belarus, because it sees an interest in reminding EU countries that it can generate a new 2015-style refugee crisis any time it wants. The EU has had almost six years since the original signing of the EU-Turkey agreement in 2016, under which Turkey is currently housing about 3.5 million refugees, to work on the then-anticipated systematic admission of large numbers of those immigrants into EU countries. Instead, the EU has been merrily kicking the can down the road ever since.

Turkey is playing its own cynical game. But Tayyip Erdoğan's government knows it can do so because of the sad state of EU immigration/refugee policy. So, for instance, if Austria or Germany wants to put limits on formal political and financial ties of the Turkish government to Turkish groups in their countries, or want to limit Turkish funding for dubious religious projects that could have national security implications (i.e., sponsoring radical Islamic activists), well, Erdoğan knows their governments are terrified of his refugee supply heading north.

Belarus, including under the current dictatorial President Alexander Lukashenko, has aimed in its foreign policy at balancing its relations between Russia and the EU. The EU has issues with Belarus over its political and human rights policies. But it also has an interest in not driving Belarus politically into a heavier dependence on Russia. That's the larger background against which the current deadly drama is playing out. And both Russia and Belarus are very aware that Europe's absurd panic reaction in the face of the "threat" of a few thousand extra refugees arriving can lead European politicians to make decisions that are short-sighted in terms of practical foreign policy and also make the EU politicians' propaganda use of their superior "European values" look like the most cynical hypocrisy.

Here are some reports on the current situation. It's worth watching in reports on this for how often they contain references to refugees as a national security threat, or how refugees are described in the terms of menace, including natural catastrophe metaphors like "flood" and military ones like "hybrid warfare."

Belarus has launched a hybrid war on Poland and Europe, using migrants as weapons. In response, Poland has created not just a humanitarian crisis but moral, legal, and administrative chaos. https://t.co/ipuA1w4tyv

— Anne Applebaum (@anneapplebaum) November 13, 2021

Although her own use of the term "hybrid war" there strikes me as misguided, Applebaum in the article also does rightly criticize Poland for that same kind of rhetoric: "Even on its own terms, [Poland's seriously illegal] “pushback” [of asylum-seekers] has failed disastrously. Lukashenko has not been deterred. On the contrary, Poland’s hybrid-war rhetoric seems to have encouraged him to find new ways to troll Polish border guards and pile in more Belarusian troops, as if this really were a war and they really were needed." (my emphasis)

Poland may call NATO for help with Belarus border crisis Deutsche Welle News 11/15/2021:

Also from Deutsche Welle, Turkey stops flying citizens of Iraq, Syria, Yemen to Belarus 11/13/2021:

‘Please save us’: Refugees face death at Poland-Belarus border Aljazeera English 11/15/2021

Warnings that Belarus migrant crisis risks military conflict BBC News 11/13/2021:

Jana Wolf, Härte und Humanität: Auswege aus dem Flüchtlingsdrama gesucht RP Online 14.11.2021

Gerald Knaus, Die teuflische Falle aus Minsk Standard 13.11.2021

Marcel Leubecher, „So könnte die EU Lukaschenkos Erpressungsversuch ins Leere laufen lassen“ Die Welt 13.11.2021

John Follain and Birgit Jennen, EU Backs New Sanctions Powers on Belarus Over Migrant Flows Bloomberg News 11/15/2021.

Andrew Connelly, Don’t Blame Belarus. Blame Brussels. Foreign Policy 11/11/2021

Belarus migrants: Poland PM blames Russia's Putin for migrant crisis BBC News 11/10/2021

EU to sanction Belarus as border crisis persists: Live updates Aljazeera 11/15/2012

Pawel Zerka, How half-hearted sanctions put the future of Belarus at risk European Council on Foreign Relations 09/30/2021

This is a dramatic case in which the EU's lack of a sensible immigration/refugee policy constitutes a real weakness for the EU, and gives adversarial powers the ability to promote disunity and a toxic form of political polarization within EU countries. In this case, it also gives Poland a way to blackmail the EU in its current legal conflicts with the EU itself with criminal cruelty against desperate refugees.

How the EU's refugee policy hogties its relations with the Taliban (and others!)

Eldar Mamedov about considerations in European Union relations to the new Taliban regime in Afghanistan. (How the EU should — and should not —deal with the Taliban Responsible Statecraft 08/23/2021)

He points to a fact that is discouraging to anyone hoping the EU could develop a more constructive immigration and refugee policy than just paying Turkey for years on end to hold 3.5 million or more refugees. That was a constructive and sensible agreement when Angela Merkel first negotiated it in 2016. But instead of using the ensuring half-decade to come up with a broader and practical policy, the EU has just punted.

(I often use somewhat dismissive language in talking about EU immigration and refugee policy. I don't mean to imply that it's an easy problem, particularly in cases where wars or their aftermaths suddenly generate a surge of refugees. My main criticism is that the approach of mainstream parties is often a head-in-the-sand posture while the xenophobic demagogues too often drive the public conversation and official policy.)

Rightwing xenophobic populists still drive the EU politics of immigration and refugees. If the center-left and center-right parties just ape the xenophobes in their immigration politics as they have tended to do, it will be hard to develop better alternatives. Unless mainstream politicians can do a much better political vocabulary for talking about the real issues involved, the far right nationalists will continue to drive the narrative. And, while waiting for the next actual refugee crisis, diplomatically kiss Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan's behind. Because he can unleash a 2015-style refugee inflow to the EU in a matter of days under the current arrangements.

Meanwhile, paranoia and panic over possible refugees dominate EU foreign policy to a ridiculous extent, as in dealing with Belarus. (See my post EU trembles before "hybrid operations" (i.e., a few thousand refugees) from Belarus' Lukashenko 08/03/2021)

And Mamedov explains that it makes a pragmatic approach to the new Taliban government particularly difficult for the EU:

Human rights activists suspect that such an about-face on the Taliban is mainly due to concerns about “migratory flows” that the crisis in Afghanistan would unleash and ultimately impact the EU, much the way the Syrian refugee crisis did in 2015. Indeed, one day after the foreign ministers met, their colleagues responsible for home and justice affairs followed suit.

The statement produced by the European Commission as a result of that meeting is a painstakingly negotiated compromise. On the one hand, it sets out to protect the borders from the “migratory pressures;” on the other, it acknowledges that the EU cannot completely close itself off to Afghans seeking refuge and should use resettlement and other legal pathways to help them out.

The implementation of these provisions, however, depends on the good will of the bloc’s member states. This is where the problem lies — the refugees/migration debate in the EU, while valid, is poisoned by the xenophobic, particularly Islamophobic, tropes pushed by nativist politicians. [my emphasis]

Gerald Knaus, an Austrian refugee expert who serves as the Chair of the European Stability Initiative think tank and was a key player in negotiating the 2016 agreement with Turkey, calls attention to how problematic the framing of refugee and even normal immigration issue in "hydraulic" terms is, i.e., "migratory pressures" (above), gigantic "flows" of refugees, a "flood" of refugees, etc. This frames the entire issue in terms of menace, threat, and danger. "The faster we put behind us hydraulic metaphors about borders and migration, the quicker we will find our way to a solutions-oriented debate." ("An den Grenzen Europas" in [Österreichische] Sicherheitspolitische Jahresvorschau 2021, p. 95)
Mamedov:

This context dangerously narrows the European conversation on Afghanistan to migration and its alleged threat to the European way of life. Seen from this angle, seeking transactional deals with the Taliban in order to “keep the migrants out” might look superficially attractive. In the longer run, however, they would not only make a further mockery of European ideals, such as women’s rights, but would also be short-sighted as they won’t contribute to creating conditions in Afghanistan less conducive to migration in the first place.

Instead, the EU should engage with the Taliban on a much broader agenda, including development, regional stability, human rights, and security. [my emphasis]

One of several ways the EU limits itself in ways that are not only morally shabby but unnecessary risky in straight-up realist terms.

Mamedov mentions several ways in which an understanding of what happened in the Afghanistan War could improve EU policies. This kind of advice is the standard tone of professional foreign policy articles, even in situations where the willingness of the parties being addressed may be small to nonexistent.

But even EU foreign ministers might be able to grasp this part:

But any European engagement must begin with a recognition that, as a U.S. junior partner for the past twenty years, the EU holds a weak hand in the new Afghanistan. That means that the EU should shed the notion of Afghanistan as another arena of global competition with Russia and China. To the contrary, it should leave Moscow and Beijing in the driving seat when it comes to relations with Kabul. [my emphasis]

Maybe China or Russia will take another shot at installing a regime in Kabul more suitable to them. For the last 180 years or so, i.e., since the start of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1839, that has not tended to produce happy results for those foreign powers making the attempt. My favorite stodgy-but-reliable source, Britannica Online, summarizes how that British effort worked out, "On January 6, 1842, some 4,500 British and Indian troops, with 12,000 camp followers, marched out of Kabul. Bands of Afghans swarmed around them, and the retreat ended in a bloodbath." Although I find the term "political Islam" problematic, this observation of Mamedov's is also important:

The swift Taliban victory should prompt a broader rethink in the EU on how it deals with political Islam. Islamic militants everywhere interpret the Taliban’s success and the failure of the Muslim Brotherhood-style parliamentary Islamism in Egypt, Palestine or Tunisia, as proof that violent resistance, not compromise and accommodation, works best.

Although this particular "swift" Taliban victory took the better part of 20 years. The final collapse calls to mind the comment economist Rudi Dornbusch about the Mexican financial crisis of 1994: "It took forever and then it took a night." (Frontline Murder Money & Mexico WGBH 1995)

EU trembles before "hybrid operations" (i.e., a few thousand refugees) from Belarus' Lukashenko

Jacopo Barigazzi reports on the EU's reaction to Belarus releasing refugees from Iraq, Syria, and Africa into Lithuania as part of the Belarus-EU confrontation over various issue, particularly Belarus' extraordinary action in forcing down a commercial airliner on the false pretence of a terrorist threat in order to kidnap a dissident Belarusian journalist and his girlfriend. This led to the EU suspending flights to and from Belarus. (EU pledges to step up efforts to help Lithuania stem migration from Belarus Politico EU 08/02/2021)

Belarus and its dictatorial President Alexander Lukashenko know that the EU has a broken system for handling refugees, much less the huge and unusual influx of the 2015-16 crisis. Far too many EU politicians use xenophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric for cheap political points and try to push the problem onto somebody else. The Politico article reflects the framing of refugees as a security threat to the EU.

Part of the anti-immigrant rhetoric in the EU is to use "migrant" as an inclusive term for refugees, people who are hired by EU employers, people fleeing bad economic or environmental conditions who may technically not qualify for asylum or permanent residence, and refugees from ongoing wars or severe political oppression. "Migrant" implies that they just voluntarily wandered into the EU. Austrian politicians like to say they are coming to take advantage of Austria's social safety-net "hammock."

My emphasis in bold):

This is not primarily a migration crisis, this is an act of aggression that is aimed to provoke,” the EU’s commissioner for home affairs, Ylva Johansson, said during a press conference in Vilnius. “What we are facing is an aggressive act from the Lukashenko regime.

Yet for Lithuania, it is increasingly a migration crisis.

The allegation is that Belarus is “weaponizing” migrants by facilitating their arrival and that several flights are landing in Minsk, the Belarusian capital, carrying migrants from Istanbul and Baghdad.

The bloc [EU] believes this is in retaliation against EU sanctions targeting Lukashenko and his allies.

The situation “is deteriorating, more people are arriving,” Johansson said, adding that “a lot more needs to be done” to protect Lithuania’s external border.

... the EU agencies active on migration have deployed staff to the country: for example, almost 120 Frontex officers, 86 of them border patrol guards, have already deployed.

Vilnius also wants to install some kind of physical barrier at the border with Belarus, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė said at the same press conference. EU money is not usually provided for the building of walls but she promised to go ahead anyway. [BUILD-THE-WALL! BUILD-THE-WALL! Lithuania needs to look for better role models, I think.]

"Lukashenko keeps waging hybrid operations against the EU and it is our duty to react and take decisions fast,” said a senior EU diplomat.

My point here is that the EU has effectively created an unnecessary vulnerability for itself by the combination of its unnecessarily stringent general immigration policy and its broken refugee process that depends on the "Dublin System" of processing new entries to the Schengen area that was never designed for significant refugee flows. And since the EU not only reacts with rhetorical overkill to even small refugee flows like those currently from Belarus into Lithuania, but quickly resorts to nationalistic resentments against other, its less friendly neighbors like Belarus at the moment know they can create a political trauma for the EU at relatively little cost to themselves.

The EU has legitimate concerns about its neighbor Belarus, including the stolen presidential election of 2020 there. Because Lukashenko's increasingly authoritarian turn increases the likelihood of problems just like the air piracy incident in May.

And threats of sending additional refugees into the EU are an obvious response to EU actions. Lukashenko is even flying them in from other countries, which doesn't cost a lot. Because, obviously, the EU could end the "hybrid operations" of, uh, Belarus releasing a couple of thousand refugees to cross the border by simply dropping its air travel restrictions on Belarus. Which would not only be a big mistake on the substance. But it would be a remarkable demonstration of weakness by the EU.

And Lukashenko may be up to more serious mischief, as well: Vitaly Shishov: Head of Belarus exiles group found dead in Ukraine BBC News 08/04/2021.

And, of course, Turkey is holding 3.5 million or so refugees under its agreement with the EU negotiated by Angela Merkel in 2016. We can take it for granted that Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan is following the Belarus refugee situation very closely. Because, if Lukashenko can bully the EU into submission with w few thousand refugees, imagine what Erdoğan can do.

To close: Yes, countries have to pay attention to border enforcement, which normally is and should be a civilian police function. But for the EU leaders to talk about refugees in terms of military threat and imminent danger - Austrian Chancellor Basti Kurz, for one, constantly uses such language - is ridiculous threat inflation. They need to knock it off. And, much more importantly, they need to set up a realistic EU refugee policy that goes beyond the Dublin System.

A few thoughts about purist left media

I took the time to listen to a podcast featuring a full hour interview with Rania Khalek, who has generally part of a left faction that is generally identified by writers and pundits like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Matt Taibbi, Aaron Mate, and Katie Halper. Primo Radical #237: Rania Khalek 07/15/2021.

I have more reservations about their perspective and reporting than the critical-minded view I try to take of all punditry and reporting. It's hard to know how much is ideology and how much is marketing sometimes. That group - Jimmy Dore most particularly - is currently defining itself as a distinct brand from other left-leaning alternative media like TYT/The Young Turks, Sam Seder's Majority Report, and Nomiki Konst. I would include Jacobin's podcasts in that latter group. Ana Kasparian of TYT also co-hosts a Saturday Jacobin podcast, for instance. I would put RJ Escrow and his Zero Hour podcast more in the latter category.

I don't mean to imply that there is some sharp programmatic list of issues that clearly differentiate them. There is some cross-pollination. David Dayen, who appears fairly regularly on The Majority Report has also recently appeared on Katie Halper's show. RJ Escrow recently conducted an interview on his show with Matt Taibbi, specifically challenging Taibbi's, uh, eccentric commentary of Herbert Marcuse's work, on which I've also commented here. (Matt Taibbi rants against Herbert Marcuse 02/26/2021)

Both groups generally take an "anti-imperialist" position, which I certainly do too. If "anti-imperialist" was good enough for Mark Twain and William James, it's good enough for me.

The Primo Radical podcast above podcasts include a reference to one of the issues that has brought some justified criticism on the Dore-Halper group (for want of a better label), which is the position they have taken on the conflict in Syria, including what looks to be the un critical embrace of at least some Syria propaganda narratives, like their denigration of the White Helmets group and their, at best, overly confident dismissal of charges that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its opponents, specifically in this case at the city of Duma. (I haven't dug very deeply into the details of that particular issue. But what I have seen on it makes it seem pretty clear that the charge is true.)

AFter 38:00 in this video, Khalek and the host get into a more ideological7factional discussion about the difference between those two groups.

In the case of Syria, I do think the intervention on which President Obama and Secretary of STate Hillary Clinton was a seriously bad idea. The fact that the Syrian government is a dictatorship with bad policies does not mean that the US needs to get directly militarily involved. And mainstream reporting on the groups that the US was directly assisting in that civil war situation also raise serious questions of how sensible their choice of local allies was. "Blowback" is a real thing. It's hard for me to imagine how anyone today can say with a straight face, for instance, that backing the jihadist mujahedeen rebels against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan had unqualified beneficial results for the US. It was that conflict that spawned not just Al Qaida but the "jihadist" brand of Muslin extremism. Israel's support for the early formation of Hamas as a way to weaken the more moderate Palestine Liberation Organization has certainly had elements of blowback, although the results are not unwelcome to hardline rightwing Israelis like Benjamin Netanyahu.

I have some friends who are Kurdish refugees from Syria, and I've talked to them some about their perspectives. But they've mainly talked to me about their personal experiences and the events in the Kurdish areas. And I know from that and from the general news that Kurds in northern Syria have had to deal with hostilities from the Syrian government, the Islamic State, and Tayyip Erdoğan's government in Turkey. Reducing genuinely complicated situations like that to a good-guys-vs-bad-guys framing that the US inevitably uses when intervening in a foreign military conflict can be a highly misleading thing.

One topic that comes up here is that fact that some people on the left, like the late and far-too-soon-departed Michael Brooks of The Majority Report, criticized the Trump-Pence Administration for withdrawing its troops from the area controlled and temporarily government by a left Kurdish group, the YPG. That was a classic case where a pragmatic recognition that we need to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time when it comes to foreign policy. On the one hand, there was no way the Trump-Pence was going to provide direct military backing over any long term for a left Kurdish government there. On the other hand, the withdrawal was done as part of a Trump deal with Erdoğan that allowed US NATO ally Turkey to invade Syria and carry out an actual ethnic cleansing operation in some of the Syrian Kurds to resettle non-Kurdish Syrian refugees there. It was a thoroughly ugly business which, among other things, should have led the EU to revise its own Turkish policy and get serious about a refugee policy.

I commented on this and criticized the Trump-Pence policy in real time, including The Syria troop-withdrawal muddle and why it shows it's a mistake to consider the Trump-Pence foreign policy non-interventionist 01/12/2019. I'll further note that, as Bibla Wahab noted NPR at the time, "[The Syria Kurds] only ask that the U.S. military sticks around because that [American] flag is powerful enough to deter a Turkish invasion. And Mr. Trump's decision was to remove that American flag and failing at protecting the Kurdish friends and deterring the Turkish invading army." (A Look At The History Of The U.S. Alliance With The Kurds All Things Considered 10/010/2019) Again, a very complicated situation. But Trump made a dirty deal with Erdoğan that made the US complicit in a Turkish ethnic cleansing operation.

The Primo Radical podcast also shows Noam Chomsky, who has been carrying on a fundamental, anti-imperialist criticism of American foreign policy since the 1960s, criticizing Trump's action in that case. And in the discussion that follows, Rania Khalek does show some appreciation of the maddening complexity of that particular situation. But she also casually dismisses the Turkish Kurdish group the PKK as "a cult," which is misleading at best. Given human rights abuses the Turkish government has committed in the name of fighting the PKK, such characterizations deserve careful scrutiny. Her discussion of the far more complex issue of creating a Kurdish state is also really lightweight.

I'll note that the Vienna weekly Falter has provided some good analysis of Erdoğan's ethnic cleansing against the Syrian Kurds, e.g., Nina Brnada, Erdogan, der Krieg, die Kurden und wir Falter 42/2019, which also discusses how the EU's refugee deal with Turkey influenced Turkey's action in this situation, and Raimund Löw, Die Schlacht um Idlib und das Ende des Syrienkrieges Falter 09/2020.

Rania Khalek is too relentlessly melodramatic for my taste. And, honestly, a bit of a Meghan McCain tone. And she does get some things right in her commentaries. But her foreign policy commentary in this videa is definitely a mixed bag. The host frames the TYT-Sam Seder group as described here as a "pro-empire left," a frivolous description as opposed to the true "anti-imperialist left," and claims the difference between the two as an "existential, philosophical" one.

On the media competition side of things, it's always good to keep in mind that, from Whittaker Chambers to David Horowitz to Dave Rubin, there is a long-standing market for "converts" taking the position that they used to be left and have now come to realize that the left is horrible and the Alt-Right has the real answers to all important political questions. Dave Rubin, formerly of TYT and now with The Blaze, has taken that track, which typically involves an "independent-thinker" stage. Glenn Greenwald has always had a quirky libertarian position. But he and Jimmy Dore are currently embracing a kind of left-right "populism" that seems to be heavily tilting toward the positions we hear from Tucker Carlson on his White Power Hour show on FOX News.

One of the people identified with this group whose trajectory I find particularly disappointing is Max Blumenthal, who didn't a really substantial book on the American Christian Right, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (2009). But his commentary for years now has come off to me as a dogmatic, uncritical version of "fundamental opposition" to US foreign policy. Nomiki Konst and Benjamin Dixon discuss this phenomenon in The Fracturing Of The Left + The So-Called Leftists Close To Aligning With The Far Right 036/04/2021.

EU summit positions on Russia, Hungary, and Turkey

The Munich Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on the recently concluded summit of the EU heads of government in Ein Flop zum Schluss (Björn Finke and Matthias Kolb, 28.06.2021) Relations with Russia and Turkey were issues highlighted in the summit, as was a new human rights issue in member state Hungary.

There was some diplomatic Kabuki theater over proposals to have a formal EU summit with Russia. Poland and the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania all opposed the initiative, which was presented as a joint proposal of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Immanuel Macron. On the face of it, it’s a dispute about whether such a summit would somehow reward Russia for misconduct. Lithuanian Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins said Russia would have to “pay a price” for such a summit.

Finke and Kolb interpret that, presumably following official guidance, as meaning, “Erst müsse Putin seine Politik des Spaltens, der Cyberangriffe und Desinformationskampagnen beenden, dann wird mal geschaut.” ("First, Putin has to end his policy of divisions, cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns, then we'll see.") This is a standard thing in diplomacy. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, countries need to talk especially about things on which they disagree. So, “you concede all these things first and then we’ll consider talking to you,” is diplomatic signaling. Since Merkel and Macron from the two strongest powers in the EU are making the proposal, they can now say to the Russians and to their publics, look, we’d like to do this but these former countries from “the eastern bloc” won’t go along.

There was also some additional Kabuki around the anti-LGBTI law that Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian Hungary just passed. My impression is that the law is likely to be overturned by an EU court action against it. Mark Rutte of the Netherlands and António Costa of Portugal asked Orbán if Hungary wanted to pass such a law obviously departing from minimum EU human rights standards, why they didn’t just leave the EU. But Hungary is not going to do that, because its economy is so heavily integrated into the EU’s and because it is a net beneficiary from EU financial assistance.

This is part of a wider EU pushback on Hungary’s violations of the Union’s minimal standards for democracy and the rule of law. For better or worse, economic requirements are more easily enforced under the EU treaties on a recalcitrant member state that standards for democracy and the rule of law (outside of the trade-related ones).

Finke's and Kolb's report also describe how central the refuee agreement of 2016 with Turkey is to EU-Turkish relations. Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan has caused problems for fellow NATO and EU members by dubious military interventions interventions in Libya, Syria, and Nagorno-Karabakh and disputes over maritime territorial rights with Greece. But the refugee agreement, which in some ways was a constructive model, is the way the EU "solved" the immediate refugee crisis of 2015-16. The EU adopted a kick-the-can-down-the-road approach to taking further substantial steps to better deal with a similar crisis. In other words, it still hasn't come up with one.

This gives Turkey a lot of clout in tempering EU criticism, whether its foreign policy, human rights concerns, or security question about the Turkish government's interactions with Turkish political and religious groups in the EU.

Erstaunlich kurz verläuft die Debatte über die Türkei. Der Gipfel stimmt dem Vorschlag der EU-Kommission zu, der Türkei bei einem bis 2024 verlängerten Migrationsabkommen 3,5 Milliarden Euro für die Unterbringung von etwa 3,7 Millionen syrischen Flüchtlingen zu zahlen. Das Geld würde aus dem Budget ihrer Behörde kommen, sagt von der Leyen. Auch wenn in der Abschlusserklärung weiter Defizite der Türkei bei Rechtsstaat und Demokratie beklagt und der Beginn formeller Verhandlungen zur Lösung der Zypernfrage verlangt werden, sollen nun "auf fachlicher Ebene" Vorbereitungen für die Modernisierung der Zollunion beginnen.

Wie sich die Stimmung verändert hat, beweist die Pressekonferenz des französischen Präsidenten. Die Spannungen hätten abgenommen und auch wenn er Griechen und Zyprern verspricht, den Sommer über weiter wachsam zu sein, sagt Macron in Richtung Ankara: "Wir werden auch die Zusammenarbeit wiederaufnehmen." So ein Satz von Macron, der dem türkischen Präsidenten Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in inniger Feindschaft verbunden schien, ist auch etwas, was man sich in Brüssel vor Monaten nicht vorstellen konnte.

[The debate on Turkey was surprisingly short. The summit agrees with the EU Commission's proposal to pay Turkey 3.5 billion euros for the accommodation of around 3.7 million Syrian refugees under a migration [sic] agreement extended until 2024. The money would come from her agency's budget, [EU Commission President Ursula] von der Leyen says. Even though the final declaration continues to complain about Turkey's shortcomings in the rule of law and democracy and calls for the start of formal negotiations to resolve the Cyprus question, preparations for the modernization of the customs union are now to begin "on a technical level."

How the mood has changed is demonstrated by the press conference of the French President. Tensions have eased and even though he promises Greeks and Cypriots that he will continue to be vigilant throughout the summer, Macron says to Ankara: "We will also resume cooperation." Such a sentence by Macron, who seemed to be intimately attached to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is also something that could not have been imagined in Brussels months ago.] (my translation)

Israel-Palestine, a new tranch of US arms sales to Israel, the EU, and Turkey

Patricia Zengerle reports on an arms sale to Israel that the Biden-Harris Administration approved in Biden administration approved $735 million arms sale to Israel Reuters 05/18/2021:

Three congressional aides said Congress was officially notified of the intended commercial sale on May 5, as part of the regular review process before major foreign weapons sales agreements can go ahead. ...

Congress was informed of the planned sale in April, as part of the normal informal review process before of the formal notification on May 5. Under U.S. law, the formal notification opens up a 15-day window for Congress to object to the sale, which is not expected despite the ongoing violence. ...

U.S. law allows Congress to object to weapons sales, but it is unlikely to do so in this case. Because Israel is among a handful of countries whose military deals are approved under an expedited process, the typical window for objecting will close before lawmakers can pass a resolution of disapproval, even if they were inclined to. [my emphasis]

I don't see any way that Israel and other governments will not take the fact that this arms sale is proceeding now as a huge endorsement of Israel's current military actions against Palestinians. According to the Reuters timeline, the approval was given before Benjamin Netanyahu initiated the current round of violent confrontations after the failure of his negotiations to form a new government.

If Austria's government flying an Israeli flag at its mains government building was a clear diplomatic signal of approval for Netanyahu's current actions - former Austria President Heinz Fischer did an editorial describing it as an amateurish diplomatic move (Einseitigkeit auf dem Dach des Kanzleramts? 05/17/2021) - the US proceeding with this trance of arms sales will surely be seen by all sides as complete support for Israel's current actions.

As of this report, the civilian deaths were 20-to-1 higher on the Palestinian side (Gaza Flare-up: 212 Gazans Killed in Israeli Strikes, IDF Downs Drone Near Jordan Border Haaretz Wiener Zeitung "Fighting between Israel and Hamas escalated in what has become the heaviest flare-up since the 2014 Gaza War. At least 212 people were killed in the Gaza Strip, and 10 in Israel in the most intensive aerial exchanges in years."

The Biden-Harris Administration is even blocking efforts by the UN Security Council to call on Israel for a cease fire. (Michelle Nichols, U.S. pursues quiet Mideast diplomacy, thwarts U.N. statement Reuters 05/17/2021) Hamas has already called for one.

A lot of the reporting and analysis on the US position has mentioned that the Biden-Harris Administration wants to tilt away from the US focus on the Greater Middle East to the diplomatic-political-military confrontation with China, and so finds the current outburst in Israel-Palestine particularly unwelcome in that regard. Since it's so commonly reported, I assume the White House is promoting that angle on the story. That's also not very encouraging. Because the main message would seem to be, "we don't really care what Netanyahu's government is going with the American aid and arms that the receive."

The EU's foreign ministers are holding a videoconference today to discuss the Israel-Palestine situation. David Hersyenhor and Rym Momtaz give this rundown on current positioning of EU countries (EU divisions over Israel-Palestine leave Brussels powerless as conflict worsens 05/17/2021):

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, convened the special videoconference of ministers after issuing repeated statements in recent days imploring an end to the rocket fire against Israeli civilians by Hamas, and urging that Israel “act proportionately and avoid civilian casualties.” ...

Among the 27 member countries, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden and Luxembourg are among those most critical of Israel. Countries in Eastern Europe, especially Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, are among those in strongest support of Israel, though in recent days the flag of Israel has flown prominently over the HQ of Germany’s biggest governing party and official buildings in Austria and the Czech Republic in a show of support. Greece and Cyprus have also grown closer to Israel in recent years, partly because of tensions with Turkey.

France typically seeks to stake out more neutral ground, but President Emmanuel Macron’s office has issued statements in recent days that tilted decidedly toward Israel. The Elysée’s statements “firmly condemned rocket launching claimed by Hamas and other terrorist groups targeting the Israeli territory,” but were vaguer when referencing Israeli bombing.

On that, they said Macron had given his condolences to “the many Palestinian civilian losses resulting from military operations and ongoing clashes with Israel.” Macron also reiterated his “unwavering attachment to Israel’s security and its right to defend itself in line with international law,” but failed to reiterate his support for the rights of Palestinians, or recall the status of Jerusalem under international law, in line with France’s historic position. ...

[M]any diplomats, officials and experts said the EU’s best chance for influence in the Middle East was more likely to come from France, which after Brexit is the EU’s only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. [my emphasis]

We'll see what comes out of EU diplomacy on this. But if France is the best hope in the EU for influencing a move to a cease fire, and the French President is taking a very public position of supporting Israel's disproportionate attacks against the open-air prison it runs in the Gaza Strip, that doesn't give a lot of cause for optimism.

It's worth noting that Turkey's authoritarian President Tayyip Erdoğan in his typically arrogant style is denouncing Israel's actions and tweaking Israel to do more. (Turkey's Erdogan condemns Western powers for inaction against Israel Reuters 05/17/2021)

How serious he is about doing anything to push the EU on this is very questionable. But Turkey is holding around 3.5 million refugees, mostly from Middle East wars who became refugees in no small part because of previous US policies, based on the EU-Turkey agreement that Germany's Angela Merkel negotiated in 2015. Since European politician have been pretty feckless in developing a decent immigration policy that complies with international law since the refugee crisis of 2015-16, though, Turkey can threaten to send large numbers of refugees to Europe. And, as we saw in 2020, such a threat puts EU leaders into a panic. We'll see what develops.

Biden and the Armeania Genocide

President Joe Biden has made an important statement about the Armenian genocide. Daniel Politi reports (President to Formally Recognize Armenian Genocide Slate 04/24/2021):

President Joe Biden became the first commander in chief to officially recognize that the 1915 massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire was a genocide, in a move that fulfilled a campaign promise and illustrated how Washington isn’t as worried as it once was about angering Turkey. ...

President Donald Trump and his predecessors had largely chosen to dance around the issue in order to avoid angering Turkey. The closest a U.S. president had come to this kind of statement was Ronald Reagan, who referred to the “genocide of the Armenians” in passing In a 1981 statement on the Holocaust but that was not followed up by a formal recognition. George W. Bush had vowed to recognize the genocide during the 2000 presidential campaign but didn’t end up following through as Turkey ended up becoming a key ally in the Iraq invasion. Barack Obama also said he would recognize the genocide during the 2008 presidential campaign but never ended up doing it during the eight years he was commander in chief. [my emphasis]

Aljazeera's Inside Story has this report and analysis, Is the US-Turkey relationship at risk of falling apart? 04/25/2021:

Nicholas Danforth of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in the Inside Story discussion notes that US relations with Turkey are at a relatively low level at the moment, which removed some of the risks previous Presidents say in explicitly using "genocide" to describe the mass expulsion and systemic killings of Armenian civilians by the Ottoman Empire.

The Britannica Online article on the Armenian Genocide (Ronald Grigor Suny, 05/19/2020 version) describes it this way:

In January 1915 [Turkish leader] Enver Paşa attempted to push back the Russians at the battle of Sarıkamış, only to suffer the worst Ottoman defeat of the war. Although poor generalship and harsh conditions were the main reasons for the loss, the Young Turk government sought to shift the blame to Armenian treachery. Armenian soldiers and other non-Muslims in the army were demobilized and transferred into labour battalions. The disarmed Armenian soldiers were then systematically murdered by Ottoman troops, the first victims of what would become genocide. About the same time, irregular forces began to carry out mass killings in Armenian villages near the Russian border. ...

Armenian resistance, when it occurred, provided the authorities with a pretext for employing harsher measures. In April 1915 Armenians in Van barricaded themselves in the city’s Armenian neighborhood and fought back against Ottoman troops, On April 24, 1915, citing Van and several other episodes of Armenian resistance, Talat Paşa ordered the arrest of approximately 250 Armenian intellectuals and politicians in Istanbul, including several deputies to the Ottoman Parliament. Most of the men who were arrested were killed in the months that followed.

Soon after the defeat at Sarıkamış, the Ottoman government began to deport Armenians from Eastern Anatolia on the grounds that their presence near the front lines posed a threat to national security. In May the Ottoman Parliament passed legislation formally authorizing the deportation. Throughout summer and autumn of 1915, Armenian civilians were removed from their homes and marched through the valleys and mountains of Eastern Anatolia toward desert concentration camps. The deportation, which was overseen by civil and military officials, was accompanied by a systematic campaign of mass murder carried out by irregular forces as well as by local Kurds and Circassians. Survivors who reached the deserts of Syria languished in concentration camps, many starved to death, and massacres continued into 1916. Conservative estimates have calculated that some 600,000 to more than 1,000,000 Armenians were slaughtered or died on the marches. The events of 1915–16 were witnessed by a number of foreign journalists, missionaries, diplomats, and military officers who sent reports home about death marches and killing fields. [my emphasis]

Donald Bloxham provided the following description in The Armenian Genocide of 1915-1916 Past & Present 181: 2003 (Nov 2003):

From late summer 1914, Armenian settlements on either side of the Ottoman borders with Persia and the Caucasus were plundered by Ottoman forces, and the Armenian menfolk were killed. From 24 April 1915, prominent members of the Ottoman Armenian community were incarcerated en masse in Constantinople. From late March to late May, arrests and limited deportations from Armenian communities were also conducted in the Cilicia region to the south-east, around the Gulf of Alexandretta. Thereafter, in a wave spreading westwards and southwards throughout the empire from the provinces of eastern Anatolia - the areas of heaviest Armenian population – the Turkish government, led by the Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti (Committee of Union and Progress: CUP), implemented an increasingly radical programme of deportation and murder.

Communal leaders and civilian men were incarcerated and/or murdered outright. The women, children and elderly were forced to emigrate to the southern desert regions, in modem-day Syria and Iraq, and along the way their numbers were decimated by depredations - rape, kidnap, mutilation, outright killing and death from exposure, starvation and thirst - at the hands of gendarmes and soldiers, irregulars, and Muslim tribespeople. Many surviving this process then perished from privation or disease in desert concentration centres, where they were left without provision and, in mid 1916, subjected to a further spate of massacres. A total of at least one million Armenians died, more than two-thirds of those deported. Many of the kidnapped, some of the other surviving women, and an indeterminate number of orphans were forcibly converted to Islam - in total 5 to 10 per cent of the Ottoman Armenians. Up to 400,000 survived the First World War within the empire, with a particular concentration in Constantinople, from which there were only selective deportations of the leadership and provincial sojourners. [my emphasis]

Turkey has had numerous tensions with its NATO allies in recent years, particularly as President Tayyip Erdoğan has he has become more of an authoritarian ruler. Recent tensions have involved conflicts with Greece over territorial waters, interventions in Syria and Libya, refugees, human rights issues, and performative arrogance. Turkey has provided assistance to Ukraine in its on-going standoff with Russia. But Russian arms sales to Turkey have also raised serious concerns in NATO.

Turkey also supported Azerbaijan in its conflict last year with Armenia. Armenia has been closer to Russia diplomatically than Azerbaijan. But Russia's position on last year's conflict wasn't entirely supportive of Armenia, either.

There is no Biden Tower in Turkey. So he is presumably more willing to consider a wider variety of policy options with Turkey than the Former Guy did.

Despite official Turkish claims that the death toll as recounted in those two sources is far too high, there's no real disagreement among actual genocide scholars and historians about the basic factual picture of what happened.

And regardless of how exactly it fits in with overall US policy toward Turkey, it's a good thing that Biden made that statement. The official text is here, Statement by President Joe Biden on Armenian Remembrance Day White House 04/24/2021.

"Sofagate", refugees and EU-Turkish relations

I recently commented on EU-Turkey relations, in which current points negotiation include The range of issues includes the long-standing dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus and maritime rights, Turkey's interventions in Libya and Syria, travel between Turkey and the EU, expanding the EU-Turkey customs union arrangement (which goes back to 1963), and human rights issues. (Europa geht auf die Türkei zu und lockt mit Zollunion und Visa-Freiheit Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 27.03.2021.)

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan made a diplomatic snub of The EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that gave headline writers something to label "Sofagate," in which European Concil President Charles Michel was given distintly privelged seating for an official photo-op and Von der Leyen was visibly snubbed.

It was diplomatic mischief on Erdoğan's part. But there is also reason to think that Michel was happüy to go along with it, because it was the EU Council that handled the diplomatic protocol in the meeting preparations. The Commission and the Council are both executive bodies of the EU. But the Commission is generally seen as representing more the EU institutions, while the Council is set up more as a body representing the member states as such. The protocol explanation for the Sofagate setup was that Michel was treated as a head of state and Von der Leyen as head of government, the implication being that the Commission President was higher representative of the EU than the Council President, which scored a point for Michel and the Commission in internal EU politics. (Sylvia Wörgetter, Welche Rolle spielte EU-Ratspräsident Michel?Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 10.04.2021)

Former Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker kinda-sorta agreed with the protocol point about the Council President being the senior official while adding: "'I think it would have been better to have her sitting at the same level' as Michel, 'but from a protocol point of view the president of the Council is No. 1.”" (Lily Bayer, Juncker tries to take the sting out of Sofagate Politico EU 04/07/2021)

But Erdoğan was no doubt happy to be seen snubbing a senior woman official of the EU.

In the previous post, I talked about the centrality of the 2016 refugee agreement in EU-Turkey relations. Gerald Knaus, head of the think tank European Stability Initiative (ESI) and an immigration activist, was one of the main players in putting together the 2016 deal. Broadkly speaking, the deal involved Turkey holding refugees, largely coming from Syria, in Turkey. The agreement assumed that Turkey would allow a certain number of refugees to come to the EU after having their asylum requests processed in Turkey. For asylum-seekers that fled to Greece, Turkey would be accept them back. In turn, Turkey would then be able to send an equal number of additional approved ssylum applicants to the EU. The idea was that the EU would regularly absorb a certain number of refugees from Turkey. And the facilities for the refugees in Turkey would be financed by the EU. The arrangement was designed to reduce the need for desperate refugees to undertake highly risky sea crossings to be able to seek asylum in the EU.

The basic assumptions of the deal were resonable. As Knaus wrote in Welche Grenzen brauchen wir? (2020):

Andere Kritiker erklärten, es sei absurd zu erwarten, dass Flüchtlinge und Asylsuchende in der Türkei sicher seien. Dabei leben in der Türkei nun bereits seit vielen Jahren Millionen Flüchtlinge, gehen Hunderttausende syrische Kinder in türkische Schulen. Die Türkei hat zudem eine lange Tradition, Asylsuchenden - darunter auch Afghanen - Aufenthalt zu gewahren, während der UNHCR Asylverfahren durchführte und Neuansiedlungen organisierte. Es sollte darum gehen, das türkische System durch Anreize und Unterstützung zu verbessern, zum Wohl von Schutzbedürftigen.

[{Some} critics said it was absurd to expect refugees and asylum seekers to be safe in Turkey. {But} millions of refugees have been living in Turkey for many years now, and hundreds of thousands of Syrian children are going to Turkish schools. Turkey has a long tradition of keeping asylum seekers - including Afghans - resident, while the UNHCR asylum procedures are carried out and resettlement organized. It should be about improving the Turkish system through incentives and support, for the benefit of those needing protection.]

But, as he also explains in that book and elsewhere, the processing of asylum seekers has not gone as planned. In Knaus' view, Greek officials with the approval of EU officials have failed to process asylum-seekers at a reasonable pace. Knaus believes it's a deliberate strategy of scaring refugees away from trying to head toward Europe. (See p. 196 in his book)

As the Oberösterreichische Nachrichten (Fünf Jahre Flüchtlingsdeal: Brüssel versucht einen Neustart mit Erdogan 20.03.2021) puts it:

Kernpunkt des Deals ist, dass die Türkei jeden Migranten, der irregulär auf die griechischen Inseln gelangt und keinen Anspruch auf Asyl hat, zurücknimmt. Im Gegenzug nimmt die EU für jeden rückgeführten Syrer einen anderen Syrer aus der Türkei auf. Für die Flüchtlingsbetreuung soll die Türkei wiederum mit bis zu sechs Milliarden Euro von der EU unterstützt werden.

Die Rückführung irregulär eingereister Migranten in die Türkei funktioniert jedoch kaum. Seit 2016 schickte die EU insgesamt nur rund 2740 Menschen zurück in die Türkei, wie die EU-Kommission mitteilte. Das liegt jedoch nicht an der Türkei, sondern daran, dass Griechenland teils massiv überfordert mit der Bearbeitung der Asylanträge war und ist.

Asylsuchende auf griechischen Inseln müssen monatelang, teilweise über ein Jahr, auf einen Ersttermin bei den Behörden warten. Viele von ihnen sitzen mehrere Jahre in den oft als menschenunwürdig kritisierten Camps, bis ihr Verfahren abgeschlossen wird. Immer wieder wurde der griechischen Regierung vorgeworfen, dieses Szenario bewusst zu provozieren, um damit möglichst viele Flüchtlinge abzuschrecken.

Umgekehrt nahmen EU-Staaten bisher 28.621 Migranten aus der Türkei auf – deutlich weniger als im Abkommen 2016 in Aussicht gestellt. Mit Beginn der Corona-Pandemie wurde der Mechanismus überhaupt ausgesetzt.

[The key point of the deal is that Turkey will take back any migrant who reaches the Greek islands irregularly and is not entitled to asylum. In return, the EU accepts another Syrian from Turkey for every Syrian repatriated. Turkey is to receive up to €6 billion in EU support for care of the refugees.

However, the repatriation of irregular migrants to Turkey hardly works. Since 2016, the EU has sent a total of only around 2,740 people back to Turkey, according to the EU Commission. However, this is not due to Turkey, but to the fact that Greece has been, and still is, massively overwhelmed with the processing of asylum applications.

Asylum seekers on Greek islands have to wait months, sometimes more than a year, for a first appointment with the authorities. Many of them sit in the camps, which are often criticized as inhumane, for several years until their trial is completed. Time and again, the Greek government has been accused of deliberately provoking this scenario in order to deter as many refugees as possible.

EU states have so far taken in 28,621 migrants from Turkey – significantly fewer than the 2016 agreement promised. With the onset of the corona pandemic, the mechanism was suspended completely.

As of last September, the UN refugee agency put the number of refugees in Syria at 3.6 million.

Turkey, the EU, and the US early in Biden's Presidential term

The EU is making moves to try to ease relations with Turkey and its authoritarian President Tayyip Erdoğan. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen of Germany and and European Council President Charles Michel of Belgium just held a meeting with Erdoğan in Ankara to discuss some major current issues. (EU-Spitzen beraten mit Erdogan über Beziehungen Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 06.04.2021) The EU Commission and the European Council are the two executive bodies of the European Union.

The range of issues includes the long-standing dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus, Turkey's role in the conflicts in Libya and Syria, travel between Turkey and the EU, and human rights issues, including Turkey's recent decision to leave the Council of Europe treaty on combatting violence against women known as the Istanbul Convention. (Turkey quits Istanbul Convention on violence against women Deutsche Welle 20.03.2021)

Turkey's human and diplomatic club: refugees

One connection between Turkey and the EU that I don't think receives sufficient prominence in news reports is the 2016 deal Angela Merkel negotiated with Erdoğan to hold millions of refugees from conflicts in the Greater Middle East. Robin Alexander gave a good account of the negotiating of that deal in Die Getriebenen: Merkel und die Flüchtlingspolitik (2018).The Oberösterrichische Nachrichten describes it this way (Die EU-Spitzen reisten mit Zuckerbrot und Peitsche zu Erdogan nach Ankara 07.04.2021):

Beide brauchen einander – auch in der Flüchtlingsfrage. Diese nannte die Kommissionspräsidentin als eines von vier Themenfeldern, um die es in einem ersten Gespräch mit Erdogan gegangen sei. Themenfelder, "in denen beide von einer verstärkten Zusammenarbeit profitieren können".

2016 hatte die EU mit der Türkei einen Deal geschlossen, wonach das Land keine Flüchtlinge in die EU durchwinkt und dafür sechs Milliarden Euro für deren Versorgung erhält. Geflossen sind davon bisher mehr als vier Milliarden Euro. Erdogan fordert mehr Geld, die EU will ihre Außengrenze dicht halten. Also wird es auf eine Verlängerung des Deals hinauslaufen.

[Both {Turkey and the EU} need each other, including on the refugee issue. The President of the Commission mentioned this as one of the four topics discussed in an initial discussion with Erdogan. topics "in which both can benefit from enhanced cooperation".

In 2016, the EU struck a deal with Turkey under which the country will not to wave refugees through into the EU and receives six billion euros for its trouble. More than four billion euros have been spent so far. Erdogan is demanding more money, the EU wants to keep its external border close. So it will result in an extension of the deal.] {my translation}

That mention comes at the very end of the news article. But it's not only an intense issue between Turkey and the EU. It's also dramatic evidence of a current weakness in the EU, which is to rely far too heavily on a kick-the-can-down-the-road approach to significant problems. The EU faced a big and very unusual surge of refugees in 2015-16, which was met with a great deal of disarray among EU member nations. And not only far-right parties responded in many countries with a xenophobic political reactions to which the center-right and left parties generally did a poor job of responding in a constructive way.

The agreement with Turkey was established in early 2016, and it gives Turkey the ability to pressure European governments by threatening to send more refugees north. As of last September, there were some 3.6 million refugees in Turkey. (UNHCR Turkey - Fact Sheet September 2020 22.09.2020) As Robin Alexander reported in his 2018 book, "Erdoğan nutzt seinen Machtzuwachs und sein Erpressungspotenzial gegenüber der EU dazu, die Demonrage der jahrzehntelang gewachsenen Demokratie in der Türkei zu beschleunigen." ("Erdoğan is using his increased power and his blackmail potential against the EU to accelerate the dismantling of Turkey's democracy, which has been growing for decades.") He threatened the EU just over a year ago with sending a large number of refugees north toward Europe. (Turkey says millions of migrants may head to EU BBC News 03/02/2020)

The EU has had five years now to work on reducing this threat, which is basically only seen as a threat because of xenophobic and Islamophobic sentiments in various EU countries that way too many EU leaders would rather duck that deal with them straightforwardly. An EU burden-sharing agreement to absorb a significant number of those refugees could have steadily reduced that particular blackmail potential. And would have been a decent thing to do. A concerted effort during that time to reduce European arms sales to warring parties in Libya and the Middle East would have also been very helpful.

All this compromises the EU's human rights position considerably. Turkey has used some of the Syrian refugees to carry out an ethnic cleansing operation in formerly Kurdish areas it gained military control over in northern Syria, moving out Kurds and repopulating those areas with non-Kurdish Syrian refugees. The 2016 deal makes the EU at least passively complicit in that kind of operation.

And whether the issues are human rights or democratic governance or Turkish foreign policy mischief, the current refugee situation gives Turkey a big addition of diplomatic clout. Erdoğan knows it, and EU leaders know it. In Germany and Austria, rightwing politicians like to bitch and moan about Turkish funding of mosques that my promote jihadism and worries that Turkey tries to inappropriately manipulate the considerable Turkish minorities in those countries in service of Turkish foreign policy. Whatever real concerns there may be on that score - and my impression is that those are relatively limited - those are legitimate concerns. But, for better or worse, Germany and Austria are significantly constrained in taking action on such perceived threats because of Turkey's refugee club.

So it's not surprising to see Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence blog expressing low expectations and a bit of disgust at the EU's current situation with Turkey (Beware of photo-ops with Erdogan 04/07/2021):

They had to have the photo op with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and it turned out to be bad idea, as we predicted. ...

A video clip from the meeting went viral. It showed Charles Michel taking the seat next to Erdogan, forcing Ursula von der Leyen to sit on the sofa opposite the Turkish foreign minister. Symbols speak more than words, especially in countries like Turkey. The same is true for the official photo in which the two EU leaders smiled, while Erdogan looked like he just wanted to get it over and done with. If the EU does not know how speak in images, they are better off keeping meetings behind closed doors.

Erdogan may not be Sergey Lavrov, but his seating arrangements were enough to display the rift between European Council and the Commission, and male dominance over a female leader. The EU's concern over Turkey's exit from the Istanbul Convention on Discrimination and Violence against Women suddenly lost its bite.

He's referring there to this obnoxious symbolic move by Erdoğan, Ursula Von der Leyen snubbed in chair gaffe at EU-Erdoğan talks Guardian News 04/07/2021:

Erdoğan pulled a similar stunt when Angela Merkel came to Ankara in 2016 to negotiate the refugee deal.

In the press briefing afterwards, von der Leyen said human rights are non-negotiable and that Turkey should respect the recent rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for the release Turkish businessman Osman Kavala and Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtain. She said the Commission will come up with a proposal for how to support Syrian refugees in Turkey in a show of good will. So goodwill first, non-negotiables after?

Hiding under the covers from the refugee challenge has a significant price for the EU, diplomatic as well as financial.

Joe Biden's early positioning with Turkey

US President Joe Biden sent an important diplomatic signal at the time of the recent EU (video) summit by singling out Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Misotakis as the only one of the Greek heads of government to whom he made a personal call, a significant diplomatic signal early in his administration that he's leaning toward Greece in its current disputes with their fellow NATO member Turkey.

Ekathimerini reports (Biden offers full support to Mitsotakis 03/28/2021):

Washington’s intention to support Athens was reportedly made loud and clear in the telephone call between US President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis last Thursday on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the start of the Greek War of Independence.

“If you need anything, call me. I’m here to help,” Biden reportedly told Mitsotakis – an offer which carries added significance given that no one can discount Ankara’s stance in the coming months. At the same time the foundations were laid for Mitsotakis to visit to the White House within the year.

If anything, the phone call reflected the open line of communication between the two capitals, and the US involvement in the region after its resounding absence during the era of Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump, during which time Ankara challenged Greece’s sovereign rights, not least with its Oruc Reis research vessel conducting surveys over several months last year.

Biden doesn't have hotel branding deals to worry about for his personal business, so he can take a more Presidential posture in dealings with other countries including Turkey than Trump did. (John Haltiwanger and Sonam Sheth, Trump’s disastrous retreat from Syria raises new questions about his financial interests in Turkey Business Insider 10/18/2019) You can check out photos of Trump Tower Istanbul here.

Biden also doesn't seem to share Trump's particular fondness for leaders like who strike authoritarian tough-guy postures.

Two stories dramatizing the passivity of EU leadership on EU foreign policy

These two stories provide yet another warning sign that the EU's unwillingness and/or inability to address key vulnerabilities of which it very continue to erode is external effectiveness and internal cohesion:

David Hersezenhorn, October 26, 2020 8:08 By sea and land, Turkey raises tensions with EU Politico EU 10/26/2020

Nicola Zolin, From compassion to fortress Europe — the migration crisis in pictures Politico EU 10/26/2020

Once again, Turkey is currently hosting around 3.5 million refugees, the largest number of any country in the world. That is part of a formal agreement with the EU. The EU pays them to keep the refugees.

The EU's ability to maintain its current immigration/refugee policies based on the Dublin System is currently extremely dependent on Turkey's willingness to hold those refugees. This puts a severe limitation on EU nations' ability to deal with unwanted policies by Turkey, whether it's with Greece in the Aegean Sea, with the civil war in Libya, or the renewed military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Politicians in Germany and Austria periodically like to grouse about the influence of Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan's party on ethnic Turks in their countries. Whatever substance those complaints contain - and there is some - it never seems to rise to a significant change in policy.

As long as EU leaders continue to tremble in fear at the prospect of changing the Dublin System, those limitations will continue.

Lots of juggling of priorities involved in foreign policy.

And Turkey is causing waves in various places, as Joshua Keating reports in Why Is Turkey Suddenly Fighting With Everyone? Slate 10/28/2020.

International dispute around the Samuel Paty murder in France

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan is taking the current uproar in France over the murder of a teacher by a Muslim zealot to posture as a champion of the Islamic faith (Muslim world condemns Macron, France over treatment of Islam 10/26/2020):

The backlash over French President Emmanuel Macron’s critique of Islam has intensified after Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan questioned his counterpart’s mental health, while Muslims in several countries are demanding a boycott of France.

Marking his second sharp criticism against Macron in two days, Erdogan said on Sunday that the French president had “lost his mind”, prompting France’s foreign minister to recall the country’s ambassador in Ankara.

The controversy has to do with a sensational case of a 47-year-old teacher, Samuel Paty, who "was beheaded after he reportedly showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a civics lesson." (Rachel Treisman, After Brutal Beheading, Rallies Erupt Across France To Honor Slain Teacher NPR 10/18/2020)

Deutsche Welle English reports on the ensuing discussion in France (Elizabeth Bryant, As France mourns slain teacher Samuel Paty, some question secular values 10/24/2020):

The same mocking cartoons which inspired the Charlie Hebdo attacks — and last month's stabbing of two people in Paris — are again testing the limits of France's vaunted secularism, or laïcité. Clashing views of faith and free speech are on the line. Feeding the tensions, some experts say, is a broader sense of stigmatization and disenfranchisement felt by many French Muslims, who represent Western Europe's largest Islamic community.

Now, as President Emmanuel Macron and his centrist government have vowed an all-out war against radical Islam, critics have said the strong defense of secularism is only exacerbating the problem. Instead of providing a neutral space for the country's melting pot of beliefs, as it's intended, secularism - enshrined in a 1905 law separating church and state - has become a flashpoint.

"There's a political culture that has problems with Islam," said Farhad Khosrokhavar, a prominent sociologist and expert on radical Islam. "And this political culture, laïcité, is a problem."

If one wants to have a real grasp of the real issues involved with violent Islamic fundamentalist groups, secularism and its relation to the democratic values of freedom of religion, social integration of immigrants from Muslim countries, women's rights, Islamophobic demagogy, and the problem of so-called "parallel communities". Elizabeth Bryant discusses the French version of the latter:

Authorities insist there is no disharmony between moderate Islam and French values. They instead fault communitarianism, a term used in France to suggest an inward-looking view of society that is often, although not exclusively, linked to conservative Islam. More recently, Macron has replaced communitarianism with separatism in his lexicon.

Some observers have said that same inward view helped fuel Paty's murder, with authorities citing an online hate campaign launched by a disgruntled parent of a student in Paty's class. That campaign, they say, motivated 18-year-old Chechen refugee Abdoullakh Anzorov to kill Paty.

In its fight against communitarianism over the years, the French government has introduced bans on religious symbols in public schools and offices and outlawed full-body Islamic swimsuits, or burkinis, in public swimming pools and beaches, the latter cast as a hygienic measure.

In September some lawmakers, including from Macron's own party, recently walked out of a session of the National Assembly during a speech by a veiled student leader — although she had broken no laws with her hijab. [my emphasis]

The French conflicts around Islam and Muslim extremism often gets framed in the press as a conflict between secularism values/laïcité and Islamic fundamentalism. In terms of classical liberal-secularist values, people are free to practice the religion they want, or no religion at all, and are free to talk and write about their religion without being put in jail for it. At the same time, they are free to criticize other people's religion or lack thereof without being jailed or murdered for it. In that framework, Samuel Paty's murder seems like a classic case of a hate crime motivated by his exercise of legitimate speech as a teacher.

But Islamophobia is also a key element of the ideology of non-Muslim far-right parties and sects and is often promoted by people who are also anti-democratic and racist and are using Islamophobia to promote a political program that has nothing to do with respecting women's rights or freedom of religion.

So keeping in mind the need to walk and chew gum at the same time is important in looking at larger controversies like the one that is currently associated with the murder of Samuel Paty.

The notion that Muslim form "parallel societies" in Europe, or "separatism" in Macron's usage, is always worth scrutinizing closely when it's used by politicians or the popular press. In France, for instance, the status of Muslims in society is heavily influenced by the specifics of French colonialism, and in particular the experience of Algeria being held as a French colony since 1830 and then becoming independence in the Algerian War of 1954-1962, which was particularly traumatic for French and Algerian politics.

But the notion of "parallel society" easily serves as one more iteration of the idea of Those People Who We In The Majority Society Don't Like as "not being like us," i.e., "The Jews keep to themselves", "Black people don't want their schools integrated with white schools," and on and on. Obviously, if immigrants or other minorities are really completely isolated from the society in which they live to such an extent that they really cannot participate in daily life and work as normal members of society, that is clearly a problem. And one that responsible governments would need to address in a practical and decent way.

But on the other hand, immigrants are more likely to hang out with other immigrants or previous immigrants from their national group because that's a key part of integrating into a new society. And terms like "parallel society" or "separatism" is mainly a means of Other-ing a targeted group. The US and European countries, for instance, have compulsory public education laws that guarantee most children growing up there will develop basic social ties outside their immediate family group. And it's not as though France or Germany or Italy are peppered with independent republics of Muslims or Algerians where the authority of the national government does not reach, like the Russian-controlled enclaves in Ukraine or Georgia, for instance.

And what we call civil society could also be described as an overlapping series of "parallel societies." The Catholic Church is itself a type of "parallel society" - as Catholic-haters have pointed out for centuries! - that has its own rituals, its own membership rules, its own institutions of authority, its own publishing houses, and even its own version of sharia, i.e., Catholic canon law. Obviously, this doesn't mean that Catholics are allowed to organize their own deaths squads and go behead some Protestant teacher they don't like. But it does mean that buzzwords like "separatism" and "parallel society" used for other-ing people should be treated with appropriate caution.

The same goes for headscarf debates.

Turkey's ambitions and tensions with Europe

Wolfgang Münchau's EuroIntelligence sketches the current challenge that Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey poses for the EU. Erdogan uses all means to keep Europe disunited and morally compromised 10/16/2020)

"Erdogan uses all means to keep Europe disunited and morally compromised," he writes. His general characterization of Turkey's policy may come off as a bit melodramatic: "Erdogan inspires Turks and Muslims with a vision of a modern empire stretching from Africa through Europe to Asia. You may not see New Turkey on the map, but it is becoming a reality."

But Erdoğan has been undertaking a more active policy in recent years:

Turkey already has a presence in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. It has military bases in Libya, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Qatar, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Northern Cyprus and Albania. It is militarily engaged in civil wars in Libya and Syria, and now in Azerbaijan against Armenia. This way Turkey is extending its reach into the Caucasus. Once the Turkish military puts its foot down, it creates realities on the ground. The buffer zone in northern Syria has turned de facto into a Turkish administration zone, with Turkish lira and products circulating. There is no need to change border lines, as unity with Turkey is an everyday experience. [my emphasis]

There are even new complications with Israel, including one the outbreak of the latest military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. "Turkey is now blatantly antagonistic toward Israel. There is no reason for Jerusalem to continue to placate it." (Zev Chafets, Israel Must Choose Better in Nagorno-Karabakh Bloomberg Opinion 10/22/2020) But Israel has had good relations with Azerbaijan for a while. Israel gets arms from Azerbaijan and sells them weapons. Also, "The country shares a border with Iran, Israel’s arch enemy. At the very least, that makes Baku an important source for intelligence gathering. There are also reports that it is a potential launching pad for the Israeli air force. That makes Azerbaijan a rare and valuable asset, one that Israel is not going to abandon."

Turkey is currently the country in the world that hosts the largest number of refugees. (Ranking der zehn Länder mit den meisten aufgenommenen anerkannten Flüchtlingen (Stand: Ende 2019) Statista 19.06.2020), 3.6 million as of the end of 2019. Because of the EU's kick-the-can-down-the-road approach to external immigration and especially toward refugees and asylum-seekers, Turkey can use it's refugees as a political club against the EU. As EuroIntelligence recalls:

Erdogan is a master of manipulation and turning arguments upside down. He sent refugees towards the Greek border to remind the EU what they could expect if they crossed his red lines. Turkey has crossed Europe's red lines many times, but there were no consequences. He sends out drilling ships into Greek waters, calls them back just in time for the EU summit, and sends them out again, blaming Greece for not having kept its promises. Who is holding Erdogan accountable for his aggressive acts? Europeans still do not seem to want to see through his tactics. [my emphasis]

Erdoğan plays another cynical game with refugees in Turkey: "Refugees are hostages to his games. They are used as a threat or bargaining chip with the EU. And the men are being trained and sent into his proxy wars in Libya or Azerbaijan." (my emphasis)

As uncomfortable as it may be for EU politicians, the current refugee policy gives Erdoğan leverage that a sensible refugee policy. But, more than five years after the refugee crisis of 2015-16 began, the EU is still sticking with the completely overwhelmed Dublin System for immigration and with Angela Merkel's 2016 arrangement with Turkey to hold refugees in exchange for payments from the EU.

This is one of several ways the EU is experiencing limits on its foreign policy clout that in many ways are self-imposed. In the case of immigration policy, foreign policy deferral to Erdoğan's Turkey is a real part of the price of holding on to the Dublin System. (Jennifer Rankin, Erdoğan puts EU's failure to agree a common migration policy in spotlight Guardian 03/02/2020) Deutsche Welle recently described the situation this way (Seda Serdar, Can the EU-Turkey deal be fixed? ):

Turkey hosts more than 3.5 million refugees, more than any other country in the world. It has so far spent €36.7 billion ($40 billion) on dealing with the refugee crisis. The EU committed €6 billion ($6.5 billion) to help Turkey.

Turkey accuses the EU of making late payments, while the EU alleges that Turkey is not sticking to its end of the deal and loosening security controls on migration routes.

Nevertheless, both sides need each other. The refugee crisis is too big for a single country to cope with on its own — a reality that has led European leaders to signal that financial aid to Turkey could continue beyond the 2016-2019 deal.

Gerald Knaus of the European Stability Initiative (ESI) think tank spoke on the current situation at the Frankfurt Book Fair this month, Der Migrationsforscher Gerald Knaus über sein Buch "Welche Grenzen brauchen wir?" FAZ 10/02/2020:

Knaus notes that the vast majority refugees in Turkey, who are primarily Syrians, mostly seem content to stay in Turkey and don't attempt to move into the EU. The 3.5 million refugees in Turkey are mostly integrated in some way into Turkish society. Most aren't living in overcrowded refugee camps, in other words. And that makes intuitive sense, because many hope to return to Syria at some point and Turkey is a Muslim country. Obviously, there are conflicts, including the hostility of Erdoğan's to Kurdish refugees and the kind of ethnic cleansing which Turkey is enacting in its occupied zone of Syria, displacing Kurds and resettling non-Kurdish Syrians on their land.

Turkey's current wreck of a foreign policy

Simon Tisdale writes of the Turkey-Syria confrontation that "what is happening now in north-west Syria is no longer a proxy war. It is a direct confrontation between the two heavily armed neighbouring states." On top of that, "it threatens to draw Turkey deeper into military conflict with Russia, Assad’s principal ally." (Erdoğan is reaping what he sowed: Turkey is on the brink of disaster in Syria Guardian 03/02/2020)

Tisdale portrays this as the result of a nine-year streak of bad decisions on the part of Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan that has brought Turkey "to the brink of disaster in Syria." Looking toward Erdoğan scheduled meeting Thursday with Vladimir Putin, he views Putin as likely to be fixed on having this be a win for his Syrian ally.

Putin’s price for letting Erdoğan off the hook may be a full or partial Turkish withdrawal from Idlib but also from other Turkish-occupied Syrian territory west of the Euphrates – and from the Kurdish-dominated north-east region that he controversially invaded last autumn. Erdoğan’s always unworkable idea of maintaining quasi-permanent “safe zones” inside Syria to which refugees in Turkey can, in theory, return looks to be dead or dying.

The intrinsic weakness of Erdoğan’s house-of-straw strategy has been further exposed by the inability of the Islamist extremists he supports in Idlib to resist the recent Syrian-Russian advance; and by the refusal of the US and Nato to come to his assistance in any meaningful way. Turkey appealed for support after last week’s convoy calamity. Only limited help with surveillance and intelligence-sharing was offered. [my emphasis]

Whenever it looks like the Trump Administration is doing something more-or-less sensible in a difficult foreign policy situation, I recall the Rick Perry version of the Stopped Clock Rule: even a stopped clock is right once a day. He already makes Erdoğan looks like a canny, astute master of foreign policy.

I've been opposed all along of having US combat troops directly involved in the Syrian civil war. Trump just agreeing on what amounts to a throwing-up-our-hands deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Because the post-9/11 US involvement in the Greater Middle East including Afghanistan has been a remarkable disaster. As we saw in the recent military incidents between the US and Iran taking place in Iraq, the very presence of US troops is providing risky possibilities for expanding military conflict.

But the US is a NATO ally of Turkey. The alliance does not include automatic involvement of NATO partners in any military conflict in which another member is involved. Each case has to be decided separately. And, as Tisdale notes above, the NATO allies have been reluctant to back Turkey's territorial incursions into Syria. The Trump Administration did facilitate the 2019 Sochi agreement between Turkey and Russia that allowed Turkey to move into the Rojava area in northeast Syria to suppress the Kurdish YPG and to drive Kurds out of a "buffer zone" that Erdoğan wants to establish there in which to settle other Syrian refugees that Turkey had been hosting.

It's worth recalling that the US for decades has claimed it as a great Cold War victory that Russia got involved in its own Afghanistan War. It had the dark side of spawning a virulent new brand of international Muslim fundamentalist terrorism. But we don't like to brag about that embarrassing detail.

And the US and Europe do need to be concerned with Russia's involvement in the Middle East. But in light of the American experience, it's tempting to sarcastically tell the Russians, "good luck with that". At a minimum, it would be misleading to assume that Russian entanglements in the Middle East are automacally negatives for the US and NATO.

But the US and its European allies should have been much more actively diplomatically in restraining Turkey's territorial incursions into Syria, in particular. And assume that's basically what Jenkins is suggesting for the immediate situation:

The humbling of Turkey is no cause for cheer in Europe and the US. What it does do is underscore its responsibility – so far shamefully ducked – to intervene directly in the Idlib crisis to protect civilians, halt the fighting, and pursue a wider peace. Leaving it to Erdoğan was never going to work. The western democracies have a last chance to do the right thing in Syria: manufacture and enforce a just and lasting settlement – and tell Putin and his bombers to go home.

And, as usual, the civilian population is severely affected (Linah Alsaafin, 'Impossible task': Aid groups in Idlib struggle to help Syrians Aljazeera 03/01/2020):

More than 950,000 Syrians have been forced from their homes since December, according to the United Nations, in the wake of an intensified military operation by Syrian government forces and their allies to retake the last rebel stronghold in the country.

The vast majority of the displaced - at least 81 percent - are women and children.

Since December, more than 200 refugee camps have been set up in Idlib, along the Turkish border, to accommodate some of the displaced civilians, known as internally displaced people (IDP), according to aid workers. But the camps lack basic sanitation and are far over their capacity, forcing tens of thousands to sleep outside in sub-zero temperatures, resulting in a number of children freezing to death. [my emphasis]

Escalation in the Turkey-Syria conflict

The Turkey-Syria military confrontation is still heating up. (Turkey downs Syrian jets after three of its drones were targeted in Idlib Middle East Eye 03/02/2020; Juan Cole, Russia backs Damascus as it closes Syrian Airspace, Threatens to down Turkish Jets Informed Comment 03/02/2020)

Turkey launches self-defence military operation in Syria Aljazeera 03/01/2020:

One important factor here is that the conflict is currently taking place inside Syria. Turkey's involvement inside Syria was agreed with Russia at two separate meetings in the Russian city of Sochi.

The 2018 Sochi agreement had Syria's ally Russia agreeing that Turkey would be allowed to operate inside the Syrian province of Idlib (Maria Tsvetkova, Russia and Turkey agree to create buffer zone in Syria's Idlib Reuters 09/17/2018):

Russia, the biggest outside backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his fight against rebels, has been preparing for an offensive on the city of Idlib, which is controlled by rebels and now home to about 3 million people.

But after Putin’s talks with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, who has opposed a military operation against the rebels in Idlib, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu told reporters there would not now be an offensive.

The rebels to be targeted in that 2018 agreement were Sunni Islamist groups, which opposed the Alawite-dominated government of Syria. The Alawites are sometimes described as a variation of Shi'a Islam. In any case, the Shi'a government of Iran is supporting the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad. Sunnis are a majority in Syria.

The 2019 agreement also concluded in Sochi was one in which Vladimir Putin gave Erdoğan permission to attack the Kurdish areas controlled by the leftwing Kurdish YPG in the Rojava area of northwestern Turkey: Full text of Turkey, Russia agreement on northeast Syria Aljazeera 10/22/2019

As Patrick Cockburn describes in, Erdogan’s ethnic cleansing of the Kurds is still happening now – and we have Trump to thank Independent 11/15/2019 Erdoğan had ethnic cleansing in mind:

In the case of the Turkish invasion of Syria last month, the motive is not a matter of speculation: William V Roebuck, a US diplomat stationed in northeast Syria at the time, wrote an internal memo about what he was seeing for the State Department. The memo later leaked. It is one of the best-informed analyses of what happened and is titled: “Present at the Catastrophe: Standing By as Turks Cleanse Kurds in Northern Syria and De-Stabilise our D-Isis [sic] Platform in the Northeast.”

Roebuck, with access to US intelligence about Turkish intentions, has no doubt that Ankara would like to expel the 1.8 million Kurds living in their semi-independent state of Rojava. He says: “Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria, spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on its payroll, represents an ... effort at ethnic cleansing, relying on widespread military conflict targeting part of the Kurdish heartland along the border and benefiting from several widely publicised, fear-inducing atrocities these forces committed.” [my emphasis]

Kurdish forces are currently hoping to make gains in the area of the city of Afrin, in northeast Syria, in cooperation with Syxrian forces. (Fehim Tastekin, Syrian Kurds ponder Afrin’s recapture in shadow of Idlib crisis Al-Monitor 03/02/2020)

We're currently seeing the serious failure of Erdoğan's foreign policy of the last few years. This report from the International Crisis Group by Nigar Göksel et al (Deadly Clashes in Syria’s Idlib Show Limits of Turkey’s Options 02/29/2020)looks at Turkey's current situation, including this on Turkey-Russia relations:

Turkey’s military options are limited by Russia’s current control over Syrian airspace. Nor does it have any reason to expect robust support from its traditional post-World War II allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including the U.S., in the event of a confrontation with Russia in Syria. As for Moscow, it presumably has no interest in sabotaging its overall relations with Ankara, which, from the Kremlin’s viewpoint, have helped distance Turkey from the U.S. and NATO.

Still, tensions between the two seem bound to increase. In recent years, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s strategy has leaned toward “Eurasianists” in Turkey who strongly favour close ties with Moscow. The death toll of the 27 February airstrike was shockingly high for Turkey, however, and Turkish media played up reports (denied by Moscow) that Russia did not even allow Turkish helicopters into Idlib’s airspace to evacuate the dead and wounded. All this will strengthen the hand of those who seek a rebalancing of Ankara’s strategic orientation toward Turkey’s NATO allies.

And, of course, the war is still creating large numbers of refugees. "One million people have been displaced in Syria's Idlib region since December near Turkey's southern border, causing what the United Nations says may be the worst humanitarian crisis in nine years of war." (Erdogan says he hopes for Idlib ceasefire deal in Putin talks Aljazeera 03/02/2020)