Anita Starosta warns that Türkiye’s attacks on Kurdish areas in the northern Syrian area known as Rojava that borders Türkiye and Iraq could get much more serious.
Rojava is a semi-autonomous region administered by a radical-democratic Kurdish group, the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD). Starosta speculates that Türkiye is setting out to disrupt the Rojavan government and neutralized the PYD as a fighting force. The PYD has been an ally of American forces - which are still actively involved in Syria - in fighting against the Syrian government and the Islamic State.
The recent strikes ordered by Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan targeted oil fields, which are a key source of revenue for Rojava. Turkish forces also struck grain storage facilities, hospitals, power plants, and schools, Starosta reports, and it is feared that Erdoğan could soon open a ground offensive.
The Russia-Ukraine War has given Türkiye new leverage over its fellow NATO allies this year. It has been playing a mediating role between Russia and Ukraine, and the Azerbaijan pipeline that runs through Türkiye has been more important than ever for European gas supplies. Starosta writes Erdoğans Krieg: Das Ende von Rojava?Blätter 1:2023 [published mid-December 2022] [Accessed 2022-15-12]):
At the NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Bucharest at the end of November [2022], [German] Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock also expressed concern to her Turkish counterpart and warned against expanding [Turkish] military action [against Rojava]. But the Turkish government does not have to fear consequences, let alone an intervention of the NATO partners, all to obvious it has been given a free hand – likely also against the background of Turkey's mediating role in the Ukraine war and the fact that Turkey plays a central role in preventing refugee movements to Europe. Direct consequences for the Turkish government and winter aid for the Kurdish regions would currently be more than appropriate. (my translation)
She also notes that since Russia and the US currently dominate the air in the Rojava region, it’s unlikely that Türkiye would have mounted its recent attacks without some kind of permission from both countries.
Since deliberately targeted civilian facilities, particularly with the seemingly obvious aim of hurting the civilian population just before the beginning of winter, is a war crime, any US complicity or indulgence of these attacks in reprehensible. That may sound quaint in light of US conduct in Iraq. But it’s true, and all the NATO nations should be taking full account of that fact.
As Starosta bluntly puts it, “Once again, it is clear that this is not about human rights, democracy or even a "feminist foreign policy", but about geopolitics and the distribution of power in a new world order.“ Foreign Minister Baerback has spoken in support of the feminist foreign policy concept.
Starosta also stresses that the crippling of the Rojava government would also weaken the fight against the Islamic State, the Islamic terrorist group that was one of the uglier types of “blowback” from the Cheney-Bush Administration’s Iraq War.
There is also this recent development between Turkish ally Azerbaijan and Russian ally Armenia: “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused the resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan to drift away from Russia’s mediation toward that of the West.“ (Krivosheev, Kirill [2022]: Russian Peacekeepers Find Themselves Sidelined in Nagorno-Karabakh. Carnegie Politika 15.12.2022. <https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/88651> [Accessed 2022-15-12])
On the Rojava situation, see also: Christopher Phillips, Why Rojava could face a slow death by a thousand cuts Middle East Eye 12/09/2022
Starosta, Antia (2022): Erdoğans Krieg: Das Ende von Rojava? Blätter 1:2023 [published mid-December 2022] (Accessed 2022-15-12)
While NATO proudly backs Ukraine against Russia in defense of national sovereignty and international law, NATO member Türkiye (Turkey) appearance to involve it in new interference in Syria against Kurdish forces:
Turkey's leader [Recep Tayyip Erdoğan] said to Vladimir Putin “it is ... a priority to clear the border of terrorists, at least 30 km deep", referring to Kurdish fighters from the People's Protection Units (YPG) in northern Syria, according to a statement from his office.
The two leaders also discussed grain supplies and a potential regional gas hub in Turkey, both countries said.…
But Connor Echols doesn’t expect the Biden-Harris Administration to discourage such an intervention very strongly:
“The Biden administration sees Turkey as a very important ally vis-à-vis the conflict in Ukraine,” [Giorgio] Cafiero [of Gulf State Analytics] said, noting Ankara’s key role in providing weapons to Kyiv and moderating talks between the warring parties. “The White House is not interested in aggravating Turkey right now.”
So Washington will likely avoid using its significant leverage over Ankara — including a pending deal that would enable Turkey to buy a fleet of 50 new F-16s — to try to prevent an offensive in Syria. Instead, U.S. leaders will continue to call on both Kurdish and Turkish fighters to deescalate. (Turkey is about to invade Syria, and the US won’t do much to stop it. Responsible Statecraft 11.29.2002)
Türkiye has new leverage because of its role in supporting the NATO effort to back Ukraine:
Turkey’s threatened incursion into northern Syria is testing US efforts to balance between an important counterterrorism partner in the Middle East and a pivotal geopolitical ally in the war in Ukraine.
At the heart of the tussle between Ankara and Washington is the United States’ support for the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a Kurdish-majority militia Washington has partnered with to fight the Islamic State (IS) group.
Ankara views the SDF as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, which has waged a decades-long war for independence against Turkey. The US considers the group, known as the PKK, a terrorist organisation, but refuses to cut ties with the SDF, which Washington sees as the most effective fighting force against IS.
Türkiye has its own power-balancing calculations at work, which Erdoğan has used fairly skillfully in recent years. It holds upwards of 3 million refugees that the EU is paying Türkiye to keep there under an agreement worked out between Angela Merkel in 2016 and renewed in 2021. This deal gives Erdoğan to pressure the EU (or blackmail them, depending on one’s perspective) at any time by threatening to send hundreds of thousands of refugees into the EU.
It’s both a tragedy and a scandal - and political malpractice of a very high order - that after the 2015-16 uptick in immigration that EU-Türkiye deal has so far been the best they could do in establishing a decent refugee policy includes burden-sharing within the Union as well as adherence to international humanitarian law. While the far-right parties have been the most toxic in promoting xenophobic politics, the center parties have been basically pitiful in pushing back against the anti-refuge demagoguery, a factor which Vladimir Putin and the Russian leadership clearly hope will be a major factor in weakening EU unity over Ukraine in the coming months.
The current situation with oil and gas sanctions against Russia and Russian embargoes of supplies damages the EU economies more than that of the United States, whose oil and gas producers are notably benefitting. (I take it for granted that war profiteers of all stripes are happy for the booming new business, at least until nukes start dropping.)
Europe has three important pipeline corridors for gas imports, from Norway, North Africa and Azerbaijan. The one from Azerbaijan goes through Türkiye. Stefan Meister explains, “Türkiye is … NATO's most important partner on the Black Sea. Ankara sees itself as a bridge for trade between Asia and Europe. One of Turkey's main goals is to become an energy hub from the Caspian region as well as the Middle East to Europe.”
And he notes that the current situation makes Türkiye an attractive partner for wider cooperation for both NATO and Russia:
Russia's war against Ukraine and the attempt to cut it off completely from its ports and transit opportunities in the Black Sea increase the need for the EU and NATO (Europe's key security partner) to play a greater role in the Black Sea. Turkey is the key state, as the [UN] agreement on grain exports negotiated by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan [facilitating indirect negotiations between Russia and Ukraine] recently showed. At the same time, Moscow is courting Ankara with energy projects and offers of economic cooperation. From Moscow's point of view, Turkey should become a key country to circumvent Western sanctions.
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)
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]
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]
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.
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-FreiheitOberösterreichische 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 SofagatePolitico 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)
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.
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 BeziehungenOberösterreichische 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 womenDeutsche 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 EUBBC 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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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)
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.
"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-KarabakhBloomberg 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 spotlightGuardian 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.
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.
Libya has become a multipolar battleground unusual in the era since 1946. The UN-recognized General National Assembly (GNA) government in Tripoli is ranged against the forces of Benghazi-based Gen. Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar is supported by the Russian Federation, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and diplomatically, France.
The GNA is supported by Turkey, which has sent in a few thousand Syrian mercenaries (battle-hardened rebels who lost in their home country and who skew to the religious Right). Although ordinarily the Turkish backing would also implicate NATO, Turkey’s Libya position is opposed by Greece, Italy and France and so Ankara is isolated on this issue. Turkey in Libya helps create an Eastern Mediterranean strategic position for that country, stretching east from Tripoli to eastern (Turkish) Cyprus and thence Turkey itself. Turkey is interested in gas deposits off Cyprus that Greek Cyprus, Greece, Italy and France also have their eye on. It is also interested in Libyan oil, which is at the moment not being much pumped and is under Haftar’s control.
The two sides, the GNA and Haftar, are gearing up for a big battle over Sirte, which would be the GNA’s gateway to recovering some of the oil fields.
Of course, oil is involved! Cole notes that the policy of Bunker Boy's Administration is incoherent.
The Trump administration is largely uninterested in the substance of geopolitics, but rather is satisfied with the appearance of willingness to negotiate US demands, as with North Korea. Curbing China and strangling Iran are virtually the only actual major Trump policies toward the rest of the world.
The US turn inward and the paralysis of the country in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, has opened up new spaces for other great powers, and for regional powers, to assert themselves.
The US is irrelevant to this one at the moment.
We're at a place in the Presidential campaign were some Democrats are panicky at the thought of anything that sounds like a criticism of the Obama-Biden Administration. But they did intervene militarily in Libya in 2011. (I'll mote here that Juan Cole, who is generally critical of US interventions, supported that one at the time.)
In a Fox News interview last Sunday, Obama was asked about his “worst mistake.” It’s a classic gotcha question, but he had an answer ready. “Probably failing to plan for the day after, what I think was the right thing to do, in intervening in Libya.” This was yet another act of presidential contrition for the NATO operation in 2011 that helped to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi but left the country deeply unstable. In 2014, Obama said: “[W]e [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this. Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions.” In recent interviews with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the “Obama Doctrine,” the president bluntly said the mission in Libya “didn’t work.” Behind closed doors, according to Goldberg, he calls the situation there a “shit show.” [my emphasis]
In the first bolded passage, Obama is repeating the stock excuse of the generals and the foreign policy establishment for failed military interventions: everything would have been better if we had just killed more of those foreigners and killed them faster, everything would have worked out. Even spectaular disasters like the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War haven't seemed to deterred them from using it.
The second bolded passage is a better description.
The US-NATO intervention nine years ago can't be said to have led directly to the current situations. Other international players made they own decisions in the process. But it contributed mightily to the developmentof the current situation. As the Quincy Institute's July 2020 report New U.S. Paradigm for the Middle East: Ending America’s Misguided Policy of Domination observes:
The military intervention, with U.S. support and involvement, that led to the overthrow of Muammar al–Gaddafi in 2011 has left Libya in chaos. The continuing civil war has had a destabilizing effect beyond Libya’s borders, including a notable increase in terrorist groups operating in the Sahel and West and Central Africa. Furthermore, the involvement of Turkey and European governments in support of opposed Libyan factions has deepened rifts within the E.U. and NATO. [my emphasis]
None of this means that Bunker Boy is displaying some kind of dovish inclinations in his Libya policy. Cole's analysis that he doesn't much know are care what is happening in Libya is very plausible. Not much market for new Trump Towers there at the moment. The Orange Clown in fact weighed in on Libya in 2011 in a statement that hardly sounds dovish, Donald Trump Vlog - Deleted: From the Desk of Donald Trump - Gaddafi, Libya - February 28, 2011Factbase Videos 03/11/2018:
He is also in that video applying the same kind of deep and incisive analysis with which the world has now become so familiar.
Competence matters in foreign policy. And the US could have some actual constructive influence - without additional military interventions - in discouraging an Egyptian invasion and pressuring both Turkey and Russia to back off. Turkey is an ally of the US in the NATO mutual-defense pact, so what countries Turkey is invading is an important matter for US policy.
The EU and the members who are also NATO allies have their own responsibility in this situation. They should all be trying to de-escalate the civil war instead of fueling it. Especially since Turkey has also been escalating tensions with fellow NATO member Greece. The EU is also particularly vulnerable to blackmail by Turkey because the EU steadfastly refuses to develop a more reasonable and humane policy for housing and processing refugees. Under the 2016 Angela Merkel negotiated, the EU is paying Turkey to hold up to four million refugees. Turkey used the threat of sending refugees into the EU to pressure the Union earlier this year. (Chris Baynes, Turkey’s Erdogan threatens to send millions of refugees to Europe unless it backs Syria ‘safe zone'Independent 10/26/2019
My wish for US policy on Russia would be that it would be framed as Russia being the peer nuclear power to the United States and as being a regional power with a medium-sized economy that is heavily dependent on oil and has a long border with China. (Cue "To Dream the Impossible Dream".)
Russia's status as a petrostate was a major factor in a recent Russian decision in opposition to petrostate Saudi Arabia. Ilya Arkhipov et al report in Ilya Arkhipov et al, Putin Dumps MBS to Start a War on America’s Shale Oil IndustryBloomberg/Yahoo! Finance 03/07/2020:
Russia’s energy minister walked into OPEC’s headquarters in central Vienna knowing his boss was ready to turn the global oil market upside down.Alexander Novak told his Saudi Arabian counterpart Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman that Russia was unwilling to cut oil production further. The Kremlin had decided that propping up prices as the coronavirus ravaged energy demand would be a gift to the U.S. shale industry. The frackers had added millions of barrels of oil to the global market while Russian companies kept wells idle. Now it was time to squeeze the Americans.After five hours of polite but fruitless negotiation, in which Russia clearly laid out its strategy, the talks broke down. Oil prices fell more than 10%. It wasn’t just traders who were caught out: Ministers were so shocked, they didn’t know what to say, according to a person in the room. The gathering suddenly had the atmosphere of a wake, said another.
For over three years, President Vladimir Putin had kept Russia inside the OPEC+ coalition, allying with Saudi Arabia and the other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to curb oil production and support prices. On top of helping Russia’s treasury – energy exports are the largest source of state revenue – the alliance brought foreign policy gains, creating a bond with Saudi Arabia’s new leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The world’s largest oil exporter engaged in an all-out price war on Saturday by slashing pricing for its crude by the most in more than 30 years. State energy giant Saudi Aramco is offering unprecedented discounts in Asia, Europe and the U.S. to entice refiners to use Saudi crude.
At the same time, Saudi Arabia has privately told some market participants it could raise production much higher if needed, even going to a record 12 million barrels a day, according to people familiar with the conversations, who asked not to be named to protect commercial relations. With demand ravaged by the coronavirus outbreak, opening the taps would throw the oil market into chaos.
The Kremlin said on Friday that President Vladimir Putin had no plans to talk to the Saudi leadership, dashing hopes that a deal could be salvaged at the very top.
"This is an unexpected development that falls far below our worst-case scenario and in our view will create one of the most severe oil price crisis in history," Bjoernar Tonhaugen, head of oil markets at Rystad Energy, told Al Jazeera.
"The decision risks sending oil prices into a free fall with the fundamental floor for prices, as in 2016, determined by the cost of completing US shale DUCs [drilled but uncompleted wells], which is now as low as $25 per barrel."
Russia's increasing involvement in the Middle East is a double-edged sword. Russia is supporting the Syrian government in its internal civil war and the related conflicts with Turkey, with which Russia had improved relationships in previous years. Russia also is also favoring Syria's ally Iran. Saudi Arabia is involved in a war in Yemen that is partially a "proxy war" with Iran. So is the war in Syria.
The conventional American response to increased Russian involvement there as a threat to the US and NATO seems to be pretty one-sided at this point. Involvement in the Middle East, especially since the Iraq War, has not proven to be a positive thing for the United States. A much weaker Russia, also committed to keeping military pressure on Georgia and Ukraine and having annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea, is arguably already overextended in its Middle East involvements.
David Hearst describes the rocky state of Russia-Turkey relations in Erdogan and Putin: The end of the affairMiddle East Eye 03/03/2020. That article was published before the new cease-fire agreement between the two countries, which so far doesn't seem to be very substnatial, in any case.
So when we talk about Russia interference in European and American politics, it's important to remember to what extent we are talking about a regional-power petrostate that's largely trying to play a weak hand as best it can. Paul Pillar provides a "realist" look at that aspect of Russian policy in Why Putin keeps interfering in U.S. electionsResponsible Statecraft 03/6/2020.
When it comes to Russian meddling in US Presidential elections, it's important to recognize that it's a real problem that needs to be countered. But despite Putin's autocratic/oligarchical approach to governance in Russia and the various rightist-nationalist-Christianist ideologies that he has employed over the years to justify it, there's little reason to view Russian goals in that interference as promoting a particular ideology or trying to set up "Manchurian candidates". As Pillar writes, "the advantages in Russian eyes of stoking as much division as possible between the major American political parties is still for Moscow the dominant factor. ...The Russian objective of stoking divisions applies to America’s relations with the rest of the world as well as to divisions within the United States."
But Pillar does speculate that Russia likely views keeping Trump in the Presidency as serving their goal of weakening NATO and other American alliance, because Trump is making such a message of international relations:
Those who have cast doubt on Putin’s desire to help Trump’s election or re-election by citing Trump’s support for beefing up the U.S. military are missing the most relevant points. What another possible U.S. president would do regarding military posture is not necessarily more desirable from Moscow’s point of view than anything Trump has done. In the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton was widely perceived as the more hawkish of the two candidates, while Trump was talking about retrenchment and getting out of overseas wars. Putin hardly seems fazed by any prospect of a Trump-led arms race; the Russian president recently related to an interviewer that Trump had told him that U.S. defense spending is too high and that disarmament is a more worthy objective. [my emphasis]
In any case, it's hard enough for American academic and journalistic experts to predict what affects whom and how in political campaigns. There's no particular reason why Russian specialists in American politics would be notably more shrewd in doing so.
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 SyriaGuardian 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.
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]
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.
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 SyriaAljazeera 10/22/2019
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]
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 talksAljazeera 03/02/2020)
The architects of the Iraq War wanted to wreck existing governments in the Middle East - not including Saudi Arabia, of course - through "wars of liberation" and thereby strengthen the relative positions of the US and Israel. The chain of events runs from the US invasion of Iraq, to the resulting installation of an Iraqi government with a pro-Iranian foreign policy orientation, to the rise of the Islamic State and a long civil war in Syria now currently has NATO ally Turkey on the verge of a war with Syria and Russia.
There were many other factors involved, of course. But to a very great extent, the current precarious political-military situation on the Syrian border is a direct result of the Iraq War. And, to a large extent, this instability, death, and massive social disruption was a desired outcome of the advocates of the Iraq War.
Earlier today [Friday], two Russian warships armed with cruise missiles transited from Sevastopol, Crimea, through the Bosporus Strait in Istanbul to Mediterranean waters.
Turkey reacted to the attacks by launching military strikes on the Syrian positions, allegedly “neutralizing 309 regime troops.” It also opened its borders for Syrian refugees to enter Europe, likely to pressure the Europeans to take a harsher stance on Russia and Syria. Erdogan's decision triggered angry reactions from Greece, which depolyed [sic] police reinforcements to the country’s border checkpoints with Turkey to prevent the influx of new migrants. Ankara also called for an emergency NATO meeting over the situation in Syria. [my emphasis]
Austria's rightwing (ÖVP) Chancellor Sebastian "Basti" Kurz wasted little time in banging his favorite xenophobic drum against refugees and immigrants:
#Österreich ist auch bereit, die Länder an der Außengrenze mit zusätzlichen Polizisten zu unterstützen, wie Innenminister @karlnehammer bereits gestern betont hat. Wenn der Schutz der EU-Außengrenze nicht gelingen sollte, dann wird Österreich seine Grenzen schützen.
A situation like [the large refugee influx to Northern Europe in] 2015 must not be repeated. Our aim must be to properly protect the EU's external borders, to stop illegal migrants there and not to wave them through.
Austria is also prepared to support the countries on the external border with additional police officers, as Interior Minister Karl Nehammer stressed yesterday. If the protection of the EU's external border is not successful, Austria will protect its borders.
The EU "solved" the acute phrase of the refugee crisis in 2015-16 which far-right parties exploited for demagogic appeals with non-trivial ´benefit to their electoral position, by an agreement that Angela Merkel negotiated with Turkey to hold refugees. Turkey's latest action appears to breach that agreement. And that agreement gave Turkey the ability to threaten the EU in other policy areas, which he is now doing.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan's foreign policy is currently a mess. He thumbed his nose at his NATO partners by accepting weapons sales from Russia that were opposed by other NATO members. Then he launched a military operation inside Syria, which is backed by Russia. He also intervened in the Libyan civil war underway, on the opposing side to the one backed by Russia.
Turkey's expressed goal in its recent invasion of northern Syria was to repatriate some of the millions Syrian refugees they were hosting. But Erdoğan used that as an excuse for “ethnic cleansing” of Kurds out of that region, generated additional refugees in the process. Because Erdoğan also wants to establish a Turkish-controlled buffer zone against a possible Kurdish independence movement. The US had previously supporter the leftist Kurdish YPG organization. But Trump abandoned them under pressure from Turkey. See: Juan Cole, Abandoned by Trump, Syrian Kurds frantically turn to Moscow for Protection from TurkeyInformed Comment 12/28/2018.
Nearly a million people have been forced from their homes in Idlib since the Syrian government launched its offensive to capture the province from Turkey-backed opposition forces in December - a crisis the United Nations has called a "man-made humanitarian nightmare". ...
Earlier this month, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad captured the arterial M5 highway, which links all of the country's major cities and six provinces, and consolidated control over Aleppo province. This has come at a heavy cost to the Turkish military, which has 12 observation posts in the region under a 2017 and 2018 "de-escalation zone" agreement with Russia.
Some of these positions now lie in areas seized by the Syrian government.
Speaking in Ankara on Friday, Turkey's Defence Minister Hulusi Akar said his country's military had responded to the Syrian government attack by striking 200 of their targets from the air and ground. Some 309 Syrian troops were "neutralised", he said. Among the targets were Syrian government helicopters, military tanks, armoured vehicles, howitzers and ammunition depots.
"This attack [on Turkish soldiers] occurred even though the locations of our troops had been coordinated with Russian officials in the field," he said. The Russian foreign ministry, denied the claim, saying: "Turkish soldiers who were in the battle formations of terrorists came under the fire of Syrian troops."
Maxim Suchkov assess the current state of Turkish-Russian relations this way:
Putin and Erdogan are increasingly unhappy with one another but both still need each other in Syria and beyond. To extend the “marriage of convenience” metaphor that is frequently applied to describe the Russia-Turkey partnership, the two have to stay together “for the kids” — joint trade, growing interdependency in energy supplies, the Akkuyu nuclear power plant and the S-400 missile deal as well as other possible contracts and political investments the two leaders have made into developing the relationship.
For Russia, the value of Turkey in these and other domains has not depreciated. It's even grown since the last stress test Moscow and Ankara experienced when Turkey downed the Russian jet in November 2015. Against this particular measurement, the partnership with Syria seems a lot less significant. Yet the price of not standing up for its ally in Damascus is measured in different currency in Moscow — one that buys global status.
With Turkish losses mounting in #Syria , President Erdogan is brushing up against the limits of his pivot to Russia. Putin has chosen Assad over Erdogan. https://t.co/98TeSXfShS
