Why Turkey’s President Erdogan Wants Those Russian Missiles
The US ultimatum gave Turkey very few days in which to choose between Nato and Russia. Either Ankara dropped the deal with the Ruskies to adopt their S-400 missile system or US punitive actions followed by the first week of June. The newly announced temporary band-aid of a joint US-Turkey study group will only postpone the reckoning. It will not resolve the fundamental issue of why Turkey's President Erdogan wants Moscow's missiles. He wants them badly. Considering what that means for Turkey's economy and defense capability, President Erdogan's obstinacy might seem baffling. The Turks would lose participation in the F-35 fighter jet program and ultimately all the privileges of integration with the Western alliance, infrastructure investments, bond underwriting, debt-service guarantees and much else. Turkish banks could ultimately face exclusion from the Swift system. Not the whole package at first but the very threat of increasing pressure would deflate the economy and devalue the currency sharply. The dark era of 1970s post-Cyprus-invasion misery could recur blackouts, shortages, insurgency, bunker economics.
Why would Ankara flirt with such disasters? Why broach the missile deal in the first place? You'd have to be highly motivated to incur such risks for your country. What is motivating Erdogan? After all, he has systematically reduced all institutional checks to his rule. Including the ballot box: He's in the process of neutralizing that too with a June 23 rerun of the recent municipal elections which his party lost. He has the country firmly in his grip. Why does he need Russian missiles? Answer: because his own military still worries him. Especially a military tied to Western weapons and training and indoctrination which makes it the last institution to be potentially independent-minded. He doesn't forget the air force jets that bombed the capital and challenged his own civilian airliner during the attempted coup.
Air force officers need to be highly literate. They tend to belong to the educated, more secular classes. They often spend years abroad learning their technical skills. In short, they're comprised of Erdogan's anti-demographic. He is right to fear them more than their land and sea counterparts. In general, as happened during the coup attempt, rebellious armed forces can be opposed and marginalized via media propaganda by flooding the streets with political supporters. But a mutinous air force presents an altogether different kind of threat. You might own the media but they own the skies; you can't hide strafing jets from the public. Anywhere in the country. They can intimidate or inflame, alter the psychological balance, fly over your supporters and find you. Most crucially, you can't shoot them down. And here's the rub. Nato radar and missiles are programmed to avoid targeting their own kind, ostensibly to prevent friendly fire incidents. As a result, should there be another coup attempt, forces loyal to President Erdogan manning Nato ground-to-air weapons cannot defend against Nato-built aircraft. But S-400 Russian missiles can.
That's why Erdogan is so highly motivated to buy the Kremlin's missile systems. Motivated enough to risk taking the entire country towards sanctions and economic catastrophe. No doubt, as a neo-Ottomanist he believes he can adopt strategic neutrality as the Turks did in the pre-and-post WWI years, playing both sides against the middle. Some around him have made noises implying that the West cannot afford to lose Turkey, or let it collapse, therefore Erdogan can defy the West as much as he wants. This is a dangerous fantasy. Neither Nato nor Europe can afford a radicalized, unstable or hostile state right on its borders, potentially locking up the Mediterranean's eastern shores as the Ottomans once did.
Erdogan may try to temporize for a while but he will have to choose one side or the other in the end, just as Yanukovych had to do in Ukraine. Yanukovych chose Moscow, which led to Maidan riots and his exile. Erdogan is not quite there yet but he is certainly girding his loins for the moment of truth when he might end up choosing Moscow despite huge Western pressure. The signs are there. He talks openly about building the successor S-500 system jointly with Russia. He fulminated publicly several times against Turkey being forced to join the renewed embargoes on Iran's economy, until he caved earlier this month (more about that later). He is building Russian nuclear power plants in the country. I wrote about his visit to Caracas in a previous column. He signed a deal making Turkey chief buyer of Venezuela's raw gold. Like oil and uranium, gold is a currency substitute, indeed a kind of currency. It acts as a hedge against sanctions. It prepares the economy for life outside the international banking system.
That's where all this is headed. And if he thinks, as he seems to, that there is a perfectly tolerable existence for the country outside that system, he needs to look again at the other countries now inhabiting that zone Syria, Venezuela, Iran and the like. Erdogan may hope that his newfound ally in the Kremlin will help uphold him but, historically, Moscow never harbored any sentimental impulses toward Turkey. There's no longterm guarantee of stability in embracing the Kremlin. Think realpolitik: the Kremlin wins just as conclusively if Turkey falls apart no more Nato eastern flank, no more impediment between Russia and the Mediterranean, no more pro-Western strategic architecture from Greece all the way to India. No more Ankara-funded resistance to Assad in Idlib.
Turkey could easily become Venezuela or even Syria. Or, at best, another Iran, with pseudo-democratic processes and a permanent governing elite furnishing a modicum of stability. Tragically, as we see in those countries, the elites responsible for pushing things that way don't necessarily lose. As the economy moves into the dark side, it concentrates in the hands of regime oligarchs who join the alternative global finance system - of massive hidden funds moving between tax havens, freeports, off-shore banks, failed states, and the like. Which is why, in the end, Erdogan probably didn't really mind adding Turkey to the countries enforcing sanctions on Iran. The rest of the population may lose the benefits of trading with its neighbor but the political elites usually find ways to profit in the shadows. The December 2017 Zarrab court case in New York which I covered in a two-parter in this column demonstrated how Turkish bankers did just that for their political masters.
As the economy in rogue countries shapes into clusters of pyramids topped by loyalist oligarchs those outside the patronage deltas find survival increasingly hard. They join up or they emigrate in large numbers. Thus the power structure consolidates itself. That approach is now a full-fledged recognizable system, one that we see replicated in country after country. It started in Putin's Russia and is now emulated widely. Because those countries have to use the same alternate global black money network, they are driven willy-nilly into each others' arms, however politically averse they may be. In effect, the Kremlin is building a new economic bloc as of old to rival the West's and Turkey looks about to become the latest member to join.
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Why Turkey's President Erdogan Wants Those Russian Missiles