Serbest Nabi
It is not typical for the Turkish president to humbly back down at the first confrontation. Rather, he wants to make a populist show through empty allegations and arrogance, stirring up the whirlwinds of threat and intimidation around him and releasing counter-statements so that he does not appear to be easily submitting to opponents in the eyes of his Turanist and Islamist fans.
Erdogan identifies with the naivety of his fans in an exceptional way, to the extent that we hardly find a parallel among the leaders of the populist right in history. His audience, like him, is shallow-minded and uncultured, driven by his heretical ego which is dominated by the duality of fear and revenge against the other who does not satisfy his desire for power. Then, with his first awakening, Erdogan would obey and rush towards his strongest opponent to offer him every possible concession that pleases him. This is what Erdogan did with the Russian shrewd, Putin, who understands Erdogan’s mentality better than all world leaders, when his missiles shot down a Russian plane in northern Syria and the captured pilot was killed by his mercenaries. After a long carnival of empty championships, Erdogan hurried to Putin’s thresholds in St. Petersburg, where he was greeted by the latter in an unprecedented humiliating manner. Likewise, he mocked US President Trump, saying: “Do not commit foolishness,” in addition to other boring daily shows that do not end with world leaders and politicians.
Finally, he made empty claims that US sanctions under CAATSA will have no effect on Turkey, and that these sanctions denote a “lack of respect” for a member state of NATO.
Originally, this Act was designed to deter states that attempted to deviate from the US national security policy and coordinate into an alliance of enemies of the US. This is what the Turkish president, who was disappointed when he rushed behind the Russian president’s plots and temptations and deliberately bought the S-400 missile system, did. Thus, it posed a threat to US national security at the technological level, something that no American president who wanted to flirt with the Turkish president, as Trump used to do, could ignore.
Trump delayed implementing the law as much as possible, until the end of his term in the White House, that is, in the final weeks of his presidency. He did not want to cause any harm to his “spoiled” dictator, despite the fact that this law was elaborated and drafted by a group of representatives of both the Democratic and Republican parties against the background of Turkey’s purchase of the Russian missile system, and it passed in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in 2018. This law requires the US president to take a package of no less than five out of twelve penalties, within 30 days of his ratification in the Senate, but it seems clear that Trump took the lightest of the rest. However, it is taking on a more severe political and economic nature than had been hoped for by both Trump and his Turkish ally.
Turkey, a staunch ally of the United States and NATO countries, had never received such security-deterrent messages before. These include signs of serious political and security distrust, especially as they coincide with stark European calls for the need to deter the reckless policies of the Turkish president in the Mediterranean.
Regardless of the fact that the US sanctions package will deprive the military industry (which Erdogan boasts about on every occasion) of advanced technology and make the armored vehicles and aircraft that Erdogan claims that the Turkish “genius” has produced mere scrap, it perpetuates an unprecedented mistrust of Turkish foreign policy in many regional and international issues, foremost of which is the Syrian issue.
It seems to us that these military sanctions are merely an extension of growing American political discontent with the role that the Turkish president plays in many fields, colluding and identical to the role that the Russian president has drawn for him at the expense of the political goals of the United States and NATO countries in Syria, the Mediterranean, and other regions. This will encourage the rest of the hesitant European countries, such as Germany, Hungary, and Poland, to take more firm positions against Turkey.