Turkey's Manipulation of Europe, Then and Now - MIDDLE EAST FORUM

A Turkish regime exploiting an international crisis to
manipulate Europeans. Sound familiar?

by Efraim Karsh, July 17, 2016

Originally published on June 24 under the title "Holding the Balance of Power: Turkey's Complicating Relationship with Europe during the First World War and Since."

It is a historical irony that, for the second time in a century, Turkey is exploiting a major international crisis to manipulate the most powerful European nation into a hugely misconceived and self-defeating policy.

Having exacerbated the Syrian civil war by allowing jihadists of all hues to cross Turkish territory to fight his friend-turned-nemesis Bashar al-Assad, then spurred a massive humanitarian crisis by allowing hundreds of thousands of Syrian refuges (and assorted Middle Eastern migrants camped in Turkey) to infiltrate Europe illegally, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan capitalized on Chancellor Merkel's recoil from her "open door" migration policy to extract substantial financial and political concessions from the European Union that, if fully implemented, will irreversibly change the EU's demographic and cultural identity.

When is not a good time to deal?

Although I shall not expand on it now, the necessary serenity is absent, there is an important reason for which there cannot be, and there should not be, any deal with today's "Turkey" for Cyprus's British-Turkish problem. That is because in "Turkey" there is authentic fascism, some Turkish liberals like Nuray Mert, call it authoritarian nationalism. It's the same thing that persists since its birth in 1923, first under the Kemalist veil that the west approved of, now under a "mildly" Islamic one.