Turkey broke into strategic space in a huge region from Libya to the Levant and the Transcaucasus.
It did it in spite of the United States, but thanks to their failure in the Middle East and the chaos that reigned in the region after the wars in Libya, Iraq and the attempted armed “regime change” in Syria.
It did this thanks to the looseness and “brain death” of NATO, which is obsessed with an imaginary “Russian threat” that does not understand how the world is changing and cannot see beyond its nose.
Thanks to the foreign policy weakness of the EU, which has no policy in the Middle East, except for the passive support of the Americans, who are enthusiastically destroying stability, but are unable to restore it.
Arrogant Europe, reveling in its European success, for a long time led Ankara by the nose, promising Turkey an unrealizable EU membership, until it suddenly discovered that Turkey had already outgrown this illusory goal and was setting itself completely different tasks. And today the European Union has to deal with a completely different country.
The leading European powers that once decided the fate of this region – France, Great Britain, pre-war Germany, Italy – are practically absent there today or are a pale shadow of their former selves. In this situation of a political vacuum, multiplied by the growing chaos, the two powers that had played here before, albeit at different times, the key roles – Turkey and Russia – returned to the Middle East.
From now on, it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for the West to contain new Turkish ambitions. The European powers, like the United States, expect to use these ambitions to their advantage, but this calculation may turn out to be a miscalculation: Erdogan got a taste for autonomous play. Turkey’s advance, which has emerged from the tight control of the region’s former rulers, is largely the result of the West’s political defeat. Geopolitics abhors a vacuum. Erdogan’s strategy proves this maxim again.
Alexey Pushkov