It would not surprise us at all if we saw in the next period of time a Turkish drilling rig with the protection of Turkish warships-drones-fighter aircraft attempting to drill south of Crete, regardless of whether the American EXXON MOBILE is doing surveys a few miles west
“A century after Atatürk’s democracy, Turks chart a path to the unknown,” is the title of an International Media article whose highlights are as follows:
Where Turkey’s political scene might be headed, as inflation continues to hit record highs and potentially game-changing elections loom next spring, is a serious question.
Last week, days after the Turkish Republic began its 100th anniversary, the ruling AKP completed two decades in power.
“The longer a democratic regime survives, the less likely it is to collapse,” Michael McFaul, a former US ambassador to Russia, wrote in a 2009 book.
“The longer an autocracy survives, the more likely it is to collapse.”
The country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, is a figure whose legacy seems to grow more impressive and more problematic every year.
He is firmly established as the sole modernizer in the Middle East, bringing a relatively stable democracy and a burst of secularism to a region that has seen little of either in the past century.
Atatürk is also compared to the European leaders of his time.
That Atatürk achieved everything he did in Turkey in the same period places him among the few great leaders of the 20th century.
Thursday marks the 84th anniversary of his death, which will once again offer Turks the opportunity to express their enduring pride and admiration in their own inimitable way.
However, Atatürk is blamed by some for failing to stop or limit the Armenian Genocide and I wondered if he considered the Arabs inferior.
Many political decisions such as the abolition of the Arabic script, the banning of the fez, the end of the caliphate, the restriction of Islamic customs were taken during his reign.
And it is easy to draw a line from the passing of Atatürk to the Islamic influence on public life to the birth and subsequent rule of the AKP.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 partly in response to the end of the caliphate. Nejmetin Erbakan’s National Vision party, essentially a Turkish branch of the Brotherhood, guided the AKP’s founders, who in turn fed the grievances of conservative Turks marginalized by Kemalism.
In creating his secular republic, Atatürk believed he had to align himself with the military and put Islam in a box. This was revised a few generations later by the AKP. Are the Turks now ready to chart a new path?
Turkey watchers generally saw the emergence and end of the AKP’s military tutelage as marking a post-Kemalist period.
In recent years, there has been much talk of a post-Kemalist era, with Turks moving away from AKP conservatism and strongman politics and towards something else.
Perhaps, we begin to see a synthesis as competing ideologies intersect.
Alternatively, the coming decades in Turkey may echo the shifts in the Democratic-Republican pendulum that the American presidency has seen since the early 1990s.
Turkish society is probably too polarized to achieve a lasting consensus anytime soon.
Success might just be a series of somewhat free and fair elections, relative stability and a degree of political pluralism.
The above concerns the interior of Turkey and the reshuffles that may occur in power.
However, Erdogan attempted to bring back to the consciousness of Turkish citizens a very important Nationalist vision-idea from the time of Kemal Attaturk, that of the “secret oath”, while creating his own counterpart, that of the “Blue Homeland”.
The first of these two ideologies concerns the recovery by Turkey of lost territories of the former Ottoman Empire, which include part of Syria, Iraq, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Crete, the islands of the eastern Aegean and the Dodecanese, Thrace, Eastern Macedonia up to Thessaloniki and the second in arbitrary expansion of the Turkish EEZ in the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, with the aim of Turkey becoming a great naval power.
On these two ideologies all the movements of Turkish foreign policy are based and carried out, from the invasion and stay of the Turkish army in Northern Iraq and Syria, from the unwavering stance of creating 2 independent states in Cyprus, as the only acceptable solution from the Turks, from the threats to occupy our islands in the Aegean, accompanied by the outrageous Bahtseli maps, from the alleged oppression experienced by the Muslim minority of our Thrace, which the Turks have dubbed “Turkish”, from the arbitrary and completely illegal demarcation of EEZ of Turkey with Libya, in an attempt to steal marine deposits located in the Greek EEZ of southern Crete and finally from the attempt to steal similar deposits within the Cypriot EEZ.
However, it is not only Erdogan who adopts these two ideologies which bring Turkey on a collision course with Greece and Cyprus, since an important part of the current opposition which, through CHP leader Kilindaroglou, criticizes Erdogan that since he says that he will take our islands in the Aegean because he doesn’t.
These moves by Turkey have brought it face to face not only with Greece and Cyprus, but also with other countries in the region, such as Israel and Egypt, with which we maintain extremely good relations.
Also, Turkey’s ambidextrous role, acrobating between the US-NATO and Russia in Ukraine, as well as the close relations between Turkey-Russia-Iran in Syria, have caused a reaction in the US, which perceives that Greece is a country of stability and a pillar of security for the region, they have become very close to it, updating by turning their backs on Turkey.
Erdogan’s game is a given, since he is trying through his two-faced attitude towards the USA and Russia to extract as many benefits as possible for his country in an effort to make it a great regional power, with the help of the Organization of Turkic Countries, Transcaucasia .
The result of the two-faced foreign policy of the Turks is the “repeated slaps” by the International community for its arbitrariness.
In the last period of time, 4 important developments have been observed, interconnected with each other, which outline the future developments in Greek-Turkish, which are as follows:
1. The announcement by the Greek Prime Minister of the immediate start of procedures for finding and extracting hydrocarbons by EXXON MOBIL, which we mentioned.
2. The recent statement by the head of the National Oil Company of Libya, Farhat Bengdara, according to which his country is considering the creation of two natural gas pipelines to Greece and the Egyptian city of Damietta.
3. The recent bombshell statement by a representative of the US Foreign Ministry, according to which Washington seems to consent to the Greece-Libya energy interconnection.
4. The indefinite postponement of the tender for the privatization of the port of Alexandroupolis and the continuation of its operation under the regime of the State.
From the above, we understand that Greece is trying to be the leader of the developments and not to follow them, following the timetable that is favorable to Erdogan regarding the research for hydrocarbons south of Crete.
The attitude of the US-Greece regarding the continuation of the port of Alexandroupolis in the Greek state clearly shows the enormous geostrategic importance it has for the supply of weapons systems and means to the Ukrainians in the war against Russia, to serve the interests of USA and the maintenance of peace in the Western Balkans, for the alternative route of transporting grain from Ukrainian ports in the event of a blockage of the Black Sea-Strait of Constantinople-Aegean route.
Therefore, Washington and Athens want to have the port of Alexandroupolis under their absolute control.
Also, the above shows that the USA wants absolute security to prevail on the Crete-Aegean-Alexandroupoli axis.
The issue is that Erdoğan has committed himself to the Turkish people with the implementation of hydrocarbon research and extraction in the south of Crete, in the post-war period, without however specifying where, i.e. whether it will be within the Greek EEZ, or very close on the coast or even on the territory of Libya.
It would not surprise us at all if we saw in the next period of time a Turkish drilling rig with the protection of Turkish warships-drones-fighter aircrafts to attempt to drill south of Crete, regardless of whether the American EXXON MOBILE is investigating a few miles west.
In such a case, it is certain that the level of tension between Athens and Ankara would rise dangerously, with a very high probability of a major Greek-Turkish crisis at least initially, which would have the potential for further military escalation.
However, the US and France together with our powerful Armed Forces, we expect to scuttle further Turkish dreams and aspirations.
