“They could have chosen between dishonor and war. They have chosen dishonor and will have war " (Winston Churchill)
It often happens that, in times of black crisis, people rely on the wisdom of their ancestors to find comfort and teaching; and the most effective teachings, handed down by popular culture, are proverbs.
A proverb that has always attracted my attention is: "to extreme ills, extreme remedies", which is explained by the need to resort to remedies of an exceptional nature where a situation is initially compromised by an exceptional event. Over the recent past I have thought very carefully about the profound meaning of this proverb as I thought about the interpretation I had to give to an article that had been sent to me not long ago. The article the question is titled: "The EU and Italy need a new relationship with the Turkish Ally in the Mediterranean" appeared on June 15, 2020 on "Observatory for Stability and Security of the Enlarged Mediterranean" (v.link).
It is necessary here to say, before proceeding, that I personally am absolutely refractory to any type of personal attack and I have always looked with ill-concealed disgust at the "heroic performances" of the "keyboard lions" who regularly throw their empty "roars" on the pages Facebook insulting everything and everyone. Personally, I have absolutely nothing against the Observatory for Stability and Security of the Enlarged Mediterranean "; however, the article in question touches closely on a topic that is of capital importance for the future of the Italian Republic therefore it deserves to be treated with attention without any lightness. Not only that, the opinions expressed in the same article deserve a double attention precisely because they are born in a doctrinal context that refers directly to the structures of the Atlantic Alliance of which Italy was one of the founding members and to which it basically entrusted uncritically your own security; in this, differing profoundly from countries such as France, Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey itself, who have always been very careful to keep the decision-making levers in their hands aimed at protecting what are perceived as "non-national interests". -negoziabili ". In light of this, my analysis in response to the claims of the article must be filtered primarily through the lenses of the national interests of our country, the Italian Republic, while considerations of a Europeanist and Atlanticist character will necessarily be subordinated to them. This means, in plain English and accessible to all, that Europeanism and Atlanticism must be instruments for the Italian Republic to pursue its national interests, and not "untouchable totems" on the altar of which to sacrifice our interests for the need to please centers of power outside our country for which the safety and survival of 60 million citizens of the Italian Republic are not the priority.
Basically the whole article gives a glimpse of the possibility that the EU engages Turkey in what is called a "grand bargain". In the English language, "grand bargain" can be associated with the idea of a "broad agreement" or a "framework agreement". In order for this to happen, it is necessary that the opposing parties have interpenetrating interests and at the same time are willing to make mutual concessions in order to monitor each other.
In essence this was the process that created the European Union. The "common European home", through its various reincarnations over the decades, is nothing more than a Franco-German pact for the maintenance of peace in Europe through economic integration (in its embryonic form, through the sharing of coal and steel, the strategic materials that had served the European nations to wage war). Above all, both France and Germany were both powers that emerged traumatized by the Second World War and neither of them had any ambition of an imperialist nature at that historical moment, without prejudice to the French desire to maintain a sphere of privileged interests in the territories of Africa Western (the so-called Françafrique). Here comes the first serious problem of the strategy mentioned in the article, since it compares a set of countries, the European ones (among which Italy is obviously included) that can be considered "geopolitically fed" and that basically think only of how to maintain the current standard of living of their populations by forgetting (or even deliberately choosing to ignore) the "Power politics", while on the other side there is a country that not only has never abjured the dictates of geopolitics, but in recent years has even chosen to take the path of revanchism and turn into "revolutionary power".
For those unfamiliar with geopolitical terminology, according to the political doctrine of the so-called "Realist School" of Hans Joachim Morgenthau, a "revolutionary power" is a state that carries out actions on the geopolitical chessboard such as to lead to a "revolution" (and therefore destabilization ) of international balances. One of the most obvious elements that allow identifying such a country is the practice of unilateral and permanent modification of the external borders of the state at the expense of others, all seasoned with rhetoric marked by an exasperated militarism (exactly the policy of the Third Reich in the years following Adolf Hitler's rise to power). In light of this definition, can we say that Turkey is indeed a "revolutionary power"? The answer to that question is: yes!
As already explained in my previous analysis concerning the Cypriot conflict (v.link), in recent years, the Turkish political scene has been repeatedly shaken by a ghost that many believed dead and buried: the "Misak-ı Millî". By this name is meant the so-called "National Pact" adopted by the father of the Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, between the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Turkish War of Independence, and with which the last Ottoman parliament ( and first parliament of the new republican Turkey) declared which territories were by right the Turkish people and that Turkey was not in the least willing to barter; in addition to the territories of the current Republic of Turkey, the other lands that would belong to the Turkish people by right according to the "Misak-ı Millî" are: a considerable portion of Bulgaria, eastern Greece up to the Chalkidiki peninsula, a good half of the islands of the Aegean Sea, the whole island of Cyprus, a large portion of Syria (from 1/3 to 1/2 of the country according to the interpretations), an equally large portion of Iraq (including all Iraqi Kurdistan), a small segment of northwestern Iran, the territories of Agiaria and Meschetia in Georgia, the entire territory of the Autonomous Republic of Naxçıvan (formally part of Azerbaijan) and also all of the Republic of Armenia.
The obsessive reference by Erdoğan and most Turkish politicians to the "Misak-ı Millî" must be taken tremendously seriously by all.
What apparently seems to be a fantasy that cannot be found for internal use and consumption is actually one coherent declaration of territorial expansion comparable to Hitler's memory "Lebensraum" and Erdoğan will never renounce it.
It is worth noting then that the "Misak-ı Millî" rhetoric does not belong only to Erdoğan or his National-Fascist allies of the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) but is shared by all of Turkey's political establishment including leaders of the Republican People's Party (CHP), Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Muharrem İnce and the leader of the İYİ Party, Meral Akşener who are Erdoğan's own opponents and who are heralded here in the West as "hope for Turkish democracy". The only exception from this point of view is Selahattin Demirtaş and his Democratic People's Party (HDP), an expression of the country's minorities, however after the arrest and imprisonment of Demirtaş in 2016, the HDP was virtually eliminated from the Turkish political scene. It is not even a secret that Turkish politicians are increasingly speaking in authentic lucubrations on the possibility of abolishing the Treaty of Lausanne (which, moreover, has been largely weakened in numerous aspects over the course of the century), reflecting on the other popular vulgarity given that according to all the statistical surveys the clear majority of the Turks are convinced that once their 1923th anniversary has passed, the aforementioned treaty will lose value (which is simply ridiculous in terms of international law because there are no "expiry treaties", according to provided that this is not expressly provided for in the treaty itself, and that of Lausanne does NOT fall into this case!). A belief, however, based on a popular anecdote that General Mustafa İsmet İnönü, chief negotiator of the Turkish delegation in Lausanne in 1938 and the right-hand man of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as well as his successor to the presidency of Turkey at his death in 100, seems to have debut to reach the agreement: "We have gained 629 years!". This narrative is incredibly reminiscent of that used by Salafist currents in the Arab-Islamic world regarding the exegetical interpretation of the so-called "Hudaybiyyah Treaty", concluded in XNUMX AD by the prophet Muhammad with the Meccans in order to momentarily put an end to hostilities at a time in which the army of Muhammad's faithful was in extreme difficulty and therefore needed time to strengthen. Two years later, Muhammad, now strong, decided to disown the treaty and resumed the war, taking possession of Mecca.
Now, for intellectual honesty and historical transparency, it must be said that there is no evidence that the behavior of Atatürk and İnönü in the negotiations in Lausanne reflected what the Islamic Salafists attribute to Muhammad in the case of the "Hudaybiyyah Treaty", as well as there is no evidence that İnönü uttered that phrase about 100 years after returning to Ankara (but I could be wrong!), however it is singular that after almost a century, the Turkish political class and a large part of the population have decided to marry this type of interpretation which, ipso facto, is a sign of an internal malaise; that of a country that believes to have been unjustly "punished" by history and foreign powers and to have been literally "locked" in political borders perceived as a "prison", which do not represent the true dimension that is proper to "civilization" Turkish "; hence the desperate desire for greatness that excites the souls of the masses of the underprivileged and winks at the vainglory of the dominant classes which, although regularly rooting themselves with Erdoğan to divide the bones of power, are nevertheless equally fascinated by the prospect that Turkey may once again claim "the place it deserves in the world" at the table of the greats and therefore do not disdain the "politics of grandeur".
A consequence of this mental state and the obsessive search for the opportunity to modify the aforementioned boundaries. An operation to which Atatürk actively dedicated himself when, during the 20s and 30s, he repeatedly attempted to regain possession of the Vilayet of Mosul, or when he propagated the idea of a "Balkan Federation" (which should have been bring together Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Albania, Romania and Yugoslavia) in an anti-Mussolinian key, to end with the attempt (this time successful) to recover the Sangiaccato di Alessandretta which was detached from Syria and re-annexed to Turkey as a province of Hatay after a fraudulent referendum.
During the "Cold War", when it seemed that Turkey had become a docile "CIA colony", even the leaders of the country took the opportunity provided by the creeping civil war that broke out in Cyprus to occupy a good part of the island and start that settlement process of Anatolian settlers that has never stopped since and which represents a serious threat to the survival of Cyprus which, it should be remembered, is a country of the European Union. To end with the military operations in Syrian and Iraqi land in recent years that have created a de facto partition situation according to which, using the most disparate apologies which I frankly no longer even want to comment, Turkey has literally clawed wide portions of the territories of the two countries where it is pursuing a subtle policy of "turchification" (the same that the leaders of Ankara have been carrying out for almost a century against the minorities of their own country and which would deserve an encyclopedia to be described) with the probable ultimate goal of organizing referenda and having the excuse to legalize as many thieves of lands from which the Turks were expelled 100 years ago and which now legally belong to other states.
We must not forget the support that Ankara has been giving to the "Muslim Brotherhood" for years everywhere, in the Middle East as in Europe itself and which has made it possible to overcome (at least at a managerial level) the inter-ethnic hatred between Arabs and Turks which has crystallized in decades of particularly driven Turkish nationalism. If until the 90s the leader of the Party of the Nationalist Movement (MHP) Alparslan Türkeş spoke his followers with the cry of: "Arabs have always been enemies of the great Turkish nation!", his successor Devlet Bahçeli, no less national-fascist than he, has appropriately modified the ideological and dogmatic aversion against the Arabs whenever it has served to broaden the electoral base and mobilize it towards issues that are close to the Turkish public's heart as for example, the status of the Old City of Jerusalem and the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza. But this pro-Arab and pro-Islamic rhetorical rediscovery has also served very well to "sell" to its public opinion the Turkish intervention in Libya in support of the Tripoli government chaired by Fayez Mustafa al-Sarraj, a local expression of the "Muslim Brotherhood" and chatted about its ancient Turkish origins. It is difficult to have access to precise estimates but it seems that between full-blown Turkish soldiers and Syrian Islamist mercenaries, Turkey can count on the remarkable strength of over 20.000 men fully equipped on the ground, who are inexorably changing the fate of the Libyan civil war in favor of al-Sarraj.
Theoretically this should be good news for Italy given that our governments have repeatedly spent in favor of the government of Tripoli, but what guarantees we have that this will lead us to levers of influence if al-Sarraj should become at all effects a puppet in the hands of Erdoğan and, perhaps, it already is?
But the most disturbing moves of Turkish geopolitics are taking place in the Balkans, and not so quietly! Apart from the strategic Turkish presence in Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia and Sangiaccato of Novi Pazar, the Turks are overwhelmingly "putting their hands" on Albania, a country that has always played a leading role in the external security strategy of Italy since our country "did not even exist"; Suffice it to recall the very important anti-Ottoman help that both the Serenissima Republic of Venice and the Kingdom of Naples offered Giorgio Castriota known as Scanderbeg, hero of the struggle of medieval Albania against the imperialism of the Sublime Door. Thanks to the funding that since 1992 Turkey has never stopped pumping in the Albanian coffers, the authorities of the "country of the eagles" have completed the modernization of the naval base of Pasha Liman, near Vlora, and if it is true that from now on also the so-called "Porto Palermo Tunnel" will be able to host the submarines of the Türk Deniz Kuvvetleri, the Turkish Navy, then Italy risks finding itself in perspective with a knife pointed precisely on one of the trade routes vital for the security and economic prosperity of our country without our authorities having a tool they want to "control" the intemperances of our Anatolian neighbors, now too close to leave us indifferent.
In light of what has been said so far and describing what are the real objective conditions on the ground (I repeat: the conditions that are, not what we "would like them to be"!) you understand how the "grand bargain" strategy suggested in the article implies that Europe, and Italy in particular, reset their policy in the Mediterranean and lie down prone letting the Turks "get into bed hoping that they have no intention of harassing us" ".
Given all that has been explained above in great detail, this suggestion is frankly irresponsible and harbinger of sensational geopolitical own goals that could cost us dearly in the future, not so far away.
It should also be noted that NATO in this case does not represent for us any kind of guarantee for the protection of our national interests because the sad reality of the last few years should have made us understand by now that the Washington elites have proved to be absolutely unable to recognize the danger of Turkish operations, and indeed they have even become corree, opposing Turkish designs with a "resistance" which is insignificant to say little, given the fact that in the past the USA waged war on other countries for much less.
In conclusion, even if this topic is not easy to deal with, and we will certainly return to it in the future, I have tried to draw a broad overview on why I do not think it is a responsible attitude to support Turkish expansionist and hegemonic designs in the Mediterranean and neighboring areas because they constitute a fundamental threat to the national and economic security of the Italian Republic and us we cannot solve the question simply "hoping for a miracle" or "beautifully ignoring the problem".
We hope that this alarm bell will start to ring in the ears of those who sit in the button room and that we will not have to wait for the moment when the "History" will start knocking on our door with a punch.
Photo: Twitter
