At the time of writing, there have been a week of protests following the arrest of Ekrem Imamoglu, widely seen as Erdogan’s main political rival. Hundreds have been arrested, and fired on with rubber bullets, for the “illegal protests” (where did I hear that phrase before?), and the unrest seems to be growing.
If you’re wondering if there is legitimacy to the corruption charges against Imamoglu, one thing to note is that one of the first actions has been to revoke Imamoglu’s University diploma…a strange action for an arrest, but it happens to make him constitutionally ineligible to run for president. That’s lucky.
If you’re wondering what the US’ response to this has been, well, there’s been no statement made, but X is blocking opposition groups’ accounts and any criticism of the crackdown on protests.
To be fair, very few leaders anywhere have spoken out against this. Too much shit going on elsewhere I guess, and as NATOs second-biggest army perhaps others feel they need to keep Turkey on side.
“In response to these developments, the United States is reported to have hit ‘CTRL-C.’ It is still an open question when and where they’ll be hitting ‘CTRL-V.’”
Extending NATO membership to countries like Turkey and Hungary was supposed to help them maintain the stability of their democracies and foster their support of post-World War II governing ideals. With the increasingly heterodox governments among NATO members and the decreasingly shared political ideals, NATO is seemingly seeing its last gasping breaths. I don’t know that there is enough cohesion among members to forge an effective new alliance to err, uhm…supplement, NATO but doing so would seem to be key to long-term security of Europe. Russia has pretty well weakened itself with its Ukraine excursions so the winner of the Cold War looks like it will actually be China.
The thing is, I would take a boilerplate “We support democracy and believe legal rights should be observed, followed by fair elections”.
But all 3 parts of that statement are things that this MAGA admin very much does not want. They want to subvert all 3 the US, and don’t care about them in other countries.
I think that the biggest thing keeping Turkey on the side of the West is that they’re bitter rivals of Iran, and so, since Iran has aligned themselves with Russia, Turkey has to be against Russia.
But Maxim 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more, no less.
Not quite, IMHO, because NATO is dominated by the US, which is currently actively hostile to its mission and its members. The EU is free of that nonsense. Its members share the common concern of opposing the US. The EU has its own multitudinous internal problems but I don’t think they are quite as bad as NATO’s internal problems at the moment.
Honestly, with the various standoffs regarding Russia, I would be surprised if NATO makes it to the end of April. Or at least: by the end of the month I think MAGA is going to be officially saying they are leaving NATO. Of course it will take much longer for the rest of the organization to decide if they will just dissolve it.