Why President Biden should say #NoJetsForTurkey? Ankara should be further sanctioned not rewarded

ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ

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By ALEXANDER DRIVAS

The Biden administration is boosting its effort to implement the promise of Democrats regarding American foreign policy. In his own article in Foreign Affairs, which Biden had written before he won the elections of 2020.

The article titled “Why America Must Lead Again”. According to that paper, the U.S. would follow a mixture of pragmatism and Wilsonism in order to face the new challenges that the current multipolar world raises. But President Biden is proving with his supportive announcement to Turkey about the potential purchase of the F-16, that the Democratic Party in the U.S. has not even a single realistic bone on its body (putting aside the excellent posture of Robert Menendez).

During the Greek prime minister’s visit to the White House, President Biden reminded the audience of the role that Paul Sarbanes played in his carrier. This commemoration does not match with the newest Biden policy on the F-16 issue. If Paul Sarbanes was still amongst us, he could not be satisfied with Biden’s efficacy toward Turkey.

• President Biden could be a master of foreign policy because he served in principal positions on the Committee on Foreign Relations. He also had a full tenure as Vice President of the U.S. and finally; he is among the top experts on Eastern Mediterranean issues.
• What changed his heart and now he adopts as a governmental policy the 6bn $ purchase/upgrade the F-16 from Turkey? And of course, is it the right time to provoke a conflict between the American government and Congress? And all these, for Turkey’s complete lack of reliability?

Erdogan had a special relationship with Trump. President Biden detests the policies of Erdogan that transforms Turkey into a dull political system that produces anarchy and chaos, both inside and outside of its territory. Almost a year before Biden was elected, he had spoken his mind about Erdogan’s Turkey in front of the eyes of journalists of NYT. He said that the U.S. and its allies in both Turkey and the Eastern Mediterranean should cooperate in order to stop Erdogan’s policies.

After the video was exposed, in the summer of 2020, Ibrahim Kalin started blackmailing the U.S. via Twitter. President Biden was right about Turkey because he knows well Erdogan when the experienced politician from Delaware was Obama’s Vice President. Making it simple, the Obama administration was guilty of feeding Erdogan’s arrogance until the Turkish President left Obama speechless with his accusations against him (and on Biden) about the failed coup in the middle of July 2016.

Until then, President Obama almost was admiring Erdogan’s fairy tales about “Turkish secular Islam exportation to the MENA area”. However, the door of the White House is not opened yet for Erdogan, although President Biden leaves the poor U.S.-Turkish relations to some bureaucrats in the State Department.

Those bureaucrats have no other knowledge but to repeat the old song about a “useful ally” when they refer to Turkey. The perplexing issues that flow from Turkey are being used by those bureaucrats as a pretext, in order to make simplistic comments about the seriously wounded U.S.-Turkish relations that drive the American policy toward Turkey, to less efficacy.

• The lobby of the convenient usage of appeasement toward Turkey made the Turkish President unfold the context of his mindset toward the U.S. Before he left Turkey to take part in the NATO Summit in Madrid, Erdogan said that there is not a member-state in NATO that could ignore Turkey because everyone needs Turkey. In other words, Turkey is constantly tricking and cheating the U.S.

The Turkish bargaining is the instrument that Erdogan uses in order to coerce the U.S. to include him in their calculations as a global leader. When Erdogan is needy for a photo opportunity (his purpose is to bolster his political legitimacy in and out of Turkey) he uses coercive tactics. The toxic and attention seeker authoritarian leader of Turkey threatened two fully democratic states with veto (Sweden and Finland).

For at least 2 months, Erdogan has been bullying Greece by authorizing other authoritarian members of his government to threaten Greece with bloody operations. The questions that are invited by all of these are of crucial importance. Has the United States the choice to thank Turkey with F-16 even if Ankara is for sure the Russian trojan horse in NATO? Is it a realistic policy to treat Turkey with benefits in order to further militarize its foreign policy against other American allies?

The last question has to do with the most severe discrepancy in the U.S. policy toward Turkey. If a superpower like the U.S., is appeasing a middle power with structural problems in its economy and political system, where is the balance of power that should be beneficial for the U.S.? Moreover, Turkey is months away from its elections and the U.S. President accords with State Department to give leverage to Erdogan who will augment his publicity.

Everyone could stress that there are a lot of reasons for the American time-wasting policy toward Turkey by promising, but again, this is not the right message that the American President sends to American allies like Greece, Cyprus, Israel, and, YPG.

By saying #NoJetsForTurkey President Biden could sharpen an effective foreign policy toward Turkey, the one that President Obama didn’t because he was deceived by Erdogan. To say the least, the U.S. should bring normality to their relations with Turkey because, for ten years, Turkey has turned over the table.

A second deception against a President that is without a doubt an expert on Eastern Mediterranean affairs could be almost unforgivable. In an era where the cohesion of the West seems like the principal of the U.S. policy, the American President should go abide by the profound needs of the new American principles in order to confront global powers or a sum of them.

An experienced POTUS should know that he couldn’t erase Erdogan’s policies that have been eroding Turkey for twenty years by giving him a tip like F-16. Finally, the inconvenient truth for both POTUS and a part of the State Department is that Turkey’s future in the West is not dependent on the U.S. goodwill to keep Turkey on western rails. Words that are used by a part of the State Department to describe Turkey’s importance like “irreplaceable”, “steadfast” etc, shouldn’t be in the dictionary of any superpower.

The U.S. should drive the train of the U.S.-Turkish relationship and selling Erdogan F-16 jets means that Washington follows an inexplicable and irrational path of reactive approach towards Turkey which for now, is not beneficial for the U.S. itself, NATO cohesion, for real American allies like Greece, Cyprus, Kurds of Syria and Israel, and of course, for Turkish people that desire their human rights back, something that is supposed to be a principal for Biden administration regarding the foreign policy.

President Biden addressed to his Turkish counterpart his anxiety about the escalation of threats that Turkey adopts. Many experts tend to claim that in order to persuade Erdogan to cease its malicious behavior in the Aegean Sea, Biden presented as a carrot the F-16 issue. In other words, in order to stop Turkey from its malicious provocations in the Aegean Sea, the U.S. supply them with F-16s to use against Greece, Cyprus, Kurds, and Israel. The essence of contradiction is in front of everyone’s eye.

To sum up, the ‘’Talk to Turkey” policy should be exactly the opposite of that Biden seems to follow. Turkey should be further sanctioned for its invasions in Syria, for its malicious role in Libya, for the threats that every day narrows against Greece and Cyprus, for its strategic partnership with Russia, and for the weaponry (S-400) that has purchased from Moscow since 2017, for its special relations with terrorists and a further sanctioning by embedding those sanctions in NDAA 2023 would be just a good start in order to make a reality-check on if Turkey wants to follow the western policies. But for now, this is a question that maybe President Biden does not want to answer because the truth is miles away from the oblivion that a part of the State Department shares.

What the U.S. policy toward Turkey should be? Erdogan must abandon bullying Greece in the Aegean Sea and in Cyprus