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… officials are on Qatari payroll, Qatar and Turkey, which is based in Syria and, with Israeli consent, in Gaza, are feeding a new monstrous axis of the Muslim Brotherhood similar to the Iranian one, and are trying to incite Saudi Arabia against us.
Ironically, Israel-backed efforts to isolate Iran have often strengthened Turkey’s hand, from the Levant to the Caucasus to Iraq.
A war with, or collapse of, the Iranian state — creating a power vacuum and weakening its peripheral regions — would almost certainly expand Turkish influence.
From a realist balance-of-power perspective, Israel ultimately benefits from a stable Iran capable of counterbalancing Turkey.
Certainly President Erdogan would like Turkey to be the new Iran— having long envisioned himself as Recep Tayip Erdogan the First, ”the much beloved”, sultan of a Muslim Brotherhood-style neo-Ottoman caliphate — but he is working with Turks instead of Persians (though both can be grateful not to be Arabs, I suppose), and Turkey has been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for thirty years, kept from falling over by confiscations from successive disfavoured groups (Ataturk military officers and Gulenists come immediately to mind), donations from various Gulf Oil nations, and selling useless Syrian jihadi mercenaries to the useless government of a few square blocks in Tripoli for Moammar Khadaffy’s gold. Also like Iran, Turkey has long suffered from a dearth of babies, Turkish and Iranian women both producing well below replacement and the average age having reached the mid-thirties. The depopulation tipping point has not yet been reached, but President Erdogan has been warning his people about it his entire political career.
With regard to a strong Iran balancing an expansionist, triumphalist Turkey — of course that is true. But not when Iran is also expansionist and triumphalist, as the current, Mullah-ruled totalitarian Shiite government is. Once Should a new, secular, democratic Iran emerge from the rubble of the current travesty, that would be a nation that could hold Turkey in check. The Mullahcracy, however, would happily work with Turkey to weaken their mutual enemies and rivals Israel, America, and Saudi Arabia, while working behind the scenes to weaken Turkey enough that Iran could knife Turkey in the back to rule all on their own afterward.
On the Turkey side, even if they expand, Turkey’s future, due to a much greater birthrate among the Kurds, simply does not exist. Like Russia, China, Ukraine, and much of Europe, the birthrate is too low for long term survival unless something drastically changes. For background on all this, I strongly recommend David P. Goldman’s How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying, Too). |
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