It\u2019s become a widely accepted assumption that Turkey is a rising powerhouse in the Middle East. The country\u2019s prime minister Reccep\u00a0Tayyip\u00a0Erdogan\u00a0has been cast as a \u201cnew sultan in a neo-Ottoman empire\u201d after he staged a \u201cconqueror\u2019s march\u201d last week through Egypt, Tunisia and Libya and lectured Arab leaders that he knows how to treat Israel, the \u201c\u201cWest\u2019s spoiled child,\u201d as he put it.<\/p>\n
There is considerable irony in all of this. Once upon a time the Ottoman Empire included at one time or another most of the Arab countries in the Middle East and stretched across much of North Africa. Unfortunately for the Turks they picked the losing side in the First World War and paid the penalty by having their empire taken away from them in 1923\u00a0 by the Treat of Lausanne. Last week, however, the one-time colonials cheered the man who now leads their former imperial master. Go figure.<\/p>\n
Yet, some think the new Ottoman emperor\u2019s new clothes are threadbare. Guy Bechor, an Israeli expert on the Arab world, points out that Turkey faces a \u201ccredit bubble\u201d that could burst at any time. Indeed, according to Bechor, Turkey\u2019s budget deficit compared to its GDP is at 9.5 per cent, just shy of Greece\u2019s 10 per cent. By comparison, Israel\u2019s budget deficit is about three per cent and likely to drop to two per cent. Turkey\u2019s economic growth \u2013 10 per cent this year \u2013 is the result of \u201cfinancial manipulation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apparently Turkey\u2019s banks have been handing out loans and mortgages at very low interest\u00a0rates, prompting Turkish citizens to pile on the debt (Does this sound familiar?) This easy credit policy is made\u00a0possible by Turkey\u2019s Central Bank acting at the behest of Erdogan\u2019s government. The result, says Bechor, is that Turkey\u2019s external debt has doubled in the last 18 months, only 15 per cent of which was financed by foreign investment.<\/p>\n
In effect, says Bechor, Erdogan\u2019s popularly with Turkish voters is the result of cheap money, not a swing to Islamic fundamentalism on the part of the electorate. That popularity could disappear if, or when, the bubble pops? It\u2019s happened elsewhere. The Greek economy is near collapse and civil unrest is rife. Europe\u2019s economies are stagnant and anti-status quo sentiment is everywhere.\u00a0 President Obama is increasingly unpopular because unemployment in the United States remains stubbornly high at about nine per cent. Turkey may well go that way, too. Turkey\u2019s unemployment, Bechor points out, is about 13 per cent, its currency has dropped sharply against the dollar and the country\u2019s stock exchange has lost 40 per cent of its value in the last six months.<\/p>\n
One of the tried and true tactics of politicians is to conjure an external enemy with which they can divert the populace\u00a0 from their own\u00a0 corruption and incompetence. Arab leaders, in particular, have pulled this stunt for decades, encouraging anti-Israeli sentiments and promoting a blame-the-Jews attitude among their people as a way to explain the backwardness and failure of\u00a0 Muslim societies. Of course, the ultimate diversion is war.<\/p>\n
Erdogan is certainly fomenting hostility toward Israel, which not so long ago had close economic and military ties with Turkey. The two countries cooperated to keep the Middle East from boiling over, with Turkey serving as a sane counterbalance to the madmen who ran Iran and Iraq. Indeed, as journalist Martin Peretz observes, Turkey was once a \u201cbuffer against Muslim millenarianism.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not any more.\u00a0 Erdogan\u00a0plays to the Islamists, using religious extremism to further his own ends, whatever they may be. Does anyone seriously think last year\u2019s Gaza flotilla sailed without Erdogan\u2019s approval or wasn\u2019t intended as a deliberate provocation of Israel? Nine people died and dozens were wounded when Israeli navy commandos seized a Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara<\/em> that was part of a six-boat flotilla of self-proclaimed pro-Palestinian \u201cactivists\u201d trying to run Israel\u2019s blockade of the Gaza Strip. The Turks have been demanding an Israeli apology ever since and using Israel\u2019s refusal as an excuse to expel Israel\u2019s ambassador and harass Israeli businessmen in Turkey. Erdogan has even threatened to send the Turkish navy to protect another flotilla.<\/p>\n Such a threat raises some interesting scenarios. Turkey is a NATO member. Under the NATO charter an attack on one NATO member is considered an attack on all. If Israel, in the act of defending itself, sinks a Turkish ship, does that constitute an act of war against the NATO alliance?<\/p>\n The idea is absurd, of course, yet it makes you wonder why western leaders are allowing a NATO member to play such dangerous games. If\u00a0 Erdogan continues promoting Turkey as an imperial power at the expense of Israel, NATO will have to rethink its continued membership in the \u201cwestern\u201d alliance.<\/p>\n The question, of course, is why Erdogan\u00a0acts as he does. One possible answer is President Obama who, if he could get away with it, would abandon the one stable and sane ally the United States has in the Middle East, namely Israel, in order to curry favour with the Muslim world. Obama\u2019s imprimatur, tacit or otherwise, is all over Erdogan\u2019s antics. In Peretz\u2019s words: \u201c(Obama\u2019s) adoring view of Erdogan has stimulated the Turkish regime to be\u00a0a force not for stability in Cairo or Ramallah.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the Israelis should be\u00a0a force for instability among all those Kurds, sending \u201cflotillas\u201d to those who loathe Turkey\u2019s continued imperialist domination of their traditional homelands. Indeed, it\u2019s only logical\u2013and fair\u2013that if Erdogan\u00a0supports the creation of a state for the \u201cPalestinians,\u201d then, presumably, \u00a0he\u2019d support creating a state for the Kurdish people on their traditonal\u00a0homeland even if that terrority subtracts from Turkey\u2019s.\u00a0If \u00a0it\u2019s good for Gaza then surely it\u2019s good for Turkey, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It\u2019s become a widely accepted assumption that Turkey is a rising powerhouse in the Middle East. The country\u2019s prime minister Reccep\u00a0Tayyip\u00a0Erdogan\u00a0has been cast as a \u201cnew sultan in a neo-Ottoman empire\u201d after he staged a \u201cconqueror\u2019s march\u201d last week through Egypt, Tunisia and Libya and lectured Arab leaders that he knows how to treat Israel, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":30672,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2938],"tags":[975],"class_list":["post-44201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle-east-middle-east-regions","tag-gaza"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}