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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28399 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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and maybe there's some sort of low-profile diplomatic dustup with Turkey that got the FBI investigating Turkish influence in the US.

In 2017 (was it that long ago!) there was an incident where Turkish secret police attacked anti-Erdogan protestors in Washington DC. It might have got Turkey on the radar.

The other thing that comes to mind is Turkey holding up Finland’s NATO admission, which would line up with the timeline quite well.

To completely sidetrack the conversation, is there a way to kick members out of NATO? Because Turkey needs to go. They just kinda... suck on every dimension.

Turkey has the second biggest army in NATO and relevant geography for anything involving Russia or the Middle East.

Isn't this just 20th century thinking?

Their human capital sucks. Israel would destroy Turkey in a war despite a much smaller population and inferior geography. The world has moved on from the era of the Dreadnought. Today's it's all about raw materials, supply chains, and microchips. Turkey is a dinosaur whose poorly trained troops would only be cannon fodder in a conflict which involved the U.S.

Turkey produces their own F-16s under license-build, they export drones, they build satellites and they're even working on their own fifth-gen fighter like South Korea.

Turkey isn't Iraq, Syria or Egypt totally reliant on whatever they can import, they build things. Turkey actually managed to beat back France and Britain and escape a planned partition after WW1, they don't just instantly lose whenever Europeans show up like Arabs. They export manufactured goods: televisions and vehicles. They're 8th in steel production worldwide.

Israel has never fought any first or even second-rate militaries like Turkey, they've never fought any serious industrial powers at all and would be reliant upon nukes (in the admittedly ridiculous scenario where the US wasn't bailing them out).

Even if that is all true (and given Turkey's population size, I don't think it is; quantity has a quality all of its own), it's far better for them to be cannon fodder FOR the US than cannon fodder for the other side.

There's no official mechanism that allows removal of a member that doesn't consent. If the alliance is dependent on however the USA feels about a member at any given time this diminishes the value of joining the alliance. The value of the alliance is also diminished by an adversarial member that does adversarial things too. Maybe to a lesser extent.

There's nothing that practically stops all the other members agreeing to boot Turkey out, considering that decision "unanimous", then writing a new rule about removal after the fact. Officially the alliance member needs to consent to removal to leave.

That's all a lot of mess when NATO and the US can just wait out Erdogan and hope the next guy is more compliant. Despite the theatrics and politics they did host support for US through the GWOT. Turkey also hasn't kicked all NATO personnel out of the country recently. Which they did in the 70's as I recall. So maybe they've always been a bit of an adversarial partner in the alliance. The grandstanding, bloviating, and opportunistic haggling is the price to pay for a relatively, if not quite as important as 50 years ago, important strategic ally.

There's nothing that practically stops all the other members agreeing to boot Turkey out, considering that decision "unanimous", then writing a new rule about removal after the fact. Officially the alliance member needs to consent to removal to leave.

I mean, if it's literally unanimous, then they totally can dump Turkey; they'd just need to agree to all leave NATO and make a new organisation that is literally copypasted NATO except Turkey doesn't get admitted.

Being able to almost singlehandedly block in Russian access in and out of the Black Sea (the only alternative is the Volga-Don canal) is incredibly valuable, and probably the main reason we put up with their shenanigans.

(the only alternative is the Volga-Don canal)

Wrong canal. You're thinking of the Volga-Baltic Waterway and White Sea-Baltic Canal, which together allow Russia to move stuff from the Black Sea to the Baltic or White Seas (the latter of which gives uninterdictable ocean access). The Volga-Don Canal connects the Black and Caspian Seas, but that's of much more limited value since the Caspian Sea is a lake.

No, you still need to traverse the Volga-Don canal to get to the Volga and those other canals (and eventually the Baltic or Arctic) because the Don empties into the Sea of Azov/Black Sea, while the Volga empties into the Caspian.

Whoops, got them mixed up. Apologies.

Seems not that valuable to me given that we have complete air superiority in the Mediterranean. Time to make Turkey pay their freight. Threaten to kick them out and they might actually act like valuable alliance members and not an embarrassment.

Per the Montreux convention, Turkey gets to block warships of warring parties without itself being a party to the war. If the US had to apply its Mediterranean air superiority to prevent Russia from reinforcing the BSF, they would have to (threaten to) directly fire on the Russians, which would let the Russians feel like they have license to shoot down US drones over the Black Sea, which would still be very detrimental to UA. Any attempt to claim that a naval blockade in international waters is not in fact an act of war would bite the US in the ass over Taiwan, as China could start that one sooner than the US argument could be memoryholed.

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