Let's Talk Turkey

It’s amazing how often we let small things get in the way of our seeing bigger things. Or forget history and repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Yep, Donald Trump. Rash, unpredictable and wrong. But, at least he showed President Obama, by pulling troops out of Syria that Obama put in as peacekeepers.

Why was that bad? How abut adding to global strife, encouraging radical movements, making wildly erroneous political assumptions, ignoring blood feuds that go back generations and adding to one of the knottiest geopolitical problems known to man - one that goes back centuries?

Well, as the title says, let’s talk Turkey.

First, let’s admit that some people couldn’t find Turkey on a map. So, I’ll tell you where it is, and try not to bore the cartographers among us. Just remember, in this case geography is everything.

Turkey is just about everywhere. It’s in Europe and it’s in Asia. It’s on the Black Sea and on the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. It’s neighbors with Greece and Bulgaria, Syria and Iraq and Iran, not to mention Georgia, which became an independent republic following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

And it’s old, very old, with a history of strife between national and religious groups going back long before the Crusades. In fact, Constantinople - named for Roman Emperor Constantine and eventually the capitol of the Eastern Roman Empire, saw it’s first siege in 626 AD, and changed sides regularly as Crusaders and Muslim leaders conquered and reconquered it.

Now, the thousand-year struggle between the Christian and Islamic worlds is playing itself out again, a relative stone’s throw from Istanbul, the name that the Turks gave to what was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries.

How do I know this? Well, members of the Eastern Orthodox Church still call the leader of the church in Istanbul "His Most Divine All-Holiness the Archbishop of Constantinople New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch." In Greece, the city is still Konstantinoúpoli(s). At least, that’s what the web says.

Oh, speaking of language, the Medieval Slavic Russians had their own word for Constantinople. They called it Tsargrad, which roughly meant City of the Leader.

So, now our President has pulled our troops away from the border area between Turkey and Syria, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - the President of Turkey - has sent troops out to chase the Kurds away from its border, creating a 30 mile safety zone that he says will keep terrorists away. And, of course, will keep his own Kurdish population from getting out of control.

How many Kurds does he worry about?  Turkey’s population is just over 83 million, and nearly one in five of them are Kurdish.

When we pulled out, he sent troops out to chase the Kurds away from Turkey’s border, creating a 30 mile safety zone to keep terrorists away. And, of course, Turkey’s President thinks it will help keep his own Kurdish population from getting out of control.

But will that kind of buffer keep a nation safe? Russia made safety zones out of all the small countries around it right after World War II, but that didn’t end well.

Germany built a similar buffer right before World War II, saying the nation needed room to grow. But that didn’t work out either. 

You could go back to the Roman Empire, conquering states right and left, then more states to keep those states safe, or go back to Alexander the Great. He started out in Macedon - another nation on the Aegean - and conquered neighboring Greece, then Persia, then Egypt, then India…well you get the idea. His empire also didn’t last.

Today, I can only think of one state that keeps putting parts of neighboring lands under its control to insure safety - Israel. 

Strangely, that has only served to isolate Israel from much of the world and make all of its Arab neighbors angry. And its also  angering many of its own citizens.

Oh, wait, there is another nation doing the same thing. Russia. And Russia is the new good friend of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I wonder how that will turn out?

Meanwhile, the few hundred soldiers we had keeping the peace and holding down terrorism on the Turkish-Syrian border are coming home. Well that’s what our President said, and maybe some day they will. But, for the time being, the Pentagon says they are being redeployed to Iraq, to protect them from the Iranians.

At least, that’s what we hear from the White House. 

Hey, what could go wrong with that?