VICTOR DAVIS HANSON AGREES WITH RELIAPUNDIT: TURKEY NO LONGER RELIABLE ALLY

I HAVE BEEN BLOGGING THIS FOR A FEW WEEKS (SEE HERE AND HERE AND HERE):

• TURKEY HAS SINCE 2003 (COINCIDENTLY WHEN ERDOGAN'S ISLAMICISTS GAINED POWER) SHOWN ITSELF TO BE AN UNRELIABLE ALLY.

• AND AS A RESULT WE SHOULD BE REDEPLOYING OUT OF TURKEY

• AND END OUR SUPPORT THEIR EU BID

• AND EVEN BE PREPARED TO KICK THEM OUT OF NATO.

NOW VDH CHIMES IN - AND BASICALLY HE AGREES WITH ME. VDH:

nothing really justifies the elemental hatred that the present generation of Turkey seems to exhibit for America, or the perverted manifestations of anti-Semitism or things like the mega-hit, anti-American film and subsequent TV series Valley of the Wolves (replete with murderous American soldiers and an organ-harvesting Jewish doctor).

Where does that leave us? I believe we need to cool the resolutions, continue to talk nicely to Turkey, send out diplomatic peace-feelers, assuage Turkish wounded pride, hope for the best—and start making immediate contingency plans for a possible dramatic break from this erstwhile critical Nato ally.

And that would mean backup plans should it become necessary to abandon facilities inside Turkey, and seek closer relations with Armenia, Kurdistan, Greece, Cyprus, and other regional neighbors. Perhaps both sides have been clumsy, but there are developments going on in Turkey that are far larger than inept diplomacy, and we should quit denying the danger, or despair that without the old Turkey we are adrift in the Eastern Mediterranean. We are not.

We should never promote such divides, but recognize the current course of Turkish politics is not necessary ahistorical, but may in fact be a natural reaction against the historical aberration of Attaturk's secularism, as European Turkey begins to become overwhelmed, demographically and culturally, by anti-Western, anti-globalization Anatolian Islamism, and thus begins to replay the historical role of the Ottomans-whom, contrary to current orthodoxy, I don't find to have very been positive for civilization as a whole.

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