Quote:Obama is bound to be on the phone, for this and other reasons. His support for the ‘remain’ camp wasn’t an idle favour for an embattled Cameron. Britain is formally the US fifth column in Europe, which is why Charles de Gaulle kept Britain out of the EEC for so long. British Labour minister Ernest Bevin proposed NATO in 1949 as a way of keeping Europe within the US sphere of influence. When the idea was first floated that Britain should join the EEC, however, JFK saw the benefits saying that: “London could offset the eccentricities of policy in Paris and Bonn” (Schlesinger 2002: 845).

More recently, Britain was at the forefront of the operation to absorb Eastern Europe into the EU, after the American invasion and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, together with the push to include Turkey, in the drive to encircle Russia.

The drive towards Russia: Turkey will accede to the EU ‘in the year 3000’

While the ‘leave’ campaign won by a margin of 52-48 overall, Boston (Lincolnshire) residents voted ‘leave’ by a margin of 75-25. The Borough of Boston is home to one of the largest concentrations of Polish people in Britain at some 5% of the population, without counting the five other East European nationalities that live there (for which I can’t find data). This may not seem strange in an American context, but these are new and distinct cultures suddenly arriving en masse into the sleepy British countryside.

The thing is about Cameron’s spectacular own-goal on his immigration pledges is that EU expansion eastwards towards Russia, and the policy of free movement of East European peoples was actually a British policy more than it was a policy of the other EU states, even Germany. Britain is in partnership with the US on this: it was all part of the move eastwards towards Ukraine and Russia.

So no one paid attention to Cameron’s embarrassed heat of the moment disavowals of his previous aggressive support of Turkish entry into the EU.

The rise and rise of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan since 1994 was accompanied by the assiduous attention of British and American diplomats, who visited him even during his spells as a political prisoner. The mainstay of Turkish politics since 2002 – that which allowed Erdoğan to topple the fearsome military régime installed by Kemal Atatürk at the inception of the new Turkish Republic in 1923 – was the country’s application to join the EEC/EU. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) was able to piggy-back all of its revolutionary legislation onto the terms of EU accession (Pérouse 2016: 179).

Accession became remarkably more difficult, however, when Cyprus, aggrieved by Turkey’s 1974 invasion of its northern section, acceded to the EU in 2004, along with a host of East European nations with a more distant Ottoman, but nevertheless troubled, past. When German politics swung to the right with the CDU and Merkel gaining power in November 2005, things ground to a complete halt. It would be Britain in Cameron’s first ministry, which then led the charge in the EU to move things along on behalf of Turkey.

The end of Atlanticism and the regional free trade agreements

Like Britain, Turkey is a historic member of the immediate post-war US ‘Atlanticist’ security architecture. Turkey was the founding plank, along with Greece, of Britain’s formal handing over of imperial responsibility for the fight against communism to the US on February 24 1947, which historical event Dean Acheson dramatically called ‘The Creation’ (Chace 2008: 166). It is also a founding member of NATO, and possesses its largest army after the US.

The Turkish nation remains an east-west lightning rod to this day. But the quadrupling of Turkey’s GDP under Erdoğan’s ministries, as a result of its neoliberal opening, has created a new independent Turkey chafing at the bit. Cracks on this eastern rim of the Atlanticist project began to appear as Turkey-Israel relations soured over the Palestinian issue.

The situation with the Turkish economy is not all that different to what happened with China. After Nixon’s opening, Bill Clinton pushed for China’s entry into the multilateral World Trade Organisation (WTO) as part of corporate America’s outsourcing drive for greater profits. China’s meteoric rise wasn’t part of the plan though, so regional free trade agreements like TTP/TTIP/CETA were devised more recently outside of the WTO context, especially under Obama, not so much to contain, but more to try to leapfrog Chinese growth (Tellis, in Baru and Dogra 2015, 107-114).

Turkey, like Britain, is a supporter of TTIP in Europe. Its customs arrangement with EU, from which it has benefitted enormously, now begins to pall. In 1975, Turkish foreign trade was 9% of GDP; by 2012 this had risen to 50%. As the EU signs new agreements with countries such as Canada, India, Japan and Vietnam, the terms of the customs arrangement don’t allow Turkey to do the same. Fortress Europe has become protectionist, and just like Britain, Turkey sees the benefit of a TTIP agreement for Europe in which it must be included (Kirişci 2013: 37)

Britain in the EU was crucial for Obama’s TTIP negotiations. France was playing tough on agriculture and GMOs. Germany was playing tough on legal issues. German judges had ruled ISDS unconstitutional; ISDS being the crucial TTIP clause which allows business to bypass national court systems and sue governments for past and/or future profits lost. With Brexit, TTIP is dead in the water for the next administration.

Not only did the secrecy of EU negotiations over the TTIP contribute to the British public’s growing distrust of its élites, but those same élites indicated their impatience with the prospects for TTIP negotiations by joining the Chinese Investment Bank, angering Obama in the process.

Like Britain, Turkey looks east, but the Turks can see the Chinese Silk Road project extending from their backyard across the Turkic heartlands of Central Asia, whose people see Istanbul and not Moscow as their spiritual capital. The only problem for the future is how the wheeler-dealer Turkish business community adapts to the bureaucratic and autocratic environments of the Russo-Chinese business environment. Adapt it inevitably will, though.

Russia outflanks America: the Middle East fulcrum once again

Irresponsible and murderous US and British military adventures in the Middle-east led to a refugee crisis of Gothic proportions, threatening a new fall of Rome. Turkey absorbed close to 3 million refugees from Syria – well over half the global figure. Unlike those that have fled to various Arab countries, a majority of these refugees have received training and jobs in Turkey, and a considerable number of their children are being formally educated.

Turkey’s importance in stabilising the Middle-east region finally saw Merkel reengaging with Erdoğan this year, and reenergising the accession process, although at great cost to her domestic popularity. She lost some ground to the neo-fascist right, but also to a European left not at all enamoured of the divisive political style which has won Erdoğan seven different popular elections over 22 years.

Ironically, the one minority supportive of Erdoğan’s AKP – the Kurds – poses the greatest challenge. Their support in his electoral successes was repaid early on in the announcement of Interior Minister Beşir Atalay of the ‘Kurdish democratic opening’ in 2009 (Pérouse 2016: 221). It would prove difficult to acclimatise Turkish nationalists to this process, in particular since the Turkish deep state has traditionally been symbiotic with the ‘Kurdish problem’ and its associated emergency laws (Söyler 2015: 199).

In the new modern Turkey, however, the shoe is on the other foot. The fact that the resolution of the ‘Kurdish problem’ is a key chapter’ in the EU accession process, has handed the militant group PKK a weakness in the Turkish position to exploit, to ensure its own survival as an ongoing militant organisation. Turning the Kurdish cause over to civil society in the wider Turkish democratic arena, would inevitably eclipse its own role.

The asymmetric treatment of the PKK and its Syrian sister organisation the PYD, neither of whom are sanctioned for their violent acts in Turkey by Western nations, comes from their exploitation by all the powers in the Middle-eastern geopolitical game. The PKK is on the DEA’s terrorist list as drug traffickers, but since the Western security services are themselves drug traffickers, this doesn’t seem to matter.

Russia has upped the ante by backing the PYD in its new Syria strategy to encircle Turkey. Now dominating the skies both in Syria and the Caucasus, Russia is in a position to influence the region’s energy politics in its favour. But that is not the only reason for Russia’s presence. The geopolitical standoff may makes itself in Eastern Europe, but it is Syria that will crucial in the future.

As the ideologues of war desert Trump’s Republicans for Hillary Clinton’s Democrats, with the likes of neocon Victoria Nuland pushing for war with Russia, it is clear that Russia is now well-placed to change the dynamics of conventional and guerrilla conflict in the Middle-east at will, potentially to Israel’s considerable disadvantage. Putin’s first strike threats during the recent NATO wargames are in effect mere reminders that Russia has nuclear subs in the Atlantic with the capacity to end life as we know it, just in case Americans didn’t realise.

The Russian will never need to do anything like that as long as hold the neocons where it hurts. Israel is already recognising Russia’s effective suzerainty over the region in its need for access to Turkey. The real threat is for a continuation of terrorism.

Although relations between Russia and Turkey became strained over the downing of the Russian fighter jet, the event was stage managed by Russia, in order to justify moving its S-400 antiaircraft system to the Latakia airbase. Bad relations with Turkey, which represents Russia’s chief supply line for military materiel to Syria and for its energy sales to Europe, wasn’t expected to last. They are now formally on the mend, and Turkey looks east again.

But fortress Europe turns in on itself, tied-up in the contradictions of its delusional monetary creation, irretrievably wounded politically by Brexit, and sinking into an Islamophobic stupor as Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico declares that ‘Islam has no place in Slovakia’, only shortly before his country takes over the EU presidency.

‘Western values’ have crashed big time in the court of world public opinion, especially in relation to Europe’s tyrannical theme park. Amnesty International charges the EU with complicity in the enforced disappearances, torture and arbitrary arrests on a mass scale perpetrated by the Egyptian military on the Egyptian people. In 2014 alone, 290 licences were authorised for military equipment to Egypt, totalling more than €6 billion (US$6.77bn), from EU states Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain and the UK. They of course take their lead from the US ‘Camp David’ programme that funds the Egyptian coup.

Obama’s legacy described in Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article, ‘The Obama Doctrine’, ends in sour grapes recriminations over Erdoğan’s ‘lack of commitment’. But the question poses itself: commitment to which part of Obama’s confused doctrine? As Erdoğan said, he couldn’t figure out what Obama was up to, so he had to start talking to Biden. Now he is the only NATO member talking actively to Putin. Turkey has no choice but to go east.

Fire in the Houses of Parliament

The Molotov cocktails have set all of the political parties in turmoil. The Blairites have staged a potentially self-immolating coup against Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour party, ahead of their spiritual leader potentially being savaged in the Chilcot Report into the conduct of the War in Iraq. It turns out apparently that Bush might not have gone to war without Blair egging him on.

Cameron and Osborne are history. The conservatives face a leadership election, but it is unlikely that the bankers who are funding the British government’s fast expanding £1.5 trillion debt will countenance a leader who voted ‘leave’.

Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond want to take Scotland out of the UK. But with oil prices on the floor and the EU in recession, the 5m Scots cannot make ends meet without the £40bn p.a. they get from the 55m English. The quick reflex demand for independence by Sturgeon in the context of the current parliamentary turmoil, and ahead of any resolution of the Brexit question, is undoubtedly a political move to push Labour into coalition talks ahead of a general election.

Merkel knows this and will slow everything down in Europe to a snail’s pace. The bankers have realised by now that their money will be worthless if there isn’t a British government that can carry a sceptical public away from their protest vote, which is legally non-binding on parliament. It would nevertheless be unwise for any government to run roughshod over the historic Brexit outcome, although ultimately Britain will eventually have to stay put in some kind of restructured Europe.

Ultimately, the prize for the populist effort might be a swing to social democracy. In any event Atlanticist project is dead.
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