On June 14, Joe Biden held his first meeting as US president with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan, ending a five-month wait for personal contact between the two leaders. The outcome and themes of this meeting were clear to all long before it took place, although Washington has been persistently emphasizing the cooler relations with Ankara since Biden took office in January and the “series of disagreements” between the NATO allies.

For example, the US claims were made public because Turkey bought S-400 air defense systems from Russia, even though, by a strange coincidence (!?), Washington has not made any claims against Greece, which has been using Russian S-300 air defense systems for over 20 years. The human rights activists continue pressuring Ankara because of the massive crackdown that Turkish authorities began after the coup and is still going on: more than 90,000 people imprisoned and more than 150,000 Turks fired or suspended because of alleged links to the Gülenists.

In response, Turkey has continued to demand that the United States extradite Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, who, according to officials in Ankara, organized the 2016 coup attempt against Erdogan. The Turkish leader accused Biden last month of “writing history with bloody hands” after he approved arms sales to Israel during the Jewish state’s conflict with Palestinian groups in the Gaza Strip. Ankara was sharply criticized because of the White House’s recognition of the 1915-1922 Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire and the US support of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria, which Ankara considers a “terrorist organization”.

However, if looking not at the external manifestation of the US-Turkish relations, but at the actual activities of Ankara in recent times in fulfillment of various instructions from Washington, a somewhat different picture emerges. Thus, in recent years, the US has actively used Turkey as its battering ram to solve many geopolitical problems of interest to Washington. And it is certainly not just about Turkey as a very important NATO instrument in the southeast.

Suffice it to recall Turkey’s role in the redistribution of the Middle East and, in particular, in the unleashing of the Arab Spring, weakening the unity and former power of the Arab states of the Mediterranean basin. In particular, in Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, and North Africa, where the radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood (banned in Russia), under the patronage of Ankara, unleashed national unrest, overthrew the existing regime in Libya, and attempts by radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood to consolidate power not only in Egypt. Moreover, such activities of the Muslim Brotherhood and their rise to power with Mohamed Morsi in Egypt or Tunisia, where Moncef Marzouki became president in 2011, took place with the active participation of the CIA, which has already been published in various media.

And it must be realized that Ankara’s use of the Muslim Brotherhood was no accident, since the Justice and Development Party in power in Turkey today is a Turkish version of the Muslim Brotherhood. And clearly, according to Erdogan’s plans, they intended to become one of his main tools in the struggle for supremacy in the Sunni world with the same Saudi Arabia, which Washington hoped, among other things, to “curb” with the hands of Ankara. Even in Jordan, where, on orders from Washington, the Muslim Brotherhood retains about 40% of that country’s parliament, and the Americans do not allow the king to change this proportion, as Washington expects to use this leverage on the army and the kingdom’s government.

Therefore, it is not surprising that today, having understood much of Washington’s hidden game in the Middle East, in a significant number of leading Arab countries of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, the Muslim Brotherhood is on the top of the black lists of banned terrorist organizations, in particular in Saudi Arabia, the Arab Emirates, Egypt and Syria.

Washington is also actively using Turkey to counter Russia. In particular, encouraging Ankara’s latest development of military cooperation with Kiev, as well as in its political and financial support through it of the banned in Russia “Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar people,” led in Ukraine by Mustafa Dzhemilev, who speculates on the Crimean issue in favor of Ukraine and the national minorities.

One must not forget that the ideology of the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood includes Ottoman and Turan ideas, i.e. the subsequent subordination to Ankara of the entire Turkic-speaking population of Eurasia, including Bashkiria, Tatarstan, Tuva, Chuvashia, Yakutia and several other territories of Southern Siberia. As well as the states of Central Asia.

So today, while the US has not solved its geostrategic problems with the involvement of Turkey and Erdogan personally in the Middle East, Russia and China against the Chinese Uighurs, the external quarrels between Washington and Ankara and Erdogan published by the Western media are more akin to a staged performance. Indeed, the president of Turkey is playing the game with everyone, including the Americans, for his own benefit. But if today Erdogan is in power, tomorrow he may be gone, thanks to the participation of the very same US. He can be replaced by another person, tougher, through “democratic” elections “the American way”. However, he is likely to have in his hands the same tools that Erdogan has prepared.

But in any case, the United States will allow Turkey to complete the stage of cleaning up the macro-region, and then they will give the same Kurds a fat chunk at the expense of the Turks. And then they won’t need Erdogan anymore.

Valery Kulikov, political expert, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. Courtesy

https://journal-neo.org/2021/06/18/is-Erdogan-reshaping-the-world-at-the-behest-of-washington/