The Dangers of Turkey’s Anti-Western Adventurism

Besides its military interventions into northern Syria, Turkish forces on June 17 initiated a ground operation, dubbed Claw Tiger, in Iraqi Kurdistan, where they have established a handful of outposts. In preparation, Turkey’s warplanes bombed Yazidi villages, a refugee camp, and other targets. These actions, writes Jonathan Spyer, are likely an attempt to create a buffer zone between hostile Kurdish forces and the Turkish border. But, Spyer adds, they are of apiece with Ankara’s larger program of regional interventions:

Operation Claw Tiger fits into an arc of Turkish military assertiveness currently extending from northern Iraq, across northern Syria, going down via the Mediterranean and via Israel, and reaching Libya. Turkey also has a military presence to the south and east of this area, in Qatar and Somalia. In the Mediterranean, Turkey is challenging Greece, Cyprus, France, and Israel for the gas riches beneath the water. [Moreover], Ankara is deeply engaged in support of Hamas against Israel.

In Syria and Iraq, . . . Ankara is, on the face of it, challenging its old [Kurdish] enemies. But there are additional layers. Recep Tayyip Erdogan was first to support the Syrian Sunni Arab insurgency. He has proved its last and most faithful ally. Western states, discouraged by the insurgency’s Islamist and jihadist nature, peeled away from it years ago. Turkey, untroubled by these loyalties because it shares them, has remained.

In Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, Erdogan wants to lay claim to the cause of recovering the al-Aqsa mosque from non-Muslim [control]. Covert military support to Hamas runs alongside active soft power efforts.

[This] is an independent, ambitious foreign policy, with not the slightest nod to the “pro-Western” and “pro-NATO” orientation that Turkey’s Western apologists like to recall. It has its origin in a combination of nationalist assertiveness, tinged with Ottoman-era nostalgia, and the ambitions of Muslim Brotherhood-style Sunni political Islam. This is a potent mix, which is not required to place itself before the judgment of the Turkish voter until 2023. As of now, its main impact is an arc of destabilization, stretching across land and sea from Iraq to Libya.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Al-Aqsa Mosque, Hamas, Iraq, Kurds, Syrian civil war, Turkey

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF