As Ahmet Insel, journalist, writer and academic, explains to us, the Turkish president knows how to position himself in the crisis that the European Union, Ukraine and Russia are undergoing. If Recep Tayyip Erdoğan knew how to be tough with certain member states of the EU, even threatening with others, Greece and the Republic of Cyprus, he nevertheless knew how to invest in economic and military agreements with Ukraine. , and find a certain “understanding” with Vladimir Putin, while taking opposing positions with the Russian president, for example during the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
Our guest, Ahmet Insel, allowed us to understand Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s strategy in relation to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Thus, the Turkish president has returned to world news by asserting his membership in NATO, therefore opposing Russia, but without applying the sanctions provided for by the EU and the United States against Moscow.
On the other hand, the advance of Russian troops on the Ukrainian coast of the Black Sea makes Recep Tayyip Erdoğan fear – if ever Russia seizes this coast – an inevitable face to face with Russia, Turkey representing the ‘NATO in this area, where neither Georgia, Bulgaria or Romania could hardly bring a geopolitical balance.
But if Vladimir Putin is a chess player, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is a tavla player. The game of tavla, backgammon or backgammon in the West, consists in having all your pawns go around the checkerboard and taking them out first against your opponent, but with each roll of the dice, you risk recomposing your game each time , good or bad, and therefore to resume, modify or imagine a different strategy. Like what the ancestral board games, like also the game of Go, are also methods of geopolitics often misunderstood.
And as Ahmet Insel reminds us, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan knows how to play on different tables, having already preserved his “eggs in different baskets“Ukrainian, Russian, NATO. This is how Recep Tayyip Erdoğan appears as a possible mediator in a supposed resolution of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, alongside Israel.
Here, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan offers pledges of “goodwill” to his NATO allies, despite the fact that he is hardly appreciated by President Biden, working for peace in Ukraine, and hoping in return that his allies will let him do as he pleases in Turkey – non-respect of human rights – occupation in Syria and northern Cyprus, claims on the Aegean Sea.
As Ahmet Insel points out to us, if the Turkish President does not apply the sanctions against Russia, making the Europeans and the Americans blink, it must be seen, for him, to take advantage of the exile of fortunes and young Russian graduates, as seen in Georgia and Finland. But for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it is also a question of betting on the arrival of European companies on Turkish soil, leaving Russia, which would be a breath of fresh air for the Turkish economy.
Thus Recep Tayyip Erdoğan knows how to find a place in international diplomacy by trying to restore the image of his power one year before the Turkish legislative and presidential elections, and especially at the dawn of the centenary of the founding of the Turkish republic, 2023.
Similarly, if Europe saw the fall of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, German empires in 1919, a century later would the EU see the birth of new empires, Russian, Chinese and Turkish, all on the same continent? Thus providing an answer to Paul Valéry’s question, “Europe, a small cape of the Asian continent?”, seeing the Eurasian dream of Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan come true?. As for the American “ally” of the EU, it will always be separated from it by an ocean, that is to say, the open sea…