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** Erdoğan: Willing Hostage to Putin's Anti-West Doctrine ([link removed])
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by Burak Bekdil • September 7, 2023 at 5:00 am
* Since Turkey's economy is undergoing an unprecedented dive, Erdoğan needs European loans and investors.
* Erdoğan seems to have a lot of wants.... [And] he wants the US Congress to endorse the sale of F-16 Block 70 aircraft to Turkey.
* What to do? Erdoğan has resorted to his old trick of launching a hoax charm offensive hoping to deceive, once again, a few naïve Western minds. Too little, too late. He has been dancing within the Russian orbit to Putin's tunes for several years so that, like a junior mafioso, he is being reminded by the capo that "once you're in, you cannot get out."
* "We take Russian missile attacks as a Russian warning that reflects Russia's discontent over a few Turkish initiatives... A Putin way to say 'Hey, behave or else...'" — Senior Turkish diplomat to Gatestone, on condition of anonymity.
* Once again, Western optimists are misreading Erdoğan, that he is "rekindling fraught relations with the West." He just needs Western money, a few pats on the shoulder and legitimacy for his sultanship.
* The Turkish company Beks Ship Management... help[s] Russia ship out its oil despite the Western sanctions, according to The Wall Street Journal.
* An elephant painted in stripes does not make it a zebra. Erdoğan has never hidden his anti-Western ideology, or its depths.
* Erdoğan comes from the ranks of Turkey's militant political Islamism that emerged in late 1960s under the leadership of the ideologue, Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey's first Islamist prime minister and Erdoğan's mentor. In Erbakan's rhetoric universal politics is simply about a struggle between the righteous (Islam) and a coalition of Zionists and racist imperialists -- all else is just details. In his thinking, the Zionists support Turkey's membership in the EU in order to "get Turkish Muslims to melt in a pot of Christianity."
* In a 2016 speech, Erdoğan talked of European countries: "These are not just our enemies... Behind them are plans and plots and other powers." Also in 2016, he said that jihad is never terrorism. "It is resurrection.... It is to give life, to build... It is to fight the enemies of Islam."
* Also in 2020, Erdoğan wished that "God grant this nation many more happy conquests" at a celebration where he recited from the Quran, a salute to the Ottoman invasion of Christian lands. To European leaders, he said: "You are fascists in the true meaning of the world. You are veritably the link in the Nazi chain."
* Erdoğan's anti-Western ideology has not changed. What changes from time to time is how much Western money and favors he needs.

Pictured: Russian President Vladimir Putin greets Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Sochi, Russia, on September 4, 2023. (Photo by Alexey Nikolsky/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

What brought the presidents of Turkey and Russia into an alliance with no name? Their geo-political opportunism was part of it, but mainly it was the inherent ideological hatred of Western civilization that eventually made the Turkish president a useful instrument in the Russian president's reckless campaign to harm the interests of the West.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan spent $2.5 billion of Turkish taxpayers' money to buy the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missiles, only to keep them unpacked at some unknown military warehouse, for fear, if he activated the system, of furthering U.S. sanctions in addition to Washington's move to kick Turkey out of the multinational F-35 fighter jet program. Since Turkey's economy is undergoing an unprecedented dive, Erdoğan needs European loans and investors.

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