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** Turkey: A NATO Ally? ([link removed])
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by Burak Bekdil • October 28, 2022 at 5:00 am
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/19028/turkey-nato-ally#print
* What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations [the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, SCO] have in common?
* With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world's democratic bloc of nations.
* "I told Putin... Let us in so we'll break up with the EU. The Shanghai Five is better [than the EU]. It is much more powerful. [With membership] we'll have a chance to be together with the countries with which we share common values" — Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, January 2013.
* And finally, in September 2022, Erdoğan became the first head of a NATO state attending an SCO summit, in Uzbekistan.... Erdoğan went to the summit upon Putin's personal invitation.
* This is the natural outcome of West's deaf ears and blind eyes. When Erdoğan first spoke of SCO membership for Turkey a decade ago, Western capitals reacted with shy laughter and a misdiagnosis: that Erdoğan was just bluffing to win quicker membership accession to the European Union.
* Western bigwigs did not even get the message when in 2013 Erdoğan spoke of Eurasian dictatorships as "countries with which we have common values." He was just speaking what, to him, was the truth.
* Funny, Erdoğan became the first NATO head of state attending an SCO summit while pressuring Congress for the delivery of U.S.-made F-16 Block 70 fighter aircraft for his air force. Behind closed doors in Washington, his envoys and back channels will be telling their U.S. audience that "Turkey's future is in the Western bloc, that the SCO talk is for Turkey's balancing act between its commitment to the West and its inevitable proximity with Russia."
* Turks are living in a totally different economic realm than the recent past. Turkey's official annual inflation climbed to a fresh 24-year high of 80% in August -- though ENAG, an independent research organization, estimated the true annual inflation rate at 181% for the same period. Worse may be yet to come.
* Meanwhile, Turkey's currency, the lira, has lost more than half of its value against the US dollar since 2021.

What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of the exotic blend of nations that is the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) have in common? With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world's democratic bloc of nations. Pictured: Leaders of member states, observers and partners of the SCO pose for a photo at the SCO Summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan on September 16, 2022. (Photo by Sergei Bobylyov/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images)

The Shanghai Five group, which later became the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), was created on April 26, 1996 with the signing of the Treaty on Deepening Military Trust in Border Regions, in Shanghai by the heads of states of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia and Tajikistan.

Full members of Russian President Vladimir Putin's de facto answer to NATO, in addition to the Shanghai Five group, are Uzbekistan, Iran, India and Pakistan, with Belarus going through the accession process. Afghanistan and Mongolia are observer states. Sri Lanka, Turkey, Cambodia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Armenia, Egypt, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are dialogue partners.

What do members, future members, dialogue partners and future dialogue partners of this exotic blend of nations have in common?

With their growing democratic deficits and authoritarian-to-dictatorship regimes, they are at cold war with the world's democratic bloc of nations.

A brief chronology:

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