John Batchelor Show

July 20, 2016

(Transcript of the first 10 minutes)

It’s chaos, but there’s a pattern here. I’ve been arguing for three years that we are in a new Cold War with Russia. People who implemented that Cold War deny it. They use euphemisms, like ‘worst time since the Cold War’. But I think it’s important to call it what it is, so we can analyze it. And now we have two more characteristic signs from the past that this is cold war. We have a scandal involving the Olympics. You remember that that the United States boycotted the Russian Olympics in 1980. President Carter did. And now we have an outburst of what seems to me to be neo-McCarthyism, with people in the United States accusing, in a strange way, the Russians of having taken over the Republican Party because of a dispute in the plank there. The symbolisms, the recapitulation of the last Cold War is now everywhere.

The other thing I want to re-emphasize, is that we are witnessing the breakdown of an entire world order; whether we look at the new Cold War, or we look at the terrorism in the Middle East, look at the coup in Turkey: This is a breakdown in what people sometimes call the post-Cold War order, or sometimes post-World War II order.

Everything that you and I lived with and our kids lived with the last 25 years or so, is coming apart. There is no order. Marx once said, ‘an old world is dying and a new one is struggling painfully to be born.’ And it doesn’t seem to me that American policy is much of a midwife. Consider only that as a result of what happened in Nice last Thursday on Bastille Day, the killing of all those people by what looks like a lone wolf in a truck led France to deploy its army to its borders, to inspect people and goods crossing its borders. I think that’s probably the end of the European Union, because the first principle of the EU was open borders for people and goods. Maybe it’s not the end, but it’s another sign, along with the financial crisis, Brexit, the migration crisis, that the European order, which was supposed to be the great liberal project since World War II, is dying. And if that’s not a coming apart of the existing world order, then I don’t know what is.

So, coming to Turkey. My first thought, being a Russologist, I think it was almost exactly 25 years ago, August 1991, that the Russian military and secret police tried to overthrow Mikhail Gorbachev. August 1991. Which led to end of the Soviet Union. But there are certain patterns here. Like Erdogan, Gorbachev was on vacation. These things tend to happen in July and August. What Russians call ‘dacha month’. Even presidents go away on vacations. Probably a good sign if you’re a wobbling leader not to go on vacation in July and August.

But here’s a larger point: We didn’t know the history of the failed coup against Gorbachev for several years. Things that happened and set off that coup. Things that happened that involved people and forces we were not aware of in the newspapers and following days. So I don’t know how much we actually know about how this coup came about in Turkey. There are for example, and they may not be true, but persistent reports that Erdogan himself was behind the coup. That he used it to get rid of the people who were blocking his road to full power, and a change in policy, and to this day people argue, Gorbachev’s enemies argue in Russia, that he staged the coup in a bid for supreme power which he was losing at the time. There are also people who think the United States either knew about the coup in advance, or actually somehow abetted it. We know that relations with Erdogan and the NATO leaders, Cameron and Obama, were very frosty at that July Warsaw summit. He was clearly being ostracized there. There are all sorts of rumors, all sorts of lacks of information.

But we say that there is a massive purge, so to speak, underway. Erdogan’s going to use it to strengthen his power. I think that these are the headlines for the story until we know more, and everything has to be tentative.

But what it means is there has now been a major breach in the anti-Russian Cold War front. Erdogan had very much been on the side of NATO, not only because Turkey is a member of NATO, but because he shot down that Russian plane, which put him completely at odds with Russia. Russia retaliated economically. It cost Turkey a lot of money.

So Turkey will now be ostracized in some way by the West. The deal he made, for example, with the EU, in return for either six or nine billion euro – the figure has never been ascertained exactly – for retaining the Mediterranean migrants, refugees in Turkey so they couldn’t get to Western Europe, that deal is probably off, so this will reignite European Union’s refugee crisis.

He’s leaving the Western anti-Russian coalition and he will probably tilt back strongly toward Russia. This will probably in return, and this is a change he has already announced, Erdogan has, that he is longer going to oppose Russian-American cooperation in Syria against the Islamic State. Now, talking the talk and walking and walk are different things, because under Erdogan, Turkey has been a major financial and military abetter of the Islamic State. It’s ridiculous when the State Department or any leader of NATO, the West, refers to Erdogan as our great ally in the fight against terrorism. That is simply a falsehood, and they know it’s a falsehood. […]

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