US Vice President Joe Biden plays a very special role in the darker foreign policies of the Obama Administration, one that is virtually overlooked as he is such a faceless personality. It seems that everywhere Washington plans to ignite a war, Obama sends Joe to get things started. He is worth a closer look, given his most recent visit in Ankara and what he said there.

On January 24, Joe Biden came to Ankara for intensive meetings with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Prime Minister Davutoğlu. What was significant about the talks, as has so far been made public, is the astonishing fact that Biden, representing the Government of the United States, claiming it is engaged in a war to defeat ISIS, the so-called Islamic State or in Arabic, DAESH, did not once discuss with Turkish leaders the negotiation on a political resolution in Syria, according to an unnamed US official present.

Instead, Washington endorsed Erdoğan’s ongoing ethnic cleansing, thinly veiled as a war against terrorist PKK, against the Turkish Kurd population and their Syrian Kurd allies. Moreover, Biden, standing beside the Turkish leaders, announced that if the diplomatic Geneva talks this week on Syria failed, military action in Syria will follow: “We do know that it would be better if we can reach a political solution but we are prepared—we are prepared if that’s not possible—to have a military solution to this operation in taking out Daesh.”

Moreover, he indicated that Washington would not pressure Turkey to stop its military troop placement inside Iraq near the rich oilfields of Mosul, presently held by DAESH, leaving it as a matter between the governments of Iraq and Turkey, meaning de facto US endorsement of Turkey’s illegal invasion of Iraq. In fact, Biden discussed US military support, unspecified, for a Turkish military move to take the oilfields of Mosul. Further, the US Vice President apparently said not a word about the continuing illegal smuggling of Iraqi and Syrian oil by ISIS into Turkey where Erdoğan’s son ships it to world markets, financing the ISIS terror inside Syria Biden claims to oppose.

Now Joe Biden, a nasty corrupt fellow by many accounts, knew well that Erdoğan and his head of the Turkish MIT intelligence, Hakan Fidan, openly support DAESH, train them, and arm them to wage the war in Syria by the DAESH or ISIS that Washington claims to be fighting against. In an October 18, 2015 interview with the Turkish news agency, Anadoly, Fidan stated the open Turkish support for DAESH: “The Islamic Emirate [IS-w.e.] is a reality and we must accept that we cannot eradicate a well-organized and popular institution as the Islamic State is. Therefore, I urge my colleagues in the West to revise their mindset on Islamic political currents, to put aside their cynical mentality and thwart Putin plans to crush the Islamist Syrian revolutionaries.”

The Great Seduction

As I have written previously, what is shaping up in the Middle East today, far from a diplomatic resolution of the US-backed war by ISIS to destroy the legitimately elected government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, is a covert behind-the-scenes Washington seduction of the grandiose, ambitious Erdoğan, backed by the equally grandiose and stupid Saudi regime of pro-ISIS King Salman and his hot-headed, militarily incompetent son, Defense Minister and de facto King, Prince Salman.

The Washington game seems to be to give the Saudi-Turkish duo enough rope to hang themselves in a mad power grab of Syrian and Iraqi oil riches and perhaps, if they are really mad enough, of Iran’s oilfields too. Few realize that it was King Salman who organized the Saudi money for the CIA that financed their creation, going back to when Salman, as Prince, organized financing of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda Mujahideen in the Afghan war against the Soviet Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980’s.

There is today an obscene military and economic alliance between Turkey’s grandiose, ambitious Erdoğan and the Wahhabite Saudi monarchy. For their part, the Saudi monarchy of Salman and Prince Salman is eager to grab more oilfields to boost their wealth. That, not because the Monarchy is destitute, but because they seem to have the delusion that if they become the possessor of the world’s most oil, they will finally be allowed to “sit at the Master’s table” and not be treated by arrogant Western oligarchs as primitive Bedouin camel herders in Rolls Royces.

The Grand Sultan?

In March this year, as a result of collusion between the Saudi monarchy of Salman and Erdoğan, Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi was coerced to hand over a vital political post to Erdogan. Erdogan will soon lead the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), considered to be the Muslim ‘UN,’ coming second to the United Nations in size and global power.

Saudi Arabia arranged the Turkey-Egypt talks setting the framework for a peace deal between Turkey and Egypt, to be finalized before April when Al-Sisi will hand over the leadership of the OIC to Erdoğan. In 2013 Turkey’s Erdoğan condemned the toppling of the Muslim Brotherhood regime by Al Sisi, refusing to recognize Al Sisi’s legitimacy. Now, under terms of the Saudi-brokered deal, Al Sisi will not only surrender his Presidency of OIC, no doubt a deal greased with Saudi money to needy Egypt. He will also turn over to the pro-Muslim Brotherhood regime of Erdoğan hundreds of Egyptian Muslim Brothers sitting on death row after Al Sisi’s overthrow of the Brotherhood’s President Mohammed Morsi in 2013.

The OIC was founded in 1969 by 57 member states, to be “the collective voice of the Muslim world“. It was set up as result of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate after World War I, which left a vacuum for a pan-Islamic institution. The OIC represents the association today of 56 Islamic states. This is much the same group of Islamic states invited to Riyadh last month by Prince Salman to form the Saudi an “Islamic Anti-Terror Coalition.”

Step by step the grandiose, ambitious Erdoğan, current international “protector” of the Muslim Brotherhood, backer of DAESH, aka ISIS, is nearing his long-held dream of restoring the Islamic Caliphate, but not with some character called Al Baghdadi, who may even be only fictional. The new Grand Sultan will be…Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Or so he believes, especially after the latest visit to Ankara of devious Joe Biden.

It’s becoming clearer by the day that the schemers in Washington and their oligarchical backers in Wall Street and Big Oil are setting the stage for something very big and very dramatic in the coming few months in the Middle East. The outcome could surprise the entire world. It will not benefit the cause of world peace and harmony if Joe Biden and his patrons have their way, we can be sure.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.