So Erdogan visits neighbouring NATO ally Greece as first Turkish president in decades and they end up refreshing the Aegean islands sovereignty dispute in front of the cameras.
This is about the dumbest thing possible in the region. Greece has well-known economic and fiscal issues and had to reduce its military spending dramatically.
Turkey experienced a 15-year catch-up economic boom, but certain parts of the economy seem to be in a bubble and the government's turn towards authoritarian rule and away from rule of law has begun dragging the economy down.
A revival of the utterly nonsensical Little Cold War about to whom the or certain Aegean islands belong may become extremely wasteful.
related:
I strongly propose to avoid such wasteful nonsense by giving a strong signal clarifying the situation:
The islands are internationally recognized as Greek, and Greece is a EU member, and in case of invasion would be defended and if need be liberated by Greek's EU allies.
7. If a Member State is the victim of armed aggression on its territory, the other Member States shall have towards it an obligation of aid and assistance by all the means in their power, in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. This shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defence policy of certain Member States.Commitments and cooperation in this area shall be consistent with commitments under the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which, for those States which are members of it, remains the foundation of their collective defence and the forum for its implementation.
Pro-Europeans, step forward and do something!
The Turkish politicians are aggressively loudmouthing and offensive against the German government and society anyway and the refugee issue has IMO to be dealt with through strategic demotivation (instead of by plugging one route after another), so there shouldn't be any real obstacle to clarifying the situation this way. Some Turkish politicians will spin and smoke, but that's what they do anyway.
Greece should after this clarification of the situation further reduce its military spending well below 2% GDP, avoiding the 'hollow forces' syndrome and being relaxed about Turkey.
further related:
http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.de/2017/04/europes-defence-in-long-term-in-light.html
S O
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IMHO this is just Erdo-blather, meant for his base back in Turkey. Nothing more than the MTGA neo-Ottomanism of his AKP party.
ReplyDeleteOr I hope so anyway.
Golden Dawn and other Greek far right groups don't help the matter either.
There is renewed Kurdish insurgency at home and PKK dominated Kurdish territory in Syria, right on the borders (Iraqi Kurdistans case being much more complicated). Turkish army is in bad shape. Erdolf doesn´t mean it. - But politically it represents dangerous situation anyway, in Greece it can produce much more propagandistic talk about unreliable allies, about need for Russian support (even if Erdolf openly accomodates himself with Moscow).
ReplyDeleteIt's not about a real threat.
DeleteIt's about the risk that pols in Greece use a foreign bogeyman to gather political support, wasting billions on the nonsense.
There has been a lot of demagoguery with overblown if not entirely fake threats in the last couple years.
The internet is full of people talking shit about some utterly imaginary takeover of Muslims in Europe, for example.
Besides; the only questionable thing about the Turkish military is in this question whether it could keep a planned invasion secret. The islands in question are demilitarised and undefended. The Turks could easily invade them with improvised means.
Sigh.
ReplyDeleteFirst, why "worrying"? You imply that something is wrong with them. About 95-99% of them are utterly unremarkable in everyday life.
Second, even if 50% or 60% of the youth were Muslim, it would still not mean a takeover, not even in the long term. Many of them cannot vote, there are almost none of them in government positions of power or authority or even only armed forces and they're divided (just look at the political difference between Turks and Kurds!) while Germans are one. The UAE has about 2/3 foreigners, and is far from a takeover by foreigners for the very same reasons.
There is simply no path for a "takeover"; even if they were many times as numerous as they actually are.
You did the same mistake as many others; you look at the figures and then went wild on imagination what they might mean. Show me one country that was taken over by a 15% or 25% minority that had little political participation and almost no positions of power.
It's so sad to see people base their political opinions on primitive gut feelings.
Culture in Central Europe has changed for thousands of years. I assure you American TV shows changed our culture more than a couple million Turks and other Muslims. In fact, they tend to live kinda self-segregated and their "influence" didn't go much past Döner food and some teen slang.
ReplyDeleteRegarding the abby boom thing; I suppose you're unable to understand. For starters, there's no baby boom among Muslims in Germany. There's not even a baby boom in their countries of origin. I blogged about that in 2009 already.
http://defense-and-freedom.blogspot.de/2009/06/europe-bashers-and-their-next.html
Neither math nor facts side with the bullshitters with their doom theories. I don't quite get why so many people have this desire to see doom - it maybe interesting to psychologists and I suspect it's closely related to conspiracy theorising, but I don't quite get it.
"The majority of the muslim immigrants live off of welfare and weaken the german state, all while causing civil discord, constant petty crimes, and demanding sharia."
Except nothing of this is true, so I call you out: You're a liar.
Oh, and "racial identity"? Bullshit. Germany has a history of ethnic mixing that goes back to the megalith farmers and Indogermans. "German" is a nationality and membership in a society, not a haplogroup.
Back to topic; you fell for one of the "us versus them" things.
I couldn't care less if a couple % of Germans have trouble digesting milk, for example.
Well, I blocked another post of his because it was full of lies.
ReplyDeleteHere some of his bigger lies:
'2 million immigrants came to Germany since 2015.'
Statistics aren't even out for 2016, so any such claim is unfounded. Immigration was reportedly sharply reduced after 2015; refugee camps have been dissolved almost everywhere in Germany.
https://tinyurl.com/y74zkm6q
Another big one: '80% of Turks in Germany depend on welfare, are criminals, yadda yadda.'
The true figure of ALG II recipients is about 277k, among ~ 2 million Turks with Turkish nationality in Germany.
There's simply no statistic showing the majority or even 80% of Turks in Germany being criminals. The idea is way outside of any plausible or sane territory anyway.
Moreover, despite all the hysteria of weak-brained xenophobes, the actual figures are unspectacular:
In both cases of a German being victim of a criminal act or sexual crime, non-EU immigrants were involved as offenders in each only 4.6% of cases in 2015.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%BCchtlingskrise_in_Deutschland_ab_2015#Kriminalit%C3%A4t_im_Kontext_von_Zuwanderung
One more statistics gem:
The fertility rate of Syrians crashed prior to the Civil War already - how stupid does one need to be to think that they would have a huge fertility rate in Germany?
https://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?c=sy&v=31
Those xenophobes who talk shit about Muslim takeover of Europe yadda yadda are VILE IDIOTS.
It's hard to scare me with anything but heights - I sure won't get scared by their brainfart fantasies.
Back to topic: i think the main twp problems here are:
ReplyDelete1 corruption in greece - to many in greece profit personaly from this arms race and the senseless buying of arms. There are acutal informations that in every case of buying weapons high bribes were paid. Because greece is corrupt to the bone nothing will change here.
2 Greece cannot trust the eu in this case to the very end. In reality the eu would not defence greece if turkey would size some islands. No one in western europe tm woud wage war with turkey for that. No one will liberate sized greece territory and no one will defence greece if turkey would size some islands.
All would try to do everything to show how upset they are and then would ignore the situation in the long term. The lisboa treaty would be worth nothing in this case, the article 42 would be ignored and everone in western tm europe will only feignedly act against turkey and make a great rethoric show and than will call endless for discussion and proceedings and nothing will happen.
Without a strong and serious military lead nation (which should and can only be germany) the eu will always be a paper tiger with no real power. Soon enough countries like turkey will exploit this weakness of the eu.
1 Greek military expenditures were overwhelmingly personnel costs. It was if anything more of a youth unemployment relief program than primarily corruption-driven.
Delete2 That's why I propose to clarify the situationw ith a strong statement.
3 I don't believe that you can predict Turkey's future policies.
1. If the costs are overwhelmingly personel costs and you therefore fire all this young men and place them on the street nothing is solved, but to the contrary.
DeleteYou will have more social riots, and you will have to pay this young men still social benefits and they will be very dissatisfied with the gouverment and will then vote for right wing radical parties and so on.
Moreover you underestimate the equipment costs. Personel costs are always and in every army a main point, that does not mean the costs for the equipment are not important.
According to this source
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/euro-krise-warum-griechenlands-militaer-so-teuer-ist-a-846101.html
80% of the costs are for personell. But the remaining 20% are still much moeny and corruption is also not only in the equipment sector but also in the question of the personel costs a problem in greece.
As the same source/article shows, the reason for the high personel costs are corruption and greed for profit which lead to very inefficient structures.
2 Such a strong statement will never happen because the western eu states are weak and not able to withstand real pressure because of the incompetence and weakness of our gouverments.
"First, NATO estimates 73.3% of Greece's 2015 military budget will go towards personnel expenditure. Only six other NATO countries have personnel costs higher than Greece's."
Deletehttp://www.businessinsider.com/why-greeces-military-budget-is-so-high-2015-6?IR=T
So 73 or 80%. That's way above normal, and if the motivation behind the big budget was corruption the investments would have a much higher share. They bloated the personnel first and foremost - maybe social policy, but not corruption.
Whatever corruption they have is an afterthought compared to the personnel issue.
Nobody can make much profit off bloated personnel through corruption.
Corruption as the driver would have led to many (more) pointless purchases of jets, tanks and other shiny things - as in Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
2 The weak governments are the governments in Greece and Turkey. The German government is rather complacent than weak. We're still having a post-election confusion moment, but that's evidently not stopping them from making foreign policy.
This is an extreme strange argument:
ReplyDelete>>The UAE has about 2/3 foreigners, and is far >>from a takeover by foreigners for the very >>same reasons.
Do you realy compare the situation in the UAE with the situation in europe and/or germany?
The foreigners in the uae are nearer to slaves than to any other status. Their legal status is completly different, to spare time: everything is completly different for them. Moreover most of them are also muslims.
>>>Show me one country that was taken over by >>a 15% or 25% minority that had little >>political participation and almost no >>positions of power.
The percentage is much higher if you regard only the children and they will get then again more children and so on. So the percentage climbes not linear but faster.
Here and today 35,9 % of the children under 7 in germany has an immigration background. And this children will have poltical power in germany and the next generation will then exceed the 50 %. So within this century (2100) germany will be an complete diffent country with different cultures and different people.
This reminds me of American racism. A white man and a black woman have a child, or a black man and a white woman have a child - and the child is never considered to be white, always black. Curious thing, that white supremacy.
ReplyDeleteThis counting of everyone with a migration background in the past two generations or so is quite the same. As if all of them were foreigners. There's a reason why it's called like that, not "all-foreigner background".
About one fifth of the people with migration background in Germany were Germans who migrated to Germany.
It's stupefying how reliably people like you get the basic facts wrong.
News flash: Those 35.9% you wrote about ARE NOT ALL MUSLIMS, much less a homogenous block. Great many of them are not practicing Muslim faith, have an entirely different faith or have zero cohesion with other Muslim groups. I already mentioned the utter lack of love between Kurds and Turks. Now there's also a split between pro-AKP Turks and urban/academic roots Turks who overwhelmingly despise the AKP. I know Turks who love pork, drink wine and beer. People like you pretend that such people add to that scary mass that's darkening the skies soon or something.
Besides - the UAE example is not all that irrelevant. Almost no foreigners in Germany are in position of power or in armed government agencies.
I can shoot down every single stupid claim that the xenophobes and islamophobes make. I saw so many of them, and just about every statistic mentioned was fantasy, misrepresented or interpreted with utter ignorance of its meanings. You guys are on the foolish side of history, again.
I wonder how much of the Greek personnel costs are pensions.
ReplyDelete