Atlantic Sentinel

Category: Explainer

  • Andrei G. Karlov Is Not Franz Ferdinand

    The high-profile killing was everything one could want from a public assassination. Cameras were live; the Western media, less prone to state censorship, watching. The assassin even had a chance to deliver a short speech that was straight to the point and then was promptly killed by Turkish security services. From the standpoint of political murder, it ticked all the boxes.

    It goes to show that humanity has made a good leap forward in education that #FranzFerdinand briefly trended on Twitter. That people knew of the long-dead archduke, and knew his killing touched off World War I, is a testament that maybe teachers are doing a good job after all.

    Well, a decent job. Because the killing of Ambassador Andrei Karlov is a blip, not a world-shaking event.

    There’s a very good reason for it: Russia needs Turkey more than Turkey needs Russia. Even if Vladimir Putin’s own mother was killed in Ankara by a similar rogue agent, Moscow would still very likely not go to war with Turkey.

    That’s because Franz Ferdinand tripped a geopolitical bomb waiting to go off. There is no such bomb between Turkey and Russia. (more…)

  • The French Far Right’s Family Feud Explained

    Marine Le Pen
    French party leader Marine Le Pen makes her way to a news conference in Strasbourg, May 11 (European Parliament/Fred Marvaux)

    Politico reports that a long-simmering dispute between the two most prominent women of the French far right is getting out of hand.

    There is even a risk of a split in the Front national, the website argues: between the faction of leader Marine Le Pen and the socially conservative wing that has rallied around her 26 year-old niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

    The fact that it’s a family feud, in which the Le Pen patriarch and Vichy apologist Jean-Marie inevitably resurfaces, makes this a headline-grabbing story.

    But there are deeper, geographical and political divides at play that have less to do with personality. (more…)

  • Joining Assad and Russia Against Islamic State Is Foolish

    One of Donald Trump’s most foolish foreign-policy proposals is to team up with Iran, Russia and Bashar al-Assad to defeat the Islamic State in Syria.

    “I don’t like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS,” the American president-elect said last month, referring to the self-proclaimed Islamic State by an acronym.

    “Russia is killing ISIS and Iran is killing ISIS.”

    If that were true, a pact might make sense. But it isn’t. And even if it were, the arguments are against an alliance. (more…)

  • Why Taiwan Could (Still) Start World War III

    American Japanese fighter jets
    An American B-52 Stratofortress bomber leads a formation of American and Japanese fighter jets over Guam, February 21, 2011 (USAF/Angelita M. Lawrence)

    Surely you know already the tripwire: Taiwan is a de facto country but a de jure province of mainland China. The people’s republic wants to bring it back under mainland China’s rule while the people of Taiwan want exactly the opposite.

    Moreover, Taiwan’s military security is guaranteed by the United States via the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, which stipulates the United States must respond militarily to a communist invasion.

    So if the PRC tries to bring Taiwan back into the fold by military force, the United States must retaliate. Conventional battles turn to nuclear battles and then we all die in the irradiated glow of our own monstrous weapons. (more…)

  • Merkel Proposes to Ban the Burqa: Why and Why Now?

    Angela Merkel’s proposal to ban the burqa has caught some of her foreign admirers by surprise.

    A headline at the left-leaning Vox reads, “Germany’s famously tolerant chancellor just proposed a burqa ban,” implying it is both intolerant and out of character for Merkel.

    Vox is right when it argues the timing is political. Merkel recently announced she will seek a fourth term as chancellor next year and is facing criticism of her immigration policy from the right.

    But this is not an about-face. If anything, her open-doors immigration policy was. (more…)

  • What Just Happened in America?

    Donald Trump
    Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives a speech in Phoenix, Arizona, October 29, 2016 (Gage Skidmore)

    The blog originally began with a simple vision: complicated foreign policy analysis stuffed with swears to soften the otherwise indigestible material. As the years have worn on, I’ve largely dropped that approach.

    But I feel we deserve the old way today.

    So let’s start to dig through the rubble and figure out what the fuck just happened in America. (more…)

  • What Did Walloons Get from Resisting Canada Trade Pact?

    The Socialist-led regional government of Belgium’s French-speaking south, which had stalled ratification of a European trade pact with Canada, agreed to support the treaty after all on Thursday.

    The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between Canada and the European Union will itself not change.

    But the Belgians do ask for a four-page addition to the 1,600-page treaty, which must be endorsed by all four of Belgium’s regional parliaments as well as the 27 other EU member states before the full accord can come into force. (more…)

  • There Are Basically Three Ways Brexit Can Go

    Theresa May Lars Løkke Rasmussen
    Prime Ministers Theresa May of the United Kingdom and Lars Løkke Rasmussen of Denmark answer questions from reporters in Copenhagen, October 10 (10 Downing Street/Tom Evans)

    While the British press frantically reports on every move and countermove in the phony war that is their nation’s withdrawal from the EU before it has even started — and while the markets attempt to infer a plan from the every word of Theresa May and her ministers when there clearly is no plan — the outlook really hasn’t changed since Britons voted to leave the European Union in June.

    There are essentially three ways this can go. (more…)

  • Why the Hell Is Yemen Shooting at the United States Navy?

    American amphibious dock landing ship Fort McHenry Suez Canal
    The American amphibious dock landing ship USS Fort McHenry prepares to transit the Suez Canal from the Mediterranean Sea, January 10, 2015 (USN/Jonathan B. Trejo)

    Of course, it isn’t Yemen shooting the navy at all, but the question would be fair to a layman.

    Three times, Yemeni rebels (Rebels? Perhaps; but we’ll get to that later) have fired upon US Navy ships guarding the Straights of Aden. Now the United States has fired back, bombing from afar radar sites.

    For Westerners, and especially Americans, creaky old stereotypes roar to life: Ali Baba, the Mad Dog of the Desert, lingers in the Western mind, reinforced by the shadows of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and now, most recently, Bashar al-Assad. Mad dogs, perhaps, but none were Yemeni.

    There are layers upon layers of conflict here, all of which can be seen as reasonable in and of themselves but which complicate the matter of Yemen beyond the layman. It was not a mad dog nihilistically hoping for cruise-missile-delivered paradise who fired those missiles at the US Navy, nor do such folks give form and function to the overlaying conflicts within Yemen.

    But first, we must understand Yemen. (more…)

  • Why Uzbekistan Is a Bellwether of Stability in Central Asia

    As we’re receiving conflicting reports today about the health of Uzbek president Islam Karimov — official sources say he suffered a stroke and has been hospitalized, other outlets report he’s dead — I thought it worth reiterating the geopolitical importance of his country.

    Much of this is copied from an article I wrote last year, when American secretary of state John Kerry visited Uzbekistan and held talks with Karimov in Samarkand. (more…)

  • Turkey’s Intervention in Syria: Why and Why Now?

    Turkish tanks rolled across the border into Syria on Wednesday. Protected by warplanes and flanked by special forces, they quickly succeeded in forcing Islamic State militants out of the city of Jarablus and driving a wedge between their territory and that of the Syrian Kurds.

    President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said Turkish-backed rebels — mostly Arab and Turkmen — had taken control of the city. (more…)

  • Why “Fundamentals” Are Irrelevant in This Election

    Hillary Clinton
    Former American secretary of state Hillary Clinton gives a speech in Chicago, Illinois, March 14 (Hillary for America/Barbara Kinney)

    If it wasn’t for Donald Trump, America’s Republicans would have stood a good chance of beating Hillary Clinton in November and returning one of their own to the presidency.

    That is according to models that study the election’s “fundamentals”.

    There is no total agreement on just what “fundamentals” are, but most political scientists would include economic and job growth, the incumbent’s approval rating and the unlikelihood of a party winning three consecutive presidential terms.

    Florian Hollenbach and Jacob Montgomery combined six different models that profess to analyze the election’s fundamentals and found (PDF) that, on average, they give the Republican candidate 50.9 percent support against 49.1 percent for the Democrat. (more…)

  • How Culture Keeps the Russians and Ukrainians Steps Away from War

    Vladimir Putin
    Russian president Vladimir Putin lights a candle during a visit to the Saint Sergius of Radonezh Cathedral in Tsarskoye Selo, December 8, 2014 (Kremlin)

    The Ukrainian civil war has been easy enough to fall off the world radar; with headline-grabbing terrorism striking the heart of Europe, Donald Trump running his irrational mouth and the EU rendering itself asunder, the conflict in Donbas, the eastern province now split away from Kiev’s central control, seems like a whisper of a war we’d all forgotten about.

    Now reports are abounding that Moscow is deploying large and powerful military units both within Donbas and in annexed Crimea. It all began with accusations that Ukrainian special forces had slipped into Crimea to bomb a highway full of officials. True or not, it resulted in a deployment of tanks and artillery on both sides of the de facto border. Worry emerged that both sides might begin blowing one another up.

    While the Russians don’t seem keen on an all-out battle, and neither do the Ukrainians, the whole mess bears examination. There are essential truths to learn, both for Russia and Ukraine and the wider world. (more…)

  • Why Turkey Is Drifting from the West

    Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Barack Obama
    Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Barack Obama of the United States meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, December 7, 2009 (White House/Samantha Appleton)

    Blaming the West is a time-honored tradition for those who would be king; Recep Erdoğan is merely following the well-worn pathway of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini and Hafez al-Assad when he declared the root of Turkey’s evil coup is somewhere in a Western intelligence agency.

    It’s a familiar Middle Eastern script. It appeals to the Turkish street because it coddles Turkish nationalism, reinforcing the (deeply false) notion that Turks’ only political flaw is letting spies slip into their society. It draws upon historical myth for credence: of course Western intelligence agencies have meddled and doubtless continue to do so, from Operation Ajax to CIA spooks in Syria’s civil war.

    But just because Western spies have meddled in the past does not mean they did so this time, nor does that let Turkey’s citizens off the hook for listening to the siren call of Erdoğan’s Islamism.

    Yet despite its familiarity, this time there is a general feeling that perhaps Turkey and the West are going separate ways.

    The rationale is simple: NATO needs Turkey, but Turkey, increasingly, does not need NATO.

    Here’s why. (more…)

  • Turkey’s Coup Signals a Generational Shift to Islamism

    On Friday, a faction of the Turkish military tried to overthrow presidential strongman Recep Erdoğan, leader of the Justice and Development Party and increasingly the man of Turkish politics. They failed; first, they didn’t kill or capture Erdoğan in the opening moments of the coup, then they failed to shut off the Internet and media so that that Erdoğan’s supporters couldn’t rally. A few hours after the coup had begun, it began to unravel as tens of thousands of Turks flooded the streets, captured tanks, killed soldiers and forced the rest of the putschists to surrender.

    It was remarkable how it played out in public: from Erdoğan FaceTiming the nation to revelations that the putschists were using WhatsApp to coordinate units, this was in every sense a twenty-first century coup run as though it were the twentieth century.

    Coups are always high-risk affairs: they must, by their nature, involve small numbers of highly motivated, highly organized troops who strike quickly at the heart of power.

    In the twentieth century, it was a simpler job. Coup plotters often grabbed hold of the few means of mass communication: telephone lines, radio stations, television stations, cutting counter-coup forces off from the ready means of counterattack. If successfully blinded, governments often found themselves on the losing end of a coup, unable to rally their superior forces before key elites were captured or killed by the putschists.

    But it is not the twenty-first century. When the Turkish plotters grabbed hold of CNN and state TV, they did not shut off the Internet — leaving the line open for Erdoğan to FaceTime the counterattack. They did not occupy broadcast stations, coming and going rather than maintaining control of journalists, who promptly lambasted the soldiers as soon as they left.

    Once Erdoğan emerged onto the scene and began his flight to Istanbul, the tide rapidly turned. It became obvious that this was just a handful of soldiers rather than the whole Turkish army: emboldened, police and protesters alike began to attack putschist positions.

    For their part, the coup soldiers began to fire back, but they were hopelessly outnumbered; even if they’d emptied their clips into the crowds, they could not hope for victory once Erdoğan had mobilized Turks against them.

    To understand last Friday, and to look at the trajectory it has now put Turkey onto, we must, of course, look back to the past. (more…)