Will Erdogan Resort to Regional Nuclear Blackmail?

erdogan-weaponsBy Mathew Maavak

The failed “military coup” in Turkey last month is still replete with discrepancies, insinuations and outright lies. Disinformation and recriminations continue to swirl like an impenetrable black hole, blotting out cogent questions over the innumerable bloopers in this poorly-scripted geopolitical drama.

To begin with, an astonishing 99 generals were allegedly involved in the July 15 coup. Most armies in the world cannot claim to have 99 generals, let alone boast of 99 coup-plotters. Just how many generals does Turkey have at any one time? To get a grip on the unlikelihood of this number, the perennially-at-war United States had 886 generals and admirals as of Feb 29 this year, according to a US Senate Armed Services Committee report which tallied “411 one stars, 299 two stars, 139 three stars, and 37 four-star active generals and admirals” in the Department of Defense. The US committee even concluded that its general staff was bloated!

Therefore, Ankara’s explanation that Turkey, with its long history of successful military coups, had swiftly neutered a coup involving 99 generals is simply absurd. So far, more than 60,000 people in the military, judiciary, civil service, universities, schools and the media have been arrested, removed or suspended over their purported links to US-based Islamist and alleged coup mastermind, Fethullah Gulen.

Yet, the West’s response has been bizarrely tepid, considering their standard deafening protests whenever a single “human rights activist” is remanded or detained in a nation not allied to the United States.

The possibility of a coup plot escaping the notice of myriad Western and non-Western intelligence assets in Turkey and beyond defies logic, especially in the wake of Ankara’s reported links to terrorist groups like the Islamic State.

To add incredulity into this Grade B drama, rumours of an imminent coup in Turkey had been swirling for months on Facebook, among other social media platforms. How this had escaped the notice of Turkey’s vaunted national intelligence service, the MIT, is equally baffling. Logically, when coup plotters read about their own plans on Facebook, they will assuredly shrink away from a foreknown, foolhardy adventure. But no so, it seems, in Turkey.

While inconsistencies regarding the “Gulenist coup plot” continue to pile up, and while the number of Turkish officials arrested or purged entails a whopping 30,000 per week, the West is looking to normalize relations with fellow NATO member Turkey at the earliest opportune moment. This will assuredly happen after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan determines the extent of Russian geopolitical concession, if any, during an Aug 9 meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Everyone is playing a game of waiting, or more specifically, a “game of chicken” which incidentally was a Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) scenario developed during the Cold War.

Hardly any mainstream Western writer or geopolitical expert is gaming out a worst-case scenario that eerily parallels Erdogan’s Pan-Turkic/Neo-Ottoman fantasies which stretch from the Balkans to Xinjiang – right through the heart of Greater Eurasia. This is redolent of a nuclear game theory denouement worthy of the legendary Herman Kahn himself!

The Nuclear Blackmail

Right after the “coup”, Ankara terminated power supply to the US/NATO Incirlik airbase and quarantined thousands of NATO personnel within, forcing the latter to rely on backup generators since then. How did the base sustain itself with backup generators and an underreported siege for over two weeks and counting?

NATO and the usually trigger-happy US government were suspiciously silent, leaving the pro- and anti-Erdogan camps to slug out a proxy war in wild speculations. Erdogan may appreciate the benefit of doubt tilted his way. The current confusion may tempt him to seize the moment by replicating the NATO-engineered chaos in Libya which, resulted in massive arms transfers to jihadi militants in Syria from 2011 onwards.

Even as hardcore Islamists from Erdogan’s AKP party are encamped outside Incirlik, and while thousands of Turkish troops are subjecting the base to an “inspection”, the US sees no urgency in removing its 50-odd nuclear weapons to relative safety. No request has been filed before the UN Security Council or NATO for its safe evacuation. Instead, the fate of Incirlik’s nuclear weapons may be deliberately sealed by further chaos in Turkey.

If Incirlik is overrun by Islamists, leading to a “broken arrow” (e.g. missing nukes) incident, Ankara may conveniently blame it on Gulenists or the bogeyman du jour. Unwitting players in this game of musical chairs may include Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, Moscow or Jerusalem – with the hot seat exchanged in sync with Erdogan’s neo-Caliphate goals and hysteria levels in the Islamic world. Factitious flexibility will be the order of the day.

Therefore it was not incongruous for Ankara to seek normalization of ties with Syria on July 13, only to declare that “Assad must go” during the hours leading up to the July 15 coup. There are additional reasons for this volte-face: Incirlik is only 90-odd kilometres from a Syrian border infested with terrorists who routinely transit via Turkey.

Except for Gulen, Erdogan has yet to specifically blame any party for the coup, leaving the copious accusations, innuendos and conspiracy theories to Western anarchist writers, the Fars News agency and commentaries from a naïve Russian media dreaming of a Russo-Turkish alliance against NATO. Erdogan’s ire is predictably shifting from Gulen the Mastermind to a “superior intelligence behind” the Gulen the Pawn. The gullible, less concerned by Erdogan’s brutal crackdowns and his regime’s casual U-turns on recent geopolitically-charged events, are convinced that Ankara is referring to the United States. The story might morph yet again to include Israel, much to the delight of the Greater Eurabian collective.

Who trusts a regime that wildly changes its terror-laden narrative by the week? The West, of course! A nuke snuck into Syria would rouse Washington into an outright military intervention. The quartet of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey – the primary creators of ISIS itself – has never wavered from its goal of overthrowing the Syrian government in favour of an Islamist regime that will be remote-controlled from Washington and Riyadh. Ankara, however, may harbour a larger and more sinister goal in mind: The union of the pan-Turkic and Pan-Islamic worlds under its leadership. A US-abetted nuclear blackmail would provide the ideal opening for this otherwise unlikely adventure.

The ball is now in Putin’s court. The Aug 1 downing of a Russian military helicopter in Syria’s Idlib province bordering Turkey was swiftly accompanied by the desecration of the pilots’ bodies. The terror group allegedly responsible for the shootdown, the Army of Conquest, was long backed by the ISIS quartet.

Erdogan, a natural quick-draw with the accusatory finger, has yet to condemn this attack. He may be frantically trying to pin this on the CIA. Any cockamamie conspiracy theory will do, with the new normal and standards in geopolitical narratives already laid down by the United States.

Against this backdrop, will Putin respond positively to Turkish overtures or will Moscow call for a UNSC meeting to demand the temporary removal of US nuclear weapons from Turkish soil? The latter course of action would infuriate a megalomaniacal Erdogan who might be backed by an equally enraged NATO; the same NATO whose military personnel are ironically besieged at Incirlik. Coincidentally, ISIS has just declared war on Russia, and one wonders whether this was a subtle warning meant for Putin? The possibilities here are of a veritable Byzantine vintage.

Either way, the farcical siege of Incirlik may catapult Erdogan to be a kingmaker or Caliph-in-waiting for the Turkic and Islamic worlds. If nuclear weapons go missing during a manufactured protest, the world will prostrate itself before Erdogan to have them recovered. The quid pro quo would likely be Erdogan’s geopolitical ultimatums to burnish his image in the Islamic world even while his military retrieves those missing nukes in a deliberate, piecemeal manner. In the interim, Western counter-terrorism experts may stoke rumours of nukes being smuggled into Chechnya, West Bank, Kashmir or Xinjiang or a via mysterious vessel floating in the Straits of Malacca. Remember the hyper-mediated fears whipped up after 9/11?

Few are gaming out the possibility of a US-Turkish plot to destabilise the Silk Road project. At the very least, Erdogan has always eyed a Turkic silk road controlled by Ankara; one where Turkey would be the undisputed linchpin of Greater Eurasia.

It is therefore imperative to demand the removal of US nuclear weapons from Incirlik to relative safety – even temporarily – until Turkey returns to normality. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, it would be criminally remiss of Washington not to do so under the present circumstances.

Image Credit

@Mathew Maavak, 2016. Published at Activist Post with permission from the author.

Mathew Maavak researches Security Foresight at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM).


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19 Comments on "Will Erdogan Resort to Regional Nuclear Blackmail?"

  1. This could have been a joint US/Erdogan covert plot to entice people to join the coup, which seemed to be expected by Erdogan forces, in order to eliminate them and cement Erdogan’s authority going forward. If this is the case the nuclear weapons were never in jeopardy. When it comes to nuclear weapons, one of the things you do is bully the countries that don’t have them. Another thing you do is threaten to use them in retaliation against someone else who uses them. Actually using them is the most horrible option of all.

    • That’s a good bet it was a layered deception to create a purge to whip up the Islamists in Turkey, more divide and conquer exactly as we see playing out in the US with the Trump vs Hillary camps and rancor with Bernie supporter and lots of suggestions of a coming “civil war” reinforced by Hollywood predictive programming (Captain America).

      The global elite are masters of the dialectic. Erdogan (CIA global puppet) looking to be a backward nationalist tyrant is contrasted with CIA global elite puppet Gulen who advocates globalism and the new world religion.

  2. The CIA and MI-6 organized this coup. Many of these arrested Generals were linked to NATO and the CIA. The Gulen organizations in Turkey and elsewhere are quite numerous and definitely are CIA affiliated. The CIA quickly put together this coup because of the quickly changing relationship between Turkey and Russia, which the CIA, NATO and MI-6 definitely did not like.

    • Except consider Russian elites are new world order members in good standing, thus this would be Kabuki theater and a sloppy operation at that. If the CIA wanted Erdogan out, there are cleaner and more efficient ways to handle it. If Russia was a threat, Podesta working for the Clintons would not have been part of a group of elites using Slokovo foundation to supply the Russians with sensitive and classified research and technologies that could undermine US national security. But then, Podesta’s far left think tank Center for American Progress took in $5.25 million dollars from Sea Change registered in Bermuda to Klein Inc tied to a number of business entities including a well connected Russian mega oligarch. Podesta, like Bill Clinton, Bush Sr., the Cheneys, Gore, etc., are Trilateralists.

      • Yes, absolutely, and also they’re not commies, they’re globalists and many are satanists.

      • While this interesting news is true, it is good to understand that Russia now is very much into well controlled capitalism. These type of business deals are made all the time. Nevertheless, those controlling our government and news media are very much anti-Russian, as anyone exposed to their propaganda is well aware.

        • It’s a mixed bag, the US MSM has written articles glorifying Russia’s invited entry into carving up business opportunities in Afghanistan, recapitulating it role decades ago. The NY Times allowed Putin an opportunity to get a favorable op-ed published. Regardless, overall the situation is Kabuki theater, thus explaining why for several years Russian troops have been training on US military bases. We were told the BRICS were the nemeses to the NWO despite modern China being a global elite creation and Indian elites under the same tight grip. There are elite papers and planning documents the blogger of redefininggod has dug up showing even before WW2 TPTB intended to create the final NWO paradigm using a multipolar global power dialectic.

    • Yep, but it was planned to fail.

      • No, Russian intelligence tipped Turkey’s intelligence agency about the coup. Unlike, the CIA coup in Ukraine, which was well planned and funded, the Turkish failed coup was hastily put together. These two factors caused it’s failure.

        • Prior to the coup, Erdogan was going so far as to go after academics and journalists who were critical of him and his policies. A lot of tension was building. Human rights lawyers and labor activists are being jailed in China. Last month Russia sentenced two peaceful government critics to serve time in Siberia. Lots of tension and police state action going global. Re-education camps in the UK if I understand correctly.

  3. America is noted for being criminally remiss. That is why there are more than a million less people in the World today then there were just 13 years ago. I don’t think the US cares one way or another as to steals its bombs, as long as they don’t find their way home with a big bang!

    • Don’t care? The global elite who hijacked the US or the US populace? Many of us care very much that’s why we follow websites like this one and get involved in local 9/11 Truth education and other activist causes. We’re being poisoned daily, refused effective cancer treatments, bankrupted, run down and dumbed down. It’s a historical travesty psychopaths tend to seize power, why else have over 97 million been slaughtered by their own communist governments (with the consent of the globalists) and many more before that in various empires that have sought to conquer the planet. It’s a very old battle.

      • Actually I was speaking of the government. Unfortunately, in a Democracy, you get the government you deserve.

        • For well over a 100 years, western “democracies” have only been so in name, the reality is they’ve been plutocracies / oligarchies as have the vast majority of nations of the world, the main difference is the window dressing. When the US was formed, I would have had few rights and been little more than “property” by law. Human society evolves but the Iron Law of Politics is always a reality we have to contend with.

        • what democracy. it does not exist anywhere. as plato indicated, democracy is the penultimate form of government before tyranny.

  4. Why would the Obomber want to “remove the nukes to safety”??? The plan is to have them hijack the nukes and set off Damascus (a ruinous heap), Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and D.C. and many others.

    Obomber will leave Killary in charge to preside over the destruction of the U.S.A. and go “by the rivers of Babylon” as antichrist.

    • Perhaps not Damascus as the Assad family is also tight with the global elite and had been transforming the culture and economy into the NWO paradigm since the late 90s going into high gear by early 2000s. For instance, Syrian planners have been working on transforming Damascus into a UN Agenda 21 “Smart City” as has been done in Iran where government issued RFID biometric tracking and monitoring “smart cards” are being given to Iranian citizens to use in “Sustainable Smart City” Tehran. For certain, we are being set up for major turmoil on multiple fronts to get humanity to accept the NWO. Damascus has been sacrificial, it seems, to become another Phoenix rising.

  5. Now they (the beast in the east) have given the Iranians $400million USD with a promise of another $1.3 billion.
    This is what the taxpayers receive for their good faith taxes.
    Stop filling income tax, it’s the only way to kill the beast.

  6. Far Reaching Theory. Erdogan is dangerous yes but Turkish People would never let happen what you have envisioned. But nevertheless it was entertaining to read.
    BTW I didn’t know that Turkiey had more Generals than soldiers

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