Quote:
Originally Posted by Joker
And heavily partnered with the Russians.
|
I remember a few years ago thinking that a Turkey/Russia alliance for monopoly control of energy transport from “the Stans” to the EU(including NATO member states) would allow Turkey/Russia to extract exhorbitant economic rent and political influence.
I was told that was crazy because Turkey and Russia hate each other.
The exclamation point on that was a Turkish F16 killing a Russian SU24 in a well calculated ambush a while’s back.
But maybe the value created/captured by traditional enemies working together far outweighs their mutual antipathy for each other.
Money and power talks.
I still remember standing next to Turkcell’s CIO(now former) nearly 2 years ago late on a Friday afternoon on the US West Coast when the global markets had closed and his phone blew up with the initiation of the failed coup attempt.
I’m wondering if this all went wrong with the Sledgehammer Affair a decade prior with Erdogan dismantling and defanging the Turkish military’s long established “reboot” role.
Few people remember one of President Reagan’s biggest and earliest wins, which was smashing Soviet plans for NATO member states customers to finance a Soviet energy pipeline for Soviet profit and influence.
That was a very tough thing to do in the middle of a Western European recession.
And it helped accelerate the fall of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact.
But no one remembers it.
With the growing potential of a Russian/Turkish energy transport alliance, and with Russia already supplying much of Europe’s energy, maybe President Reagan just won a major series of battles, rather than the entire war.
No wonder Libya has had so much focus from UK/France.