by ROBERT FISK
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, and Russian President Vladimir Putin speak at a news conference after their talks in the Konstantin palace outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2016 PHOTO/AP/Alexander Zemlianichenko/CTV News
Not long ago, it was Hillary Clinton who wanted to press the ‘reset’ button with Putin. Now it’s Erdogan – with, one suspects, a far greater effect
So the Sultan travels to see the Tsar at the royal seat of St Petersburg. And the Caliph of Damascus will watch from Syria with the conviction that Ba’ath Party policy has once again proved its worth. The policy? Wait. And wait. And wait.
For just as Turkey’s power over Syria – its Pakistan-like role of conduit for Arab Gulf money and arms to the civil war, its smuggling routes to Isis, al-Qaeda (or Jabhat al-Nusra or Fatah el-Sham or whatever) – seemed an overwhelming threat to Damascus, along comes Turkey’s mysterious coup, its army neutered, and Sultan Erdogan scurrying off to St Petersburg to move his country from Nato to Mother Russia.
And all this when the rebel armies in Syria have resurrounded government troops in Aleppo with the aim of reopening their supply routes to Turkey.
For with Russian forces scarcely 30 miles south of the Turkish border, and its pilots daily bombing the very same rebels who are besieging Aleppo, Tsar Putin is not going to tolerate any more missiles smuggled across the Turkish border to shoot down his helicopters.
And if Nato and the EU believe they can rely on their faithful ally Sultan Erdogan to pursue the destruction of the Assad regime or curb refugee flows to Europe – or tolerate US jets flying out of Incirlik airbase and other former Armenian properties in Anatolia – they can think again.
You only have to read the Russian versions of the Sultan’s grovelling statements prior to his Ottoman visit to grasp how the sick man of Europe is breathing in the fresh air of the Steppes.
“This visit seems to me a new milestone in bilateral relations, beginning with a clean slate,” quoth the Sultan, “and I personally, with all my heart and on behalf of the Turkish nation, salute President Putin and all Russians.”
That was Russian television for you. Then take the Russian news agency Tass, through which the Sultan refers to his “friend Vladimir” and promises that “there is yet much for our countries to do together”.
Now let’s abandon the Tsar-Sultan stuff. This was more like the fraternal greetings a Brezhnev or a Podgorny might have expected from an erring member of the Warsaw Pact, full of “bilateral relations” and “salutes” and “friendship” (though not “eternal friendship”, as brotherly nations might once have pledged to the Kremlin).
The first post-coup visit of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is to Russia – and there’s a coup of a different kind.
Here’s another line from the Tass version of Erdogan’s pre-St Petersburg declarations: “A solution to the Syrian crisis cannot be found without Russia. We can resolve the Syrian crisis only in cooperation with Russia.”
Independent for more