Scenario analysis
are no longer KISSINGER AND BRZEZINSKI with us but in their absence shouldn’t lesser mortals be allowed to write down politico-economic scenarios? Because Turkey is in the middle of pretty much everything, scenarios ought to include the U.S., Russia, and the Middle East. Of course, the first item on the first agenda is the American elections. In Turkey, local elections will basically put at stake a new constitution, which means there will be another referendum either in 2024 or in 2025. If the AKP wins Istanbul, there will be a referendum. If the AKP wins both İstanbul and Ankara, of course there will be a referendum. Here the margin between the runner up and the winner do not mean much. The winner gets all. So, the first scenario should involve both a Trump win and an AKP victory.
WHAT COULD HAPPEN SHOULD TRUMP WIN?
Should Trump win obviously the working of the American political system would undergo deep changes. The checks & balances that might have characterized the presidential system will be gone perhaps forever, leaving mostly the executive in charge. It is not easy of course after two centuries to get rid of the judiciary and the press, but the power of the president will be enormous during Trump’s second tenure. All three leaders have a personal way of doing things; so Trump and Putin and Erdoğan could talk to each other easily. None of them has the habit of sugar-coating important feedback with bureaucratic or diplomatic courtesies. Although it is not so easy to let Ukraine go, Trump may not be as enthusiastic as Biden on that issue. Less military support means that Ukraine will not be able to maintain a prolonged war of attrition as Biden still seems to hope. Trump may also withdraw from Syria and concentrate on China instead. Sanctions against Russia will still stand, but the loopholes would increase and Russia would have more degrees of freedom. In short, if Trump wins Turkey will be able to play a more pronounced role as intermediary between the clashing sides, be they in Ukraine or in the Middle East. If we equal the leaders’ aspirations and policies with their respective national interests, that scenario would be a (win-win-win) scenario for all parties concerned, at least in the short run. The essence or the consequences of that equilibrium is an entirely different matter.
In Syria the war theatre became populated by lots of organizations, backed by various states, and many cross-cutting cleavages followed from that, and for a time it looked like the resulting chaos would endure ad infinitum, without generating any order. «Ordo ab chao» may have been the desideratum, as the neo-cons had liked to recite often in the late 1990s, but it didn’t work. The order of the day had better be «Abyssus abyssum invocat». The abyss invokes another abyss. One ramification of a Trump victory would be the abandonment of various fanatic groups in Syria to their own fate. In this case, which Israel may not prefer for obvious reasons, there will be three major players left: the regime, YPG (Kurdish) and Turkey. Because Russia would sweep away the remnants of fanatic groups the only issue would be how much autonomy the regime is prepared to give to YPG and to what extent Turkey is ready to accept it. It also seems that fundamentalists have no future in Syria. After the Idlib conundrum is somehow resolved, what will happen to those fellows? Nobody wants them back, and certainly not the European states. Perhaps they could be used somewhere else as mercenaries. Or rather, will they stay where they are? I don’t know. Clearly, neither the ISIS nor any similar organization is capable of state-building and obviously they could not win the minds and hearts of even the Sunnite population at large. They may have supporters but the support is weak relative to the population. This part of the adventure may indeed be over.
IRAN AND ALL THAT
There remains the Palestine issue. The big thing there, beside human tragedy, is whether Iran will come to the centre of a regional confrontation. So far, it did not and Biden did not want that to happen
either. However, it seems clear to me that Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 not by a fluke, but there was something of a rational kernel in the behaviour of both of the polity and the electorate. Excesses and fluctuations all too often observed by the public at large are due more to the style of leadership than its essence. The containment of China is not a novel idea either. The reversal of strategy vis-à-vis Iran could have also been anticipated to a certain extent. That Iran has to be driven out from Syria and cornered in the wider Middle East is a sine qua non for Israel if Bashar Assad is to stay in power. Otherwise, brokering an even temporary peace may not be possible. The Iran issue is also serious in that it is a counter- Obama Doctrine initiative. Therefore, it is not by a flimsy act that Trump got there years ago. This stance is built-in the American polity’s one powerful wing. There is a chance that Trump is put under further pressure before the elections, but these two moves are more likely to be shored up by the American polity in general than not. They will have enduring consequences in the years to come. Now, you cannot quarrel with North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran at the same time.
Hence, choices that seem to have been made back in 2017 will be remade, cards will be reshuffled. To argue otherwise would be to admit that the Trump presidency is a historically random phenomenon that has no basis whatsoever in the American global strategic outlook and in the expectations of American labour and industry. Things may change on the Iranian front also after a Trump victory.
SCENARIO 2
Biden wins and also AKP does not secure a clear-cut victory. This is the exact opposite of the base-case scenario. Putin will not be pleased. The war in Ukraine will endure. The U.S. will not withdraw from the Middle East. The relations between Turkey and the U.S. will remain as they are, and all too often new problems can pop up. Biden will be unwilling to leave Turkey and Russia with enough leverage to broker a new equilibrium. The good thing is probably the current macroeconomic policy will endure longer than envisaged. It is also probable that the constitutional referendum will be postponed. Actually, under Trump we should expect novelties but under Biden all we can think of is more of the same. I personally think Trump has a very good chance of winning though.
CIVILIZED WEST AGAINST BARBARIC ASIA
In the last two decades European countries and the Anglo Saxon world have been ideologically and politically transformed. The U.S. for instance is not the same U.S. after the 2004 Patriot Act. In many western democracies right-wing populist politicians have either won the elections or came close to winning. In the 1990s, in the aftermath of the collapse of communism western democracies have presented themselves as champions of free speech, human rights, minority rights etc. They have been doing so before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, but between 1991 and 2000 this image has been accepted by most of the non-western world as well. History had ended; democracy and liberalism had won.
However, after 2000 everything has changed. The so-called soft power was no longer working as pretended a decade ago, and the U.S. returned back to the old days, i.e. the use of hard power. The EU has been reluctant to follow, but they did follow nonetheless, notably in Iraq in 2003. After that, major European countries have begun to develop policies that did not entirely square with American interests. For example, former German Chancellor Schroeder has been sitting on the board of a company that is just an extension of the Russian giant Gazprom. Emmanuel Macron had said in November 2019: “what we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO”. At that point a return to a closely knit Atlantic Alliance was warranted. Biden made that possible, and certainly Putin’s invasion in Ukraine helped him a lot. Today’s anti-Russian feelings and the attitude of the media show that in order to convince national public opinions calls for democracy are not sufficient. What is on the shelf is a very dangerous Huntington-inspired idea of the clash of civilizations. Imbued with right-wing populisms, the European public opinion could buy that argument – or some very influential people think so in the EU. Trump, on the other hand, is a pragmatist and an erratic one on that. He could easily untie the recently cemented fabric of NATO and render it a somewhat a not so closely knit organization.