Two Wars Test Turkish-Russian Relations

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Drawing on Turkey’s geo-strategic position, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has refrained from taking definitive sides in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, earning himself the role of a mediator and expanding his room to make other gains. 

Having fostered military cooperation with Kyiv and rejected Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, Erdogan has maintained this policy after Russia invaded Ukraine, which did anger Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Even so, by the outbreak of the Ukraine war, Erdogan and Putin had gained ample experience of dealing with each other, with Putin flexible enough to work with a tough and pragmatic counterpart. Turkey has delivered weapons and ammunition, especially drones, to Ukraine while trying to increase trade with Russia. For Erdogan, this “balanced” position is necessary due to Turkey’s dependence on Russian energy supplies. 

This has enabled him to speak to both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Turkey brought the two warring parties together twice in March 2022, though without results. Four months later, however, Turkey and the United Nations brokered a deal that cleared the way for Ukrainian grain exports that were being blocked by Russia. Erdogan declared that it would benefit “the whole of humanity.”

After President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine paid a visit to Istanbul July 7, the Turkish leader said he would work to help extend the Black Sea grain deal for longer intervals. Erdogan also contended that “Ukraine deserves NATO membership with no doubt.”

But Erdogan believes the Kremlin wants a prompt end to Russia’s faltering campaign in Ukraine. After his Sept. 4 visit to Russia to meet Putin, Erdogan asserted that “Putin is on the side of ending this war as soon as possible. That’s what he said. And I believe his remarks.”

Erdogan has also refused to join the Western sanctions against Russia, offering Moscow an economic lifeline. Russian businesses have come to use Turkey as a transit hub to ship European goods, mostly technological products, to Russia. Turkey’s skies have remained open to Russian planes, while the Turk Stream pipeline has emerged as the only conduit that still carries significant amounts of Russian gas to Europe.

Of course, Erdogan has sought Russian favours in return. The Russian company building Turkey’s first nuclear power plant injected additional funds into the project to make it operational and pledged to put dollars into Turkish sovereign bonds or bank deposits. In another move, Moscow agreed to accept 25 per cent of Turkish gas payments in rubles.

Economic data offers proof of the friendship. The trade turnover between Russia and Turkey increased more than 80 per cent in 2022 to $62 billion, with Russia becoming Turkey’s biggest source of imports. At their September meeting, Putin and Erdogan committed themselves to increasing bilateral trade to $100 billion.

“From every direction, Erdogan gets maximal profit: markets, technologies and economic modernisation from the West, cheap raw materials, fuel and a natural gas hub from Russia,” Kyiv-based political analyst Aleksey Kushch remarked.

Elsewhere, foreign policy has often been a sticking point between Ankara and Moscow. But now, with the flare-up in the Israel-Gaza conflict, they find themselves in the same camp. A report of a telephone call between Erdogan and Putin on Oct. 24 regarding the war stated that they have “practically overlapping positions, focused on implementing the well-known two-state solution, which provides for the creation of an independent Palestine coexisting with Israel in peace and security.”

Russia’s support for Hamas is a relatively recent phenomenon, and a direct consequence of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It has led to a cooling of ties with Israel and warming relations with Iran, a major Hamas sponsor.

Before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the sight of Hamas delegations in Moscow could have been interpreted as Russia seeking to mediate between Palestinian factions. Now, however, such contacts are perceived very differently by Israel.

Erdogan, on the other hand, has long supported Hamas, allowing Hamas fighters to reside in Turkey and giving them Turkish passports. The Turkish president himself emerged from Islamist circles, and backing Hamas is ideologically important for him.

In the first days of the current war, Erdogan tried to go back and forth between Israel and Hamas but he has since abandoned that tactic and decided to give his full support to the Palestinians.

Different roads have brought Moscow and Ankara to the same decision to sacrifice relations with Israel, which means neither can be a mediator in the conflict. At the same time, neither country’s interactions with Hamas have been particularly effective.

Despite liaising with the group’s political leadership, neither Russia nor Turkey achieved the freeing of any hostages held by Hamas. Nevertheless, their approach allows Russia and Turkey to level criticisms at the West, which is important for their domestic audiences.

By accusing the United States of fueling chaos in the Middle East, Putin is shoring up his narrative that the West is the source of all misfortune in Russia and the wider world. In the same way, Erdogan’s criticism of the West for ostensibly attempting to start a war between Christianity and Islam appeals to strong feelings in Turkey.

Agreement over the Israel-Hamas conflict means diplomatic cooperation between Russia and Turkey will grow. But any warming of ties will be situational, and no guarantee against future disputes.

 

New President Will Try to Mend Argentina’s Economic Troubles

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Argentina is in a mess. But nothing new there – it has been that way for many decades. It’s almost a test case of a country with great promise ruined by a terrible political culture. And no single presidential election can change that.

On Nov. 19, radical outsider Javier Milei, candidate of the La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances) coalition, won the country’s presidential election with almost 56 per cent of the vote. It had pitted him against Sergio Massa, the candidate for the Peronist Union por la Patria (Union for the Homeland) coalition, who got 44 per cent.

The Peronistas are populists who are hard to categorize as either left or right-wing, but they have been the bane of Argentine politics since Juan Peron first governed the country beginning in 1946. The Peronist political movement has dominated politics for 16 of the past 20 years and has nine of the last 12 free and fair presidential elections before this.

And it has cost Argentina dearly. As late as the 1920s it ranked among the top five wealthiest countries in the world. Now it ranks 66th, below Mexico and just above Russia and China.

Argentinians are faced with runaway inflation and a looming recession. According to the data released by the country’s statistics agency on Nov. 13, year-on-year inflation hit 142.7 per cent in October, up from 79 per cent in August 2022, when Massa became the Minister of the Economy in the Peronist government.

Considering that neither the centre-right Mauricio Macri government, which ruled from 2015 to 2019, nor the current government of President Alberto Fernandez, a Peronist who has not sought re-election, succeeded in stabilizing Argentina’s economy, this proved fertile ground for Milei to rise.

Milei, the self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” pledged to “dynamite” the central bank and “dollarize” the economy, by replacing the Argentine peso with the U.S. dollar. “We are going to dollarize. We are going to close the central bank. We are going to end the cancer of inflation,” Milei declared, attracting voters frustrated over decades of poor living standards.

On the campaign trail, Milei brandished a chainsaw to symbolize his desire to slash subsidies and drastically reduce state expenditure on social programs. He also repeatedly claimed “taxes are theft” and called the “social justice” programs they finance an “aberration.”

Argentina has an almost insurmountable $44 billion debt with the International Monetary Fund. In August, though, Milei did meet with members of the IMF to assure them that he would continue paying Argentina’s international dues if he won.

His bellicose political style has had observers compare him to Donald Trump -- he has worn “Make Argentina Great Again” hats -- and to Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s former president.

Milei maintained that Argentines are “hostages” to generationally destructive economic policy and that politicians -- or, as he calls them, the “parasitic, useless political caste” -- have destroyed one of the richest countries in the world “with nefarious ideas to line their pockets.” Peronism offered a state that supports its followers based on perks and clientelism.

The state, Milei asserted, “was invented by the devil, God’s system is the free market.” He promised to raffle off his presidential paycheck if he won. “To me, that is dirty money,” he explained. “From my philosophical point of view, the state is a criminal organization that is funded through taxes taken from people by force. We are giving back the money that the political caste has stolen.”

No surprise, then, to learn Milei is a fan of right-wing and libertarian economists of the so-called Austrian School, including Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, and Murray Rothbard.

A lawyer and longtime politician, with one failed presidential campaign already under his belt, Massa had argued that Milei's proposed economic policies are reckless and would only make matters worse for Argentina’s poor, now 40 per cent of the population.

He emphasized Milei’s volatile character and even called for psychiatric evaluations of would-be presidents. President Fernandez called Milei “a threat to democracy” last March.

Milei was widely considered the frontrunner before last month’s first round, although he unexpectedly finished second with 29.9 per cent of the votes to Massa’s 36.6 per cent. Patricia Bullrich, a conservative former security minister, came third with 23.8 per cent and endorsed Milei following her loss, calling Massa “someone who has been part of the worst government in Argentina’s history.”

“The biggest challenge for the next government is to develop an initial stabilization plan and then push through a series of structural reforms to profoundly change the economic system,” remarked Agustin Etchebarne, director of the Libertad y Progreso Foundation in Buenos Aires. Etchebarne is part of a group of economists who condone radical structural changes to the economy to lift Argentina out of its current crisis. Others are more skeptical.

In an open letter released Nov. 8, more than 100 high-profile economists, including Thomas Piketty from France and Jayati Ghosh from India, had warned that Milei’s proposals are “full of risks that could potentially be very harmful to the Argentine economy and the Argentine people.” Their intervention didn’t work.

Still, Milei faces a daunting task: It will involve economic adjustments, budget cuts, and reducing state expenses, and that will come at a high cost.

 

Some Canadian Universities Have Not Stood up to Antisemitism

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Winnipeg] Jewish Post & News

The war between Israel and Hamas has exposed for all to see just how nasty some of our institutions of higher learning have become.

Today the “woke” left, which seems to have attained ideological hegemony on many campuses, provides a model of the world in which many conflicts are viewed as a struggle pitting settler-colonist-Europeans against indigenous/BIPOC people. It follows from their critique that the legitimacy of a tactic can only be assessed with reference to whether it is being used by the oppressor or the oppressed.

It casts Israelis as “white” or “white-adjacent” and Palestinians as “people of colour.” It describes Israel as an “imperialist-colonialist” force, Israelis as “settler-colonialists,” and contends that Palestinians have a right to eliminate their oppressors.

So “freeing Palestine” is a resistance against foreign settler colonialists, a revolution in which violence against civilians is defended as a legitimate means of achieving racial justice.

Some of this stems from the writings of anti-colonial psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, among many others. In Les Damnes de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth), Fanon maintained that the violence of colonialism can only be met by the violence of the colonised.

But this decolonization logic ignores the fact that more than half of Israel’s Jewish population does not have European, but North African and Middle Eastern, origins and came to Israel after themselves suffering ethnic cleansing.

Yet since Oct. 7, the day Hamas massacred some 1,400 Israelis, marches and demonstrations have continued across Canada, many openly supporting their murders.
There were gatherings to celebrate the attacks as an act of “resistance,” to cheer on the “martyrs” who perpetrated them. They usually featured some iteration of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” a call to continue until the State of Israel is eradicated by force.

A group called Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights McGill immediately described the attack in Israel as “heroic” in posts on social media. Along with three other pro-Palestinian groups, they called the Israeli regime “fully responsible” for the ongoing violence, describing it as “a consequence of decades of oppression” of the Palestinian people.

Answering their call, hundreds of people marched through the streets of Montreal Oct. 8 to “celebrate the resistance’s success.” At another pro-Palestine rally, held off-campus five days later, it was estimated that at least 2,000 people attended, greatly outnumbering the overall Jewish student body at the university. A further rally was held Oct. 20.

That same group issued a joint statement with Palestinian student groups at Concordia University and two Montreal-area CEGEPS stating that Hamas had “no option but to resist.”

“A Statement of Solidarity with Palestine” was released Oct. 12 by the York University Graduate Students’ Association, the York Federation of Students, and the Glendon College Student Unions from York’s Glendon Campus.

The groups reaffirmed “our solidarity with the Palestinian people” against “settler-colonialism, apartheid, and genocide.” It also accused “so-called Canada” of complicity with “so-called Israel.” York and its Federation of Students are now facing a $15-million class-action lawsuit related to decades of alleged antisemitic incidents.

University of Toronto’s downtown campus saw pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students facing off on Oct. 17. Posters of missing Israelis kidnapped by Hamas were torn down and a Palestinian flag was painted on the steps of the building where the rally took place. At McMaster and Western — where a demonstration took place Oct. 29 — students were seen ripping down posters of Israeli hostages. 

At Toronto Metropolitan University’s law school, some students wrote a letter Oct. 20 arguing that Israel “is not a country,” and called for “an end to the entire system of settler colonialism that has strangled Palestine for the last century.”

Student newspapers followed suit. In the Varsity, the student newspaper at the University of Toronto, one writer referred to Israel as “an apartheid state that is breaking international law to wipe out an indigenous population.”

The Link at Concordia University published articles replete with anti-Israel content accusing Israel of committing ethnic cleansing. A piece in the student newspaper at Queen’s University, the Queen’s Journal, claimed Israel’s response was aimed purely at “collective punishment” and “achieving the mission of ethnically cleansing historic Palestine of its Indigenous Arab population.” A column in the Manitoban, the University of Manitoba paper, asserted that Hamas’ attack on October 7 was a “response” to “Israeli settler colonialism.”

On October 20, a group of anti-Israel demonstrators protested on the Edmonton campus of the University of Alberta. The next day, the Gateway, a student newspaper, quoted one student asserting that people in Gaza “are resisting over 75 years of oppression, systematic genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.”

So here we are. “We need to challenge our policy at universities and the governments that fund them,” maintained former Alberta premier Jason Kenney, speaking at a conference on anti-Semitism in Ottawa Oct. 16-17. Thousands, he said, were “celebrating the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.”