Tensions between Israel and Turkey continue to soar after last week’s incident where Israel attacked the T4 air base in Tadmur, Syria, a base which Turkey was very open about planning to take over. Israel said the attacks on that base and others were “a message to Turkey.”
Turkish forces weren’t present at T4 at the time of that attack, but that’s changing, with reports that Turkey has sent reinforcements to the facility, and are planning to install a substantial air defense around it allowing them to defend against short, medium, and long-range threats.
Israel has expressed concern that Turkey’s presence at the base would harm their “freedom of action,” in which they’re attacking targets across Syria several times a week. The direct attack on T4 seems it may lead to Turkey doubling down on the facility, not caving to Israeli opposition.
Israel and Turkey have both been working on carving out their respective spheres of influence in Syria since the Assad government was ousted, but both have gone very different directions. Turkey has been working closely with the new Islamist government in Damascus, while Israel has been invading and occupying part of the south.
The concern these conflicting efforts and the tensions could lead to direct military confrontation is reportedly leading both nations to discuss a “deconfliction line,” effectively a hot-line to report on one another’s activities and avoid any accidental clashes, which could lead to a broader regional war.
Turkish FM Hakan Fidan has been very open about not wanting a direct confrontation with Israel over Syria, and denied the Israeli allegations that Turkey is trying to turn Syria into a protectorate.
Israel too is reportedly loathe to go down the regional war route in this case, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly telling officials that the attack on T4 last week was a “limited window” and that once Turkey was actually there at the base it would be “off-limits.”
At the same time, Israel is said to be heavily lobbying US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to block the planned sale of F-35 warplanes to Turkey, believing it would hurt their qualitative edge over the NATO member. Rubio is believed to be hawkish on Turkey, though it is unclear if he will block a lucrative US sale of warplanes in this case, which may undermine the US demands for NATO nations to spend ever more on their militaries.
Boy would I welcome a shooting war between the two. It would give Iran a measure of time to prepare for their war to come.
Psychopaths generally go after the weak and the defenseless. This scenario is just a pipe dream.
I wouldn't mind Turkey and Israel going to war with each other, as it would alliviate the Palestinian genocide and one should never interrupt their enemies (both, enemies of Humankind, equally genocidal) when they are fighting each other.
Said that, it's almost unthinkable: tiny Israel would be utterly destroyed overnight by the second largest army in NATO. I know that Netanyahu is a suicidal madman but can't be that crazy, can he?
Israel has worked long to eliminate Syria and become Türkiye's bordering neighbor. Yes, Israelis are stark raving mad.
Hah, the far-Right thinks the Russian Federation, under Putin, is attempting to revive the USSR when all along, it was the Ottoman Empire secretly on the return !
Russia has geostrategical interests in the "near abroad" but it can't and won't ever restore the USSR, not before the communists, the only real opposition to Putin, take power again.
Would that more people understood those facts !
Especially the part about the communists being the only actual opposition in Russia (and even claiming to have been stolen the last parliamentary elections) and also being at least as combative in what regards to Ukraine as Putin and his capitalist-bonapartist clique are. Whoever thinks that Yeltsinism (comprador capitalism?) can be restored in Russia is absolutely wrong: there’s no “pro-Western” opposition in Russia of any magnitude.
Much of the same applies to China: imagine that by some sort of abracadabra the Republic of China (Taiwan) wins the endless civil war and takes over mainland China. The regime would be different but the objective interests of China would be the same, China would be in many aspects the same country as it is under the PRC system. And, as first or second global economy, it would be unavoidably confronted with the USA just as it is today. Probably even more so, because at least the official stand of the PRC is “peace and shared prosperity” but a fully capitalist China should actually be more aggressive, because that’s the nature of advanced Capitalism: Imperialism.
Yeah – everybody in the Die Russia Camp (except those in Germany where it means “The Russia Camp”) seems to think there’s a slew of neutral Centrist democratic parliamentarians waiting to take over the instant Putin is gone. I for one remember “Mad” Vlad Zhironovsky (sp ?) and HIS brand of “Russia First” politicking, so, the devil you know & all that…
As to the DPRC, its version of Communism has evolved to accept, I think, a much greater degree of capitalism than Mao, Marx, Engels et. al. ever envisioned (or might be able to stomach).
To the point where, maybe just maybe, if the Yellow Perilists of Project 2025 and associated anti-Socialism brigades just hung back and encourages trade and cooperation with China, they'd find that State would turn Capitalist within a couple more generations, no shots fired. Communism is a tiny faction in the Authoritarian far-Left, a vestigial structure more likely to evolve a new purpose than to revise its old one.
Yeah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Duma
347 seats: government coalition (324 United Russia + 23 Lib-Dems = far right)
44 seats: pro-government but not in government "centrists": 28 For Truth, 16 New People
58 seats: opposition: 57 communists, 1 independent.
Granted that elections in Russia (especially in the ethnic minority territories) are by no means fair and transparent but still the above numbers give a sense of who is a political force, after you discount maybe 150 seats of United Russia (??)
Most times “close enough” seems to put a tolerable veneer over most countries’ elections, in terms of “fairness” or “transparency”. My main concern is always to whether an election represents the interests of the majority of citizens.
Case in point, the Crimean referendum on Russian Federation accession. I have friends who’ll swear up & down it was a complete fraud, soldiers coercing voters (yet allowing a double-digit percentage to vote No ??) tho I believe that, even if hasty and one ethnic group chose NOT to participate (soldiers again apparently let them be ???), the vote DID and DOES represent the majority will of the citizens .
Supported further by that essay by two regular antiwar.com journalist-contributors who traveled Crimea last year ( ? ) and found, overwhelmingly, a relatively peaceful and content region despite the proximity to (and targeting by) Ukraine and its war.
It wasn’t any fraud at all, that’s preposterous! I followed the events in almost real time from various sources and it’s absolutely clear that Crimea was from top to bottom, from west to east c. 90% pro-Russian. It was the case previously (as the population was mostly ethnic Russia and the transfer of Crimea to Ukraine by Ukrainian Khrushev was seen as a terrible undemocratic arbitrary decision) but it spiralled after the nazi putsch called “Euromaidan” and the many nazi crimes that followed, most notably the burning of the (peacefully protesting) antifascists at the Odessa Trade Unions’ building. That particular crime was the point of no return and Crimea was absolutely determined to break apart from Ukraine thereafter. The only ones who doubted were Tatars (who are older in Crimea than the Russians and have grudges on various historical reasons) but even they eventually preferred tolerant Russia to nazi Ukraine.
The subsequent secessions of Donetsk People’s Republic and Lugansk P.R. were also hyper-legitimate and as democratic as can be under war conditions. However Putin was less interested in them, even distrustful because of their strong proletarian and socialist leanings, so he basically ditched them with the infamous Minsk Accords (1015). There was also an attempt to secede Kharkov but was neutered by rapid nazi intervention (it’s after all the 2nd city of Ukraine and, while ethnic Russian as such city, the countryside is rather ethnic Ukrainian, that was the capital of Red Ukraine in 1918), finally there was some Anarchist guerrilla in Zaporozhia (the core of Makhno’s libertarian socialist Free Zone) but it was short-lived.
What I have doubts about is re. the 2023 referendums in Kherson and Zaporozhia, while DPR and LPR almost unanimously voted for annexation to Russia, as expected (after so many Ukronazi crimes reconciliation is impossible), the other two oblasts are ethnic Ukrainian mostly, even if language is mixed, and only backed (officially) the annexation by c. 2/3 of the vote. They are less densely inhabited areas, Russia has definitely done their best to protect civilians (while Ukraine constantly mistreats them) so whatever: it may be fraudulent (or not, I don’t actually know) but still the lesser evil.
THANK you. I thought I was the only one reading sources that weren’t AP, Reuters, and PBS (at best) or MSM tripe (at worst) like my friend-group tends to. They’ve bought into the “Russia intends to gobble up Europe” nonsense I thought we’d given up in Grade 9 (circa 1991).
For some other details on Ukraine specifically you may want to browse over what I was writing back in those days about Ukraine (disclaimer: the blog has been closed since 2018): https://forwhatwearetheywil…
There are other worlds but they are in this one (P. Éluard)
Thanks !
DPRC? You must mean PRC (i.e. China as recognized by nearly all countries and the UN).
Man, as a communist I hate Dengism (“black cat, white cat” unprincipled theory) and I think that Mao did the right thing with the Cultural Revolution, which had Deng arrested twice I believe but was a broader movement for not just overcoming medieval mentality but also to keep the CCP under control by mobilizing the radicalized youth (and in this case the word “radical”, going to the root of issues, does apply IMO, they were no mere extremists but actually led even our own Western “cultural revolution” of the 60s-80s to some extent and indirectly). I’ve gone to the extreme of calling the PRC a fascist regime (single party capitalism in which inter-classist “social peace” is the main goal). However recently has been moving back towards socialism, re-nationalizing a good chunk of the companies, even if only because that’s how you prevent them from collapsing. They also retain a strictly public (state-owned) banking system, so it’s a complicated matter; even if I’ve also compared with Bismarck’s Germany (Rhineland Capitalism, of strong state planning and supervision, later imitated by Japan, also France on their own accord, etc.), it’s clear that they are very “sui generis” (their own thing) and are not fully capitalist even if they are partly capitalist and were recently 80% capitalist or so.
I’m not much of a classical Marxist, partly because I find the concept of dialectics a bit oversimplistic (it’s like the 2-body problem vs the actual n-body problem: not totally useless because it can be solved but ultimately very incomplete: Chaos rules rather than neo-Socrates) but still I’d say that the very complex (yet central) dialectic of capitalism vs communism, of oligarchs vs workers, also operates to some extent inside the CCP and the PRC (and surely also inside the purely capitalist countries) and it does in a way that is often ignored: EFICIENCY. Maybe in the end Deng was sorta right and, if previously the capitalist “white cat” was the most efficient, now it is again the “black cat” of socialism which works best because anyhow Capitalism has degenerated so much into monopolism and corruption (in the West very especially) that “marketism” (competion, classical Capitalist theory/system) has become less efficient and thus does not “catch mice” anymore (or at least in many contexts doesn’t).
Short answer, yes, I go with Democratic Peoples’ Republic of China. The CCP elected Xi, that’s democracy enough for legal purposes.
Not the official name and I definitely do not consider China democratic by any stretch of the imagination. That doesn’t mean that Xi or the CCP are illegitimate: they certainly seem to have vast popular support (at least for as long as they deliver prosperity and seemingly endless GDP growth).
There is no rise of the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turks had more balls than Eurdogan who is ready to transition to his son or Son-in-law.
Does the Young Turks YouTube channel (run by Cenq)(spelling uncertain) still exist ? Had a friend really into it back in the day.
Israel is kicking up a sh-t storm in the region…
For Turkey F-35 sale would be a Red Line…! If F-35 sale is blocked Turkey would know who the orchestrator is and would attack Israel…!
I wonder if Turkey might just pivot toward Russia (or China), whose warplanes are just as capable as any from the US. And probably at a fraction of the cost.
Canada's interested in some Saab fighters instead of the '35s…maybe Ankara might look to Sweden ?
Tho really, anyone preventing anybody else from buying & operating F-35's is really kind of a good friend in that regard.