Türkiye broke with the West due to betrayal - expert
Western countries have completely ruined relations with Turkey, which is now forced to seek protection and help from Russia or China.
Ilya Kusa, an international politics expert at the Ukrainian Institute of the Future think tank, stated this on the Capital YouTube channel, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“Turkey needs someone, preferably a global center of influence, to hold on and make a successful leap from a regional player to a regional superpower that can be one of the regional policemen in the Near and Middle East.
While Turkey has poor relations with the West, they are betting on Russia or China,” he noted.
The expert also emphasized that the crisis of confidence and conflicts with the West exclude the possibility of the good neighborly relations that Turkey had with European countries and the United States before.
“I would also cite another point, this concerns their final divorce from the West - this is 2015, when the Turks shot down a Russian plane on the border of Turkey and Syria. Then there was a turning point in Turkey’s relations with the West.
Turkey clearly expected that its Western partners would support it; the Turks said: “Look, a Russian plane flew towards us and we shot it down. Protect us." For the Turks this was important.
But the West's reaction was completely different. Not only did NATO not support Turkey. Also, some countries, for example, the Netherlands, took their missile defense systems from Turkey, and other European countries criticized Turkey’s provocation against Russia. This was due to the coup attempt in 2016, and in Turkey they are convinced that the West and especially the United States had a hand in this.
In addition, it is not the extradition of Gülen and criticism of the internal repression that took place after 2016.
This convinced the Turks that the West could not be a partner. Turkey has experienced a crisis of confidence, which today allows us to talk about the impossibility of Turkey returning to its former good neighborly relations in the western direction,” Kusa concluded.
Turkey broke with the West because of betrayal – expert