The United States was always going to eventually abandon the Kurds. And the United States will eventually abandon the Afghans - which I would argue is going to be much more impactful than the Turkish indiscretion with the Kurds. Pakistan fucked the US on Afghanistan - and was caught out in 2011. US foreign aid to Pakistan was cut $300M in 2018 based on security concerns. The NATO member states have known for quite some time that Turkey was going in the wrong direction as an authoritarian state with close ties to bad actors. The US has a couple of countries with which they share much more intelligence with than others - Great Britain, Australia, and Japan. I would be surprised if NATO was sharing anything of substance at present with Turkey. The US at present has an air base in Turkey and they have nuclear weapons based in Turkey. Europe was very incensed about Turkey's cross-border excursion and the German Military Minister is at present meeting with Turkish officials in Ankara. Turkey has underestimated the resolve of the Europeans and the US and they're in a bind at the moment. The EU and the US could easily destroy Turkey's economy.
Turkish Lira futures from CME is untradable because volume is zero. I wonder if there are any other things like Turkey Index Futures, Turkey govt bonds .... which are tradable.
If that's the case, and I don't doubt it would (will) be.... then wouldn't all the cyber damage be done within the first 48 hours at the most? Our grid goes down. Theirs goes down. Banks. Sats. ATC.... you name it. The world is crippled. Then what? Its comes back to conventional war right? Without technology. Like WWII, or the Korean/Vietnam era. Boots on the ground. Heavy iron. Am I wrong? And who wins that? China, NK, and Russia have the expendable body's to march to the front, and the brainwashing to get them there. We have have American Idol and gender neutral bathrooms. It sure seems to me that technology is a huge Achilles heal. Without a back-up at least.
Yes, you are wrong. WWII tech is all fossil fuel-based. We cannot have that in our new world war, because all that carbon emission will harm the environment. War must and will now be carbon-neutral, so it does not harm the planet. You can drop all the bombs you want, but they must be electric bombs that derived their energy from solar, wind, geothermal and hydro-motive wave energy. And pixie vapor. You know, that spirit ether that is in the atmosphere from all the people killed with the POTS of war. The classics, like TNT.
The transition from bullets to bits can't occur literally overnight but figuratively. It's already begun. Putin's Russia has conquered parts of Northern Syria using bits, not bullets. How? By installing Putin's new best friend in a position of convenient authority. He used bits, not bullets to do it. He practiced first on Ukraine. He installed Russian, sympathizer Viktor Yanukovych as President of Ukraine using a coordinated campaign of dis-information.* Yanukovych's term ended on February 22, 2014; not incidentally, the official date of the 'temporary' Russian occupation of Crimea is February 20, 2014! Sometimes events, whether by chance or design, lead us to places that could not have been foreseen. So just as Hittorf's tube, a curious toy at the time, led to discovery of the electron, the proton, x-rays, and many other scientific advances, the Russian that walked into Trump's office in 1984 led to the laundering of millions of ill gotten Russian rubles via the eventual purchase of over 1300 Trump condos. The opportunities this would create for the Russians could not have been foreseen at the time. But they were eventually realized by a clever and creative Russian named Vladimir Putin. At some point Putin must have realized that if he could create a wholly dependent individual and install him in the American Presidency he might accomplish what could never be accomplished militarily! It's unlikely, however, that he could have foreseen that that same Donald Trump, a monumentally flawed individual, would fit his plans like a key fits a lock. The rest, as they say, is history. Bits not bullets! ___________________________ *I refuse to accept that Paul Manafort's appearance at Trump Headquarters, where he offered to lead the Trump political campaign for nothing!, does not have a direct Russian connection. Manafort was the political consultant behind the Yanukovych campaign and would have had to have been intimately familiar with Russian cyber capabilities. The same techniques used to put Yanukovych in office were used to install Trump -- in the Trump campaign, over three thousand fake, U.S. citizen social media accounts were established and went undetected until it was too late. And on the day he turned up at the Trump campaign, Manafort owed millions to a close associate of Putin!! Too bad only lies emanate from the tight lips of the jailed Mr. Manafort. He could confirm so much for us were he more congenial. He is patiently waiting for his federal pardon that will not arrive. Trump can't pardon him because then he could talk with impunity. Trump, the criminal, trusts no one. Then there are the State charges for which a federal pardon does no good. Mr. Manafort's situation is dire, but look on the bright side; at least where he is now, he's relatively unlikely to be served a polonium martini.
I read online that once Trump said he was pulling out of Syria, that the Turkish lira went up. I don't know though, I did not follow up to check.
It all started when Obama, Biden and Hillary attacked Syria, Tunisia and Libya without provocation. They are the ones that set the ME on fire. I don't understand the historical hatred between the Kurds and the Turks but, the U.S. can't protect everyone. We have to choose our fights more carefully. If we had not withdrawn our support last week, when should we have done it? How long did the world expect us to stay in Syria and Iraq to be their protectorate? There is no reason for us to be in Afghanistan after 18 years. We have spent hundreds of billions in Afghanistan and the resources have been squandered. I don't care if the Taliban takes over the rural areas of Afghanistan. They were there when we arrived. They should be able to govern themselves without our interference. If they can't, that is their problem, not ours. I realize we are the leaders of the free world, but other nations need to step up to the plate. I would love to see us leave Afghanistan, the ME, and withdraw our troops from Europe. Europe has enjoyed the longest era of peace in their history with our assistance. It's time to bring the troops home.
I can't tell if you think it's a good idea to spend $40 all at once, and lose thousands of Americans' lives, and destroy what squeaks by as Civil Society and pound it into lawlessness and debt, or to spend $1 a year for 10 or 20 or 40 years, destroying zero societies, losing zero American lives, and annoying some people who declare "We're not the policemen of the world..." But I would offer this suggestion: the fact that NATO makes U.S. participation look unnecessary is a sign of success, not of failure. It's like good parenting: you rarely see good parenting in action -- you only see the results that make it look easy. If you see parenting in action, it's most likely because of a lack of parenting a'priori. Hello. And as a basic Libertarian Republican, I'm NOT if favor of getting involved in everybody else's shit. I'm just less-in-favor of sending someone else's son-or-daughter into harm's way, to clean it up. I'm in favor of good parenting. NATO is good parenting, and has been for 70 years.
The Middle East has been on fire since Israel was granted Statehood. Russia, Britain, France, and the United States have been financing or outright fighting regime change wars ever since.
People in the Middle East have been fighting each other since the Pharaoh ran Moses out of Egypt, and before that. ISIS and the Taliban direct their aggression towards the U.S, Israel and Great Britain because we represent a threat to them. The ME is based on a male dominated society and if the nations of the ME adopted the cultural values of the West and women were equal, it would threaten male domination and the superiority of the Imams in society. But, without the West, they would be fighting each other. When we left Iraq, it was Shiites vs. Sunni vs. Kurds vs. Alawites. It is Iran vs Saudi Arabia vs. Yemen vs Syria. Hamas and Hezbollah vs Israel vs Syria vs. Saudi Arabia ........and the list goes on. The bottom line is that there will not be peace in the ME any time soon. They will be fighting when we leave, but they will be killing each other instead of Americans.