Remember my concerns over American abrogation of the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) and how it might affect international relations (link here, mitigation here)? This is all based on the premise that international relations do not happen in a vacuum, the opposite of which, on the face of it, is risible. But the recent meltdown of Venezuela under the watch of President Maduro, his continuance in office, and the recent decision by the Trump Administration to support Juan Guaido, President of the National Assembly, as the President of Venezuela without recourse to Venezuelan legalities, has suspicious leaders wondering if they’ll be next on the chopping block. Semih Idiz in AL Monitor reports on one of them, erstwhile Trump-buddy Turkish President Erdogan:
Developments in Venezuela are reverberating in Turkey, especially after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threw his weight behind the country’s embattled President Nicolas Maduro.
Erdogan feels honor bound to do so, of course. Maduro was among the first international leaders to contact him even though the two hadn’t met before and offer support against the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July 2016. …
The fear in government circles and among the religious and nationalist supporters of Erdogan is clearly that Washington — with support from other Western democracies — could do to Turkey in the future what they are trying to do to Venezuela today.
Those who believe this are also angry with Turkish commentators who stress the mistake of standing up for Maduro and his authoritarian regime.
They are particularly furious with those who stress that the international opposition to Maduro comes mostly from the democratic world, while authoritarian countries like Russia and China are the only ones joining Turkey in supporting him.
And there’s lots more of an interesting nature at the link, but this is illustrative of how the world watches the United States, and everyone else with enough heft to interfere in other nations’ domestic affairs. I know little about the Venezuelan leader Maduro, and only a bit more about a situation in which an oil-rich country appears to have mismanaged itself into a real corner.
Erdogan I’ve watched a bit more. He appears to be attempting to transform Turkey from a secular country into an official Muslim country as a way to shore up his power base and accumulate more power personally, which according to reports is starting to corrupt the Muslims, even as they reach out for that power. I’d not weep if he were to be swept from power legally.
And I emphasize legally. Respect for the law, even in the face of suspected illegalities by authorities in the law enforcement hierarchy is important because otherwise we have the gored ox phenomenon: it may have been your opponent’s ox who was gored in today’s rioting, but next year it might be your’s.
But the moral of this particular post is that the world is watching America’s every international move in order to divine what it may do tomorrow, and our fidelity to international legal norms – or lack thereof – will have an impact on our international relations with countries which are not directly involved in those actions.
