15.11.2021, Moscow.
The USA is alleviating Turkey’s role on the southern flank of NATO by strengthening its military presence in Greece, REGNUM news agency’s analyst Stanislav Tarasov wrote in his article “Erdogan is being expelled from the Western alliance” published on November 14.
The USA is transferring a military contingent to Greece. “By all indications, this is not an opportunistic decision of Washington but a fixation of tectonic shifts in the US strategy along the Eastern Mediterranean-Middle East line,” Stanislav Tarasov notes.
He notes that the USA has long perceived Turkey as a country with a powerful army, a large population and a favorable geographical location and cooperated with Ankara in the region. “But now the West has realized that Ankara, even in the NATO format, acting outside its borders, seeks to strengthen its own, not American positions,” the expert notes.
In January 2020, the Turkish Parliament approved the deployment of national armed forces in 12 states: Albania, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, Qatar, Kosovo, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Somalia and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
Unlike Turkey, Greece has no empire-building ambitions, which is why the USA began to bet on this country, the analyst notes. Therefore, “numerous Greek ports and naval bases became more actively used by the US warships, and the Greek islands became a convenient place to gather intelligence on the situation in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Balkans,” the publication reads.
“The analysis of Turkey’s regional policy over the past 5-10 years shows that the growth of its geopolitical ambitions is happening in parallel with the decline of US influence, which is especially noticeable in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Iran,” Tarasov notes. Turkey is beginning to fill the resulting vacuum.
Greece is positive about such changes because it believes that the US can protect it from Turkey’s invading ambitions.
According to Bloomberg, Turkey does not intend to leave NATO, it simply seeks to raise its political status in the alliance, saying that “no one but the United States has the eight-division capability that Turkey has, that it has a deeper and stronger military structure than it appears to have.” Washington, however, is responding to Turkey’s actions by threatening to move its military facilities to Greece.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
