Tuesday 3rd January

Turkey has always been a problem.  For two hundred, years or more British Foreign Policy has been to try to keep the Turks on our side, or at least not on Russia’s side.  Russia has always had a geographical problem, although it is the largest country on Earth it is mostly in the far North, or landlocked.  Archangel to the West and Vladivostock to the East are ice bound for months, and it is only in the far South, in fact on the Black Sea that Russia has a gateway to the Mediterranean.  That was one of the main reasons for unilaterally annexing the Crimean peninsula.  In the old days of the Soviet Union the Ukraine was part of the USSR but after the collapse of Communism the Ukrainians wanted and got independence.  That was okay as long as they remained in the Russian sphere of influence, but about a decade ago their leaders started leaning far more to the West, wanting in fact to join the EU and NATO.

But in the game of international chess NATO had already wooed Turkey over to our side.  Turkey straddles the entrance to the Black Sea, and strategically that meant that if NATO wanted to it could lock the Russians in.  Turkey has always played Russia against the West, and once again it is being wooed by Russia, this time ostensibly over Syria.  For a while Turkey was playing hard to get, technically opposed to ISIS (though rumours abounded that Erdogan’s son was shipping ISIS oil through Turkey) but the Turks also hated the Syrians.  Though they hated the Kurds even more, especially as in both Iraq and Syria the Kurds were proving to be the best fighters, and of course the Kurds had been fighting for their own homeland which would include a small but sizeable chunk of East Turkey.  The EU, keen to staunch the flow of Syrian refugees flooding through Turkey into Greece and Bulgaria and beyond are currently paying them billions of euros to keep the refugees in camps in Turkey.  Now (despite planes shot down and ambassadors shot) Russia and Turkey are getting cosy again.

Enter Donald Trump into the equation….

I suspect that he will be willing to give Russia a free hand in the Ukraine and maybe even the Baltic states as long as America can rule the West.  At least the war in Syria may soon be over, but much as you cannot trust Russia, it is really Turkey that is the key to peace in the Middle East, and maybe the whole world….