Georgetown law Professor Steve Vladeck is one of the leading critics of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But in an insightful recent post on his substack, he outlines key reasons why "court expansion" is a bad response to its flaws. The cure is likely to be worse than the disease:
[I]t seems to me that those who are fully onboard the expansion-or-bust train should have to do more than simply assert that having four new Democratic appointees on the Court in 2029 would be a self-evidently "good" thing. If nothing else, proponents of expansion should have to answer the following four questions:
- How do we avoid touching off a race to the bottom, where each time one party controls the House, Senate, and presidency, it expands the Court to ensure an ideologically and politically sympathetic majority?
- If a race to the bottom is unavoidable, how do we avoid further (and potentially fatal) erosion of public confidence in the Court—which will quite transparently be little more than a lever of power for whichever party last had such a trifecta?
- If eroding public confidence in the Court is a feature, and not a bug, how do we insulate against the same erosion of public confidence in lower federal courts?
- What is the case for why expansion is a better way to achieve the desired reforms than alternatives that would (or, at least, should) avoid many of these forward-looking concerns?
He adds that court-packing could easily "permanently undermine judicial review as an institution." The rest of his piece (which is behind a paywall) offers far from reassuring answers to these questions.
I have offered similar criticisms of court-packing in a long series of articles and blog posts, most recently in a June Lawfare article where I explained (among other things) why the Supreme Court's recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais doesn't justify packing, and in a July UnPopulist article critiquing a court-packing proposal advanced by Andy Craig. In these pieces, I explain why the Court's record of checking dangerous abuses of government power - though not without serious flaws - is considerably better than many critics claim. In addition, I argue that court-packing is likely to undermine effective judicial review - not only by the Supreme Court, but also by lower courts.
Like Vladeck, I think some of the issues that concern critics of the Court can be more effectively addressed in other ways. For example, in the Lawfare article, I explain how Congress can fix the flaws of the Callais decision by banning or restricting gerrymandering. It could also enact a binding ethics code for the justices. Justice Alito was wrong to suggest otherwise, back in 2023. That said, if your main goal is a sweeping reversal of much of the Court's recent jurisprudence, there may be no easy way to achieve that quickly without court-packing or something like it. I would argue that any benefits that might achieve are outweighed by the enormous costs of destroying judicial review.
In addition, if your objection to the Court's recent decisions is that they often don't do enough to constrain unconstitutional actions by other branches of government or by the states, court-packing is likely to make that problem worse, not better. Destroying judicial review won't enforce tighter constitutional constraints on the executive or bring back Roe v. Wade. To the contrary, it would largely destroy any hope of doing so.
In another recent piece, I assessed "non-packing" rationales for increasing the size of the Supreme Court. There, I argue that these rationales are mostly weak; and, to the extent they have merit, there are better ways to address them than an expansion that amounts to court-packing. I even outline possible ways to increase the size of the Court without creating an opportunity for court-packing (this would require allowing the party that doesn't hold the White House to pick some of the new justices).
The post Steve Vladeck's "Hard Questions About Court Expansion" appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Cuba has stated that, despite recent contacts with Washington, it sees no progress toward a serious dialogue, while denouncing U.S. restrictions on oil supplies as a form of collective punishment against the island’s population. This statement was made by Tanieris Diéguez, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Cuban Embassy in the United States, in an interview with EFE.
RELATED:
Cuba Expands Renewable Energy Use Amid U.S. Fuel Blockade
Diéguez explained that Havana has maintained contact with the administration of President Donald Trump, but that it perceives no movement toward substantive negotiations. “We truly do not see any progress toward a serious dialogue—which is what we are willing to engage in,” the diplomat stated.
In March, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel confirmed that talks were taking place with the U.S. government. Since then, Washington has pushed for political and economic changes in Cuba.
When asked about potential threats of U.S. military intervention—like to the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in Venezuela—Diéguez noted that Cuba takes any statement from U.S. authorities seriously, given that the United States is the world’s foremost military, nuclear, and economic power.
When asked about potential threats of U.S. military intervention—similar to the operation that took place in Caracas—Diéguez noted that Cuba takes any statement from U.S. authorities seriously, given that the United States is the world’s foremost military, nuclear, and economic power.
Nevertheless, she emphasized that Havana considers the defense of its independence to be its highest priority. “Our people will never allow that to be sidelined or subjugated under any circumstances,” she affirmed.
As has become customary, the US government has imposed a new aggressive measure against Cuba, this time against BICSA, an absolutely legitimate bank whose transactions in Cuba and the world are also absolutely legitimate.
— Bruno Rodríguez P (@BrunoRguezP) October 15, 2026
It is an evidence of the criminal determination to apply… pic.twitter.com/fRs6onus4a
Impact of energy restrictions
The diplomat linked the worsening of Cuba’s energy crisis to the restrictions imposed by Washington on oil supplies—a situation exacerbated following the events in January involving Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the island’s primary fuel supplier.
According to Diéguez, fuel shortages and power outages are affecting essential services, including hospital care and surgical procedures. “This is a form of collective punishment; it is entirely contrary to international law and directly harms the Cuban people,” she denounced.
The official presented figures attributed to the impact of the situation: infant mortality has reportedly risen to nine deaths per 1,000 live births; 96,500 people are awaiting surgery, and 32,000 pregnant women are waiting for an ultrasound.
Diéguez also rejected U.S. criticisms regarding Cuba’s economic management. “It is not a matter of ineptitude; rather, we have managed to put our scarce resources to work thanks to our organization,” she maintained.
🇿🇦 At the Human Rights Council, #SA delegate highlighted harmful impact of unilateral coercive measures against #Cuba & warned of its humanitarian consequences.
— Southern Africa Eye (@eye_southern) September 10, 2026
Delegation also addressed the extraterritorial & deterrent effects of the #blockade, which hinders trade & investment. pic.twitter.com/70wM404eyO
International support
The Cuban representative expressed confidence that the international community will once again support the lifting of the U.S. blockade during the annual vote at the United Nations General Assembly, scheduled for late October.
“Cuba does not feel alone. We have received the support of the vast majority of the international community,” Diéguez stated, noting that for more than three decades, resolutions against the blockade have secured overwhelming majorities.
In 2025, the Cuban-sponsored resolution received 165 votes in favor, seven against, and 12 abstentions in the General Assembly—though the text is non-binding.
Diéguez further asserted that the restrictions also harm U.S. citizens by limiting their access to products from the Cuban biopharmaceutical industry. “Cuba deserves to live in peace,” she concluded.
© Doug Mills/The New York Times
di Alessandro Bartoloni
La Guerra fredda non è stata solo una questione di missili, spie e sbarramenti militari. Quello che la storiografia ufficiale spesso dimentica — o finge di non vedere — è che la battaglia più feroce e decisiva si è combattuta direttamente dentro le teste delle persone. Gli Stati Uniti non si sono accontentati di dominare il mondo con la forza delle armi e il peso del dollaro: hanno voluto plasmare le categorie stesse con cui le società occidentali interpretano la realtà, ridefinendo da cima a fondo ciò che è desiderabile, accettabile o anche solo pensabile. Questo articolo è frutto della lettura di alcuni testi che hanno trattato direttamente questo tema, come Perché l’occidente odia la Russia di Hauke Ritz, La guerra fredda culturale di Frances Conor Staunders, e Who paied the pipers of western marxism, di Gabriel Rockhill.
Fabbricare il consenso in Europa
Nel secondo dopoguerra, Washington aveva un problema enorme. La sua travolgente superiorità economica non bastava a garantirgli un’egemonia automatica sul piano culturale. L’Europa devastata dal conflitto non guardava all'America come a un faro indiscutibile: i partiti comunisti e socialisti avevano un radicamento di massa, i sindacati erano forti e il marxismo costituiva l'ossatura teorica dei principali intellettuali del continente. Per molti europei, dalle macerie del fascismo non doveva nascere un capitalismo all'americana, ma una società profondamente diversa.
Per la Casa Bianca e per gli apparati di sicurezza statunitensi, questo scenario era una minaccia intollerabile. Se un'intera sponda dell'Atlantico continuava a mettere in discussione il libero mercato, il progetto di dominio globale americano rischiava di crollare sul nascere. La risposta fu immediata e spietata: trasformare la cultura, la ricerca universitaria, il giornalismo e l'arte in vere e proprie prolunghe della propria politica estera.
La CIA e il mercato dell'intelligence intellettuale
L'operazione più plateale di questa ingegneria del consenso fu il Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), fondato nel 1950. Sotto l'ipocrita bandiera della "difesa della libertà intellettuale" contro l'autoritarismo sovietico, gli Stati Uniti costruirono una sterminata rete di copertura finanziata in gran segreto dalla CIA. Attraverso fondazioni fantoccio, Washington ha pompato milioni di dollari per finanziare mostre, saggistica, convegni e riviste prestigiose in mezza Europa — come Encounter nel Regno Unito, Preuves in Francia o Tempo presente in Italia.
Il punto centrale non era fare propaganda becera, che avrebbe insospettito chiunque. Il metodo americano è stato ben più raffinato e perverso: cooptare gli intellettuali, stabilire quali temi fossero dignitosi da dibattere e premiare chiunque indirizzasse la propria critica esclusivamente contro Mosca. Quando nel 1967 lo scandalo dei fondi CIA venne a galla, la maschera cadde, ma il danno era ormai fatto. L'America era riuscita a dimostrare che l'egemonia non si impone con i carri armati, ma comprando gli spazi di visibilità e distribuendo prestigio a chi fa il gioco del potere.
L'astrazione come dottrina e la trasformazione della sinistra
Lo stesso meccanismo fu applicato alle arti visive. Prendiamo l'espressionismo astratto di Jackson Pollock: il governo americano e le sue fondazioni sponsorizzarono ed esportarono in tutto il mondo questa pittura priva di contenuti sociali espliciti. Perché? Perché serviva come perfetta arma ideologica. La totale assenza di critica sociale nella pittura astratta veniva sventolata come l'emblema della "libertà occidentale", in contrapposizione al grigio realismo socialista sovietico. L'arte smetteva di contestare la realtà e diventava un manifesto pubblicitario dell'american way of life.
Ma il capolavoro politico degli apparati statunitensi è stato un altro: la domesticazione della sinistra occidentale. Capito che era impossibile eradicare l'aspirazione alla giustizia sociale, gli strateghi di Washington lavorarono per separare la critica sociale dalla contestazione del capitalismo. Si doveva finanziare e promuovere una sinistra "compatibile": una sinistra ferocemente antisovietica che finisse per accettare la proprietà privata e l'impianto liberale come orizzonti unici e insuperabili.
Contemporaneamente, il linguaggio politico venne sistematicamente manipolato. Attraverso un'accorta selezione di concetti filosofici e opere letterarie, il fascismo e il comunismo vennero infilati nello stesso calderone del "totalitarismo". Il risultato ideologico fu perfetto: l'ordine capitalistico e liberale non veniva più percepito come un sistema storicamente ingiusto e pieno di contraddizioni, ma come l'unico baluardo possibile contro la barbarie. Chiunque provasse a mettere in discussione le basi economiche del modello americano veniva automaticamente bollato come complice del totalitarismo.
L'eredità coloniale del pensiero unico
Con il crollo dell'Unione Sovietica, la narrazione occidentale ha decretato la "fine della storia", ma le tecniche di manipolazione culturale affinate dagli Stati Uniti durante la Guerra fredda non sono affatto andate in pensione. Oggi assistiamo allo stesso identico schema: la complessa realtà geopolitica globale viene costantemente ridotta a un manicheo e infantile scontro morale tra "democrazie" e "autocrazie".
Dietro questa patina etica si nascondono gli stessi identici interessi strategici ed economici di sempre. Ogni paese che rifiuta l'allineamento ai desiderata americani viene squalificato sul piano morale prima ancora che politico, rendendo impossibile qualsiasi analisi seria delle responsabilità e degli imperialismi occidentali.
La vera tragedia della guerra culturale condotta dagli Stati Uniti è che ha finito per sterilizzare il pensiero critico anche a casa nostra. Trasformando la cultura in un’arma di distrazione di massa e in uno strumento di propaganda geopolitica, l'Occidente ha perso la propria autonomia intellettuale. Abbiamo importato le categorie concettuali di Washington, finendo per scambiare la nostra subordinazione culturale per libertà di pensiero.
© Photo illustration by Kim Hoeckele for The New York Times
President Donald Trump promised that his tariffs would usher in a "golden age" by prioritizing the interests of American workers.
Those workers, however, are now turning against Trump's tariffs.
Support for the Trump administration's tariff policies has fallen by 25 percentage points among blue-collar workers over the past year, according to new polling data from Echelon Insights and the Economic Innovation Group (EIG).
A poll conducted by the two groups in August 2025 found that blue-collar workers supported the tariffs by a narrow margin. Now, that same segment of the population has turned decisively against Trump's tariffs: 58 percent oppose them, compared to just 36 percent who support them.
Overall, support for the tariffs has declined from about 43 percent last year to only 34 percent. Opposition to the tariffs has grown from 50 percent to 59 percent. Elsewhere in the same survey, 68 percent of respondents said the tariffs have made the cost of living higher.
It's not hard to figure out why people have turned against the tariffs: They have contributed to rising prices across the economy.
The annualized inflation rate ticked upward to 3.7 percent in September, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). More BLS data released Thursday morning shows that the producer price index, which often operates as a precursor to inflation, is up 6.3 percent over the past year.
America's war with Iran has been a major factor in rising inflation, but the tariffs have played a significant role as well. In a study released last week, the New York Federal Reserve concluded that consumer prices would have declined slightly over the past year if not for the economic effects of the tariffs.
The tariffs have become so unpopular that not even partisanship can save them. "Among GOP-voting workers, only 3 percent select tariffs as their top priority," note Jordan McGillis and John Lettieri, policy experts from the EIG, in their write-up of the poll.
Other parts of Trump's economic agenda are not faring much better. The Trump administration has bought or seized shares of more than 30 private businesses over the past two years—ranging from major firms such as U.S. Steel to small mining companies with few customers. "The federal government's state corporatism is unprecedented," reports the Cato Institute in a new analysis of those deals.
Large majorities of workers across both major parties and all generations said they opposed the federal government taking equity stakes in American companies in the Echelon/EIG poll.
In short: This economic populism sure isn't very popular.
All of this is likely to be a major factor in next month's midterm elections. Regardless of how that shakes out, however, there are lessons to be drawn from this poll for both sides of the political divide.
For conservatives, these polling data should end the tariff experiment. It has proven economically damaging, and it is no longer a political winner (if it ever was).
Remember, the idea to hike tariffs and start trade wars with all of America's biggest trading partners was not some grand plan backed by careful study and thoughtful analysis. It sprung, half-baked, from the head of one man. Yes, there have been various attempts to support, in a post hoc way, Trump's desire for tariffs. All of that can, and should, be easily discarded. There is no reason to allow a lame duck president to continue to set such a politically and economically destructive path for the country.
Undoing the tariffs might also put a meaningful dent in rising prices. That should be a no-brainer after the midterms, no matter which party controls Congress.
On the left, this poll should be a reminder that Americans do not look favorably on the mixing of government and business. Democrats should promise to unwind the "equity stakes" that the federal government has taken under Trump's watch. Heading toward the 2028 presidential cycle, Democrats might want to borrow some old Republican talking points about how government shouldn't be picking winners and losers—they may find that message is still quite popular.
Yes, it's probably right to be skeptical that those things will happen. Trump's efforts to centralize economic power in the executive branch are likely to outlive his presidency—that's how these things always seem to go.
But there is a glimmer of hope here. Americans are soundly rejecting the Trump administration's big government policies.
The post Even Blue-Collar Workers Have Turned Against Trump's Unpopular Tariffs appeared first on Reason Magazine.
When a president starts with a predetermined policy and then goes looking for a statutory pretext to justify it, he is building on shaky ground. President Donald Trump illustrated that point once again in July, when he announced a third round of broad tariffs after his first two attempts ran into legal trouble.
Shortly after taking office in 2025, Trump claimed to have discovered a previously unnoticed delegation of extensive tariff authority in the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that does not mention import taxes and had never been used to impose them. That claim was rejected by every court that considered it.
Last February, the Supreme Court ruled that IEEPA does not authorize tariffs at all. But Trump had a backup plan: Hours after that decision, he announced another sweeping set of tariffs, this time relying on Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974.
That provision allows tariffs in response to "fundamental international payments problems" caused by "serious United States balance-of-payments deficits." In May, the U.S. Court of International Trade (CIT) ruled that the new tariffs were illegal because Trump had failed to "identify balance-of-payments deficits within the meaning of Section 122."
Although that decision was stayed pending appeal, Trump's Section 122 tariffs, which were subject to a 150-day statutory limit, expired on July 24. Trump then switched to Plan C, invoking Section 301 of the Trade Act, which authorizes tariffs in response to a foreign "act, policy, or practice" that is "unreasonable or discriminatory" and "burdens or restricts" U.S. commerce.
Trump's Section 301 tariffs supposedly targeted countries that had failed to "impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labor." The alleged offenders included 86 economies that accounted for nearly all U.S. imports.
In separate complaints, the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) and the law firm Akin Gump, which had played leading roles in challenging Trump's prior tariffs, immediately asked the CIT to block the new import taxes. By and large, they noted, the government had failed to explain how the targeted countries had fallen short, how their alleged failures burdened U.S. commerce, or why the new tariffs could be expected to ameliorate the problem they were supposed to address.
The LJC argued that the forced-labor issue was "simply a pretext" for reinstating Trump's "invalidated global tariff regime." It added that Trump's reading of Section 301, like his interpretation of IEEPA, would violate the "major questions" doctrine, which requires clear congressional authorization for policies of "vast economic and political significance."
This was Trump's "third attempt" to "impose essentially the same set of sweeping global tariffs," Akin Gump's lawyers wrote. "The third time's not the charm."
The post Trump Keeps Coming Up With Legally Dubious Tariff Justifications appeared first on Reason Magazine.
President Donald Trump says he has struck a deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to import large amounts of diesel fuel into the United States—apparently hoping to lower fuel prices in the weeks before the midterm elections.
The exact terms of that agreement remain somewhat unclear. The White House has not said when the purchases will be made, what prices will be paid, or who will be paying (private companies or taxpayers), though the Treasury announced that it would be issuing a "temporary general license to allow the supply of Russian diesel to the global market." Reporting by The New York Times suggests that investors with ties to the administration are most likely to profit. Because diesel prices are determined by a global market, it's also far from certain that the Russian gas would make much of a dent in American prices.
However, this much is clear: If Trump follows through with this "deal," he will have violated two federal laws recently passed by Congress—one of which he signed just weeks ago.
The more significant of those two laws is the Ending Importation of Russian Oil Act, which passed the House with a 413–9 vote and was unanimously approved by the Senate. President Joe Biden signed that bill into law on April 8, 2022. The law is an outright ban on Russian energy products, including diesel fuel.
The law also lays out the process for lifting the ban on imports. The president must tell Congress that Russia has "reached an agreement to withdraw Russian forces and cease military hostilities in Ukraine" and has recognized "the right of the Ukrainian people to independently and freely choose their own government."
There is also a clear timeline for lifting the ban. Any termination of the ban requires a 90-day waiting period, during which time Congress has the opportunity to block the change.
Obviously, Russia has not withdrawn from Ukraine. Even if it had, the White House has not gone through the necessary process to notify Congress, nor waited the necessary 90 days.
The law does not allow a president to ignore it if fuel prices are high and an election is approaching. It does not allow a president to ignore it if he starts an illegal war in another part of the world that causes fuel prices to spike.
Trump's attempt to disregard that law has drawn a bipartisan rebuke from members of Congress. A group of seven senators—three Democrats and four Republicans—issued a joint statement this week saying that Trump's deal "runs directly counter to" the 2022 law.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R–N.C.), one of the senators who joined that statement, said on Sunday that there is "a legitimate case for saying the president's not following the law."
The second law at play is the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act, named for the late senator and passed earlier this year. Among other things, it authorizes the president to levy tariffs of up to 100 percent against countries that buy Russian crude oil and natural gas. The intent is clear: to prevent Russia from being able to finance its war against Ukraine by selling energy commodities onto the global market. Trump signed it into law last month.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have also pointed to that law in the days since Trump announced his deal to buy Russian diesel.
"Now is the time to use those sanctions to squeeze Putin's war machine, not reward a dictator by putting more money in his hands while he continues targeting and killing Ukrainian civilians," Rep. Don Bacon (R–Neb.) posted on X this week. Rep. Steny Hoyer (D–Md.) said it was "outrageous" for Trump to be buying energy from Russia after signing a bill that could be used to punish other countries for doing the same.
The White House could argue that, in this case, Trump is merely violating the spirit of the law rather than the letter of it. Even so, this is blatantly hypocritical.
The hypocrisy runs deep. The Trump administration has spent much of its second term trying to restrict trade and downplay the advice of economists who have warned that doing so would raise prices. Now, Trump is once again seeking imports as a means to ease high prices—as he has done with beef and other products. Perhaps the White House should apply this general principle more broadly, and in circumstances where doing so would not violate federal laws.
Some of the president's allies are now trying to downplay these violations of federal law. Conservative pundit Mollie Hemingway says Trump is merely trying to "put the American people first" by addressing rising gas prices.
Sorry, but no. The president is not allowed to disregard federal laws because he believes it will lower gas prices in swing states.
You can, of course, criticize those laws for being misguided. Trade is generally good, and erecting barriers to the flow of goods tends to be costly. Trump could ask Congress to repeal these laws. He cannot deliberately ignore them.
If the "deal" with Russia comes to fruition, it will further erode what little power Congress retains within America's democratic system. If a president is not bound by the laws Congress has passed, then the legislature might as well not exist at all.
The post Trump's Plan To Buy Russian Diesel Would Violate Federal Law appeared first on Reason Magazine.
Have we passed peak oil – are fossil fuels running out? Richard Lyon says yes, and the transition to 'renewables' is making it worse. But peak oil is a myth, says Tilak Doshi, as he reviews Lyon's book The Energy Trap.
The post Are Fossil Fuels Running Out? appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
di Alessandro Bartoloni
Le sconfitte incombono su Washington. Alcuni avvertono e temono ciò che sta per arrivare, ma i media mainstream per lo più tacciono. Le prossime sconfitte degli Stati Uniti in Ucraina e in Medio Oriente saranno terremoti geopolitici destinati a produrre ripercussioni per decenni, nonostante gli sforzi per minimizzarne la portata e limitarne le conseguenze politiche.
A peggiorare le cose, una crisi combinata del debito, dei titoli obbligazionari e dell’energia, provocata dagli stessi Stati Uniti, è già iniziata, anche all’interno degli Stati Uniti stessi. A questo punto sembra inarrestabile: l’unica questione è fino a che punto il Tesoro statunitense e Wall Street riusciranno a ritardarla o a scaricarne la maggior parte sui Paesi vassalli.
Il declino geopolitico ed economico degli Stati Uniti, previsto da molti da oltre un decennio, rischia ora di procedere molto più rapidamente e in modo molto più accentuato di quanto si potesse immaginare anche solo un paio di anni fa. Nel lungo periodo, a vacillare sarà la stessa preminenza internazionale del dollaro statunitense, che costituisce il pilastro dell’intero sistema finanziario costruito dagli Stati Uniti dopo la Seconda guerra mondiale.
Ciò che sorprende è che Washington abbia aggravato una posizione strategica ed economica già delicata attraverso anni di spesa finanziata a debito e di guerre all’estero. Le crisi menzionate sono imminenti o sono già iniziate, anche se, come al solito, è difficile valutare l’esatta sequenza e la durata degli eventi.
L’oligarchia al potere negli Stati Uniti ha già subito battute d’arresto in passato, non da ultimo durante la guerra del Vietnam. Ma questa volta è diverso, per le tre ragioni principali che esamineremo di seguito.
1. Oltre la dimensione militare
In primo luogo, Washington non si trova ad affrontare sconfitte militari lontane, come in Afghanistan o in Iraq. L’illusione del periodo successivo alla Guerra fredda, secondo cui l’egemonia statunitense potesse essere facilmente consolidata combattendo i «terroristi» a vantaggio del proprio complesso militare-industriale (Military-Industrial Complex, MIC), è finita.
Oggi Washington ha provocato la formazione di una coalizione multipolare composta da avversari di primo piano — Russia, Cina e Iran — molto più resilienti sul piano economico, capaci militarmente e coordinati diplomaticamente di qualsiasi avversario affrontato dagli Stati Uniti negli ultimi decenni.
Gli attacchi iraniani hanno danneggiato o distrutto centinaia di basi statunitensi in Medio Oriente, con un costo di 33,4 miliardi di dollari, secondo quanto affermato dal Pentagono.
Ma questa sfida al potere statunitense va ben oltre la dimensione militare. Le ripercussioni per Washington sono anche diplomatiche, economiche e finanziarie.
Le aggressive sanzioni introdotte prima di Trump e i dazi imposti da Trump si stanno ritorcendo contro gli Stati Uniti, proprio come era prevedibile. Inoltre, l’interruzione dei flussi energetici globali, provocata dalle stesse scelte di Washington, sta alimentando l’inflazione in Occidente, che non può essere realmente contenuta attraverso gli aumenti dei tassi d’interesse.
L’attuale aumento dei rendimenti obbligazionari sta già mettendo sotto pressione Paesi come la Francia e il Giappone, quest’ultimo gravato da un debito pari al 250% del PIL e caratterizzato da uno yen storicamente debole.
2. La tempesta perfetta
La ritirata umiliante degli Stati Uniti dal Vietnam è il precedente più vicino a ciò che sta per accadere oggi. Allora, tuttavia, la base industriale interna era formidabile, la leadership tecnologica incontrastata e il sistema finanziario internazionale non disponeva di alternative praticabili.
Quando, nel 1971, gli Stati Uniti abbandonarono il sistema aureo e iniziarono a svalutare il dollaro attraverso l’espansione monetaria e a finanziarizzare la propria economia — a spese della popolazione — la domanda globale di dollari rimase forte e, sotto molti aspetti, il ruolo internazionale della valuta statunitense si consolidò ulteriormente.
Oggi, per la prima volta, Washington si trova ad affrontare una «tempesta perfetta».
Dietro e al di sopra delle imminenti sconfitte geopolitiche e militari non ci sono soltanto le crisi del debito e dell’energia, ma anche una bolla dell’intelligenza artificiale che potrebbe essere sul punto di scoppiare.
Allo stesso tempo, mentre Anthropic si prepara a quella che potrebbe essere la più grande IPO della storia, ma forse anche la più rischiosa, l’ascesa della Cina nella maggior parte dei settori tecnologici avanzati, compresa l’intelligenza artificiale open source, minaccia seriamente di mettere in crisi il modello statunitense dell’IA, orientato al profitto e alla tutela dei cartelli.
Le crisi in arrivo sono dunque simultanee, si amplificano a vicenda e si rafforzano reciprocamente, lasciando a Washington pochissimo margine di manovra strategica.
È proprio questa, in altre parole, una «tempesta perfetta».
3. Ripiegamento verso l’interno
Tutti questi fallimenti accumulati sul piano internazionale finiranno inevitabilmente per produrre conseguenze politiche interne.
Oltre al problema del debito legato all’intelligenza artificiale, che pesa sul mercato azionario statunitense e sugli investitori, è fondamentale sottolineare che Israele sta rapidamente perdendo una parte consistente del sostegno di cui godeva tradizionalmente negli Stati Uniti.
Inoltre, il Partito Democratico non rappresenta un’alternativa credibile e razionale alla follia guerrafondaia dei repubblicani.
La classe politica statunitense impedisce alla maggioranza degli americani di ottenere sia sicurezza sia prosperità. Di conseguenza, dovrà affrontare una perdita ancora maggiore di legittimità interna.
Dopo l’esplosione della crisi economica e finanziaria, si aprirà la strada a disordini sociali, alienazione politica e rivolta popolare. Tutto questo avverrà senza quella rete di sicurezza economica e quella coesione istituzionale che avevano protetto l’establishment statunitense durante i disordini sociali degli anni Sessanta.
La storia dimostra che, quando un impero commette errori strategici, sopravvaluta le proprie capacità e, al contempo, genera squilibri strutturali interni sul piano sociale ed economico, il costo finisce inevitabilmente per ricadere sulla popolazione.
In questo senso, alcuni hanno paragonato Trump a Commodo, l’imperatore romano ossessionato dal potere che prosciugò le casse dello Stato tra il 177 e il 192 d.C. e fu fermato soltanto da un assassinio. Quell’episodio segnò anche l’inizio della caduta di Roma.
Per l’americano medio, i risultati dei disastri della politica estera statunitense sono per lo più negativi: si traducono in spese militari sempre maggiori, a beneficio soltanto di una piccola parte della popolazione.
A questo si aggiungono la perdita di potere d’acquisto, le infrastrutture fatiscenti, la deindustrializzazione delle regioni centrali del Paese, gli abusi delle forze di polizia, il costo della vita in aumento e un’assistenza sanitaria sempre più cara.
Il popolo statunitense sta pagando il prezzo di decenni di governo da parte dell’oligarchia parassitaria di Washington.
Prima o poi, Washington dovrà pagare un prezzo politico, anche in presenza di una cittadinanza in larga parte passiva e scarsamente informata come quella americana.
Mentre l’impero esaurisce le proprie opzioni all’estero, la resa dei conti per gli Stati Uniti finirà inevitabilmente per consumarsi anche sul fronte interno.
Da una parte ci sarà un establishment politico di Washington sulla difensiva, isolato e sempre più coercitivo; dall’altra, una popolazione indebitata e afflitta da problemi di salute legati anche all’obesità, ma al tempo stesso armata, arrabbiata e disillusa.
In gioco c’è il futuro della Repubblica americana.
(Finn Andreen)
Carbon Brief claims that wind and solar power saved the UK from gas imports worth £5.9bn during the Hormuz crisis. Not mentioned, says Paul Homewood, is that the wind and solar power cost more.
The post Carbon Brief’s Con Trick appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
di Alessandro Bartoloni
Lo sviluppo più importante di questa settimana in Europa potrebbe non essere avvenuto sul campo di battaglia. La Russia ha lanciato un avvertimento particolarmente esplicito sulla questione di Kaliningrad, chiarendo che qualsiasi tentativo di bloccare o minacciare l’exclave potrebbe provocare una risposta con l’intero arsenale militare a disposizione di Mosca, comprese le armi nucleari. Allo stesso tempo, esponenti del governo lituano hanno ammesso di non disporre di alcuna informazione di intelligence che faccia pensare a preparativi per un imminente attacco russo contro la NATO.
Questo accostamento non è casuale. I governi occidentali continuano a discutere scenari sempre più ambiziosi lungo i confini della Russia, pur sostenendo di voler evitare uno scontro diretto. Con il suo messaggio, Mosca vuole eliminare ogni possibile ambiguità: Kaliningrad, dal punto di vista russo, non è un semplice punto di pressione nell’ambito del conflitto ucraino. È territorio sovrano della Federazione Russa e qualsiasi interferenza verrebbe considerata e affrontata come tale.
Siamo di fronte a un ulteriore inasprimento delle tensioni. Per gran parte della guerra, i Paesi della NATO hanno ampliato gradualmente il proprio coinvolgimento: condivisione di informazioni di intelligence, forniture di armi, addestramento, sanzioni e capacità di colpire obiettivi a distanze sempre maggiori. Ogni nuovo passo è stato presentato come compatibile con il quadro di intervento esistente. Kaliningrad rappresenta però un caso diverso: Mosca sta facendo capire che esistono limiti oltre i quali questa logica di progressiva escalation potrebbe non valere più.
Il fronte finanziario
L'avvertimento russo arriva mentre l'Ucraina deve fare i conti con un problema meno appariscente, ma altrettanto grave: quanto costa continuare la guerra.
Le necessità di Kiev vanno ormai ben oltre il semplice mantenimento delle truppe al fronte. Lo Stato deve garantire il pagamento di stipendi e pensioni, finanziare gli acquisti militari, riparare le infrastrutture, importare energia e programmare le forniture di armi per l'anno successivo. Il materiale esaminato indica un fabbisogno aggiuntivo di decine di miliardi e sottolinea, in particolare, la necessità di prenotare con largo anticipo munizioni e droni a lunga gittata.
È proprio questo il problema di fondo. Un nuovo pacchetto di aiuti può colmare una carenza immediata di liquidità, ma non risolve il problema strutturale. La guerra genera continuamente nuove spese: le attrezzature si consumano, le infrastrutture vengono danneggiate, i costi di manutenzione aumentano e bisogna finanziare nuovi acquisti prima ancora che le scorte esistenti siano esaurite.
La questione, dunque, non è più soltanto se l'Occidente riuscirà a trovare altri fondi, ma se sarà in grado di mettere in piedi un sistema stabile e duraturo che consenta di sostenere l'Ucraina anno dopo anno. Finora gli aiuti sono stati garantiti soprattutto attraverso una successione di interventi e decisioni politiche, piuttosto che attraverso un meccanismo strutturato e adeguato alle dimensioni del conflitto.
Una differenza che diventa sempre più rilevante con il prolungarsi della guerra.
I soldi non bastano: servono capacità industriali
Il caso degli F-16 ucraini mostra chiaramente la differenza tra gli impegni finanziari e la reale capacità industriale di sostenere una guerra.
Secondo il materiale di partenza, i ritardi nelle operazioni di manutenzione in Belgio hanno lasciato a terra una parte consistente della flotta di F-16 ucraini. Interventi che normalmente richiederebbero poche settimane finiscono per protrarsi per molti mesi. Gli aerei possono essere riparati: il problema è disporre del tempo, delle infrastrutture e delle competenze specialistiche necessarie per farlo.
Si tratta di una debolezza più generale dell'Occidente, emersa più volte nel corso del conflitto. I governi possono stanziare miliardi in tempi relativamente brevi, ma i sistemi industriali non possono essere potenziati da un giorno all'altro. Gli aerei hanno bisogno di tecnici e strutture per la manutenzione. I sistemi di difesa aerea richiedono intercettori. L'artiglieria ha bisogno di proiettili. Le reti elettriche necessitano di trasformatori e componenti specializzati.
Il vero collo di bottiglia, quindi, non è sempre il denaro. Sempre più spesso è la capacità di produrre, riparare e sostituire ciò che viene consumato.
L'arretrato nella manutenzione degli F-16 viene indicato dall'analisi come un ulteriore esempio dell'insufficiente capacità industriale occidentale di fronte a una guerra di logoramento prolungata. Ed è proprio questo il nodo centrale: il sistema di sostegno militare occidentale era stato concepito per fare affidamento sulle scorte disponibili e per affrontare operazioni di durata limitata, non necessariamente per sostenere una guerra potenzialmente senza fine, che richiede un continuo rifornimento di mezzi e materiali.
La pressione sulla rete elettrica
Nel frattempo, la Russia sembra aver esteso la propria strategia di pressione alle infrastrutture economiche ucraine.
Gli attacchi si stanno concentrando sempre più sulle reti di trasmissione dell'energia elettrica, e non soltanto sugli impianti di produzione. È una distinzione importante: un Paese può anche disporre di una capacità sufficiente a produrre elettricità, ma andare comunque incontro a gravi carenze se non riesce a distribuirla in modo efficiente attraverso sottostazioni, linee ad alta tensione e reti regionali.
Il materiale esaminato descrive attacchi mirati proprio a interrompere il funzionamento di questa rete, con conseguenti blackout.
La logica militare è quella di un logoramento progressivo, più che di un singolo colpo spettacolare. Le infrastrutture danneggiate possono essere riparate, ma ogni intervento richiede denaro, attrezzature e manodopera. Ogni nuovo attacco aumenta quindi la dipendenza dell'Ucraina dai finanziamenti esteri e dalle forniture di componenti e materiali dall'estero.
La pressione sul sistema energetico ha conseguenze dirette anche sui conti pubblici. La produzione industriale rallenta, le attività economiche si contraggono e i costi della ricostruzione aumentano. Il gettito fiscale diminuisce proprio mentre le spese dello Stato continuano a crescere.
È qui che il fronte militare e quello finanziario finiscono per intrecciarsi.
Il dilemma dell'Occidente
L'Occidente si trova oggi a dover gestire contemporaneamente diversi problemi.
L'Ucraina ha bisogno di armi subito, ma per produrle o ripararle possono essere necessari mesi, se non anni. Kiev ha bisogno oggi dei finanziamenti per acquistare i sistemi militari che le serviranno l'anno prossimo. I governi europei devono continuare a sostenere l'Ucraina mentre aumentano contemporaneamente le proprie spese per la difesa. E, nel frattempo, qualsiasi peggioramento della situazione sul campo di battaglia alimenta le pressioni per un coinvolgimento ancora maggiore dell'Occidente.
La questione di Kaliningrad è importante proprio perché Mosca sta cercando di fissare una linea rossa: il limite oltre il quale il coinvolgimento occidentale non verrebbe più considerato un semplice sostegno indiretto all'Ucraina, ma sarebbe interpretato come un intervento diretto nel conflitto.
Il pericolo non sta necessariamente nel fatto che una delle due parti voglia davvero allargare la guerra. Il rischio è che il progressivo deterioramento della situazione finisca per spingere tutti verso decisioni sempre più azzardate. Pressione militare, difficoltà finanziarie e impazienza politica tendono infatti ad alimentarsi a vicenda.
Ecco perché l'avvertimento di Mosca merita attenzione, al di là delle dichiarazioni di facciata. L'obiettivo è restringere il margine di manovra dell'Occidente proprio mentre, su altri fronti, le possibilità di intervento diventano sempre più difficili da gestire.
Una guerra di capacità
La guerra si sta trasformando sempre più in una prova di tenuta dei sistemi, piuttosto che in una semplice competizione tra singoli armamenti.
L'Ucraina può ricevere nuovi finanziamenti, ma il fabbisogno continua a ripresentarsi. Gli F-16 possono essere riparati, ma le capacità di manutenzione sono limitate. Le reti elettriche possono essere ripristinate, ma possono essere nuovamente colpite. Le armi possono essere ordinate, ma le linee di produzione non sono in grado di aumentare immediatamente la propria capacità.
La vera sfida, quindi, non riguarda tanto un singolo pacchetto di aiuti o un particolare sviluppo sul campo di battaglia, quanto la capacità di sostenere lo sforzo bellico nel tempo.
Per l'Occidente, questo significa trasformare gli impegni finanziari in produzione industriale concreta, a un ritmo sufficiente per sostenere l'Ucraina senza esaurire le proprie scorte e senza superare il limite della propria disponibilità politica a continuare a finanziare il conflitto.
Per la Russia, invece, significa mantenere la pressione militare e, allo stesso tempo, dimostrare che qualsiasi tentativo di allargare il confronto comporterebbe rischi che vanno ben oltre i confini dell'Ucraina.
La questione di Kaliningrad e la crisi finanziaria ucraina possono sembrare due vicende separate. In realtà, sono strettamente collegate.
Entrambe pongono la stessa domanda: per quanto tempo ciascuna delle due parti sarà in grado di sostenere i costi materiali, finanziari e politici di questa guerra, prima che emergano i limiti della propria strategia?
Taiwan’s new American-made F-16V Block 70 jets deliver much-needed breathing room against daily Chinese gray-zone coercion, yet surging Chinese stealth numbers and cratered runway risks mean their wartime utility would be sharply contested. Taiwan received its first two new-build Lockheed Martin F-16V Block 70 fighter jets, touching down on October 2 at Taitung’s Chihhang Air […]
The post New F-16s buy Taiwan time and space against China’s air coercion appeared first on Asia Times.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s offer this week of “associate membership” for Canada was received rapturously in the European Parliament. But member states, noting that the EU treaties say nothing about “associate membership”, have already tempered expectations, as has the Canadian ambassador to the EU. Make no mistake, “associate membership” does not mean that Canada will join the single market or become bound by EU directives anytime soon. The offer is currently a rhetorical gesture that, without a legal definition, risks meaning nothing at all, or becoming an expanded version of CETA, the EU-Canada trade deal in force since 2017, rather than a genuine new form of partnership.
As the United States estranges its allies, the EU has an opportunity to position itself as an alternative geopolitical anchor. New forms of association could help the EU build the capacity to act as a genuine world power. But to succeed, “associate EU membership” must be narrow but deep. Narrow in that it stops short of single market access or freedom of movement (not because it is undesirable but because it is currently unworkable); deep in that it can provide the basis for a unique alliance on security, defence and resilience—and offer a template for co-operation with other allies.
To prevent the proposal from landing dead on arrival, the commission should quickly define what associate membership means, with a timetable and clear objectives. This would also reassure candidate countries that others are not jumping the queue, and distinguish the offer from the “associate membership” Friedrich Merz, Germany’s chancellor, has pitched for Ukraine as a waiting room for accession.
To carry real weight, associate membership must address the pressures driving Canada into the EU’s arms in the first place. Security, defence and resilience are where both sides depend the most on America, where both sides face similar threats, and for which they can get public buy-in. Easy wins exist in low-friction defence-institutional steps, such as deeper Canadian participation in PESCO, the EU’s defence-cooperation scheme; an administrative arrangement with the European Defence Agency; and a role in future EU security missions.
But the boldest step would be to make Canada a full member of the EU’s defence technological and industrial base. This would bind Canada into Europe’s security architecture and give EU members access to Canadian expertise and industrial capacity for joint development and procurement. France’s protectionist zeal will be an obstacle; its EU ambassador this week pushed for tougher “Made in Europe” rules that would restrict non-EU firms’ access to defence funding. However, if Germany, the Nordics and the Baltics put their combined weight behind associate memberships, they might just bring the French on board.
The war in Ukraine, America’s treatment of its allies and rising global instability have prompted EU states to explore association models that offer their neighbours and allies closer ties without watering down EU membership itself. In her State of the European Union speech, von der Leyen invited Canada to become the bloc’s first “associate member”, but the commission has yet to explain what that would mean in practice.
At the NATO summit he hosted in Ankara this July, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, gifted visiting heads of state a peculiar souvenir: a Turkish-made revolver, loaded with live ammunition. Several delegations were left wondering how one declares an unregistered firearm at customs.
It was a fitting emblem: a gift no one could quite accept, from an ally no one can quite place. At the summit itself, Turkey had never looked more central to the alliance. The Ankara Summit Declaration called for “a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO”, reaffirmed Article 5 and placed European support for Ukraine at the heart of the alliance’s future. With NATO’s second-largest armed forces, an expanding defence industry and control of the Black Sea’s southern gateway, Turkey looked indispensable.
Look closer though and the picture is less tidy. This is still the NATO ally that bought Russia’s S-400 air-defence system, the EU candidate country whose membership negotiations have effectively collapsed, and the Black Sea power that arms Ukraine while maintaining extensive ties with Moscow. It is also, thanks to Erdogan’s close relationship with US president Donald Trump, an ally with unusual leverage over Washington at a time of strained transatlantic relations.
Turkey is neither drifting away from the West nor it is coming home. It has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that has learned to build strategic autonomy from inside the Western system rather than by leaving it. NATO still guarantees its security, Europe still buys its exports and funds its factories, and Western technology still powers its best weapons. But none of that buys alignment with Western preferences any more.
European policymakers have often treated this contradiction as a problem to solve. Their debate has revolved around whether Turkey can be “anchored” in the West or prevented from “drifting” towards Russia, China or the Middle East. Both approaches assume that Ankara must eventually pick a geopolitical home. It has chosen not to. Nor is this likely to change after Erdogan. A post-Erdogan government could be more democratic and predictable, but it would still be unlikely to abandon defence autonomy, regional activism or Turkey’s desire to balance among larger powers.
This paper argues that Europe should stop trying to resolve this contradiction and instead learn to capitalise on it. Turkey’s autonomy can frustrate Europeans, but it has also produced capabilities and relationships that Europe itself lacks. Its ability to maintain channels to Moscow helped it broker the Black Sea Grain Initiative and prisoner exchanges while continuing to arm Ukraine. Its military presence and political networks in Syria give it influence that few European states can match. Its growing defence industry could also make it an important partner in Europe’s rearmament.
It is true that the same autonomy sometimes works against European interests. In the eastern Mediterranean, Turkey’s assertiveness has brought it into direct conflict with EU member states Greece and Cyprus. Elsewhere, its balancing between Russia and the West has sometimes undermined European objectives.
The more useful question for Europe therefore is not whether Turkey can ever be a reliable ally, but when its autonomy serves Europe and when it cuts against it. The answer is managed interdependence: deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie the benefits of cooperation to clear and reciprocal obligations and withhold these benefits when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests. The aim is not obedience. It is to make Turkey’s autonomy pay for Europe more often than it costs.
Turkey’s pursuit of greater foreign-policy autonomy did not start with Erdogan. Since the early republic, Turkey’s Western alignment has coexisted with suspicion of Western intentions.
The young republic pursued Westernisation after fighting a war of independence against European powers. It developed close ties with Soviet Russia after the war, but Soviet pressure later helped justify Turkey’s integration into the US-led Western bloc, culminating in NATO membership in 1952. But alliance membership did not end tensions with the West. The Cyprus crisis, the 1974 military intervention and the subsequent US arms embargo reinforced Turkey’s conviction that it could not always rely on its allies.
Erdogan inherited this impulse, but he also transformed it. Over more than two decades, his governments have expanded Turkey’s geographical ambitions and given them a neo-Ottomanist flavour at home. Turkey has become more willing to use force abroad and built the institutions needed to sustain a more autonomous foreign policy. Erdogan has also added a personal style of decision-making and an ideological vocabulary. His slogan “the world is bigger than five” calls for reform of the UN Security Council. The term “precious loneliness”, coined in 2013 by his then foreign policy adviser Ibrahim Kalim, casts Turkey’s regional isolation as the price of moral consistency.
This transformation unfolded in four broad phases:
In the Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) first years in power, from 2002 to roughly the end of that decade, Erdogan and his government were celebrated in the West as reformists. They used the EU accession process to modernise the economy, pursue political reforms and curb the military’s influence over civilian politics. Ankara also expanded trade and diplomacy across its neighbourhood, presenting this activism as complementary to its Western orientation.
Closer ties with Europe accompanied an economic boom. Turkey’s GDP rose from roughly $241bn in 2002 to $775bn in 2008, while GDP per capita tripled. Foreign investment surged after accession talks opened in 2005, from about $900m in 2002-04 to nearly $12bn a year in 2005-08. EU member states accounted for roughly three-quarters of inflows by 2008.
From the late 2000s through the Arab uprisings, Ankara became more ambitious in its neighbourhood. Foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbours” doctrine reflected a growing belief that Turkey’s history, location and political model gave it a distinctive regional role. Economic growth and mediation underpinned this confidence, while construction companies, television dramas, Turkish Airlines, diplomats, religious institutions and development agencies extended the country’s soft power.
However, the Syrian civil war, Egypt’s military coup and the regional backlash against the Arab uprisings upended this strategy. Soft power gave way increasingly to hard power and regional rivalry.
The decisive turn came between 2015 and 2020. The collapse of the peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and a failed coup attempt of July 2016 fed a sense of geopolitical isolation and a more combative foreign policy. As Turkey grew more authoritarian, with executive power consolidated in the presidency, the country launched several external military operations in Syria, Iraq and Libya, and expanded its overseas military presence across the Middle East. It also cultivated closer economic and defence ties with Russia to reduce dependence on the US and Europe, both of which were becoming increasingly concerned about Turkey’s democratic backsliding and regional activism.
Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 systems in 2017 became the clearest symbol of this rupture. It led to Turkey’s removal from the F-35 programme—the US-led fighter-jet project for which Turkish firms were supplying components—in 2019 and to American sanctions in 2020. This purchase showed that Ankara was prepared to defy its allies when it believed core security interests were at stake.
Anti-Western sentiment rose significantly during this period. Many Turks blamed the US for the failed coup attempt and for supporting Kurdish forces in Syria affiliated with the PKK. The post-coup crackdown, along with the 2017 constitutional referendum, helped create a national security state and concentrated decision-making even more in the presidency.
Military interventions in Syria and elsewhere during this period also created their own momentum. The armed forces, intelligence services, defence companies and the state bureaucracy acquired the skills and experience to sustain overseas operations, cooperate with non-state partners and convert military involvement into diplomatic leverage.
By the end of 2020, Ankara concluded that its assertive posture had become counterproductive—it had alienated Western allies and Middle Eastern governments alike, thereby helping create an anti-Turkey alignment across multiple fronts. Intensifying great power rivalry and the fragmentation of the West also made Turkish leaders more anxious about being left out in the cold in a tumultuous world. The recalibration was also economic: a currency crisis at the end of 2020 left Ankara in acute need of external capital—Western and Gulf alike—and de-escalation on both fronts was the price of access to it.
From 2021, Ankara therefore sought to repair ties with former regional rivals, from Saudi Arabia to Greece, and pursued a pragmatic reset with Europe and America—while preserving its autonomy.
Turkey’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine captured this shift. Ankara condemned the invasion, supplied Kyiv with drones that proved highly effective early on, refused to recognise Moscow’s annexations, and invoked Montreux’s wartime provisions to close the Straits to belligerents’ warships, which mainly constrained Russia’s Black Sea fleet. It saved its neutrality for the economic sphere, declining to join Western sanctions and casting itself as mediator, keeping Moscow close.
Donald Trump’s return to the White House created another opportunity to reboot ties with the Western system. Erdogan and Trump share a disdain for liberal Europe and a preference for flexible, transactional and personalised diplomacy. Close ties between the two presidents and their inner circles also facilitated dialogue on Gaza, Caucasus, Ukraine and Syria, with a surprising degree of alignment on many of these files.
Ankara increasingly saw its military leverage and geography as the basis for strategic autonomy—a foreign policy built on cultivating ties across rival centres of power so that no single relationship became indispensable and none foreclosed another. It sought closer defence-industrial ties with European states without abandoning its domestic production. It normalised relations with Gulf monarchies while retaining military or political networks in Libya, Syria, Palestine and Somalia. It renewed dialogue with the EU while prioritising bilateral ties with individual member states. Even as a NATO member, it flirted with membership of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
In August 2026, Turkey joined Saudi Arabia and Pakistan in the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement—a trilateral mutual-defence pact dubbed in the media as a “Muslim NATO” that commits the three states to Article 5-like security guarantees. Building on a 2025 Saudi-Pakistani accord, the pact signals Turkey’s ambition to make regional security arrangements of its own, even as it remains in NATO. However, the new pact so far lacks the integrated command, joint planning and shared threat perception that would make it a functioning alliance rather than a political declaration.
The Mecca agreement aligns with Turkey’s ambition to keep a foot in several camps. Many in the country’s ruling elite see a larger role in the Middle East and on the world stage as Ankara’s natural destiny. Meanwhile, where previous US presidents saw Turkey’s regional ambitions as disruptive, the Trump administration came to view Ankara as a useful and capable regional partner.
Turkish foreign policy under Erdogan has not travelled a simple path from pro-Westernism to anti-Westernism and back again. Ankara has rebuilt its foreign policy repeatedly around the needs of the ruling far-right nationalist coalition at home and what a changing international order permits abroad. The re-embedding since 2021 is no exception: it did not reverse Turkey’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, but relocated it. Ankara now seeks that autonomy from inside Western structures, because that is where the leverage lies.
Although Erdogan’s dominance at home is a reality, in 2024, the opposition alliance led by the Republican People’s Party swept local elections, taking Istanbul, Ankara and most major cities—its best showing since 1979. The following March, Istanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoglu, the opposition’s presidential candidate and the man most likely to beat Erdogan, was arrested on corruption charges widely seen as politically motivated. Two decades of Erdogan rule have narrowed political space, but they have not closed it.
So what would change in foreign policy in a post-Erdogan Turkey? A successor could reset relations with the West and rebuild institutions. But a new government would not rethink the fundamentals—that Turkey must keep its freedom of action, arm itself and depend on no single power. Those assumptions no longer rest on one man’s decisions. They rest on an elite consensus, underpinned by a domestic defence industry, bases across three continents and Turkey’s own geography—and reinforced by a fragmenting international order that makes autonomy look like a necessity.
Public sentiment also seems to embrace an independent foreign policy. Turks might be split over Erdogan and domestic governance, but they largely agree on autonomy and avoiding unconditional alignment with any single outside power. Ukraine makes this point clearly. In a 2022 Kadir Has University survey, 52% of respondents wanted Turkey to remain impartial and 50.7% wanted it to mediate. Only 21.5% backed sanctioning Russia and 20.8% backed supporting it. In spring 2024 polling by Pew Research Center, a plurality of Turks (46%) said Turkey was providing the right amount of support to Ukraine.
The Iran war reveals a similar picture. A MetroPoll survey in March 2026 found that 68.1% wanted Turkey to remain neutral between Iran and the US, compared with 22.6% favouring support for Iran and 2.1% for the US and Israel. Neutrality won among the voters of every major party. This was no affection for the mullahs; rather, Turks fear a collapsing Iran would send refugees across the border, give the Kurdish insurgency new momentum, disrupt the Turkish economy and embolden Israel.
The argument at home is therefore about the methods, not autonomy itself. The opposition parties criticise the AKP-MHP government’s rhetoric and self-inflicted isolation, yet they treat maritime jurisdiction, the Aegean and Cyprus as national issues. In the 2022 Kadir Has survey, half or more of every major party’s supporters named maritime jurisdiction and the militarisation of Aegean islands among Turkey’s main problems with Greece.
A 2022 Carnegie study that interviewed opposition foreign-policy figures found the same. Most favoured repairing relations with the US and EU, restoring the foreign ministry’s authority, reducing personal diplomacy, and resolving the S-400 dispute to reopen the path to the F-35 programme. They also wanted no confrontation with Russia, no concessions on Turkey’s maritime claims, and no American weapons for Syria’s Kurds.
A post-Erdogan Turkey would therefore be a different kind of embedded outsider, not a former one. Democratisation and a return to institutional decision-making would make Turkey more predictable. But Ankara would still likely pursue diversified partnerships, its own arms industry, regional influence and the ability to say no to allies.
Turkey no longer treats the West as a complete strategic home or a reliable guarantor of its interests. Yet Russia, China, Iran and the Gulf cannot replace the security, markets, technology and institutional ties it draws from NATO, Europe and America. Turkey thus hedges from the inside. Europe cannot end that, and no Turkish government would tolerate the attempt. Its only realistic aim is to keep the hedge bending westward.
Turkey today is rarely described as a European power. Yet it is still a NATO member and, technically, an EU candidate. It is also a partner for Europe and the US on critical regional issues ranging from containment of Iran to counter-terrorism and support for Ukraine.
But Turkey’s Western embeddedness goes much deeper than institutions. Its economy, private sector, defence industry and society are tightly integrated with the West, particularly Europe. These connections constrain Turkish autonomy, but they also enable it: the markets, technology, capital and security relationships Turkey draws on to project power remain disproportionately Western.
The EU remains the centre of gravity of the Turkish economy. The customs union, in force since 1996, goes far beyond an ordinary free-trade agreement. It removed tariffs and quantitative restrictions on industrial goods and required Turkey to align with important parts of EU customs, commercial, competition, intellectual-property and technical legislation.
The numbers remain striking despite political tensions. The EU accounts for 42.7% of Turkey’s goods exports and 35.3% of its imports, with volume reaching €217.6bn in 2025. Services trade added €42.1bn in 2024.
Trade volumes understate the depth of integration. Turkish factories are embedded in European production networks, supplying the automotive, appliance, machinery, textile and electronics industries while relying on European capital goods, technology, standards and intermediate inputs. By mid-2025, Turkey reported that it had aligned 24,597 national standards with European standards, a harmonisation rate of 99.5% with the European Committee for Standardisation and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardisation systems.
European capital has been equally important. Turkey received roughly $200bn in foreign-equity inflows between 2003 and 2025, with around 60% originating in the EU. The West as a whole, including the US, UK and Canada, supplies roughly 70% of Turkey’s foreign direct investment.
Ankara has tried to diversify, towards Russia, the Gulf and, above all, China. It joined the Belt and Road Initiative in 2015, applied to BRICS in 2024 and courted Chinese manufacturing, including electric vehicle manufacturer BYD, whose $1bn plant in Turkey will benefit from access to the EU market. But China has not emerged as an alternative to the EU. Chinese firms treat Turkey as high-risk and stayed out of the top 20 sources of foreign investment in 2024. Turkey runs a large trade deficit with Beijing and competes with it for influence in Africa and Central Asia, while Beijing’s treatment of its Uyghur population remains a source of tension.
No partner has been able to match Europe’s market, investment stock and dense supply chains. Ankara’s economic autonomy therefore has limits. It can diversify eastwards, but the capital, technology and markets on which much of its industry depends remain Western. That dependence is sharpened by chronic macroeconomic fragility—high inflation, a weak lira and reliance on external financing—which has repeatedly forced Ankara to seek Gulf and Western capital, setting a hard ceiling on its autonomy.
This dependence also comes with a political irritation. Through the customs union, Turkey aligns with relevant EU regulations but has no say in making them. The agreement is also outdated, excluding services, digital commerce, public procurement, agriculture and climate regulation. The European Commission proposed negotiations to modernise it in 2016, but the European Council has yet to approve a mandate.
This captures a contradiction in Turkish foreign policy. Ankara seeks privileged access to the EU economy while demanding political distance from Brussels. Yet much of its industrial power, export capacity and ability to attract investment still depends on its position at the edge of Europe.
Turkey’s security ties with the West are deep. A NATO member since 1952, Turkey has the alliance’s second-largest military after the US and critical infrastructure including the Incirlik air base, where US nuclear weapons are widely believed to be stored; the Kurecik early-warning radar system that covers the Middle East; the Allied Land Command headquarters in Izmir; and forward bases at Konya and Istanbul. Turkey and its territory are therefore woven into a NATO security architecture that stretches from the Middle East to Europe’s eastern flank.
Despite the on-and-off crises with America and a more ambivalent policy towards Russia than most European allies, Turkey’s relationship with NATO is not dormant. Not only has Ankara recently hosted the NATO summit, it has also continued to support NATO’s collective defence missions, including participating in the Baltic Air Policing in 2006 and 2021. After the summit, Turkey agreed to do so again in 2026, even as it maintains cordial relations with Moscow. And while Turkey has worked hard to reduce its military dependence on its allies, many of its high-end programmes still depend on Western engines, components, certification, financing and export access.
Yet embeddedness has not meant deference or loyalty. For example, when Sweden and Finland sought to join NATO, Ankara used its veto in the alliance as leverage—delaying ratification until it had extracted commitments on the PKK and, from the US, approval of a major F-16 sale. Turkey capitalises on its position in NATO as much as it upholds the alliance.
Turkey’s political relationship with Europe is weakest precisely where its institutional ties are deepest. Ankara applied to the European Economic Community in 1959, signed the Ankara Agreement in 1963, became an EU candidate in 1999 and opened accession talks in 2005. Those negotiations have now effectively collapsed: only 16 of 35 chapters were opened and just one closed before the process froze. In 2018, the EU General Affairs Council noted that accession talks had come to a standstill, stopping short of formal suspension, but freezing the opening or closing of any new chapters. In 2025, the European Parliament reaffirmed this, on the grounds that Turkey’s strategic importance cannot offset its democratic backsliding and divergence from European norms.
Yet neither side has formally ended the process. Turkey remains a candidate, receives pre-accession funding and participates in EU programmes like Erasmus and Horizon Europe. It is also in the European Political Community and has expressed a desire to be part of a future European security architecture.
Turkey’s European embeddedness is also demographic. Since the 1960s, migration has created communities whose lives span Turkey and Europe. At the end of 2024, around two million Turkish citizens held valid residence permits in the EU, excluding naturalised citizens and second generation Turks born in Europe. Germany alone is home to about 2.6 million people of Turkish background, the country’s largest single-origin immigrant community. Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Sweden also have sizeable Turkish communities.
Turkey’s European diaspora connects Turkish cities and regions to European labour markets, schools, businesses, media and political parties. They also make Europe an arena of Turkish domestic politics: governments and opposition parties campaign among overseas voters, while disputes about nationalism, religion, Kurdish identity and democratic rights spill into European public life. Europe is therefore not just an external actor but an extension of the political debate in Ankara.
Turkey’s political estrangement from the EU can also obscure the continued attraction Europe holds for many Turks. In a spring 2025 survey commissioned by the EU delegation to Turkey, 58% said they would support EU membership in a referendum and 66% said membership would bring more advantages than disadvantages. Visa-free travel, higher living standards and employment opportunities were the most frequently cited benefits. Similarly, Pew found in 2024 that 56% supported EU membership, rising to 66% among those under 35. Polls show mixed motivations for supporting Turkey’s accession to the EU, with younger, urban and educated Turks consistently aspiring to European legal and political standards even as faith in accession has eroded.
Migration creates another form of interdependence between Turkey and Europe. Turkey hosts a large refugee population and sits on major migration routes from the Middle East and Asia into Europe. European governments have relied on Turkey as a buffer, most explicitly through the 2016 EU-Turkey migration deal. Meanwhile, Ankara has periodically used refugee flows as political leverage, but it has also come to rely on EU funds to manage migration. Neither side can manage migration sustainably without the other.
Turkey’s distinctive position among middle powers lies not only in its aspiration to act independently but in the tools it has built to do so. It is one of the few middle powers that treats military force as a routine instrument rather than an exception, and the only one that has turned the resulting hardware into a diplomatic currency.
Five tools carry Turkish influence abroad: an expeditionary military, a strong arms industry, a geography that charges rent, an apparatus for soft power and a habit of brokering other people’s wars. Each has widened Ankara’s room for manoeuvre, but each also reveals the limits of Turkish autonomy.
What changed under the AKP was less Turkey’s appetite for military activism abroad than how it used force. Before the Arab uprisings, Turkish deployments took place largely within NATO and UN frameworks. But over the past decade, Ankara has increasingly acted unilaterally to advance its own security interests, using forward bases, long-term deployments and partnership with local armed actors. Syria, Libya, Iraq and the Caucasus region each show a version of the method.
In Syria, four cross-border operations between 2016 and 2020 created a belt of Turkish-controlled territory in the north, governed through the Turkey-backed Syrian National Army. Ankara’s presence also helped preserve an opposition-controlled enclave in Idlib, from which Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) emerged and eventually overthrew Bashar al-Assad, in December 2024. Turkey has since become the most important external backer of Syria’s new government, signing a defence accord in August 2025 to train, equip and advise the army Damascus is rebuilding out of former rebel factions. Ankara’s leverage nonetheless has limits: it has not yet converted this partnership into permanent bases beyond the north, constrained by Israeli red lines and Damascus’s own wariness of overdependence.
Turkey has similarly intervened militarily in Libya since 2020, when it helped prevent warlord Khalifa Haftar’s forces overrunning the internationally recognised government in Tripoli. The intervention has shifted the military balance and entrenched a Turkish security presence, which Ankara subsequently converted into economic and political leverage—against the will of competitors like Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and the UAE. However, Turkey has recently repaired relations with Egypt and opened channels to actors in eastern Libya.
In Iraq, Ankara’s footprint has proved more durable, driven primarily by its campaign against the PKK. A network of forward operating bases across the north has hardened into a de-facto security belt along the border. And despite renewed efforts to resolve the Kurdish question—such as PKK founder Abdullah Ocalan’s 2025 call to disarm and the party’s subsequent dissolution—Ankara is unlikely to dismantle that presence in the near future.
Beyond those, Turkey maintains bases in northern Cyprus, facilities in Qatar, and a training base in Mogadishu. Turkey’s regional footprint today is far larger than it was two decades ago.
Turkey’s expanding defence industry provides the material foundation for this more assertive foreign policy. Once a buyer of US weapons systems, Turkey has spent the last three decades building its capacity to produce a range of high- and low-end systems, from armed drones and navy vessels to armoured vehicles, missiles, tanks and artillery shells.
Defence and aerospace exports reached $10.05bn in 2025, a dramatic hike from $248m in 2002. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranked Turkey the 11th-largest exporter of major arms for 2021-25, with five Turkish firms—MKE, ASELSAN, Turkish Aerospace, Baykar and Roketsan—entering its global top 100 in 2025. Many of their systems have been battle-tested in Karabakh, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. In the early phase of the Ukraine war, Baykar’s TB2 “Bayraktar” drones gained particular prominence and have since become a symbol of Turkey’s defence-industrial rise. This transformation in the defence industrial base has given Ankara capabilities and relationships in Africa, Central Asia and Europe it did not possess two decades ago.
Greater autonomy, however, is not self-sufficiency. Turkish officials boast that the domestic share of defence production has risen from about 20% in the early 2000s to roughly 80%. But that figure conceals continued dependency on imported technology in propulsion, power transmission, advanced materials and aviation components. For example, Turkey’s flagship fifth-generation fighter-jet, the KAAN, relies on imported engines, as its indigenous turbofan is still in development. Altay tanks entered production with a South Korean power pack, pending integration of the domestic BATU engine and transmission. Imported engines and export licences have also complicated both production and sales of systems such as the Firtina howitzer.
One way Turkey has sought to overcome these constraints has been by embedding itself into the European defence base. In 2025, Baykar and Italy’s Leonardo formed LBA Systems, a fifty-fifty joint venture headquartered in Italy to build unmanned systems, while Baykar outright bought Italian aerospace company Piaggio Aerospace, with its production lines inside the EU. Also in 2025, Turkish Aerospace agreed to supply Spain with Hürjet trainer jets in a €2.6bn deal, which includes substantial production in Spain. These are co-production arrangements inside European supply chains.
Turkey’s defence-industrial autonomy is therefore uneven. It is strongest where companies have accumulated design experience and domestic supply chains, and weakest where production depends on complex propulsion or externally controlled components. And while the industry’s rise has reduced the ability of any single country or supplier to block Turkish military action, its most ambitious programmes still depend on Western technology, certification, finance and markets. This captures the logic of the embedded outsider. Turkey has built greater autonomy not by leaving Western industrial networks, but by using domestic production, offset agreements and selective partnerships to improve its bargaining position within them.
Ankara has not created its own geography, but it has learned to monetise it. Turkey sits between Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Russia, astride important trade and energy routes. It is crisscrossed by several energy pipelines despite producing little energy itself. And regional disorder only makes Turkey’s location more valuable.
Azerbaijani oil and gas cross Anatolia through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and the Southern Gas Corridor. Russian gas reaches Turkey and south-eastern Europe through Blue Stream and TurkStream, while Iranian gas enters from the east. Expanding liquefied natural gas terminals give Ankara access to seaborne supplies from America, Qatar and elsewhere.
Turkey has also invested in logistics and connectivity. The Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway connects Turkey to the trans-Caspian Middle Corridor, linking Central Asia and China westwards. Ankara regards the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which bypasses Turkey, as a geopolitical challenge. It has instead backed the $17bn Development Road, linking Iraq’s al-Faw Grand Port through Turkey to Europe. Instability in the Strait of Hormuz has given a boost to this project. This eastward reach also has an institutional home: Turkey leads the Organization of Turkic States, a bloc spanning Azerbaijan and Central Asia that hopes to turn the corridor’s unique geography and ethnic ties into standing political influence.
Turkey’s ambitions are also supported by an extensive cultural and diplomatic network. It now operates 255 diplomatic missions, up from 163 in 2002, with the number of African embassies rising from 12 to 44 in this period.
In addition to its diplomatic corps, there is the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency, the Turkish Maarif Foundation, the Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Yunus Emre Institute and the state broadcaster TRT World. All of those are active in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Turkish Airlines has also become an unusually effective instrument for connectivity and visibility. The Antalya Diplomacy Forum now serves as a flagship venue to showcase Turkey’s ambition to convene international actors, modelled after the Munich Security Conference, India’s Raisina Dialogue and Russia’s Valdai Discussion Club.
Perhaps Turkey’s most effective soft power, however, is one the state neither built nor controls. In 2024, Turkish producers exported more than 300 television dramas to over 150 countries, earning over $500m a year and reaching close to a billion viewers. They have made Turkey’s language, cities and lifestyle familiar across the Balkans, Middle East, Latin America and parts of Africa. The state has since moved to harness this success: TRT’s own historical epics carry a more explicit neo-Ottoman message abroad, while per–episode export subsidies introduced in 2026 aim to bend the commercial sector toward promoting Turkey’s image.
Meanwhile, humanitarian aid, education, religion, media, commerce and defence partnerships reinforce the conservative government’s “civilisational” narrative, placing Turkey at the centre of a wider historical and cultural world. Turkey’s overseas network promotes Palestinian rights and positions Turkey as a natural leader of Muslim nations. Erdogan’s slogan that “the world is bigger than five”, referring to the UN Security Council, captures this ambition.
Yet Turkey’s economic fragility sets a hard limit on its ambitions. Inflation peaked at 85.5% in October 2022 and, despite the return to orthodox monetary policy after the 2023 election, remained above 32% in mid-2026. A volatile lira and persistent inflation make it harder to finance reconstruction in Syria, sustain long-term influence in Africa and compete with other powers. Technological dependence, weak institutions and personalised decision-making reinforce these constraints.
Mediation became a signature of Turkish foreign policy in the mid-2000s. Under the Davutoglu doctrine of “zero problems with neighbours”, Ankara presented itself as a country able to speak simultaneously to the West, the West’s regional adversaries and the Muslim world. Ankara facilitated indirect talks between Syria and Israel in 2008, engaged in Balkan diplomacy and, alongside Brazil, negotiated a nuclear fuel-swap with Iran in 2010. Also that year, Turkey and Finland launched a UN Friends of Mediation group.
That premise collapsed with the Arab uprisings. Ankara’s support for Syrian opposition and the Muslim Brotherhood, along with its feuds with the Arab Gulf monarchies, Egypt and Israel, made Turkey increasingly party to the region’s conflicts rather than a neutral mediator. As it expanded its regional entanglements, the nature of its mediation efforts changed. From 2017, Ankara worked with Russia and Iran through the Astana process on ceasefires and de-escalation deals in Syria even while backing the opposition on the ground. In Libya in 2020, Turkey participated in the Berlin process as a stakeholder while its troops were deployed in Tripoli. Ankara was not mediating because it stood outside these conflicts, but because it was embedded in them.
From the 2020s, Turkey’s mediation rested on a different foundation. Its leverage came from its higher international profile and its unique access to regional conflicts, such as in Gaza and Ukraine.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Turkey has hosted several rounds of negotiations between Russian and Ukrainian officials, facilitated prisoner exchanges and, with the UN, brokered the Black Sea grain deal in 2022. None ended the war, but the grain agreement kept a critical maritime trade route open for almost a year and demonstrated the value of Ankara’s working relationships with both Moscow and Kyiv.
In the final round of negotiations leading to the Gaza ceasefire, Turkey used its relationship with Hamas to convince the armed group to sign the US-brokered agreement with a specific clause for disarmament. Ankara provided political guarantees that helped bring Hamas to the table, but its involvement also led Israel to veto a greater Turkish role in a multinational peacekeeping force in Gaza.
Turkey’s comparative advantage in mediation therefore does not come from neutrality but access. Its willingness to maintain relationships across geopolitical divides can make Ankara frustrating for its Western allies. But it is also precisely what allows Turkey to reach actors that Europeans and Americans sometimes cannot.
For Europe, the instruments described above could be assets or liabilities, depending on where and how Turkey uses them. The three case studies that follow trace that variation. In Ukraine and Syria, autonomy generates outcomes Europe wants—grain corridors, prisoner exchanges, a check on Russian and Iranian influence—that a more compliant ally could not have delivered. In the eastern Mediterranean, the same autonomy cuts the other way, pitting Turkey directly against two member states. Together, the three cases leave Europe with a question: how to channel an autonomy it can influence but cannot switch off.
Ankara’s position is often summarised as “pro-Ukraine without being anti-Russia”—a formulation that frustrates European allies but has proved durable. Turkey recognises Ukraine’s territorial integrity, including Crimea, and built a substantial defence relationship with Kyiv before the full-scale invasion, selling it Bayraktar TB2 drones and agreeing joint production. It was also among the few NATO states willing to provide strategically significant military technology before February 2022.
At the same time, Ankara refused to join Western sanctions, kept extensive ties with Moscow and described Russia’s aggression in cautious language. After the invasion, it invoked the wartime provisions of the Montreux Convention, closing the Straits to belligerent warships—a move that limited escalation while also constraining NATO’s naval access.
Ankara’s access to both capitals produced results, though not a ceasefire. In 2022, Turkey brokered the Black Sea grain deal with the UN and has facilitated several prisoner exchanges. But it has also been a key conduit for trade with Russia, the flipside of its balancing act.
Ukraine shows the embedded outsider at work: Turkey supports the principles and institutions that protect its own security while reserving the right to diverge from the broader Western strategy. While this balancing is self-interested, it has at times served Ukrainian or European interests.
Syria offers the clearest demonstration of Turkey’s embedded-outsider role in practice. After more than a decade of cross-border operations, troop deployments, intelligence work and local patronage, Ankara entered the post-Assad period with leverage few external powers could match: close access to President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government, influence over armed groups in the north, control of border routes, a substantial military presence, and a strong hand in debates about reconstruction and refugee returns. Assad’s fall also weakened Turkey’s rivals, Iran and Russia, and opened up space for Ankara to expand its political and economic influence.
Yet Syria remains a work in progress. Turkey met its core security objective—blocking a PKK-linked autonomous zone along its border—and deepened its leverage in Damascus, but it has neither established a new order nor reaped the economic benefits of its patronage.
Syria’s battered economy is one constraint. Ankara can reopen trade routes, repair energy links and position its companies for reconstruction, but it cannot finance Syria’s recovery alone; that will depend on external capital, European and Gulf support and governance reforms.
Israel is another problem. It remains deeply suspicious of an enlarged Turkish role and has attacked sites earmarked for Turkish military installations. Turkey, in turn, views Israeli support for Syria’s Druze and Kurdish minorities as an obstacle to state consolidation. The Turkish-Israeli rivalry, sharpened since 2024 by Gaza and in the contest for Syria’s new government, increasingly structures the regional order into rival camps: Ankara’s Sunni grouping on one side and an Israel-Greece-Cyprus bloc on the other.
Syria is therefore where Turkey’s embedded-outsider status could pay off most—and where its limits show most clearly. Ankara has access, military leverage and relationships Europe cannot easily reproduce, but not the financial resources and institutional capacity to rebuild Syria on its own. Its ability to shepherd the transition depends, paradoxically, on the very Western relationships it has sought to loosen.
The eastern Mediterranean shows the other side of bounded autonomy. Turkish hydrocarbon exploration in waters claimed by Greece and Cyprus triggered EU sanctions in 2020, and contested maritime claims between the three countries remain. This is potentially the most dangerous flashpoint in Turkey’s relations with the EU.
The dispute predates Erdogan. It is rooted in the unresolved conflict in Cyprus and competing interpretations of maritime jurisdiction in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean. Ankara rejects Greek claims that islands close to the Anatolian coast should generate extensive maritime zones, and resists any arrangement it sees as restricting Turkey’s access to the open sea. Successive rounds of UN-led negotiations—including a 2004 referendum and the 2017 talks at Crans-Montana—have failed to produce a settlement.
These longstanding trilateral disagreements have sprawled into a regional confrontation. Offshore gas exploration around Cyprus has repeatedly stoked tensions over the past decade, while closer defence and energy ties between Cyprus, Greece and Israel have reinforced Ankara’s sense of encirclement.
Tensions peaked in 2020, when Turkish and Greek vessels came close to direct conflict. The EU subsequently imposed targeted sanctions linked to Turkish drilling activities. At that time, the German former chancellor Angela Merkel became personally involved in shuttle diplomacy between Ankara and Athens and helped avert a military confrontation. But since Merkel left office, no European leader has had the same standing with Erdogan or mounted a comparable sustained effort to address the underlying political dispute.
As long as Cyprus remains divided, Ankara is unlikely to abandon its insistence that Nicosia cannot unilaterally develop the island’s hydrocarbon resources without agreement on how Turkish Cypriots will share in them. Ankara is also unlikely to accept any Greek extension of territorial waters from six to twelve nautical miles in the Aegean—a step the Turkish parliament declared a casus belli in 1995—on grounds that it would sharply curtail its own access to the open sea. That suggests a limit to punitive conditionality by the EU. Targeted sanctions may raise the price of Turkish actions, but by themselves they are unlikely to change Ankara’s position on an issue it regards as a core national interest.
But Europe has not yet seriously tested sustained diplomacy aimed at the source of the dispute. The EU should invest political capital in a renewed Cyprus settlement process, working alongside the UN and encouraging a negotiated arrangement between the island’s two communities. It should not approach the conflict simply as a dispute between a member state and an outside power. The EU cannot easily present itself as a neutral actor when Cyprus is itself a member state, but it can provide incentives, pressure Nicosia into talks, and use diplomatic weight and the prospect of deeper Turkey-EU integration, with security guarantees for Cyprus, to support a settlement. Without progress on Cyprus, the island will remain a perennial obstacle to a more functional relationship between Turkey and Europe.
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The three case studies show the uses and limits of Turkish autonomy. In Ukraine, Ankara worked both sides without breaking with either, creating access Europe could use. In Syria, Turkish power created leverage but not the resources to consolidate it. In the eastern Mediterranean, autonomy produced confrontation, while European sanctions contained some of the immediate costs without resolving the political dispute that generated them.
Europe’s Turkey policy swings between two illusions: that Ankara can be brought back to the Western alignment of the 1990s, or that it is lost and can only be contained. A country this entangled with Europe yet so determined to act alone fits neither.
The alternative is managed interdependence. It begins from two facts: first, Turkish autonomy is here to stay—no future government will return to unquestioned Western alignment; second, autonomy stops well short of independence—Turkey still relies on NATO for ultimate security, Europe for markets, capital, technology and regulation, and America for advanced defence cooperation and regional deterrence.
Europe should use that dependence without trying to eliminate Turkish autonomy. It should make Western cooperation valuable enough that Ankara keeps its forces interoperable, honours common rules and avoids partnerships that damage allied security.
There are limits to this policy. Ankara is unlikely to agree to Greek or Cypriot maritime claims, but it could be open to a UN-led settlement or a deal dividing hydrocarbon resources. Europe should push for that instead of settling for the status quo, even at the cost of having to pressure Cyprus into a new framework or resumption of UN-led talks.
The reality is that European leverage on the eastern Mediterranean is limited, and punitive measures will not change the Turkish calculus. In order to build leverage, Europe first has to define a credible endgame in the conflict and try something new: positive engagement with Ankara aimed at a durable settlement to the frozen conflict. A good place to start would be a pan-Mediterranean conference, inviting Turkey, to set out the disputes and the case for diplomacy. Following that, the EU could work with the UN to push Cyprus and Turkey back to the table, either for a final settlement on Cyprus or a resource-sharing deal on hydrocarbons.
On the broader agenda with Turkey, the EU should pursue separate, self-contained deals across defence, trade, regional security, migration and mobility. Cyprus can block some of these deals, but in the end can be persuaded by other member states to agree to a more pragmatic approach in return for security guarantees. Each deal should exchange concrete benefits for defined obligations with clear monitoring so that cooperation no longer rests on personal ties between leaders.
The return of Donald Trump somewhat complicates this strategy. Erdogan’s direct relationship with Washington can reduce the immediate cost of ignoring Brussels by giving Ankara another route into the Western system. But transatlantic uncertainty also cuts the other way. Turkey likes to hedge and understands that Trump’s America is a risky player—and that Europe is a good hedge against US volatility. As Europe assumes more responsibility for its own defence and Washington becomes less predictable, Turkey’s military capacity, geography and defence industry become more valuable to Europeans. The result is mutual leverage rather than European dependence alone. Ankara has alternatives to Brussels, but Europe also has assets—market access, industrial integration, finance and regulation—that Washington cannot replace.
This is where Turkish and European interests overlap most obviously. Europe is rearming; Turkey has factories, a fast-growing arms industry and capabilities relevant to Europe’s eastern and southern flanks. Excluding Turkey entirely from emerging defence-industrial arrangements would be self-defeating.
Yet that is roughly what has happened. In 2025, the EU launched its most ambitious defence effort to date—ReArm Europe, including SAFE, a €150bn joint-procurement instrument. SAFE is open in principle to candidate countries such as Turkey, but deeper participation requires a separate bilateral agreement with the EU, and Turkey has yet to conclude one. Cyprus and Greece have made clear that they view such access through the prism of their own security disputes with Ankara, and this is another way unresolved conflicts in the eastern Mediterranean constrain Europe’s ability to draw Turkey more deeply into its emerging defence architecture.
Turkey should be let in. Europe should use the linkage constructively: greater Turkish access to European defence programmes should accompany sustained de-escalation with Greece and progress on Cyprus, rather than being treated either as an unconditional entitlement or as a permanent exclusion.
EU institutions and member states should pursue this at different levels. The Commission and Council should create pathways for Turkish participation in EU-level defence instruments where political and security conditions are met. Meanwhile, individual member states should expand bilateral procurement, co-production and supply-chain partnerships with Turkish firms on a project-specific basis. Access should be conditional: tied to end-use guarantees, IP protection, sanctions compliance and limits on transferring jointly developed technology to third countries. Kept modular and reversible, such projects give Ankara a stake in interoperability and give Europe access to Turkish capacity without waving away its political and security concerns.
Economic interdependence is Europe’s strongest lever and Turkey’s main reason to stay close. Yet the existing customs union is outdated and ill-suited to a world of supply chain fragmentation, US tariffs, Chinese overcapacity, digital trade and climate regulation. It covers goods and little else—no services, no digital trade, no public procurement and almost no agriculture—besides having weak dispute mechanisms.
Modernisation of the customs union should be at the centre of the Turkey-EU relationship. An expanded agreement would deepen supply-chain integration, attract investment, support green and digital transitions, and pull Turkish regulation closer to that of the EU. And by helping the EU’s industrial competitiveness, it would strengthen its hand against both China and America.
Modernisation should proceed in stages, with access to new sectors tied to measurable compliance and stronger dispute settlement. The objective is not more trade for its own sake. It is to make the dependence run in both directions.
Turkey is now central to many crises in the Middle East, and there is room for Ankara and Brussels to work together more closely. But this does not have to be a single regional bargain. A more realistic model is a portfolio of issue-based coalitions.
In Iraq, both want stronger state institutions, better energy and transport links, reduced dependence on the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian-backed militias out of the military and politics. In Lebanon, both want functioning state institutions and reconstruction while containing escalation with Israel. In Libya and Somalia, maritime security, migration, energy and political stabilisation all provide areas for cooperation.
In the South Caucasus, Europe should continue to support Turkish-Armenian normalisation, the Armenia-Azerbaijan peace process and the east-west transit corridor. On Iran, Ankara’s rivalry with Tehran and diplomatic access to it are useful: both Europe and Turkey want neither an Iranian hegemon nor an Iranian collapse.
The 2016 migration deal reduced a complicated relationship to cash for border control, punctuated by political threats. Europe treats Turkey as a wall; Turkey periodically opens a door in it to make a point. This has delivered no more than short-term containment.
A more durable framework should distribute responsibilities more evenly between Turkey and Europe. It should combine joint border management with sustained refugee protection, greater EU financial support for Turkish municipalities and host communities and expanded resettlement from Turkey to EU member states. Any large-scale return to Syria should be voluntary and depend on improvements in security, housing, documentation, ability to earn a living and protection from persecution. Achieving that will require the EU to do more than simply leave returns for Turkey to manage: it should jointly monitor conditions on the ground, while helping finance reconstruction of civilian infrastructure Syria needs to improve those conditions.
The EU should also make legal travel easier for Turkish citizens: faster visa processing for students, academics, businesspeople, and families, alongside expanded educational and professional exchanges. The point is to replace money-for-containment with better mobility, giving Turkish citizens a reason to care about Europe while reducing Ankara’s ability to weaponise migration.
Managed interdependence cannot ignore Turkey’s authoritarian turn. Politicised courts, jailed political opponents and hollowed-out institutions render commercial deals less reliable and foreign policy less predictable.
But Europe’s response has often produced the opposite of what it intended. Keeping Turkey at political distance has not reversed democratic backsliding. It has instead weakened constituencies invested in European integration, reduced the EU’s influence over domestic reform and recast the relationship as an increasingly transactional exchange between governments. The lesson is not to abandon conditionality, but to use it more precisely and consistently.
Europe’s experience with Viktor Orban’s Hungary offers a partial lesson. It demonstrates the value of linking material benefits to specific institutional and rule-of-law conditions, and that different policy areas can be treated separately. But Turkey is not an EU member. It has an independent, regional presence, relationships beyond Europe and no obligation to submit to European courts. The EU’s leverage therefore is much narrower.
Conditionality should therefore be specific, proportionate and tied to the area of cooperation concerned. Instead of making the broader relationship contingent on an open-ended judgment about Turkey’s political trajectory, the EU should tie access to particular benefits to transparent and measurable commitments. Serious rule-of-law violations might affect access to EU financing or progress in areas requiring high levels of regulatory and judicial trust. Coercive actions abroad might trigger restrictions on particular defence-industrial partnerships or targeted measures against the individuals and entities responsible. Measures should have clearly defined triggers and, equally importantly, a clear route to reversal when the triggering behaviour stops.
This approach also requires distinguishing between the Turkish government and Turkish society. Measures intended to constrain the government should not unnecessarily restrict students, researchers, businesses, municipalities or civil society organisations whose interaction with Europe sustains the social foundations of the relationship. Visa access, academic cooperation, municipal partnerships and civil society programmes should therefore be insulated, as far as possible, from political disputes between Ankara and European governments.
Conditionality also has limits when disputes concern interests that Ankara defines as fundamental to sovereignty or national security. In such cases, increasing the cost of Turkish behaviour may signal European resolve without producing a change in policy. Conditionality works best when it creates incentives for a negotiated adjustment, not when it becomes a substitute for diplomacy. Europe therefore needs to pair credible costs with equally credible benefits and a political route back to cooperation.
Managed interdependence is not a substitute for democracy, nor does it require pretending that Turkish accession is imminent. It is a framework for organising relations in the space between joining and walking away. But that raises the question of what should happen to Turkey’s candidate status. Three options are on the table.
Re-opening accession negotiations is unrealistic: the talks have been at a standstill since 2018 and there is neither consensus for a fresh start nor much value in pretending membership is approaching. Formally closing the process would be worse. It would remove one of the last institutional links between the two, weaken pro-European constituencies inside Turkey and make cooperation harder without resolving a single underlying dispute.
The better course is to leave candidate status legally intact but politically dormant and build the cooperation around it. However, the relationship should not be called a “privileged partnership”. This term, floated in some European capitals in the past, remains toxic in Turkey as Ankara sees it as a demotion that in practice would close the accession door forever. The substance is more important: a deep and differentiated partnership of managed interdependence that both sides have reason to maintain, with the formal question left open.
Turkey would remain outside the EU’s political core but get closer where interests align: NATO planning, Ukraine and Black Sea security, defence production, trade, energy, migration, mobility and Syria. In return, Europe would demand greater predictability, sanctions compliance, institutional accountability and adherence to agreed rules.
Disagreement would persist over Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean, Israel, aspects of the regional order, and Turkey’s continued relations with Russia and China. Managed interdependence is not designed to erase those differences, but to prevent them from bringing down the wider structure of cooperation.
Europe’s choice is not between restoring the Turkey of the past and accepting permanent divergence. It is between an interdependence left hostage to crises and personal bargains, or one organised around common projects, reciprocal obligations and enforceable conditions. A successful strategy would give Turkey room to act as a middle power while making Western cooperation more valuable than the alternatives.
Over the past two decades, Turkey has gone from aspiring to regional influence to building the capabilities to exercise it—military deployments, overseas bases, defence exports, economic networks and diplomatic channels. The paradox is that much of this autonomy rests on continued integration with the West. Turkish embeddedness is the platform Turkish autonomy runs on. Ankara has learned to operate in the space between alliance and independence, sufficiently autonomous to shape regional crises, yet sufficiently embedded that the West cannot easily exclude it.
There are limits to this model. Turkey might be able to disrupt arrangements it opposes, but it has been less successful at building durable regional arrangements of its own. That asymmetry is the opening for Europe. A Turkey that can obstruct but not construct needs partners for what it wants to achieve—reconstruction money in Syria, advanced technology for its defence programmes and markets for its exports. Europe has been slow to use this leverage because it keeps looking for a different kind of relationship: an ally that agrees, or an adversary it can hold at arm’s length. Turkey is neither.
Europe needs to stop waiting. It should start using the interdependence that already exists around common projects and enforceable terms. This will not eliminate the contradictions at the heart of the relationship. It will instead turn those contradictions into a framework for bargaining, making cooperation possible without requiring alignment and disagreement manageable without producing rupture.
We are grateful to Jana Puglierin and the Re:Order team at ECFR for encouraging us to take on this project and for helping shape the original idea, and to Angela Mehrer for her coordination throughout. Thanks also to Jeremy Cliffe and the ECFR publications team for their guidance on the initial proposal and outline, and to Nastassia Zenovich whose work on the maps was essential. We would also like to thank the many officials, experts and practitioners who shared their insights with us on an off-the-record basis; their perspectives informed the argument in important ways. Finally, we are especially grateful to Taisa Sganzerla for her thoughtful and incisive editing, which sharpened both the structure and the argument of the paper.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş is an associate senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) and a fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, where she also directs the Turkey Project. Before joining the foreign policy community, Aydintasbas had a long career in journalism, including writing a Global Opinions column for the Washington Post. She has covered wars in the Middle East and lived in New York and Istanbul, holding positions at Milliyet, Cumhuriyet, and CNN Turk. She is a regular commentator on the Middle East and Turkey and her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, among others. Her recent publications include “Turkey’s search for a new Middle East order” and “Turkey’s post-American hesitation” on the impact of the Iran war. She has also recently written “Here is how one country may have solved a violent uprising” and “Trump, don’t repeat Churchill’s mistake” for the New York Times.
Evren Balta is a professor of international relations at Özyeğin University in Istanbul. She is also academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum, co-director of the Democracy Lab at Özyeğin University, a permanent member of the North South Futures Forum and a member of the Global Scholars Network on Identity and Conflict at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. She is also affiliated with the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC. She is the author or co-author of several books, including “The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism”, which received a Best Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She holds a PhD in political science from The Graduate Center, City University of New York, an MIA from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and an MA in sociology from Middle East Technical University.
This paper is part of the Re:Order project and was made possible with support from Stiftung Mercator, but does not necessarily represent its view.
European leaders losing sleep over Trump’s economic and territorial threats should spare a thought for their Canadian counterparts. On August 22nd, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney announced that his country was “at war” with the United States after trade negotiations collapsed at the eleventh hour. Trump’s subsequent renaming of Lake Ontario to Lake America echoed the crisis with Greenland in January, when the US called into question Denmark’s sovereignty over the territory and refused to rule out taking it by military force.
Both the EU and Canada, in other words, face a similar conundrum: how to de-risk their relationship with an increasingly predatory United States, which exposes them to security threats from Russia and poses a new threat of its own. It is against this backdrop that Carney will attend commission president Ursula von der Leyen’s State of the European Union Speech in Strasbourg on September 16th. An EU-Canada summit will follow in October. The timing could scarcely be better for Europe and Canada to make common cause. But if European leaders want to shift the relationship into a new gear, they will have to revise their usual approach to how the EU treats third countries, particularly in defence and security, where both sides’ dependence on the US runs deepest.
Some Canadians, traumatised by Trump’s bullying, have fantasised about joining the EU. Alas, Article 49 of the Treaty on European Union—its accession clause—restricts membership of the bloc to European states. But the EU need not choose between full membership and arm’s-length third-country status. A strict in-or-out model of security and defence co-operation risks excluding partners like Ukraine, Britain, Norway and Canada from key initiatives and the bloc’s defence technological and industrial base—leaving Europe less safe as a result.
The EU already treats one non-member as something more than an ordinary third country or even one on the path to membership: Ukraine has received notable carve-outs for the European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) and the EU’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) mechanism, which offers €150bn in low-interest defence loans—not to mention exemptions in other areas like trade, energy, and telecommunications. In other words, the question is not whether bending the rules is permissible under certain circumstances, but what those circumstances are. Extending the same treatment to Canada (as inoffensive an ally as they come) would be popular at home and would offer a template for how other relationships, including with Britain, could be structured.
There is already a clear trend towards a closer relationship between Brussels and Ottawa, especially on the defence industrial side. In 2021, Canada joined the military mobility project of the EU’s framework for deeper defence co-operation, PESCO. Last year, both sides signed a security and defence partnership and this year they agreed to Canada’s participation in SAFE.
On the bilateral front, Berlin and Ottawa are finalising a strategic partnership agreement which will include elements on defence cooperation, on top of agreements already signed with France, Denmark, and other Nordics. On the procurement side, German shipbuilder ThyssenKrupp Marine Systems won a contest to build 12 submarines for the Royal Canadian Navy—the biggest defence deal in Canadian history. Canada is also considering buying Swedish Gripen fighter jets instead of American F-35s and is building ice-breakers in Helsinki. Finally, Canada is actively involved in deterring Russia with boots on the ground in Latvia, where it leads a multinational brigade as part of NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP).
But these efforts are mostly non-binding and aspirational—except for SAFE (which is time-limited) and eFP (which sits outside of EU structures entirely). The EU-Canada summit at the end of October gives Brussels and Ottawa a concrete opportunity to turn these efforts into specific investments, capabilities and operational co-operation.
Canada is an underrated military power. The 2% of its GDP that it currently spends on defence is already more than the 14 smallest EU defence budgets combined
The EU stands to gain more from a closer relationship than one might think. Canada is an underrated military power. The 2% of its GDP that it currently spends on defence is already more than the 14 smallest EU defence budgets combined. Compared to the EU’s biggest defence spenders, it ranks behind only Germany, France, Italy and Poland. And its budget is set to increase significantly as Canada moves to spend 4% by 2030 and C$500bn (€310bn) over the next decade.
Much of that money will be invested in equipment and suppliers outside of Canada. As Carney made clear in a recent speech: “The days of our military sending 70 cents of every dollar to the United States are over.” EU defence projects should open up to countries outside the EU and the European Economic Area. Canada’s armed forces bring significant know-how in Arctic warfare, an area of increasing interest to Europe amid growing threats from both Russia and the US. And its six decades within the joint US-Canadian air-defence command, NORAD, give it rare experience of continental-scale air defence and early warning, just as Europeans scramble to expand their own independent missile-defence network.
The EU can use these resources and capabilities to deter Russia and wean itself off its dependence on America, starting with deeper Canadian co-operation with the EU’s defence projects and agencies. A first step would be encouraging Canada to join further PESCO projects. Canada’s expertise could be of great help in ACCESS, which aims to develop Arctic-capable, GPS-denied electronic warfare and sensor systems, and TWISTER’s space-based early warning strand. Canada could join both without too much red tape (for EU standards) because neither project is supported by the European Defence Agency (EDA). A second step would be an administrative arrangement between Canada and EDA, which would allow Canada to join EDA-supported PESCO projects it is currently ineligible for, as well as joint training, monitoring and research. Since the US already has such an arrangement, extending it to Canada should prove uncontroversial.
But the most ambitious step the EU could take would be to treat Canada as a full-fledged member of the EU’s defence technological and industrial base instead of as a third country. Member states and the commission should write Canada into EDIP’s successor, the ring-fenced defence-spending stream—or “window”—of the upcoming European Competitiveness Fund (ECF), which is currently being negotiated as part of the EU’s next budget.
As it stands, current EDIP rules will likely roll over into the ECF unchanged. Under those rules, a system built in Europe carrying 35% American components would qualify for funding, but a wholly Canadian one would not. When EDIP was being negotiated, members states deliberately created a carve-out for Ukraine. Member states should extend the same preferential terms to Canada under the ECF, but also go further, letting Canada run programmes as well as bid for them.
These would be major concessions and they must not be given away for free. The expectation should be that Canada pay for access, open its own procurement to European firms in return, and align its export controls with the EU’s. As a proof-of-concept, both sides could design at least one major system with no US export-controlled parts in it (a counter-drone system would work very well).
In addition to these efforts, Berlin and Paris should also throw their weight behind Canada’s proposal for a Defence Security and Resilience Bank. They might even propose merging it with Britain’s proposed Multilateral Defence Mechanism to create a coalition spanning Britain, Canada and EU member states.
As the EU’s borders come under pressure from multiple directions, there is a strong case for expanding Canada’s stake in European territorial integrity. That begins by establishing reciprocity. Europeans shouldn’t scoff at Canadian concerns—just as Denmark flew blood bags to Greenland in anticipation of a US invasion in January, so too have the Canadian Armed Forces modelled a possible US military invasion.
European countries should make it clear to Washington that its statements calling into question its ally’s sovereignty are intolerable. They should also prevail upon Canada to unequivocally pick sides should the US raise the Greenland issue again. In the event of a future military mission to Greenland, similar to the Danish-led Operation Arctic Endurance, or even a mission under the EU’s common security and defence policy, Copenhagen should invite Ottawa to join with boots on the ground, just as it has done in Latvia. Likewise, the EU could bind its anti-coercion instrument to equivalent Canadian countermeasures, ready for joint activation during a crisis.
Boosting Ottawa’s participation in Arctic issues would tie it more closely to the defence of the region more broadly and would give it a bigger role in defending European borders. After all, no serious conversation about the region is conceivable without Canada, whose Arctic territory is vastly larger than that of most other Arctic states. Canada is already part of the region’s multilateral infrastructure, but there is still scope to deepen its co-operation with the EU instruments specifically. One way to bridge the gap would be to take up the European Parliament’s proposal to create a dedicated EU-Canada Arctic cooperation framework with structured dialogues between EU and Canadian institutions.
An additional step which would contribute decisively to European security would be to invite Canada to the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), the UK-led coalition of northern European states. Canadian forces have already taken part in JEF exercises in Latvia last year and Carney has participated in virtual meetings of the group. Formally joining JEF, which sits outside NATO and EU structures, would involve little red tape and could happen almost immediately. As the US considers far-reaching troop reductions in Europe, any step that improves interoperability among non-US NATO allies is a win for the entire continent.
The steps outlined above are likely to draw America’s ire and invite retaliation. The US has repeatedly cast scorn on Carney’s middle powers strategy—an effort to rally mid-sized states against pressure from larger ones—which it increasingly views as a serious challenge to its primacy. Under-secretary of war for policy Elbridge Colby recently suspended the Permanent Joint Board on Defence, a longstanding US-Canadian strategic consultative body, and linked the pause to Canada’s weak defence spending and its middle powers strategy. Both the EU and Canada should expect increasing pushback if they embark on this joint course. But any American paroxysm will prove the point—that both Europe and Canada are better off together than alone or in thrall to Washington. If that means blurring the boundaries between EU member states and third countries, so be it.
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