This story is a part of the weekly newsletter about security, defence, and tech in the eastern flank of Nato, How we cee it.

Over the past few weeks, a new wave of fear has engulfed Europe. A number of intelligence and government officials have spoken out, saying Russia could possibly attack a Nato country within months, not years.

On 18 September, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk warned that Russia is planning hybrid strikes with drones or rockets on European countries that support Ukraine, such as Poland.

Two days later, Czech intelligence chief Michal Koudelka told the Guardian that, as well as increased drone activity, a small-scale invasion of Nato territory bordering Russia could be part of the Kremlin’s plans.

Then, last Thursday, Denmark’s defence intelligence service said that Russia is likely to intensify its hybrid war against the West in the coming months, with more frequent attacks against Nato countries.

On the same day, speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, Poland’s foreign minister Radosław Sikorski said, according to TVP World: “We are receiving information … that Russia is preparing something big this year.”

This is not the first time a wave of comments like this has appeared. A similar situation arose last year, when various officials in Europe took turns escalating their rhetoric about the Russian threat.

It is possible that they are speaking out again because new information has surfaced within the intelligence community. The communication goal could be letting Russia know that they know. Much like CIA director John Ratcliffe’s visit to Moscow last month, this could be an effort to make sure Russia doesn’t miscalculate.

The warnings also come in a different context from last year, when the Baltic countries were sounding the alarm. Russia has noticeably been turning up the temperature of its activity around Europe.

Back in July, a cruise missile crashed in Poland. According to experts, it was not a misguided missile, but one deliberately aimed at Poland. Then, in early August, a drone carrying an explosive device was discovered at Leipzig/Halle Airport in eastern Germany, close to Ukrainian cargo planes.

Germany’s interior minister Alexander Dobrindt said the Leipzig airport attack followed the “well-established pattern of Russian hybrid operations in Europe,” the BBC reported.

According to German investigators, who spoke to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the incident was also connected to other events, such as an attempted arson attack on a drone manufacturer in eastern Slovakia, and an arson attack in Munich on September 3, when several incendiary devices were thrown from a passing car onto a construction site near the headquarters of defence firms Rohde & Schwarz and Helsing.

In fact, there have been so many different incidents recently that the semi-regular drone incursions into Romania and the Baltics have become almost normalised and struggle to make headlines anymore.

Hypothetical scenarios abound

Scenarios of where Russia could take its hybrid attacks next are as abundant as onlookers’ creativity allows. They range from small attacks on factories, through the seizure of a small piece of land by an elite drone unit, all the way to the capture of the Suwałki corridor – a strategic piece of land between the Baltic states and mainland Europe.

Most recently, the CIA warned that while all eyes had so far been on the Baltics, Russia may be preparing a drone strike against Spain, France, and Italy.

According to Marko Mihkelson, chairman of the Estonian parliament’s foreign affairs committee, the snowball of speculation about an imminent Russian attack on Europe is gathering pace.

But as he sees it, isolated facts are being mixed with wishful thinking, worst-case scenarios and, at times, little more than the need to grab attention.

As he wrote in an opinion piece for the Estonian news agency ERR: “Russia understands that it can confuse and paralyse us through information operations alone. Constant speculation about the Baltic states and Poland risks creating the impression that this is primarily a problem for two or three countries on Russia’s doorstep, while the rest of Europe can somehow remain untouched.”

According to Mihkelson, Russia’s campaign against the West would not necessarily begin with a conventional attack.

It could start by undermining Nato from within: interfering in elections, amplifying polarising narratives, exploiting political divisions, and spreading fear. It could seek to isolate Ukraine by limiting Western support, and then test Nato’s willingness to stand together.

As for worries that Russia will attempt to grab land from the Baltics or Poland, there are no significant material or military changes to note along the borders.

Belarus did hold a four-day military exercise near its border with the Suwałki corridor in mid-September, but that is nothing close to the signals we were getting from Russia just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Back then, physical military infrastructure was being constructed ahead of the attack.

There are also no significant changes in the Russian military’s posture to launch a land attack against the Baltics.

Estonian government officials confirm this. According to Estonia’s minister of defence, Martin Herem, its assessment of the Russian threat remains unchanged.

That means Russia’s main effort remains focused on its war in Ukraine, and neither Estonia, Denmark, nor other Nato allies currently see a threat requiring raised military readiness.

Military experts in Lithuania also see no signs of new escalation. This doesn’t mean Russia won’t continue to be dangerous. It means that Russia has been engaged in provocations against Nato countries for years already, and similar behaviour will continue.

“No one is currently planning to conquer us – not at this moment, nor this year. In this case, specific, very precise attacks or provocations are more likely, designed not so much to cause physical damage as to sow serious panic in people’s minds,” Deividas Šlekys, a professor at Vilnius University’s Institute of Political Science and International Relations, told the Lithuanian wire LRT on Monday (28 September).

And so, while last autumn it was the Baltic states sounding the alarm about a potential Russian attack, now their officials are looking to calm the panic about their aggressive neighbour.

Less than two months after his government hosted the NATO summit — which was framed as proof of Turkey’s pivotal role in transatlantic security — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has proposed full Turkish membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, an entity that has been described as being anti-NATO or a “rogue NATO.” The apparent contradiction […]

The post Erdogan playing East and West, winning room to maneuver appeared first on Asia Times.

Gli effetti di una fusione tra banche vanno valutati considerando il mercato e i segmenti di clientela coinvolti. Le operazioni possono produrre guadagni di efficienza e migliorare la qualità dei prestiti. Ma possono anche portare a riduzione del credito.

L'articolo Fusioni bancarie tra efficienza e potere di mercato proviene da Lavoce.info.

By Prof. Glenn Diesen | September 26, 2026

The following are excerpts from my speech in Istanbul on September 26, 2026.

The unipolar world order has collapsed, and we should conduct a post-mortem to reflect on what went wrong and to understand the current turbulent transition of the world. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously published his article on the ‘End of History,’ which was largely adopted as an ideological guide by the political West. The world only had one superpower and one ideology, and the expectation was that the world would unify under US leadership and liberal democratic values. The dominance of the US would end international anarchy and security competition, as there was only one centre of power, and the US hegemon would elevate the role of liberal democracy to form an inclusive community of universal values. For more than three decades, the West produced a new generation of politicians who believed that the collective hegemony of the West was for the benefit of all mankind, and they were the administrators who would manage the transition from the chaotic world of the past to perpetual peace. So what went wrong?

The Contradiction of Hegemonic Universalism

The unipolar moment was always destined to be a temporary phenomenon, as the US would predictably exhaust its resources and incentivise rising powers to collectively balance the US. However, there is also an inherent contradiction in hegemonic universalism, as universal values are linked to one entity of power. A hegemon claims to represent universal values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights, albeit this universalism is promoted through a particular historical, cultural, and geopolitical order.

Universal values advocating for equality are used to institutionalise a dominant position for the US. Universal values advocating for inclusion are used to build exclusive blocs such as NATO rather than developing an inclusive pan-European security architecture. John Herz noted as early as 1950 that the more democratic states were at home, the more they seemed to insist on a dominant position in international institutions to defend liberal values from the rule of the majority. Liberal values build on the idea that tolerance is imperative, as all people and states have different ideas about the good life and their own path to development, yet the universality of values suggests that all states must develop along the same path, and the political West, as the champion of liberal democracy, is the civilizational teacher seeking to “socialize” the rest of the world. Liberalism has subsequently been promoted as a hegemonic norm.

The Revisionism of Hegemonic Universalism

The modern world order was established with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, in which a hegemonic system legitimised with universalist claims was replaced with a multipolar system based on the cultural distinctiveness of states. The past 80 years have been a historical anomaly, with a bipolar system that collapsed and gave way to a unipolar system with one centre of power. The normal situation of the world has been a multipolar Westphalian system with a power equilibrium.

Over the past decades, hegemonic universalism transformed European states as national competencies were transferred to the US. US military dominance meant that Europe largely outsourced its security and foreign policy to the US within the format of the alliance system. US economic dominance meant that the international economic architecture, with banks, currencies, payment systems, and trade agreements, was largely administered by the US. Civil society in Europe and beyond has been managed by “non-governmental organizations” financed by the US government and cooperating closely with US intelligence services. The European political system is premised on the idea that loyalty to international institutions is more vital and moral than national interests, as Europe’s linkage to the US within the political West is the main source of stability and prosperity.

Return of Civilizational Distinctiveness

The hegemon is now gone, and the universal claims are rejected by the wider world. A multipolar world is already here, and the rising powers are demanding a return to a Westphalian world order of sovereign equals based on civilizational distinctiveness. As Xi Jinping insists, all civilizations have their own path to development, and no aspiring hegemon has the right to tell others how to develop. The return of rhetoric about civilizational states across the Eurasian continent signifies a rejection of unipolarity and universalism. New institutions such as the SCO and BRICS attempt to accommodate the multipolar world, yet new members are joining faster than institutional efficiency can adjust to.

The US has reluctantly already begun adjusting to these new realities, as it recognises it cannot be everywhere and must prioritise, while the language of liberal universalism is being replaced with national interests. New political forces are rising in the US that want to scale back the empire to save the republic, as a strategic retreat would allow the US to rebuild its strength and end the collective balancing by other great powers. What makes Europe so dangerous today is its weakness and panic due to the failure of finding a new role in the multipolar system. Security can no longer be based on the dominance of the collective West; there is no clear economic model; and the claims of representing universal values are no longer convincing. Yet the Europeans are not willing to recognise new realities and adjust accordingly by diversifying economic and political connectivity. The available evidence suggests that this will be a very turbulent transition from unipolar universalism to multipolar distinctiveness, and the new world will more likely be born through war than diplomacy

The year 2023 was pivotal for understanding the effects of abortion restrictions in the United States. A year earlier, in June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the decision known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (JWHO), which overturned the abortion-rights protection established by a previous ruling from 1973: Roe v. Wade. Since then, thousands of American women have ended pregnancies with help from Mexican feminist collectives. Several recent studies put a face to those seeking abortions: a large share come from states such as Texas, where abortion is banned, and live in neighborhoods with high levels of poverty.

Seguir leyendo

© J. Scott Applewhite (AP)

We are experiencing not just one, but many tipping points in world history all at once. 

By Peter Hanseler | Forum Geopolitica | September 26, 2026

There have been many tipping points in history; to name just a few examples:

• The Peace of Westphalia in 1648
• The French Revolution of 1789
• The Congress of Vienna in 1815
• World War I in 1918
• World War II in 1945

Many of these turning points led to shifts in power in Europe. These were merely transfers of power within the world we now call the “Collective” West. Examples include the collapse of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Tsarist Empire at the end of World War I.

These shifts in power were significant, yet what is happening now cannot be compared to past turning points, as they encompass the entire globe. The reins of power are not being handed over within the West; rather, there will be a shift in power toward the East and the “Global South.”

From Tipping Point to Entropy

The scale, the number of nations involved, the geographic scope, and the speed at which the current geopolitical crises are unfolding are truly astonishing.

Ukraine as a War Platform for the U.S., NATO, the EU, and Russia

Russia Will Prevail Militarily

Looking at the military reports from the front lines, it becomes clear to any observer that Russia will achieve its military objectives. While Russia might have relinquished the Donbas, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia had a peace agreement been successfully concluded in the spring of 2022, such an agreement is unrealistic under the current circumstances, as Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson have been part of the Russian Federation since September 2022. It is currently unclear how far the Russian military advance will go. I have commented on this in my article “The Summer Peace Died,” to which I refer. For the situation on the front lines, I once again refer to Military Summary; I have been following this channel for nearly five years, and it provides objective reporting.

Catastrophic Mobilization Situation in Ukraine

There are thousands of videos showing young men being hunted down like animals on the streets throughout Ukraine in order to forcibly recruit them. Recently, however, videos have also been circulating that show some of those forcibly recruited being transported to the front lines without uniforms and even in handcuffs, like criminals—to prevent them from escaping. I’ll leave it to the readers to ponder the combat effectiveness of these men against battle-hardened and motivated Russian soldiers.

The latest move by the Ukrainian military leadership is to forcibly conscript women. Given this situation, it’s no surprise that Scott Ritter stated that the Ukrainians are losing 30 times more soldiers than Russia. We hear nothing in the West about this inhumane treatment of their own soldiers in Ukraine.

Ukrainian volunteers, who later disappeared without a trace, are said to have used drones and artificial intelligence to count the number of soldiers’ graves throughout Ukraine. They counted 2,000,054 graves. Added to this are the dead buried by their own people in mass graves and the wounded—the Ukrainians’ losses do indeed appear to be astronomical. Nevertheless, Zelenskyy claims that only 50,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed. A few weeks ago, I attended a funeral in Russia. The soldiers’ graves are easily identifiable by the Russian flag and the flag of the fallen soldier’s unit. There were soldiers’ graves, but no sea of flags like in Ukraine.

Military Victory Does Not Solve Russia’s Geopolitical Problem

Whatever needs to be achieved militarily, Russia will achieve it; however, this does not resolve Russia’s geopolitical problem on its western border, because the goal is not new territories, but peace in the West—a goal that Russia has literally been striving for centuries and has never been able to achieve. Time and again, Russia has been attacked from the West and has regularly paid a high price in blood, money, and industrial capacity—resources diverted to military spending rather than civilian purposes. As a result, Russia’s social development has been repeatedly set back.

If Russia wants to keep pace with the major powers in terms of its civilian economy in a sustainable manner, reliably securing its western border is an absolute prerequisite. Although Russia is the only industrialized nation in the world that is self-sufficient and thus capable of waging a war lasting decades, such a confrontation would massively hinder the country from achieving its actual development goals.

The U.S.’s Lack of Credibility in Negotiations with Russia

The U.S.’s lack of credibility in the eyes of Russia is multifaceted. On September 15, Foreign Minister Lavrov said, verbatim:

“If the Americans hadn’t backed away from the Anchorage agreements, if Europe hadn’t pulled them away from those agreements, we would have been living without war for a year now.” – Sergey Lavrov, September 15, 2026

Under this agreement, Russia would have made major concessions. Russia would have retained the Donbas, frozen the conflict in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, and relinquished further territories. Objectively speaking, this was a bad deal for Russia, but it demonstrated the Russians’ considerable willingness to compromise. The Russians assumed that this verbal agreement was binding as a gentlemen’s agreement. However, gentlemen’s agreements should only be made with gentlemen. The Americans taught the Russians otherwise. The Russians are dismayed about this incident and have had to admit that no agreements are possible with the U.S. government. Personally, I’m surprised by the fact that this realization came so late. Even written agreements with the U.S. government are not to be trusted. This was evident in the breach of the Memorandum of Understanding that the Americans signed with Iran in June. Thus, one must conclude that this conflict—or any conflict in which the U.S. is directly or indirectly involved—must be fought to the bitter end. A bitter lesson for every contractual partner of the U.S.

The Risk of Escalation is Significant

Ukraine is desperately trying to officially draw NATO into this military conflict. It is astonishing that European countries—above all Germany and the United Kingdom—are not only signaling their willingness to do so, but are actually doing everything they can to prepare their people for a war with Russia.

Instead of naming many people, we’ll use Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg—former cabinet minister and Member of Parliament for North East Somerset—as an example. In this excerpt from an interview, he compares the situation with Russia—without naming it—to the situations during World War I and World War II:

Young people are thus being called to arms to prepare for war against Russia. In Germany, such efforts have failed miserably. Of the more than 300,000 young Germans surveyed, only 0.17% volunteered to serve in the Bundeswehr. Furthermore, it came to light a few days ago that the Bundeswehr itself could not even find 5,000 volunteers for a battalion in Latvia.

It is incomprehensible what these European countries are up to besides spreading propaganda. Even combined, the European countries do not possess military forces that would give them even the slightest chance of standing up to the Russian armed forces. The Russians are by no means impressed by this farce in Europe—they are disgusted by it. I assume that this war propaganda in Europe serves only to perpetuate the anti-Russian narrative.

Both President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov have repeatedly emphasized that they have no interest in attacking NATO targets outside Ukraine. However, if European countries are foolish enough to send even small European military contingents to Ukraine, the situation could change abruptly.

The greatest risk of escalation at the moment is that the Europeans, presumably in collaboration with the Americans, are planning a false flag attack in Europe in order to somehow trigger Article 5 of the NATO Charter. According to geopolitical analyst Warren Thornton, preparations for false flag attacks are in full swing. He writes on X:

I can’t say whether this theory is correct, but it’s by no means far-fetched that the Europeans would attempt something so outrageous.

U.S. Military Campaigns in the Middle East Beginning in 2001

Looking back over the past 25 years, the U.S. has sought to reshape the Middle East according to the Wolfowitz Doctrine since 2001. None of the wars the U.S. launched during this period (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, etc.) were successful. In fact, it was already evident back then that the hegemon lacked the resources, military strategy, strength, and credibility needed to act successfully. However, if one’s view is that the actual intent was destabilization and chaos, then they were extremely successful. Nevertheless, they returned to the plan in collaboration with Israel, apparently after Israel had succeeded in completely undermining American policy.

Israel: Genocide and Greater Israel

The immediate starting signal for the “Genocide” and “Greater Israel” projects was given on October 7, 2023, when a military operation by Hamas was turned into a false flag attack to justify the genocide against women, children, and other civilians in Gaza and, later, in the West Bank and Lebanon. This, in turn, served as the starting signal for the continuation of the Greater Israel project; initially, Syria and Lebanon were attacked. Although the Western press not only downplays Israel’s genocidal and imperialist actions but also fully supports and fuels them—including through the media of “neutral” Switzerland—Israel is viewed with increasing criticism by the general public in the Western world. According to Pew Research, 60% of Americans view Israel negatively. The Western media thus conveys an image that finds no resonance among the general public.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium to address the plenary session on Thursday, delegates to the UN General Assembly left the hall in droves.

Netanyahu called these delegations “moral cowards”—in other words, genocide requires courage—I am at a loss for words.

One interesting photo shows the plenary hall during the speeches by Netanyahu and Perseshkian.

It is important to me to continually remind my Western readers of what is actually happening in Gaza right before our eyes—eyes that many choose to close.

Major Escalation in the Middle East—Loss of Control

Starting in February 2026, events began to accelerate even further. Since then, everything has gone wrong for the West and Israel in the Middle East. The Global South has already wrested the initiative from the West. While Iran initially limited itself to responding to American-Israeli aggression, it is now the Iranians and the Yemeni Ansar Allah movement who are setting the pace.

Ansar Allah managed to bring the entire western coast of Yemen under its control in a very short time and thus controls not only the Bab al-Mandab Strait but also the island of Perim Mayyun off the coast. With virtually no Western media coverage, the advance continues, and it is quite possible that Aden will soon be captured.

Furthermore, the Saudis’ East-West pipeline was paralyzed and targets near Riyadh were attacked. So far, the Saudis have been unable to mount a serious military response to this large-scale attack, as they do not seem capable of doing so on their own, and repeated calls for help to Trump and others have been in vain. The Mecca Alliance, which unites Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey in a military alliance, also appears to be a thing of the past, as even these “friends” refused to provide assistance.

President Macron’s grand announcement that he will send troops to Saudi Arabia won’t change any of that. “Arabia” is called Saudi Arabia because this country is ruled by a family—a tribe—the Sauds. A tribe that is protected by the Americans. However, there are approximately 100 other tribes within Saudi Arabia. It’s very possible that they could join forces with Ansar Allah and overthrow the House of Saud. The House of Saud no longer has any income and seems unable to continue buying off—as it has done until now—all those who could pose a threat to them. There’s a chance that the Saud house of cards will collapse, and if that happens, I wouldn’t give a penny for the remaining Gulf states.

Alastair Crooke also pointed out on several occasions that this dynamic could spill over into Iraq, another millennia-old civilization alongside Iran. If that happens, Kuwait will likely fall as well. Another smoldering conflict can also be detected in Jordan. It is therefore quite possible that the entire structure in the Middle East established by the British a good 100 years ago could collapse within a few months, without the Americans being able to stop this tsunami in any way. Arabia to the Arabs, Persia to the Persians, and the Americans out for good. If this happens, Israel will go from perpetrator to target; one certainly cannot speak of it as a victim in this context. How the emerging great powers of the Middle East will deal with the genocidal Zionists should be left to those who have suffered the greatest losses, for Palestinians are Arabs.

Europe

Chaos is once again rearing its head in Europe. Germany is the first country—once the world’s leading exporter and the major power in the EU—that is in danger of becoming politically ungovernable. The Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has been labeled as far-right and Hitler-like by the previously dominant parties and excluded from government participation by a so-called firewall , not only won landslide victories in two state elections in eastern Germany but also leads the CDU by a clear margin in national polls (30% to 20%). Chancellor Merz’s approval rating stands at 10 percent—a barometer that reveals the people’s dissatisfaction and would have driven any truly democratic chancellor to resign. Whether the Germans, in light of this political situation, will clench their fists and do nothing, as they have in the past, remains uncertain. The chancellor’s downfall would be good for Germany. The AfD is the only major party seeking dialogue and peace with Russia, which is not only desperately needed by this once-thriving industrial nation but is also a prerequisite without which it cannot survive economically. The alternative to real and fundamental political change in Germany is the war against Russia sought by Chancellor Merz and the ruling political elites. The last time Germany went to war against Russia in 1941, Adolf Hitler sent 3.7 million soldiers eastward and failed, despite the Germans’ genocidal behavior, which cost the lives of approximately 17 million civilians. As already explained above, the Federal Republic of Germany today finds itself unable to assemble a brigade of 5,000 volunteer soldiers for the Baltic states. This does not seem to concern the chancellor, which is a clear sign of the madness that has taken hold of him. This is strong evidence that he is acting in the interests of a power located outside Germany. One would be a naughty person to believe that this has anything to do with his BlackRock past. Those who managed to install him as chancellor can pat themselves on the back, as they’ve snagged a puppet at the bargain price of a few million.

The following clip shows how the new leadership in Berlin is presenting itself—the Left has taken over. No words needed:

The situation in the rest of Europe is no more encouraging. The presidential election in France will take place in April 2027. Macron is no longer eligible to run, and Marine Le Pen has a significant lead over the other candidates. The situation is thus similar to that in Germany: a party that is denounced as far-right by the parties currently in power, yet is the most popular among the people. Le Pen’s position on peace with Russia is unclear—she seems to be speaking with a forked tongue: on the one hand, she wants a negotiated peace, but at the same time supports the training of Ukrainian troops. A seasoned politician who positions herself to capture as many votes as possible. France’s financial situation is grim, with no silver lining. The rise in the interest rate on 10-year French bonds over the past twelve months has been even steeper than in any other European country.

Trump

President Trump’s policies only seem difficult to understand at first glance. His constant flip-flopping on Ukraine, Iran, and Israel is counterproductive and damaging to the U.S.’s reputation on the world stage. The reason behind Trump’s current actions is the midterm elections in November. Trump is struggling with the high oil prices he himself has caused, which he can prevent from spiraling out of control by manipulating the futures markets. However, actual market prices are 30% to 50% higher than the manipulated, fantasy futures prices. The fact that futures prices are indeed manipulated is evident, for example, in diesel prices at gas stations, which are moving in only one direction and have reached unprecedented levels worldwide. Diesel is the lifeblood of the American economy, and high prices are one of the biggest drivers of inflation, since virtually all goods are transported by trucks, agriculture depends on it, and large parts of industry rely on diesel. Trump’s latest farce: He’s blaming Zelenskyy for the high diesel prices because Ukraine is attacking Russian refineries; he’s doing this solely to divert attention from the biggest price drivers—the blockades of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab.

Somehow, Trump wants to turn things around, but it seems that he will lose the midterm elections coming up in about six weeks. According to Polymarket, an American online prediction market where users bet on the outcomes of future events—with market prices reflecting collective probability estimates—the probability that the Republicans will lose their majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate stands at 66%. Should this come to pass, Trump will likely face impeachment proceedings. He then runs the risk of going from a lame duck to a dead duck and being replaced by his turncoat vice president, Vance—not a promising outlook for the United States.

Trump’s latest appearance this week before the UN General Assembly was a testament to his psychopathic nature: He announced—nota bene after the election—that he would either make Iran a rich country or obliterate it completely.

Trump is every bit as bad as Adolf Hitler. In his speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on September 4, 1940, Hitler said, “We will wipe out their cities.” Trump wants to wipe out a 5,000-year-old civilization—without any legal basis, of course—acting like a god. In doing so, Trump is publicly calling for the genocide of an entire civilization. One might wonder whether he belongs in prison or in a psychiatric hospital, but the fact that he can make such statements before a global audience with impunity shows the depths to which Western civilization has sunk. I refer to a speech I gave in Switzerland on September 3.

The Financial Markets

I have made numerous comments on the instability of the financial markets. Now my dire predictions seem to be coming true. In addition to the overvaluations in the stock markets, I have repeatedly pointed out the unsustainable situation in the bond markets. Among the more astute market participants, fear is beginning to set in. Mr. Bessent has lost control of interest rates. On August 28, 2026, I looked at the average interest rate the U.S. had to pay on its debt; at that time, it stood at 3.35% (May), resulting in an annual interest burden of 1,340 billion. Today, this average interest rate stands at 3.49% (August); the debt mountain currently stands at 40,070 billion, meaning it has already increased by another 70 billion. Annual interest payments have thus risen by 56 billion to 1,396 billion per year in this short period of time.

Over the past 28 days, the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond has risen from 4.722% to 5.185%, an increase of 0.46%. It does not appear that this trend will change. If this pace continues, not only will the government bond market collapse, but so will the towering mountains of debt in the AI sector. The same picture is emerging in Europe and Japan as well. The question isn’t whether the collapse will happen, but when—and who the U.S. will let go first: the Japanese or the Europeans. That is my personal opinion. When it comes to timing, I’m regularly wrong, which has taught me not to be active in these markets. I have the great privilege of meeting regularly with one of the world’s most successful investors. At our last meeting, he agreed with me in principle but remarked that I couldn’t possibly imagine what tricks and means the Americans still have at their disposal to delay the inevitable.

The scale of this crisis will dwarf anything humanity has ever seen. Compared to today, the 2008 crisis was a stroll through a sunny park with a delicious picnic. Such a collapse in the West will also affect the countries concerned’s geopolitical freedom of action; suddenly, everyone will be very preoccupied with their own problems. No one knows whether this will lead to an escalation in the geopolitical arena. What is certain, however, is that the “experts”—who are still driving the markets forward with their jubilant cheers—will solemnly declare that this simply could not have been foreseen—as always.

Entropy

All of these individual tectonic shifts lead to what can be described as entropy, a term from thermodynamics. Applied to geopolitics, I describe the situation as a massive, irreversible state of disorder and uncertainty within the various international systems. Existing power structures, rules, institutions, and hierarchies are losing their cohesive power, and a new order that would promise stability is not in sight.

For the collective West, which until recently held the reins firmly in its hands, is unwilling to make compromises so as not to jeopardize its position as a hegemon.

The Global South, taken by surprise by the rapid pace of events, has not yet devised a coherent, unified, and effective policy to wrest power from the West.

It appears that the Global South, under the military dominance of Russia, China, and—most recently, Iran as the fourth major military power—is in the process of adapting to the new circumstances and coordinating its efforts, which will ultimately lead to its victory.

How long this will take, however, and whether the West will use nuclear weapons to maintain its hegemony remains to be seen—though I would like to express my doubts on this point. So far, only Adolf Hitler believed that Germany should go down with him. Let’s hope that cooler heads are in control of the apocalyptic buttons.

Let’s not lose all faith in humanity.

Obwohl ich eine anstrengende Woche als Wahlbeobachter bei den Parlamentswahlen in Russland hatte, haben wir es geschafft, wieder eine Folge von Tacheles mit Röper und Stein aufzuzeichnen, die nun online ist. Sollte YouTube die Sendung löschen, finden Sie sie auch hier bei NuoViso.

Press TV – September 24, 2026

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs Kazem Gharibabadi has said NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s admission that some 5,000 sorties were flown from European bases in support of US military aggression against Iran proves that Europe formed part of the infrastructure of that aggression.

In a post on X on Thursday evening, Gharibabadi wrote that the NATO chief’s remarks demonstrated Europe’s role in enabling the illegal US campaign.

“Governments that placed their territory at the disposal of the United States cannot evade their responsibility,” he said. “This participation will not go unanswered.”

Rutte has repeatedly acknowledged that thousands of US military flights, between 4,000 and 5,000, departed from bases in Europe during the US-Israeli war of aggression against the Islamic Republic, which began on 28 February.

He described Europe as a “platform of power projection” without which Washington could not have conducted the operation.

Countries including Italy, Romania, the United Kingdom, France and Germany were cited in connection with the use of bases, airspace, tankers and logistics.

Iran has consistently described the US-Israeli assault as an unprovoked act of aggression in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and international law.

Tehran has stressed that providing territory, bases or infrastructure to an aggressor state itself constitutes participation in the act of aggression, as recognized under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3314.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi separately warned European officials in New York of the severe and long-term consequences of facilitating and supporting US and Israeli war crimes, both in Gaza and against Iran. He noted that submitting to a bully never satisfies that bully.

By Tarik Cyril Amar | RT | September 24, 2026

Great Britain is going through a war scare. Or to be precise, its combined political and media establishment is subjecting its people to a relentless propaganda (in up-to-date NATO-speak “cognitive warfare”) campaign to create a sense of impending war against Russia.

As you would expect, that war is, of course, framed as strictly defensive. In propaganda textbook manner, the message is both very simple and very repetitive: The UK is in great danger of a Russian attack, and its whole population must prepare itself to withstand and resist it.

It goes without saying that Moscow’s repeated declarations of having no such intention make no difference.

Britain is certainly not alone in its establishment-induced hysteria. Much of NATO-EU Europe is undergoing, in essence, the same treatment. In France, for instance, President Emmanuel Macron has called a theatrical all-manicured-hands-on-deck meeting to give what can only be called a national scare talk about “Russian hybrid warfare”; in Germany, Berlin and its mainstream media won’t stop stirring the pot about the murky drone affair at Leipzig-Halle airport.

Yet, over the last weeks, within a crowded field of European panic-mongering, Britain has stuck out as especially virulent. The single most grotesque contribution was made by uber-Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg. Comfortably seated against a backdrop that screamed country-squire probity, Rees-Mogg held forth on war within the next few years, ancient Rome (he’s been to Eton, he wants you to know) and, most importantly, “circumstances where people may have to die.” Either that or – so Rees-Mogg’s stern message – decline and fall, as happened to those Romans, who let mercenaries do their fighting and thus lost their empire.

So much to unpack. For one thing, the reference to paying others to fight – and die – must be a Freudian slip. Surely, Sir Jacob cannot have meant to refer to how the West, Britain very much included, has paid the Kiev regime to send its subjects – if need be, after kidnapping them – into the folly of a proxy war meatgrinder to demote Russia. And then, that Roman Empire analogy? Clearly, Rees-Mogg, true to type, is still struggling with the fact that Britain has its imperial collapse well behind it already.

Yet, sour oddball as he is, the arch-conservative – and multimillionaire – Rees-Mogg is perfectly representative of the current British establishment trend. Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for instance, has just used his first UN General Assembly address in New York to blame his country’s misery not on, say, his predecessor and Labour Party comrade Keir Starmer, but on Russia.

Meanwhile, at home, Sky News is rolling out ‘The Wargame’,  a bizarre “docu”-fantasy in four parts, built on the premise that the Russians are coming, no, they really, really ARE this time!

Pretending to be a sort of “realistic” account of what a British government would do in case of Moscow launching a series of escalating attacks, this production – from available reviews – is unusually awful shlock. It features has-been politicos doubling as un-reality TV stars, such as Michael Gove and Nicola Sturgeon, and living out their inner Tom Clancy by pretending to be serious, decisive, and, most of all, terribly important to the nation’s survival.

Unintentionally funny, though, as it may be, ‘The Wargame’ clearly has substantial political support and much hype around it. Propaganda can easily look ridiculous and be highly toxic at the same time. Because effective propaganda is, above all, one simple thing: the psychological manipulation of the many by the few. This is such a case. The viewers of ‘The Wargame’ are fed a silly but efficiently dramatized story, with the whole bag of well-worn but powerful tricks: suspense, shock, and, last but not least, a thrilling score.

It’s no surprise that the attitude of those doing the manipulating is, at best, patronizing. And to be fair even to the unbearable, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who carefully tends his beyond-caricature English-toff image, is quite honest about his disdain for ordinary people and their expendable lives. From his always obstinately ill-fitting yet clearly expensively tailored suit to the diction of a terribly bored yet forbearing Eton headmaster, his performance oozes good old upper-class condescension.

When Rees-Mogg tells you that you may have to die, you know he won’t lose sleep over it, because you are you, and he – well, he is something entirely different and, really, much better (and, as it happens, richer, too), of course.

In a Sky News interview, the UK’s Chief of the Defense Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, has revealed a less excentric as well as more insidious approach to the masses. Referring to a “national conversation on defense,” both he and his interviewer took it for granted that the purpose of such a conversation is to remedy “what the British public hasn’t got, […] haven’t understood.”

What a delicate way to start a “conversation”: let me tell you how damn slow you are and where you need to catch up. Not: Let’s exchange views and respect each other as equal citizens. Indeed, it’s not only very rude – what has happened to English manners? – but positively Orwellian to call such offensively complacent preaching a “conversation.”

Marshal Knighton’s idea of how the British can and must do better was no less revealing: In essence, be more like the Estonians or, at least, the Swedes. Because in Estonia “the threat from Russia” is “part of normal daily conversation,” and in Sweden, they are at least trying to achieve the same single-minded obsessiveness.

There you have it, chums on the homefront: Make an effort, will you now? Learn from the worst, get a grip, and make your whole life turn around the fear we tell you to feel.

And don’t you dare notice that – how embarrassing, really – it is precisely the Estonian authorities who, notwithstanding their generally record-level Russophobia – have just called on everyone in NATO-EU Europe to cool it.

Because, those unpredictable Estonians tell us, the Russia-at-the-gates narrative “has been blown completely out of proportion. For example, Russia makes some adjustments on the other side of the Narva River and now everyone across NATO is losing their heads and hyperventilating over it,” while, in reality, “there is absolutely no reason to believe that Russia is imminently going to launch a military attack on NATO, Estonia, or the Baltic states.” Oops.

Unfortunately, war propaganda is almost immune to its own absurdities, inconsistencies, and plain silliness. Because it is designed to operate not by appealing to reason but to fear, stereotypes, and conformism. A conformism that some British establishment members already openly want to reinforce by locking up any dissenters.

The true weak spot of this warmongering may be its arrogance. There are signs on social media that many Brits do not appreciate their establishment’s latest efforts to scare and mobilize them for senseless war. Let’s hope that the mix of threats and condescension – displayed by a snob as gleefully aloof as Rees-Mogg, an officer-bureaucrat as clumsily tactless as Knighton, and the makers of something as slick as ‘The Wargame’ – rubs much of the country the wrong way. The “elites” are insane and malevolent. Any hope for peace and a return to reason will have to come from below.

---

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian from Germany working at Koç University, Istanbul, on Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, the history of World War II, the cultural Cold War, and the politics of memory.

Defence Minister David McGuinty says he's taking a 'cautious' approach to drawing conclusions from intelligence as European leaders warn Moscow may be preparing attacks on NATO.

Defence Minister David McGuinty says he's taking a 'cautious' approach to drawing conclusions from intelligence as European leaders warn Moscow may be preparing attacks on NATO.

Across Europe, officials are issuing unprecedented warnings about a sharp escalation in Russian aggression and an even larger one that could soon come. As a result, they are scrambling to protect against the rapidly evolving threat Russia poses.

The dire messaging, growing louder by the day, is being delivered amid concerns about intensifying hybrid attacks that Russia is using to spread fear throughout the continent, fray the NATO alliance, and make it think twice about continuing support for Ukraine. Intel has increasingly pointed to the possibility that this could culminate in a much more severe operation, one that would be aimed to challenge NATO at its core.

All this is taking place against the backdrop of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine that shows no signs of abating. Kyiv just launched its largest drone attack on Moscow, which is burning on a near nightly basis amid ongoing strikes while Ukraine has introduced a new ballistic missile to its long-range arsenal. Russia for its part continues to try to advance on the ground in the east and south as it carries out daily airstrikes across Ukraine.

Our long-range responses had a very significant impact in the Moscow region last night. One of Russia’s key oil industry facilities and the aggressor’s logistics facility were hit. These are billions of dollars that sustain the war machine. The systems used included FP-1, RZ-100,… pic.twitter.com/ka5mlDSgb7

— Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) September 20, 2026

“There has definitely been an uptick” in Russian so-called hybrid warfare actions of late, a senior NATO military official told TWZ on Monday morning. “Despite its accusatory statements towards NATO, which remains a purely defensive alliance, Russia remains the aggressor. We see that clearly in Ukraine, where Russia is losing more than just the war it started. It therefore may incorrectly perceive the only way out is through increasing its hybrid campaign. That’s a losing proposition, because we are ready to respond, which we have shown.”

The official’s comments come after the shoot down last week of a suspected Russian drone that entered Lithuanian airspace from Belarus and in the wake of recent defensive actions by several European nations.

On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron told reporters that his country had recently been targeted by Russian hybrid attacks. He ordered “the government to prepare a plan to protect our critical infrastructure” and the “most sensitive” defense industry and technology sites against drone and cyberattacks.”

Macron said the “intention behind it is to intimidate us and to derail the effort to support the Ukrainians. The consequence will be the opposite.”

In addition to Macron’s warnings, the French newspaper Le Monde reported that the French military was carrying out clandestine operations against Russia. However, the unnamed source cited offered no details and TWZ cannot independently verify that claim.

A day before Macron’s statements, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned in a speech to the Polish parliament that Russia is planning hybrid strikes with drones or rockets on European countries supporting Ukraine, including Poland.

The Polish leader offered an assessment about Moscow’s motives similar to Macron’s.

Russia will pretend the attacks are “accidental” in order to “paralyze or at least weaken the motivation of NATO countries” to rush to the defense of the member state coming under attack, The Associated Press noted.

“There is a real risk that drones or other types of projectiles will enter the territory of one or several countries on the eastern flank and even cause destruction,” Tusk cautioned. In July, a Russian AS-23 cruise missile crashed in Poland.

In the face of these growing threats, officials in Lithuania are updating evacuation plans in case of a Russian attack.

“Poland is to be one of the evacuation destinations from the capital,” Žygimantas Solovjovas, head of the Civil Defense Department at Vilnius City Hall, told Polish Radio. 

Evacuation should begin before a direct threat arises, Solovjovas stressed. “Vilnius residents should not assume that they will flee the city along an evacuation route while under fire,” Solovjovas explained, adding that in such a situation, one must seek shelter. 

“One of the reasons for preparing this plan was to get residents accustomed to the idea that this should be a controlled process,” he noted. “If we allow chaos to ensue, the entire operation will be much more difficult.”

In Germany, where Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said Russia could attack by 2029, hospitals are preparing for a future influx of war-related casualties.

“In a report that gamed out potential scenarios should Russia invade NATO territory, the Bundeswehr calculated that as many as 1,000 wounded soldiers could arrive in Germany each day,” Bloomberg News reported last week. “As the country’s five military hospitals would quickly reach capacity — and the law requires that civilian hospitals help during wartime — the system would likely come under unprecedented strain, and could be forced to triage soldier and civilian care.”

As we noted last week, the alliance writ large is taking action against the growing Russian threats as well. 

NATO’s air commander, U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, told reporters, including from TWZ, last week that he was tasked with implementing two NATO air and missile defense plans. Hinds is also the Air Force’s top officer in Europe, serving as the commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe/U.S. Air Forces Africa (USAFE).

Adding to the concerns about Moscow’s actions, Russia’s client state Belarus just wrapped up mechanized and tank battalion training adjacent to the Suwalki Gap. That’s the border between Poland and Lithuania that separates the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad from Belarus. It has long been considered a potential flashpoint for a war in Europe and the training exercise exacerbated concerns that NATO allies are not prepared for a Russian attack there.

Russia is also making some potentially concerning preparations.

The Defense Ministry is reportedly seeking “an additional 16,000 to 20,000 hospital beds for wounded soldiers in the Northwestern Federal District,” according to the Russian Volya Telegram channel. That district is located near the Baltics.

“Military hospitals have been struggling to cope with the influx of wounded since 2023, so the Ministry of Defense is increasingly using civilian hospitals (including maternity hospitals and specialized medical facilities) for its needs,” Volya stated. “Some of these hospitals are being completely repurposed for military use, but more often, civilian hospitals allocate a few departments to treat the wounded, while continuing to provide care for civilian patients in other departments.”

The expansion “will primarily affect regions within the Northwestern Federal District: Karelia, St. Petersburg, Leningrad and Novgorod regions, as well as Smolensk,” which are near the Baltics “and the Moscow regions.”

While Russia is framing this as a way to handle the influx of wounded from the ongoing conflict, Ukrainian analysts see this as a move to prepare for an expansion of hostilities into Europe.

Militarnyi: In the fall of 2026, the Russian Federation plans to add 16,000-20,000 military beds in civilian hospitals in the Northwestern Federal District, located near the Baltic states. pic.twitter.com/0sLMvoCxfC

— MAKS 26 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) September 15, 2026

In addition, the Border Service Directorate for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region announced that from September 16 to September 26, 2026, there would be a restriction on access to the border of the Slantsevsky and Kingiseppsky districts near the Estonian border. 

“These measures aim to prevent violations regarding border regulations, migration laws, and the protection of aquatic biological resources,” the directorate claimed, according to Russian regional officials. 

The new rules prohibit people from being on the shorelines or in small vessels along a portion of the Narva River and from hunting or carrying firearms in the border area. In addition, they forbid the “presence and movement of individuals and vehicles during hours of darkness outside of populated areas within the five-kilometer strip of territory along the state border in the Kingiseppsky and Slantsevsky districts.”

Obviously, the stated reasoning behind this was taken with great skepticism from neighboring Baltic NATO countries who are already on edge.

Russia's FSB imposes a nighttime curfew along the Estonian border near Narva, banning people and vehicles outside towns and villages within 5 km of the border in the Slantsy and Kingisepp districts from Sept 16–26 pic.twitter.com/8Ez8AvMXFy

— Faytuks Network (@FaytuksNetwork) September 20, 2026

Though Russia remains bogged down in its war on Ukraine and is suffering heavy losses of personnel and equipment, some European intelligence officials suggest Vladimir Putin could still carry out a small-scale invasion of NATO territory.

“It’s possible,” Michal Koudelka, the head of the Czech Republic’s BIS security service, told The Guardian about a potential Russian thrust into NATO. “It could involve a limited incursion, false-flag provocations, a massive influence campaign,” he told the publication, adding that this scenario could play out in a matter of “months, not years.”

While Russia has been carrying out a range of hybrid actions against Europe for years, including cyberattacks, drone incursions and sabotage, last month’s foiled attack on Germany’s Leipzig-Halle airport is seen in European intelligence circles as an inflection point.

As we previously reported, a drone discovered inside the secured area of Leipzig/Halle Airport during the night of August 4-5, was carrying approximately 1.3 pounds of explosives. It was found close to a Ukrainian-operated Antonov An-124 heavy cargo aircraft used to transport weapons to Ukraine. German authorities blamed Russia for that incident.

“To have an armed UAV drone sent into a busy airport in the middle of Europe … If you have attacks that could result in losses of life or losses of very critical infrastructure that have a huge implication for society, I think that is a gamechanger,” Thomas Nilsson, the head of Sweden’s military intelligence and security service, told The Guardian.

It is unknown at this point whether Putin will decide to expand his hybrid actions against Europe to a more traditional conflict. However, as the attacks increase, officials across the continent are committing greater resources and planning to be prepared should that happen.

At the same time, the heat is only being turned up on Moscow as Ukraine accelerates its long range attacks. Now it has a whole new weapon, one that has been long in the works, to reach into Russian territory with while bypassing most air defenses.

Zelensky has officially unveiled the FP-7 Pelican ballistic missile and said it was used in the attack on Moscow. This is a monumental advance for Ukraine that has lacked modern ballistic missile capabilities since the war started. Still, Ukrainian media has raised doubts about whether the FP-7 — with an estimated operational range of 200-350 kilometers (124-217 miles) — can reach the Russian capital, which is about 450-500 kilometers (280-311 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

However, one expert suggested “that the ballistic weapon may have played an integral role within a coordinated, multi-axis combined strike,” according to the Kyiv Post.

Regardless, even if it can’t hit Moscow, it can hit plenty of other targets and it represents a major escalation in Ukraine’s weapons capabilities.

Ukrainian President Zelensky said that during an attack on Moscow, Ukraine used its Pelican FP-7 ballistic missile for the first time. pic.twitter.com/KqM9bqk9ur

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 20, 2026

There is no avoiding the reality that the security situation in Europe is deteriorating, where exactly that leads is unclear apparently to everyone at the moment.

UPDATE: 7:04 PM Eastern –

Airspace restrictions have been imposed over Vilnius Airport due to a suspected “hybrid attack” from Belarus after the detection of what is suspected to be balloons in Lithuanian airspace, airport officials announced.

The restrictions were imposed from 11:45 p.m. local time on September 21 to 02:45 a.m. on September 22, the airport announced on its Facebook page. 

“Aircraft arrivals are temporarily suspended; however, departures are permitted from 12:55 a.m. subject to all safety requirements,” the airport explained. “These restrictions were introduced due to a hybrid attack by Belarus against Lithuania, civil aviation, and the public, involving the detection of navigational markers—characteristic of balloons—in areas posing risks to aviation.”

Belarus launched balloons toward the Vilnius Airport area, in what Lithuanian authorities are describing as a hybrid attack. pic.twitter.com/U7Etg3xn5o

— GMI (@Global_Mil_Info) September 21, 2026

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The post Alarm Bells Ring Across Europe As Security Situation With Russia Deteriorates At Accelerating Pace appeared first on TWZ.

Swedish and German forces are conducting what appears to be the first joint rehearsal of their rapid-reinforcement plans for the Baltic island of Gotland. The exercise is another step in Sweden’s defense planning for an island whose position in the middle of the Baltic gives it an outsized strategic importance for controlling access, protecting the Baltic states, and maintaining NATO’s freedom of movement in a region where Russian military activity remains a persistent concern.

The exercise, Silver Wotan 2026, running between September 14-23, brings together Swedish and German forces across the land, maritime, and air domains. The scenario is built around a Swedish request for allied assistance, with German forces moving personnel and equipment across the Baltic before integrating with Swedish units already defending the island. The operation is testing the entire process of getting allied combat power to Gotland, protecting it during the movement to Visby, and rapidly incorporating it into the island’s existing defensive network.

A video shows troops coming ashore on Swedish CB90 fast assault craft, a type that German soldiers are also trained to operate:

A rapid deployment of German and Swedish forces to Gotland island is being carried out today. Units from and are rehearsing the swift reinforcement of the strategic island in order to ensure the security of the Baltic Sea.#SilverWotan#NATO pic.twitter.com/A0r3LF8XUP

— Försvarsmakten (@Forsvarsmakten) September 18, 2026

The strategic importance of Gotland has grown considerably following Sweden’s accession to NATO in March 2024, which was a direct response to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Located approximately halfway between mainland Sweden and the Baltic states, the island occupies a central position in the Baltic Sea, close to the maritime approaches to the Gulf of Finland and within reach of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad. Its location gives forces operating from Gotland a potentially significant position from which to conduct surveillance, air defense, and maritime operations, while also making the island an important part of the wider network connecting NATO’s northern and eastern members.

At the same time, Gotland sits within an extremely complex littoral environment, where shallow waters, islands, narrow maritime approaches, and the proximity of multiple states can make both offensive operations and defensive planning more difficult. The region has also been shaped by longstanding Swedish concerns about Russian clandestine activity, including intelligence gathering and other forms of covert or deniable activity. The complexity of the Baltic operating environment can make such activities harder to detect and attribute, adding another layer of uncertainty alongside the more conventional military challenges facing the region.

Geography has long made Gotland important to Swedish defense planning, but its significance has taken on a broader dimension since Sweden joined the alliance. NATO has described the island as strategically important to its freedom of maneuver in the Baltic, while Swedish officials have highlighted its potential role as a hub for military operations and logistics in the region.

The current exercise is designed around the practical difficulties of reinforcing such a position.

Military equipment is being transported by sea to Visby, Gotland’s principal port, including by commercial ferry. In Visby, Swedish and German personnel are securing the harbor and conducting the reception of the arriving force. Among the equipment being moved are air defense systems, while Swedish forces are also operating coastal defense systems armed with anti-ship missiles.

Meanwhile, publicly available flight-tracking data showed German Luftwaffe transport aircraft, including at least one Airbus A400M airlifter, apparently involved in the effort. The commercial airport at Visby has long also been used for military activities related to Gotland and the wider Baltic region.

”A rapid deployment of German and Swedish forces to Gotland island is being carried out today” https://t.co/z6oLs1LCT4 pic.twitter.com/n18MdST6r1

— Jamming (@balticjam) September 18, 2026

The movement is supported by Swedish and German naval forces and other aircraft, creating a scenario in which the maritime transit, protection of the port, air operations, and subsequent movement of troops and equipment ashore all form part of the same military problem. Once ashore, the arriving forces have to be moved into position and integrated with Swedish units already responsible for defending the island.

The Swedish Gotland Regiment, P 18, provides the core of the island’s permanent military presence. The regiment, Sweden’s youngest and smallest, has been rebuilding its capabilities since Sweden began expanding its military presence on Gotland. Its forces form the basis of the ground-defense structure into which allied reinforcements would be incorporated.

Swedish coastal defense capabilities are another important element of the drill. Land-based anti-ship missiles provide the island with a means of threatening hostile surface vessels operating in the surrounding waters, giving the defense of Gotland a direct connection to the wider maritime battle for the Baltic. During Silver Wotan, Swedish and German forces are also conducting anti-surface warfare activities alongside the broader reinforcement operation.

Germany is contributing more than 500 troops to the exercise, part of approximately 2,000 Bundeswehr personnel involved, including elements from the army, navy, and air force. The German Luftwaffe has deployed Panavia Tornado aircraft for surveillance, while German naval forces are participating in the maritime component, and German ground personnel are involved in the reinforcement and security activities on Gotland.

The exercise scenario is particularly relevant against the backdrop of Russia’s continuing military presence in the Baltic region.

Russia maintains major military infrastructure in Kaliningrad, including naval, air, missile, and air defense capabilities, while the Russian Baltic Fleet operates from bases in the region. Kaliningrad’s position between Poland and Lithuania gives Moscow a significant military foothold inside the NATO area, while Russian forces and military infrastructure elsewhere along the Baltic add to the complexity of operating and reinforcing allied territory in the region.

The security environment around the Baltic has also deteriorated considerably since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. NATO has increased its surveillance and military activity in the region, including the launch of Baltic Sentry in January 2025 following a series of incidents involving critical undersea infrastructure. The alliance has subsequently expanded efforts to monitor maritime activity and protect infrastructure and sea lines of communication.

Swedish authorities have stressed that Silver Wotan was planned in advance and is not being conducted in response to a specific imminent Russian threat. The exercise nonetheless reflects the operational environment in which Swedish and NATO planners now have to consider the possibility that maritime and air movements across the Baltic could be monitored, disrupted, or contested.

The exercise also builds on a series of increasingly large Swedish-led activities designed to test the reception of allied forces on Swedish territory. During Aurora 26 earlier this year, more than 18,000 troops from 13 countries participated in operations across Sweden, including the deployment of allied forces to Gotland alongside the Gotland Regiment and Swedish Home Guard. NATO described that activity as an emergency deployment intended to test the reinforcement of the island.

Silver Wotan places a more concentrated emphasis on the Swedish-German relationship and on the movement of an allied force into the island’s existing defensive structure.

Germany’s participation is also consistent with its growing military role in the Baltic and along NATO’s northeastern flank. Berlin is already providing forces for NATO’s forward defense in Lithuania and has increasingly emphasized the ability to move German forces rapidly across northern Europe in support of allied operations.

For Sweden, meanwhile, Gotland has become one of the clearest examples of how NATO membership has changed the country’s defense planning. The island remains a Swedish responsibility, but its location means that what happens there has consequences well beyond Sweden’s territorial defense.

A defended and adequately supplied Gotland provides NATO with a strategically positioned base for surveillance and defensive operations in the Baltic, while the ability to reinforce it demonstrates that the alliance can maintain access to the island even as the surrounding maritime and air environment becomes more contested.

The exercise comes as European allies are being forced to plan for a NATO in which the United States may provide less of the conventional military weight it has supplied for decades. The Pentagon is reviewing the size and posture of U.S. forces in Europe, including the forces and capabilities Washington would make available in a European crisis, while NATO’s top commander has said further U.S. troop withdrawals should be expected as European allies build up their own conventional capabilities.

At the same time, the alliance now describes Russia as its most significant and direct security threat, citing military activity alongside airspace violations, sabotage, cyber operations, and other forms of hybrid pressure. There are also growing concerns that Russia could try something in the Baltics, while it continues to step up its gray-zone activities regardless. NATO officials have warned that Russia could rebuild enough military capacity to pose a more serious conventional challenge to the alliance before the end of the decade.

There are escalating warnings from Poland that Russia is preparing to widen its war against Ukraine, with "accidental" missile and drone strikes on NATO territory.

Such a move – Russia falsely claiming air strikes that hit NATO allies happened by accident – would be designed to…

— Deborah Haynes (@haynesdeborah) September 18, 2026

For Sweden and Germany, the Silver Wotan exercise is a practical test of how quickly European forces can reinforce and defend one of the Baltic’s most strategically important positions. As the security environment grows more contested and Europe prepares for a future in which U.S. forces may not be as readily available, the ability to move allied combat power across the region and integrate it into existing defenses is becoming an increasingly important part of NATO’s deterrence.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post German Forces Surge Onto Baltic Island In First-Of-Its-Kind NATO Drill appeared first on TWZ.

Lo smaltimento illegale di rifiuti tossici non produce solo danni ambientali. Si registra anche un aumento persistente dei decessi per tumore, che emerge dopo decenni ed è particolarmente marcato tra i più giovani. Cosa dice il confronto tra comuni vicini.

L'articolo Rifiuti nella Terra dei fuochi: il costo nascosto per la salute proviene da Lavoce.info.

Da der Westen, also vor allem die Europäer, derzeit regelrecht nach Krieg lechzen und ihn mit allen Mitteln zu provozieren versuchen, während die deutschen Medien gleichzeitig über die Positionen und Argumente der russischen Regierung immer schamloser lügen oder sie verschweigen, finde ich es wichtig, ein aktuelles, einstündiges Interview des russischen Außenministers Lawrow komplett zu übersetzen, […]

The Leipzig drone episode shows how jumping the gun turns suspicion into a weapon: NATO intelligence found no Russian trace, yet Berlin keeps insisting otherwise — and the real question is no longer who is to blame, but why Germany needs this narrative at all. “In war, truth is the first casualty.” (Aeschylus) Imagine getting […]

Senior U.S. Air Force leaders in Europe say NATO allies are increasingly looking to participate in the development and employment of collaborative combat aircraft (CCAs), even as several of those same countries pursue their own indigenous fighter and drone programs. American commanders say they are looking forward to CCAs expanding the alliance’s overall capacity, and are already pushing for such systems to work together from the outset.

Speaking yesterday at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Symposium that TWZ is attending, Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, U.S. Air Forces Africa, and NATO’s Allied Air Command, and Chief Master Sgt. Joshua J. Wiener, USAFE-AFAFRICA’s command chief, discussed how the command is preparing for an eventual European role in the U.S. Air Force’s planned fleet of hundreds of CCAs.

The issue is particularly significant for USAFE, which operates a fraction of the fighter force it maintained in Europe during the Cold War, even as many of its NATO allies contend with shrinking fleets of crewed combat aircraft. This comes against a backdrop of deepening tensions with Russia and the emergence of new kinds of threats. Autonomous aircraft that can augment crewed fighters could provide the alliance with additional combat mass without requiring a corresponding increase in the number of crewed aircraft and personnel permanently based in Europe.

“I’m excited about what CCAs have in store for the Air Force,” Hinds said, pointing to recent comments from the Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink, including the aim of having at least 500 CCAs in service by 2032.

He added that European interest in these kinds of platforms is already growing.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more interest from other nations inside Europe about what is America doing with CCAs and how they can join this party, if you will,” Hinds said.

Germany is “heavily involved,” he said, while Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands are also showing interest.

In the case of Germany, we have previously explored how that country is looking to procure CCAs by 2029. Sweden, too, recently unveiled a concept for a high-end, stealthy CCA-type drone, while the Dutch are looking to become more closely alligned with U.S. Air Force CCA efforts.

USAFE is currently using two broad operational scenarios to explain to allies how CCAs could fit into NATO’s force structure.

The first is defensive. A CCA could operate as part of an integrated air and missile defense network, potentially engaging one-way attack drones or cruise missiles without the need for expensive crewed fighters.

The second is offensive. In that scenario, autonomous aircraft could help suppress or destroy integrated air defense systems and potentially attack fielded forces during an effort to repel a hostile incursion into NATO territory.

Allies are interested in both missions, Hinds said, and want the ability to incorporate CCAs into their own force designs. Interestingly, only yesterday, Anduril shared photos of its YFQ-44A Fury configured with air-to-ground weapons, underscoring the fact that the CCA could take on an air-to-ground role in the future in addition to its current air-to-air focus.

That kind of interest has already prompted work at the NATO level. Hinds pointed to a study by the Joint Air Power Competence Center, the alliance’s airpower think tank based in Kalkar, Germany, examining how NATO members could employ CCAs in a modular fashion, including issues such as sustainment, training, and exercises.

“It was a pretty long paper, but the nations wanted it,” Hinds said.

Initial experimentation is expected to take place in the United States, but European experimentation could follow, including by Sweden and potentially other NATO members.

At the same time, European countries are not simply waiting for an American CCA to arrive.

The United Kingdom has launched its own Storm Fighter CCA program. Germany is pursuing a separate loyal-wingman effort, while the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan are meanwhile jointly embarked on the Global Combat Air Program, or GCAP, which is intended to produce the Tempest next-generation crewed fighter and associated uncrewed systems.

The proliferation of national programs raises an obvious question: How does NATO prevent a growing fleet of autonomous aircraft from becoming a collection of incompatible national systems?

Hinds said the answer starts with commonality.

“The first and foremost thing is we want to strive for commonality,” he said. “Commonality means we don’t even have to worry about interoperability.”

Where common equipment is not possible, however, USAFE wants interoperability built into national systems from the beginning.

“Interoperability by design” is the preferred approach, Hinds said, with NATO data standards and other requirements incorporated before a system enters service rather than retrofitted later.

The good news for USAFE is that NATO already has extensive experience establishing common standards for interoperability, covering everything from tactics and procedures to communications, datalinks, weapons employment, and other technologies. That existing framework gives the alliance a foundation for integrating increasingly diverse national systems without requiring every member to field identical equipment.

Hinds did warn that some countries have previously acquired equipment that was not compatible with NATO systems, leaving them with the choice of paying to modify their own equipment or forcing the alliance to adapt its systems around it.

That problem becomes particularly important as autonomous aircraft are connected to increasingly complex sensor and weapons networks. Even more important is the requirement for a baseline command-and-control network for CCAs themselves, allowing different platforms to manage them seamlessly.

The ability to share and control CCAs across a complex battlespace is already emerging as both a major opportunity and a significant integration challenge. The U.S. Air Force and Navy, for example, have made clear that their respective CCAs are being developed with the ability to be controlled seamlessly across services, pointing toward a future in which autonomous aircraft need not remain tied to the service or platform that launched them.

Hinds described a potential kill chain in which an F-35 detects a target, passes the information to another node in the network, and a ground-based system operated by another NATO country ultimately launches the weapon.

In such an architecture, the aircraft, sensor, command-and-control network, and weapon do not necessarily have to belong to the same country.

As an example, Dutch F-35s, operating in Europe, have used a data-exchange system to transmit targeting coordinates to Israeli-made PULS (Precise and Universal Launch System) rocket artillery. The system, developed by Lockheed Martin is known as Keystone, and you can read more about it here.

USAFE is making “significant advances” in areas including cross-servicing, cross-loading, and cross-flying allied aircraft, Hinds said, all of which are intended to make multinational operations more seamless.

The same philosophy applies to weapons.

“We want to have all the fires, right? Whether it’s U.S. built or built inside European nations,” Hinds said.

That could prove increasingly important as European countries expand domestic production of missiles, drones, and other weapons alongside their aircraft programs.

The growth of GCAP and other European defense programs comes amid broader debate over how much Europe should depend on U.S. military equipment.

But Hinds rejected the idea that allies developing indigenous aircraft and autonomous systems necessarily signals a move away from American equipment.

“No, I don’t,” he said when asked whether allies were moving away from U.S. systems.

Instead, Hinds characterized the trend as an expansion of the transatlantic defense-industrial base.

Sweden was one example he cited. The country, which recently joined NATO, continues to produce new military equipment, including Gripen fighters, while those aircraft are already being operated by NATO members.

Swedish Gripens are currently leased to Hungary, and other countries are considering the aircraft, Hinds said.

The broader trend toward co-manufacturing and co-production is also something he welcomed.

“I’m seeing a lot of discussions about co-manufacturing and co-production, and I welcome those discussions as well,” Hinds said.

That approach could become increasingly important as NATO tries to expand its available combat power without relying exclusively on additional U.S.-built platforms.

For USAFE, the objective is to ensure that whatever aircraft NATO countries develop or purchase can plug into a common architecture, sharing data, receiving targeting information, drawing on common logistics networks, and contributing weapons effects across national boundaries.

For a U.S. Air Force command that has spent decades trying to cover Europe with far fewer fighters than it once had, hundreds of autonomous wingmen, whether American-built or allied, could provide a significant way to generate additional combat mass.

Senior U.S. Air Force officials are now working to ensure that the networking, weapons integration, logistics, and command-and-control architecture will be in place once those aircraft start to come online.

Contact the author: thomas@thewarzone.com

The post How The USAF Is Preparing For European Allies To Join The Collaborative Combat Aircraft Club appeared first on TWZ.

Summary

• Europe still expects Turkey to pick a side. It has refused, and a post-Erdogan government would refuse too.
• Turkey has become an embedded outsider: a middle power that builds strategic autonomy from inside the Western system—because that is where its leverage comes from.
• Ankara has now tools of its own: troops abroad, a $10bn arms industry, partners in the global south, a geography everyone needs and channels to actors Europeans cannot reach.
• Yet it still needs NATO for its security, Europe to buy its exports and fund its factories, and Western technology to power its best weapons.
• Europe should stop trying to resolve the contradiction and learn to capitalise on it. It should deepen cooperation where interests converge, tie benefits to reciprocal obligations and withhold access when Ankara acts against fundamental European interests.

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.

Under Erdogan: An old instinct transformed

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:

European integration

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.

Regional ambitions and civilisational mission

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.

“Precious loneliness”

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.

Transactional re-embedding

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.

Beyond Erdogan: Different versions of autonomy

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.

What Turkey is embedded in

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.

Economic embeddedness: Europe as market and regulatory ecosystem

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.

Security embeddedness: Inside NATO’s architecture

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.

Social and political embeddedness: A diaspora and a stalled accession

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.

The instruments of autonomy

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.

An expeditionary military

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.

Defence

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.

Connectivity

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.

Soft power

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

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.

What it means for Europe

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.

Ukraine: Pro-Kyiv, but not anti-Moscow

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: Access without capital

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: Autonomy that backfires

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.

***

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.

A European strategy for the embedded outsider

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.

Integrate Turkey into European defence

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.

Modernise the customs union

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.

Build coalitions in the neighbourhood

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.

Cooperate on migration

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.

Make conditionality targeted, not existential

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.

Keep the accession question open

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.

Neither home nor away

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.

Acknowledgments 

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. 

About the authors

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.

Source

The top U.S. Air Force officer in Europe, who also serves as the NATO Allied Air Command leader, said he has been tasked with enacting new alliance plans to defend against cruise missiles and drones. He was responding to questions about a drone that NATO had to shoot down after it entered Lithuanian airspace overnight. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday morning that the incident was “part of a broader pattern of Russian aggression and provocation against Europe, testing our readiness and our resolve.”

The drone incursion into Lithuania took place against the backdrop of the ongoing Russian war on Ukraine and amid a spate of so-called ‘hybrid’ or ‘gray zone’ actions Moscow has been accused of carrying out throughout Europe, including a recent attempted drone attack on the Leipzig-Halle airport in Germany.

We now know that Russia is responsible for the attempted explosive attack at Leipzig airport. Russia's repeated hybrid attacks on Germany and Europe are unacceptable. (1/4) pic.twitter.com/o3vBjgpeb1

— German Embassy Washington (@GermanyinUSA) September 1, 2026

“I don’t know what’s in the mind of Putin or his fielded forces about those one-way attack drones or even cruise missiles, like we’ve seen enter Polish airspace just a few months ago. In July, we had an AS-23 cruise missile enter Poland,” Lt. Gen. Jason T. Hinds, Commander, U.S. Air Forces in Europe/U.S. Air Forces Africa (USAFE), and Commander of the Allied Air Command, said in response to a question about the drone shootdown over Lithuania. He was speaking during a media roundtable at the Air & Space Forces Air, Space and Cyber Conference that TWZ is attending.

Hinds added that while he doesn’t “know the why behind” the drone incursion into Lithuania, he has been tasked by U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus G. Grynkewich, who serves as NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), “to fully implement EVA [Enhanced Vigilance Activity] Eastern Sentry and now its Standing Defense Plan 12000, which gives the nations the capabilities that they need to defend their airspace against either one-way attack drones like the one that you described last night, or a cruise missile.”

EVA Eastern Sentry is a mission NATO stood up in September 2025 after “an unprecedented number of Russian drones and planes violated the airspace of several NATO Allies,” according to the alliance. “Allies are contributing additional capabilities and assets to NATO’s deterrence and defense – for instance, more fighter jets, helicopters, transport aircraft, air defense systems, surveillance aircraft and frigates – and improving the coordination of these assets through NATO.”

Standing Defense Plan 12000 is a new plan for integrated air and missile defense across the alliance. Grynkewich introduced the concept during testimony to Congress in March.

Hinds acknowledged that Russia could be testing the alliance.

“It’s not about the small UASs; that’s typically a national responsibility, and it could be probing,” the Air Force general noted. “Regardless of the intent behind it, what we want to be prepared for is the second that a one-way attack drone or a cruise missile is first and foremost detected – hopefully well before it enters NATO territory – we want to know it. We want to know where it’s coming from. We want to have the capability to sense it. We want to be able to have the C2 [command and control] systems to be able to decide what to do about it, and then have the right kit to be able to act.”

Despite an integrated air and missile defense system that includes Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries, NATO currently is primarily “using air power” against drones and cruise missiles “and that’s not putting us on the right side of the cost curve,” Hinds stated. “But we want to get there.”

Using NATO jets to take down drones “is very effective, just like what you saw last night, and many other times,” but not necessarily efficient, Hinds explained. 

“I think there’s been at least five other cases of allied nations providing air power to shoot down one-way attack drones,” he proffered. “I want to get to the point where we’re doing it efficiently, using lower-cost interceptors, hopefully ground-based, and in some cases air-based that are cheaper to use, so we’ll see what the intent may be. Intelligence organizations are going to provide us with that intelligence later on, but I just don’t know yet.”

You can see one of those NATO jet engagements with drones in the following video.

NATO airpower in action this morning, safeguarding Latvian airspace. pic.twitter.com/Ugzbx8aaZS

— Marko Mihkelson (@markomihkelson) June 8, 2026

It should be noted that Europe is starting to follow the American lead in using less expensive laser-guided, air-to-air rockets as drone-killing weapons. TWZ was the first to report about the use of 70mm Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) rockets by the U.S. The U.K. Royal Air Force announced in May of this year that its Typhoons were now equipped with APKWS rockets while the French recently tested their own 68mm laser-guided rockets from Rafale fighters.

The Defence Procurement Agency has successfully completed integration testing of 68 mm laser-guided rockets on the Rafale fighter jet. The time between the contract being awarded for this new capability and initial operational capability being achieved was less than 8 months. pic.twitter.com/rR2Nij9EzY

— French Aid to Europe (@aidefranceukr) July 13, 2026

As the threats have evolved, NATO has “transitioned away from air policing, and we’ve transitioned to air defense for some specific reasons,” the general pointed out. “One is readiness. Air policing is a readiness decrementing mission that the alliance has done for years. There’s also an assurance mission that we did for 32 nations. That’s transitioned to air defense now. Air defense means we have the right kit, multi-domain, to be able to be put in the right place based on indications, warnings, or real threats, like you saw last night, inside of the Baltic nations, to be able to respond decisively and quickly.”

“There’s also a deterrence value there,” Hinds added. “So if Russia does fly a one-way attack drone or a cruise missile, they know that we’re going to be in the right spot to be able to detect it and then defend against it.”

“These are limited incursions, right? Small numbers. Here’s what I see: hybrid activities may, in fact, only be one of the few levers that Putin has available to him, because he sees that he does not have an advantage in geography, domain, or readiness,” Hinds suggested.

“Think about that,” he urged. “So what are we seeing? We’re not seeing a massing of forces across the opposite side of Finland, a new NATO nation. We’re not seeing a massing of forces whatsoever in any domain opposite of Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia. You’re seeing a significant number of one-way attack drones in the Black Sea targeting Ukraine. Some of them are entering Romania. What you’re not seeing is a direct confrontation in geography. We’re not seeing direct competition in domains. And I think Putin knows that we are ready. I know he knows that we’re a defensive alliance. I know he knows that we have an advantage in every domain against them, and I think that’s likely why you’re seeing things like what you’re seeing with hybrid activity.”

Though below the level of armed conflict, these Russian activities raise the potential for something worse, Hinds posited.

“The risk about hybrid activity, from my perspective, is it could lead to escalation, and that’s where I hope that we get back towards deterrence again, and that the nations they’re going to decide to do what they want to do when it comes to these hybrid activities,” the general said. “Some of them are law enforcement. Some of them are military responses, and that’s up to the nations to decide how they’re going to deal with that. Not me.”

“But what I owe General Grynkewich is to ensure that we are demonstrating our deterrence each and every day, and we’re doing that effectively across all domains,” Hinds added. “And to ensure that Putin knows that if he tries something against the alliance, that we will be there, and we’re ready to win decisively if challenged.”

Contact the author: howard@twz.com

The post NATO Air Commander Details Thinking Behind The Alliance’s New Air Defense Plan appeared first on TWZ.

Auf diese Meldung bin ich in der russischen Nachrichtenagentur TASS gestoßen und sie hat mich wegen ihrer Einfachheit fasziniert, denn ein italienischer Publizist hat ein komplexes Thema wenigen und einfachen Worten auf den Punkt gebracht. Alessandro Orsini schrieb in seiner Kolumne für die Zeitung „Il Fatto Quotidiano“, der Ukraine-Konflikt habe das Ende der EU als […]