Where do reason and strategy stand in US policy?

The US becoming the world's superpower is of course no coincidence. It is not only the sheer size of its territory or its material resources that were decisive in reaching this power. Russia, China and India, though their territories are larger and even their natural material wealth greater, do not possess the same power. Conversely, there have also been states that, despite having less territory and fewer material resources, have achieved miracles in development.

Today many European countries have an economic size and wealth wholly out of proportion to their small territory and population. Strategic reason and the best management of available resources play a very large role in their achieving this.

However abundant and rich our natural resources may be, they cannot withstand bad management. Indeed, the existing resources can even become a curse for that country. By this comparison we can even think of Turkey's lack of oil today as an advantage. For, because it had no natural resources, it was driven to work much harder, to rely more on its human resources, and to make up the deficit by finding more creative ways.

Whereas we see that the great majority of oil-owning countries in the Middle East, without any need to develop any other resource, were seized by an intoxication of trust in this seemingly uninterrupted resource. This intoxication led them to squander their resources and gradually dragged them into a strange vise in which they are condemned to poverty amid plenty.

It can be accepted without dispute that the US reached this power by pulling ahead of other countries both in the management of its human resources and of its other assets. We can say that the US has brought its human population to the present through a highly successful citizenship and immigration policy. Admittedly, the inhuman racist policies it once applied against Native Americans and Africans cannot be ignored. But it can be said that the management of this process too was carried out according to the rules of the logic of power. It has also successfully created the impression that it reached the level of democracy, freedoms and human rights it attained at the end of this process as if by very democratic means. Yet it arrived at today by paving those paths with much blood, much oppression, many massacres.

Another impression the US has produced is that it always acts very strategically, especially in its international relations, and gives little room to emotions, ideologies and religion. A "US strategy" that makes its strategic plans seeing a hundred years ahead and calculating accordingly, and that is not affected at all by day-to-day developments, is in vogue as a perfect American legend. It is worth adding that this is only a legend, but that if you have power, legends too are capable of producing perceptions.

The crushing weight of power prevents one from seeing certain mistakes, inexperiences, clumsiness, stupidities, foolishness. Had any medium-sized country made the foreign policy mistakes the US is making today, it would have had no chance of surviving. The US can make grave mistakes against its allies, but its colossal power protects it against those mistakes becoming an unmanageable problem.

The mistake the US has made against Turkey as an ally is beyond comprehension. How can such a mistake be made: how does one support one terrorist organization against another terrorist organization? How can it so comfortably harbor in its own country a secret sedition organization that wanted to stage a coup against Turkey, that is, against a NATO country? We here are at a loss to understand it.

If you like, let us look at one more situation at this point: while our media treated the process of the Zarrab case being heard in the US as the top story for months, with everyone going to bed with Zarrab and waking up with Trump, the space this event occupies in the US media is incredibly small, trivial. While our world changes with the effect of the support for the PYD on us, this event is not something to be made much of in US public opinion. Frankly, this attitude of the US and the (non-)reflexes it displays with public opinion toward this attitude show that, put in the simplest terms, it is indifferent, rude and brutish.

Being strong and big can temporarily grant a state the luxury of indifference, rudeness and carelessness, but there is no doubt that the persistence of these conditions has an effect that, over time, shrinks, finishes and brings down even a great state.

It is no secret that the US pursues its conflict-based foreign policy within a certain scientific framework, by increasing and managing conflicts, and thereby controls countries and finds and manages markets for its weapons and other goods. It does this very well. But it is also true that in doing so it supports very different ideologies and uses them as instruments. Yet this does not show that, in contrast to the ideologies it uses, it itself is subject to no ideological constraint.

The US administration, despite all its claims of secularism, is not protected against being held captive by an extremely bigoted religious ideology. Let alone not being protected, American foreign policy is to a great extent determined by an ultra-fundamentalist interpretation of Christianity.

Trump's Jerusalem decision is a concrete indicator of the stage this captivity has reached. America's Middle East policy shows that the mind governing the US has remained entirely in the time written about in the Gospel and the Torah. Actually, it is an extreme interpretation that decides what that time is. Otherwise not everyone draws the same conclusion from the Torah and the Gospel. Evangelicals believe that Jerusalem must be under Israeli sovereignty so that, close to the time of the end of the world, Jesus can come and save us. In the end, a war is envisaged in which not a single Jew would remain.

Therefore, in fact, Evangelism is ultimately an enemy of Judaism as well. But in the foreseen flow of time, the priority is the purging of Muslims from there.

This temporarily makes the Evangelicals allies of the Jews. One finds it hard to believe that the presidents of the mighty US could believe such a story and tie all their policies to the pursuit of this prophecy.

If put any other way it would be something to laugh off, but there is no other explanation for the story the US has followed with regard to Israel from the beginning.