If the US is not going to attack itself, why does it oppose Turkey's defending itself?

Turkey's purchase of the S-400 defense system from Russia has become the most important issue between Turkey and ABD in recent days. Yet when the process that brought Turkey to the point of buying the S-400s is evaluated as a whole, one must see that this is the result of a more general problem in relations.

ABD says that Turkey's NATO membership should restrict it from buying this defense system. Yet NATO has no binding decision obliging its members to develop their own defense systems or to procure them by other means. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg himself said this last month. The matter must be taking place not within NATO membership but only within the limits of relations with ABD. Moreover, the party that has until now failed to fulfill its responsibilities toward Turkey arising from NATO membership partnership, and has clearly violated those responsibilities, has always been ABD.

NATO membership envisages a common sensitivity, defense cooperation and solidarity against any threat that may be directed at any member country. ABD, however, has to date armed the Syrian branch of the PKK, the YPG or PYD, which has cost 50 thousand citizens their lives and is considered a terrorist organization even by its own official documents, disproportionately, supposedly against the DAEŞ threat, established an army out of its militants and deployed it on the Turkish border. Let alone supporting Turkey against this threat, it itself supported this threat. While it was doing this, Turkey was exposed every day to the attacks of the terrorist organization PKK and was losing martyrs, civilian or military.

Of course ABD, which did not swallow al-Qaeda's trick in Syria of turning first into Nusra and later into HTŞ, tried to make others swallow, by regarding and presenting the PKK's merely having changed its name to YPG on the Syrian borders as sufficient to get off the terrorist organization list.

Yet the establishment of this organization as a little state on the Turkish border threatens both Turkey as a NATO country and the entire region. It unjustly divides Syria and acts as an intermediary in the ethnic cleansing carried out through the YPG. A journalist relaying his impressions from YPG camps in Syria said that the people he encountered there spoke among themselves not Arabic or Kurdish at all but Turkish. The reason is well known: nearly all of the cadre leading the YPG consisted of PKK militants who had gone from Turkey.

ABD made a thousand kinds of fuss about procuring weapons with which Turkey could defend itself if exposed to an attack, and refused, in the Obama period, ten years ago, to sell Turkey the Patriots. The weapons it did not give to Turkey for its own money it gave free of charge to the terrorist organization's Syrian extension YPG, in 7 thousand trucks and 2 thousand cargo planes, in a way that poses an open threat to Turkey.

ABD has long since lost the position from which to remind Turkey of the measures of commitment to NATO membership conditions, ethics or rules. Moreover, when Turkey buys the S-400s, it is in fact not acting contrary to the conditions of NATO membership. The problem of compatibility with F-35s or NATO systems is not an unsolvable one. It can be worked on technically and settled. Compared with the Patriots, Turkey is procuring the S-400s on much cheaper and more advantageous terms. It is buying them on terms that include the technology and the possibility of co-producing and exporting them in the future. This is an advantage we could not obtain from any country of NATO, of which we are a member, or from ABD.

Therefore the matter is a problem within the limits of Turkey-ABD relations rather than a matter of the Turkey-NATO relationship. The question here is why ABD objects to Turkey's acquiring a system with which to defend itself against the encirclement that is a real problem around it today. Turkey is not acquiring an offensive weapon; it is acquiring a defense system.

Why does ABD oppose Turkey's defending itself? If it has no intention of attacking some day, why does it oppose the acquisition of a defense system? In fact, does not opposing Turkey's acquisition of the S-400s openly reveal the intention that ABD will carry out an attack targeting Turkey one day or another?

Especially when it has revealed this intention, would it not become an unavoidable measure for Turkey to defend itself against ABD, which has become a real threat, beyond merely defending itself?

While Turkey is virtually encircled within the range of a great many weapon systems deployed around it, each of which could threaten Turkey at any moment, its right to acquire its own defense systems cannot be debated. Trying to dissuade Turkey from this decision means, in advance, surrendering Turkey to the threat of these barrels aimed at it.

Of course the matter also has a (CAATSA) dimension. That is, the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act that the ABD Congress passed in August 2017. It is stated that Turkey's purchase of the S-400 from Russia would violate Article 231 of CAATSA and that sanctions should therefore be brought onto the agenda. This article provides for the application of sanctions against persons or institutions that trade with the intelligence or defense sectors of Russia, which is regarded as an adversary of ABD.

Can you see the dimensions of the price that Turkey has been made to pay for its alliance with ABD?

ABD regards Iran as an adversary and, within the scope of the sanctions it applies against it, regards any trade with it as directed against itself. ABD regards Russia as an adversary against itself, tries to bring the S-400 deal with it under investment as a contribution made to its industry, and in doing so again sends the bill for these sanctions to Turkey.

The cost of ABD's sanctions falls on Turkey, and ABD, which is its ally from NATO, makes not the slightest contribution to covering these costs. And when Turkey takes its own measure, ABD opposes that too. This is a somewhat wider-angle view of the picture. What else might we see on a wider horizon, I wonder?