Talking Geopolitics

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Kamran Bokhari and Jacob L. Shapiro discuss Turkey's future after the referendum on April 16. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am Jacob Shapiro, I am the director of analysis and I am joined by Kamran Bokhari, one of our senior analysts. Thanks for joining us today Kamran.

Kamran Bokhari: Thank you for having me again.

JLS: I think, Kamran, you’re in Missouri right now, right? You’re giving a lecture or are about to give a lecture if my memory serves me.

KB: Yes, I am going to be giving a lecture this evening in a couple hours.

JLS: What’s the topic of the lecture?

KB: The topic of the lecture is political Islam, sectarianism and the collapse of the Arab world. That’s sort of the broad topic. There’s a long formal topic, but that’s sort of in a nutshell the issues that I’ll be addressing. You know ISIS and what’s behind ISIS, the underlying geopolitical current and drivers that are shaping the current reality in the Middle East.

JLS: So that all dovetails nicely with what we want to talk about today on the podcast, which is last week’s referendum in Turkey. It has turned out that the polls that said that the “yes” votes were going to win the referendum were correct and now President Erdoğan seems to have more powers than he did before. I think there are a lot of questions that people are wondering about here and we’re going to tackle some of them in succession.

But the first one I think we should just start with is the simplest one, which is what does this mean? So maybe Kamran from your perspective, somebody who has been following the AKP in Turkey for a long time, what does this mean in the broad scheme of things?

KB: So I think at one level, this is the sort of formalization of a de facto reality, and that de facto reality is that Erdoğan is the most charismatic leader in the country. His party is stronger than anybody else. His prime ministers have been weak. Since he left the office of prime minister and assumed the presidency, he’s basically been ruling the country in the way that he envisions and what this referendum does is just basically formalizes it. It allows him to establish a legal system that basically justifies what he’s been doing anyway.

I don’t see the referendum as a monumental shift in and off itself. I think it’s the finalization or formalization of a dynamic that’s been in play ever since Erdoğan assumed the presidency.

JLS: I think one of the important things to point out there is also that it isn’t just about Erdoğan. Erdoğan happens to be one particular individual who happens to be a very skilled politician. But the broader thing that is happening here is that you can see this in the way the referendum vote broke down. There’s a big divide between the cities like Istanbul and like Izmir and the central Anatolian regions, which are the regions that really give AKP a lot of its electoral heft.

I think people at their own risk diminish the importance of those people in the interior because they’re prejudiced to think that the things in the cities matter the most. But we’ve seen this time and time again that there really is a divide between the cities and the interior and Erdoğan has been able to capture that, right?

KB: Yes and in many ways, this is just a continuation of the trend that we’re seeing worldwide. I mean Brexit was one, the election of President Donald Trump is the other major case in point. There is this divide between those who live in urban areas. In many ways, the people living in Ankara, Istanbul, Izmir have more in common with their counterparts in other cities like that – other mega cities on the European continent, North America, Asia – than they do with their own fellow citizens who live in the rural areas, in many cases not too far out from the city limits of these major metropolises.

So I think that, that phenomenon is continuing. And the idea that somehow autocracy is gaining ground in Turkey – I think that is problematic because clearly there is a sizable amount of people in Turkey who do not see it that way, who think that it is their democratic vote that has allowed Erdoğan to become what he is and he represents them and they support him. So I think we have an issue – there is a variance in how people see democracy being played out in practice.

JLS: Yeah I think that’s a good point. One thing that I would pick up on what you were saying though is that you were talking about comparing what happened in Turkey this past weekend to Brexit and to Donald Trump but I wonder, do you really think that’s a good comparison? Because I think on the one hand you have some of that ...

Kamran Bokhari and Jacob L. Shapiro discuss recent developments on the Korean Peninsula, how they affect U.S.-China relations, and evaluate the chances of a U.S. strike on North Korea's nuclear program. What will the world will look like in a quarter century? Find out, free: hubs.ly/H0757Mt0

TRANSCRIPT:

Jacob L. Shapiro: Hello everyone and thanks for joining us for another edition of Geopolitical Futures podcast. I am joined again by one of our senior analysts, Kamran Bokhari. Kamran, thanks for being with us again.

Kamran Bokhari: Hey, thanks for having me.

JLS: So there’s a lot of stuff going on geopolitically in the world today but our focus is pretty sharply on the Korean Peninsula right now, and Kamran, the first thing I wanted to ask you was do you think that large bomb the U.S. dropped in Afghanistan yesterday, the largest conventional weapon in some ways that the U.S. has, do you think that was a message for the regime in Pyongyang about what might happen if they go ahead with their tests this weekend as they’ve been threatening?

KB: Well, I mean it’s a $15 million weapon, that’s the cost of using one of them. I doubt that it was just used for posturing. There has to have been some intelligence and military basis for it to be dropped in Afghanistan. So maybe there’s an added benefit to it, maybe it shapes perceptions in Pyongyang, but I don’t know.

So I wanted to ask you, where are we going with this standoff? This nuclear standoff, as you know Jacob, is not new. It’s been going on, it pops up every now and then. The pattern that we’ve noticed is that the North Koreans want something, they wave this card and get the U.S.’ attention and then either they get what they want or they just go back home until the next time. But this time it feels a bit different. Why don’t you pick that apart?

JLS: It doesn’t just feel different, in some ways it is different. You know this Kamran, we’ve been working together for a long time now. One of the most dangerous things you can do in intelligence, in analysis and in general is to assume that just because you’ve seen something happen once before that it’s going to happen the same way again. So certainly, the United States has danced with China in a diplomatic game over North Korea before and North Korea has wanted food or it’s wanted respect or it’s wanted whatever it’s wanted.

The thing that’s different this time, there’s two things. First of all, the North Koreans have always done a good job of proving themselves a little bit mentally unstable. We’ve always seen that as a bit of a ruse as a way of getting what they want. Kim Jong Un is giving an Oscar-worthy performance in this regard. Even hardcore geopolitical thinkers like us, we look at this guy and we think that he might be a little bit crazy. You know he’s executing his family members with anti-aircraft guns. I don’t know even know what that looks like, how you would even do that. You know, throwing his family members to the dogs.

But the most crazy part of all of it is there have been pictures that have surfaced of him with what looks like a nuclear weapon or some kind of deliverable thing that you could use to deliver a nuclear weapon. And so we’re moving from a place where the worst case scenario is not just the North Koreans, you know, flaunting around a program, but that they might be delivering an actual deliverable weapon. It might be in the hands of somebody that mentally isn’t quite there.

I say all that to say that all our analysis at GPF is still that China has control over what’s going on in North Korea. We know that the Trump administration wanted to put a lot of pressure on China when it came to trade. We know that China didn’t want to give in on those trade terms. We know that this North Korea stuff really started happening as those negotiations with China came closer about trade.

So we can’t say anything for sure, but when you look at what’s going on, our expectation is that China will intervene here in some way and will get North Korea perhaps not to act rationally but at least to back down enough such that the United States won’t go ahead and feel like it needs to take unilateral action.

KB: What kind of unilateral action would that be? We don’t know, at least publicly. Perhaps the U.S. intelligence community has a better picture of the reality, but we don’t really know in terms of the world of analysis, what does a DPRK nuclear program look like. Is it a device? Can they mount it on a missile? I mean there’s been mystery shrouded over this. What do you think?

JLS: I mean again with North Korea, there’s so much we don’t know. I wouldn’t put a lot of trust in the intelligence agencies considering the mistakes that they’ve had before in Iraq and other failure...

Jacob Shapiro and Kamran Bokhari discuss the geopolitical importance of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and whether the realities it created will define the future. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: hubs.ly/H06mXwR0

TRANSCRIPT:

JS: Hello everyone and welcome to another Geopolitical Futures podcast. My name is Jacob Shapiro, I am the director of analysis for Geopolitical Futures and I am joined again this week by Kamran Bokhari, who is our senior analyst, welcome Kamran.

KB: Thanks for having me, Jacob.

JS: I just want to apologize to our listeners, I know that we didn’t manage to get a podcast out last week, so we’re going to try and get two out this week. In general, we are going to try to stick to one a week, so we appreciate you guys bearing with us as we go along.

Last time we talked, Kamran, we talked about the Islamic State and we talked about the Islamic State’s origins and its futures. And one of the things I think is interesting right now is that the Middle East is really in a state of flux. The balance of power in the Middle East is changing. We can see it changing all the time. One of the things we are chronicling in our writing is how the balance of power in the Middle East is changing all the time. You brought up to us when we were thinking about what to talk about today, that we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and also Lebanon and Iraq had some token forces in there, but really it was between Israel and Jordan, Syria and Egypt. The 50th anniversary is coming up in June. How about you lay out for our readers why you think this is such an important anniversary to note?

KB: I think 50 years is a good point in time to go back and review and measure just how things have unfolded in the region. And 1967 is particularly important because it really shaped the way the region has unfolded. It was a pivotal moment. Israel, as a result of that war, its massive victory over three Arab states, really established it as a military power in the region. And it was only 19 years old, Israel was only 19 years old when that war happened. And at the time, no one could’ve foreseen that Israel would be able to defend itself against three major Arab powers, at least they were perceived as major Arab powers. And the whole perception of Arab strength was essentially laid bare. The image of the Arabs was tarnished. I mean the fact that in the collective Arab memory, June 5, 1967, is seen as Yawm al-Naksa, which is loosely defined or translated as the day of setback, although ‘naksa’ in Arabic is far more, if you will, stronger than just the word ‘setback’ as we know it in English, but nonetheless, it left a deep imprint on the Arab world and established that the Arab world was very much hollow and it could not impose a military solution on Israel.

JS: Kamran, I think this was one of the things you brought up last week that was interesting, which was when we were talking about the Islamic State and we were talking about the rise of radical jihadist Islam as a major ideology in the region, you pointed towards this moment as the moment at which the political ideology of the time, which was secular nationalism, Arab nationalism – in 1967 Egypt was still known as the United Arab Republic technically, right, which is an ode to the short-lived entity that existed when Egypt and Syria were part of the same republic from 1958 to 1961. So you sort of pointed out last week just how important this moment was in history and how it really defined how the Arab world was going to move forward. It amounted to the failure of Nasserism and in some ways, it was the moment that Egypt abdicated leadership in the Arab world, wouldn’t you say?

KB: Absolutely, and I think that it was forced to do that. I think that nobody could argue and nobody could sustain the image of this leadership role that Egypt had projected, that it was the leader of Arab nationalism, the Arab soul, the Arab world. When the Egyptian Air Force was destroyed in a matter of hours on the fifth of June, you couldn’t make that argument anymore. And it was essentially the beginning of the end of the Nasser regime, at least Nasserite Egypt – though some would argue that we are still living in the legacy of Nasserite Egypt – but Nasser himself didn’t live too long after that. He died in 1970, and that really closed that chapter of Arab nationalism, but it also demonstrated that the Arab states, and here we are talking about Egypt, I mean Egypt is the heart of the Arab world given it is the largest Arab state by population, any type of cultural renaissance, new ideologies that take shape in Egypt, in Cairo particularly, and then disseminate to the rest of the Arab world. So that was the status of Egypt. ...

Allison Fedirka and Xander Snyder explain the importance of this often overlooked region. Sign up for free updates on topics like this! Go here: http://goo.gl/j7gFyE.