Quote:
Originally Posted by nik-
So you want them to play chicken with a NATO ally crucial in Black Sea access, with nuclear weapons on their soil and the cap for the champagne bottle that is the refugee crisis?
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Your simplistic and hyperbolic nonsense is getting quite tiresome, so this is it for me for this discussion. It's just more and more obvious that you just don't know anything about international politics, and you barely bother to read the answers you get.
I already mentioned the example of George Bush putting pressure on Israel, succesfully. No real difference.
The type of financial trickery I described is something EU does pretty much all the time. At any point in time the EU is "investigating" dozens of breaches in trade contracts that could end in some country no longer being allowed to export some product into EU. Russia used to get that trouble all the time before the EU kinda sorta stopped trading with Russia alltogether. There are probably dozens of cases like that open between China and EU, going both ways, and many of them tied to something completely different. Those investigations in themselves are a big hassle that costs a lot of money for the related companies, even if nothing comes out of them.
This stuff is not "playing chicken", this is everyday life.
Besides, Turkey "playing chicken" with EU would be the equivalent of a toddler playing chicken with it's mother.
EU is Turkey's main trade partner. South of their border is right now a major warzone so it's not going to be a great place for trade any time soon. Erdogan is in very bad terms with Putin. Ukraine's economy is in a terrible shape and largely propped up by EU. (So for example if the EU told Ukraine to stop buying from Turkey...)
In short, the Turkish economy desperately needs EU right now, possibly more than ever.
If EU had hinted a couple of years ago that Erdogan is bad for business (usually this is done in a bit roundabout way), he would have been ousted in elections, "fair and square". As long as the country was a democracy, politicians still rose and fall on the wellfare of their local economy.
