Turkey Goes Ballistic for China
The whole episode has become an oxymoron of noisy speechlessness.
It has been two weeks since Turkey announced its preference for a Chinese-made long-range air and missile defense system.
In a country like Turkey, where the daily agenda changes several times a day, this is ample time for the missile issue to drop from the agenda and be slowly forgotten. But it doesn’t appear as if the United States and NATO are likely to forget it. At the moment, it is not clear if the bill will be made out to Turkey and if so, to whom. But if Turkey is a country that will remain in the Western collective security system, it is obvious that the option of jointly producing a missile system with China is not very much in the cards.
The missile defense system bidding Turkey first announced in 2009 actually goes back six more years. On the day Turkey announced its decision to go for Chinese Precision Machinery Import and Export Corp., in bidding that included an American consortium of Raytheon, which produces Patriot missiles, and Lockheed Martin and a French-Italian partnership, by chance I ran into some senior American diplomats in a meeting.
Although they were not talking anything but Turkey’s choice of China, you could easily see that they were absolutely speechless. The next day in another international meeting, I was with a group of Western security and defense experts including a former UK minister of defense. They too were speechless about the news.
