So the threat laid out by Erdogan of Turkey is that if the EU gets all huffy over the attacks being conducted in northern Syria....he'll release three-million Syrian refugees to make way to Greece and then it'll be a five-star mess for the EU to resolve. In simple terms, Erdogan is holding a great hand in poker.
A month ago, if you'd laid out this potential threat, I would have laughed. Today, it's approaching a 50-50 odds situation. He might be crazy enough to do it.
So this essay is to address the threat, and impacts.
To say all three-million would be released at once? That's a joke. You'd require a vast number of rubber rafts (way over 100,000 of them). What you'd see in the initial week is probably 20,000 migrants bused up to the beach area of the western coast of Turkey, and given a chance to board rafts....which would be dragged out near Greek isles. They'd land and then the Greeks would be stuck with them.
An immediate meeting would be held with the EU. It'd be a bloody mess that they really can't handle. They might find some method of taking the 20,000, but when you establish that another 20,000 will raft over to Greece next week, and it could go on for months....the EU would be dissolved into a fairly big mess.
The value of Chancellor Merkel's reputation? In a matter of just a month or two....trying to make this a national problem to take in a fairly large group of Syrian migrants....she'd lose public trust. It's one thing to suggestion taking 50,000 in a short-period of time, but to suggest it might go up to 1.5-million? No, that won't sell to the general German public.
So the odds that the EU will just stay quiet and not agree with Trump's economic threat on Turkey? I'd give it a 90-percent chance. It's a sad situation for the EU crowd and the pro-Merkel people to be put into.....where Trump is on one single occasion is right, and they can't side with him or face down Turkey's threatening behavior into Syria.
No comments:
Post a Comment