A FIFTH WAR WILL NOT DO TURKEY ANY GOOD. However, on August 28th Erdogan's advisors published a map of "Greater Turkey" which illustrates the extent of Turkey's revisionist ambitions. It includes areas of Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Georgia and Armenia.

A Fifth War Won't Do Turkey Any Good

by Burak Bekdil  •  October 5th 

• On August 28, a former MP from Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party, Metin Külünk, published a map of "Greater Turkey" which illustrates the extent of Turkey's revisionist ambitions. It includes areas of Greece, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Georgia and Armenia.

• In a similarly threatening statement, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar provocatively advised Greece to remain silent "so as not to become a meze [snack] for the interests of others."

• Erdoğan's fifth war would be one with no winners. But Erdoğan's Turkey would be the bigger loser.

Threats from Turkey have been coming in unprecedented abundance. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently said: "... Turkey has the political, economic and military power to tear up immoral maps and documents imposed on itself. Either they will understand this with the language of politics and diplomacy or through painful experiences on the battlefield... A century ago, we either buried them in the ground or threw them into the sea..." Pictured: Erdoğan speaking in Ankara on September 17, 2020. (Photo by Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images)

During the 20^th century, the Turks and their traditional Aegean rivals, the Greeks, fought four conventional wars: The First Balkan War (1912-1913); the First World War (1914-1918); the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922); and the Cyprus War (1974). So it is not the first time during an expanse of peace that newspapers across the world are telling their readers that the Aegean Sea is on the brink of war. "Peace" across the Aegean has always been cold-to-very-cold except for brief periods of relative warmth. It looks as if Turks and Greeks live in neighboring homes built on a centuries-long blood feud.

Charles King, in his book Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul, wrote about the early post-Ottoman years in Istanbul and the nation-building efforts of the infant Republic of Turkey:

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