"The AKP government has signed the so-called “Mecca Joint Defense Agreement” and thereby dragged our country into a new and extremely dangerous military adventure. The agreement’s most important declared clause treats an armed attack on any one of the three countries as an attack on all of them.
The ruling party has taken on this obligation in a region where imperialist aggression, regional rivalries and the calculations of reactionary governments constantly intertwine and threaten to produce fresh conflicts at any moment.
Nothing guarantees that Saudi Arabia’s role in the wars in Yemen and the Red Sea will not tomorrow present itself to Turkey as a “joint defense obligation.”
No one can guarantee that a new wave of attacks on Iran, an escalating war in Yemen, or some other regional reckoning will not pull Turkey directly into the fighting.
This is precisely the point: Turkey’s military power is being chained to imperialism’s regional plans, and the road is being cleared for our people to pay the price of these plans in blood. It takes little imagination to picture Trump rubbing his hands together as he announced this deal to the world, boasting of “Turkey’s army and arms industry, Saudi Arabia’s financial power and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.”
AKP circles have tried to sell this agreement as regional powers mobilizing against Israel, even as the founding of some new balance of power. None of this carries any conviction.
The AKP is not balancing against Israel, its “enemy brother” in the region. It is signing up as a subcontractor for an “American peace,” a peace that strengthens Israel, weakens Iran, and is flanked by reactionary regional powers ready to play whatever grim role imperialism assigns them.
It has become plain that Washington is working systematically to remove every point of resistance standing in the way of a broader regional settlement centered on Israel, and to realign the whole region to serve its own interests. The attacks aimed at weakening Iran, the rollout of the Gaza Plan, and the signing of the Turkish-Saudi-Pakistani security pact as tensions in Yemen and the Red Sea escalate: none of these developments stands apart from the others.
Washington wants to spread the military burden of this strategy across its regional allies, and at the same time fold its regional orientation into NATO’s common strategy. Turkey has become critical precisely on this point. It was no accident that the NATO Summit in Ankara pushed Turkey’s war-making capacity and arms industry to the fore, or that the bargaining over the regional role assigned to our country took place there.
Now we watch that bargain being carried out step by step across the region.
The Mecca Agreement is therefore not a “defense agreement” signed between three countries. Turkey’s NATO-embedded war machine and military capacity are being bound, through new mechanisms with reactionary regional powers like Saudi Arabia, to imperialist plans spanning a still wider geography.
A harsh period awaits the vast expanse stretching from the Middle East through the Red Sea to Africa. As the fight over control of energy and trade routes, and over new and profitable fields for investment, intensifies, it is plain that this fight will bring new military alignments and bloody reckonings in its wake.
For all these reasons our people must stay alert to the new war scenarios the government will place before them, dressed up in nationalist bombast, dreams of a “new Ottoman” order, sectarian rhetoric, or the language of “national security.”
Turkey’s security does not lie in more military alliances, more armament, or taking on ever greater roles in imperialist plans.
Turkey’s security lies in withdrawing from NATO, shutting down the imperialist bases, sending foreign troops out of our country, and building relations with all our neighbors on the basis of equality, sovereignty and mutual respect.
Only a consistent and strengthening anti-imperialist popular will in Turkey can secure this.
Without the organized strength of our people growing, Turkey cannot break free of the war machine into which the ambitions of its capitalist class have thrust it.
Rejecting the fate that imperialism and reactionary forces have written for our country, and seizing hold of our own future, has become a vital necessity that demands organization. The TKP will do whatever this requires."
tkp.org.tr
