Okay, let’s assume Turkey is our main enemy right now. A treacherous country that stabbed us in the back. We’ll set aside the question of why the hell, a month ago, were people fawning over them and opening mosques together with them?.
So, an enemy. You have to fight an enemy, and to do that, you have to study them. Devote substantial intellectual resources to every kind of Turkish studies. Yes, impose sanctions, but at the same time open and fund “Turkey study centers,” “Ottoman seminars,” “Atatürk universities,” and all the rest of it.
Bring in, and then train, the best specialists—people who can work with everyone from students to intelligence and counterintelligence officers. Open lots of language courses and courses on Turkish history.
Obviously, the results won’t come quickly, but if there has been a stab in the back, then everything must be done to prevent anything similar in 5, 10, or 50 years.
What is happening instead?
Isn’t this sheer idiocy and sabotage? Shutting down Ottoman language courses and obstructing graduate students studying Turkey. In other words, undermining the intellectual capacity for studying a potential adversary (to use the language of wartime mobilization).
The KGB and the CPSU Central Committee already lost one Cold War because of this kind of stupidity. Instead of diversifying the ways they studied the world and gathered information, they banned everything and hoped that diplomats and intelligence officers would somehow deliver some unique, secret knowledge “about foreign countries.” It led to nothing but the degradation of both diplomacy and intelligence. Secret knowledge does not exist; there is only knowledge, and it has to be approached systematically, like any other field of study.
If you want a bomb, build strong math-and-physics schools and train physicists. If you want to know “what the Turks are up to,” create Russian-Turkish research centers instead of shutting them down.
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