Professor Fahrettin Altun, the Turkish Presidency's director of communications, in his recent book titled "Türkiye as a Stabilizing Power in an Age of Turmoil," analyzes a number of problems plaguing humanity and reaches the conclusion that these issues are the results of the shortcomings and failures of the international system.

From the global health crisis to ongoing regional conflicts, selective fights against terrorism to hunger problems, anti-Semitism to Islamophobia, political populism to xenophobia, economic protectionism to the ineffectiveness of United Nations mechanisms, Altun highlights the failure of the international community to act together to find solutions. The root of these shortcomings, according to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s diagnosis, lies in the systemic institutions themselves:

"On numerous occasions, President Erdoğan underlined the fact that it is not sustainable for the international system to pretend that the existing mechanisms, approaches and institutions are sufficient in handling the system’s current crises. Türkiye has sought to promote workable alternatives, particularly as it has seen its portfolio strengthen as a regional power in the Middle East."

(Altun adopted the new orthographical spelling for Turkey as "Türkiye," like some other authors now do.)

Heading the Presidency's Directorate of Communications since its inception in 2018, Altun works very closely with Erdoğan and understands the president’s motivation in adopting a more proactive foreign policy in the region: mutually acceptable solutions to long-term disputes.

Altun has personally engaged in research in the fields of political communication, media and communication sociology, political sociology and cultural studies. He held the position of general coordinator of SETA Istanbul (the Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research) for a long time, a research institute that counseled Erdoğan governments and his political Justice and Development Party (AK Party). He also contributed to Ankara’s call for the international community to respond collectively to common global challenges without falling into the trap of unilateralism.

Glimpses into IR

The era of the Cold War, from 1946 to 1991, was a period of unilateralism because the United States, the Soviet Union and their allies were locked in a long, tense conflict under the threat of nuclear war. Later on, both sides understood that such a war could not have a winner because of the certainty of "mutually assured destruction." Neither side would rationally choose to attack the other because of what Raymond L. Garthoff, in 1979, defined as: "The consequences of un-avoidable retaliation – whether only one, or for that matter neither, actually has or would have an intention to attack in the absence of such a deterrent retaliatory capability on the other side." They had to act unilaterally; after all, they were technically at peace while simultaneously also engaged in an aggressive arms race, proxy wars and ideological bids for world dominance.

However, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, any aggression from the Russian Federation could not be used as a pretext to justify Cold-War-grade unilateralism, especially after the implementations of START I and II (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) between the U.S. and Russians, which bars its signatories from deploying more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and a total of 1,600 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and bombers, also banning the use of multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) on ICBMs. These treaties created a verifiable multilateral mechanism to reduce the possibility of the Cold War principle of mutually assured destruction. We knew that a nuclear attack by one superpower would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack in which both the attacker and the defender would be annihilated. The anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaties worked fine until five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Four former Soviet republics agreed with the U.S. to succeed the USSR's role in the treaty; and in June 2002, Washington withdrew from the treaty, thus leading to its termination. In response to the U.S. withdrawal from the treaty, Russia also pulled out. In addition, Russian President Vladimir Putin responded to the move by ordering a build-up of Russia's nuclear capabilities.

Reading Ukraine

Ukraine was one of the four countries that assured the U.S. that it would obey the ABM treaties. The country was the subject of an orange revolution, and Kazakhstan, another of the four, too, almost experienced a revolution of the same kind. Currently, both sides are working on these two countries. John Rhinelander, a U.S. negotiator of the ABM treaty, had predicted that the U.S. withdrawal from the agreement would lead to a "world without effective legal constraints on nuclear proliferation." It was also feared that the construction of a missile defense system would enable the U.S. to attack first with a nuclear strike.

The Biden Democrats hate Donald Trump's guts based on their words, however, they kept many of Trump's people at the helm of national security, national defense and various diplomacy apparatus across departments and the White House. Nobody knows for sure what Trump’s "America First" meant in terms of nuclear rearmament. Where does NATO get the courage to threaten Russia with paying "a terrible price" if it invades Ukraine? Why did its two major European members – France and Germany – flatly reject joining in on those threats?

The more essential question should be why there aren’t any effective mechanisms to bring nations together to discuss the issues that they themselves cannot solve. As there are no accidental coincidences in life, there is no such a thing as a rambling speech in diplomacy. Biden knows very well that "the side of the bed he gets up on in the morning" has nothing to do with what Putin is going to do. As Biden confesses, whatever Putin does is not irrational but rather in accordance with "a strategic doctrine and dealing with force structures in Europe and in the European parts of Russia."

The unfortunate part is that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a Ukrainian actor, comedian and politician who happens to be the sixth and current president of Ukraine, does not know what that doctrine is or what those force structures are. No one is offering to help him, either ... other than Erdoğan who, following his own maxim that the "international community (should) act together to find solutions to existing and emerging challenges," is going to visit Ukraine (and perhaps afterward, Russia).

France's President Emmanuel Macron and Germany's new Chancellor Olaf Scholz, come on! Don’t just stand there. Be part of the solution if you don’t want to be part of the problem ... (Ms. Angela Merkel would have by now, you know!)