Erdogan’s NATO brinkmanship smacks of desperationWhat exactly does Recep Tayyip Erdogan want from NATO? And more to the point, does NATO need to give it to him?
The far-right mystical writer who helped shape Putin’s view of RussiaVladimir Putin has frequently tried to legitimize his invasion of Ukraine by invoking the idea of a religiously tinged civilizational clash: Eurasia against the West. For Putin, Moscow is the “third Rome,” the spiritual and cultural inheritor of the legacy of the Roman and Byzantine empires, the center of a distinctly anti-European dominion, one powerful (and authoritarian) enough to withstand the perceived threats of liberal modernity, multiculturalism and progressive values.
