ANKARA
In a newly surfaced video, the current front-runner in the US presidential race said he would seek regime change in Turkey and declared to work with “opposition leadership” in the country to topple President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey’s 2023 elections.
While former Vice President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have long accused Russia and other foreign powers like China and Iran of interfering in US elections – and accused President Donald Trump of collusion with these efforts – Biden’s remarks recorded last December seem to embrace the same tactics of interference in foreign elections, only this time for the US to try to sway elections in Turkey.
In the video, recorded last December for the FX documentary series The Weekly, Biden speaks with the editorial board of local news publisher in NYC , whose first foreign policy question to him incongruously does not concern such longtime adversaries as China, Russia, or Iran but rather NATO ally Turkey.
“Do you feel comfortable with the United States still having nuclear weapons in Turkey given Erdogan’s behavior?” Kathleen Kingsbury, the paper’s deputy editorial page editor, asked Biden.
Some 50 US nuclear weapons based in Turkey “began to stir public debate after Turkey’s offensive into Syria in October,” she added, mischaracterizing Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring, launched last fall to prevent the formation of a terrorist corridor on its southern borders and to liberate local Syrians from terrorist oppression.
“The answer is my comfort level is diminished a great deal. I’ve spent a lot of time with Erdogan,” Biden responded, describing Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s democratically elected president, as an “autocrat.”
Biden added that if he is elected this November, his administration will pursue a policy of intervention against Turkey’s elected government.
“What I think we should be doing is taking a very different approach to him [Erdogan] now, making it clear that we support opposition leadership,” said Biden.
He added, suggesting an ultimatum: “He [Erdogan] has to pay a price. He has to pay a price for whether or not we’re going to continue to sell certain weapons to him.”
During the two-term presidency of Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice president, Turkey took strong exception to the US policies of financing and arming Turkey’s terrorist archenemy in northern Syria, the YPG/PKK – whose mother terrorist group the PKK has taken some 40,000 lives – as well as to refusing to extradite Fetullah Gulen, the US resident leader of the terrorist Fetullah Gulen Terrorist Organization (FETO), which carried out a defeated coup attempt in July 2016.
Before the coup was defeated, the terror group FETO martyred 251 Turks and wounded more than 2,200 in less than 12 hours on the night of July 15.
Obama and Biden’s failed Middle East policies, especially in Syria, also exacerbated relations with Turkey and set the stage for recent tension between the two NATO allies.
