If you watched today’ video on my Power Pundit Youtube channel, you already know that Trump is going full realpolitik with both Netanyahu and Erdoğan.
The recap: Monday and Tuesday, three tankers got holes put in them in the Strait of Hormuz, and Washington says Iran did it. Tuesday night, the United States hit more than 80 targets inside Iran, including Kharg Island, the island that handles about 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports. Wednesday morning, at the NATO summit in Ankara, Trump declared the ceasefire dead: “As far as I am concerned, it’s over.” Brent jumped five percent.
And within hours of killing that ceasefire, Trump handed Erdoğan the two things Turkey has wanted since 2019: he’s lifting the CAATSA sanctions, the ones that punish countries for buying Russian weapons, and he’s opening the door to selling Turkey the F-35. One day after Netanyahu went on American television and begged him not to.
So what did Erdoğan do to earn it? I checked the record, and... Turkey’s record is nearly empty. Turkey declined to join the Iran campaign, contributed no offensive assets, and when the ceasefire got brokered in June, the brokers were Qatar and Pakistan, not Turkey. Meanwhile Spain declined the same campaign and got called a terrible partner in front of thirty governments.
The difference, for anyone who has been paying attention, is that Erdoğan let Trump author a story where Turkish neutrality was a personal favor to Trump, and never corrected him. He converted nothing into loyalty, then collected it in stealth fighters, with cannons and cavalry at the airport as the invoice.
But that leaves the real question: why pay him now, this week, that exact morning? My guess is that Trump is not paying for the past. He is paying for what he needs next. And what he needs next has a deadline on it, sitting on the Treasury’s website right now, dated July 17, and will tell you where the energy markets are moving next:
