From Tripoli to Tripoli, Turkey’s Real Aim Is Egypt

The recent explosion at Beirut Port highlights both Turkey’s growing defense cooperation with Iran and its strategic interest in Lebanon, which facilitates Ankara’s provocative and worrisome agenda in the Eastern Mediterranean. However, Turkey’s unrestrained aggression in that region may be a diversionary tactic from its slow and patient pursuit of a complex strategy to surround Egypt with hostile forces on multiple fronts and undercut its powerful regional role.

The recent deadly and destructive explosion in Beirut raised more questions than answered, and even the “answers” that the international community arrived at obscured in some ways the underlying issues that made this tragedy possible. Several talking points floated to the surface and continue to hold sway.

• No matter what the ultimate intent of the explosives or cause of the explosion, Hezbollah is to blame because it stored the explosives among the civilian population in direct violation of international humanitarian laws. It is assumed that the explosives were intended to be used eventually against Israeli civilians.
• The only winner in this fiasco was that same Hezbollah because it was able to capitalize on international sympathy to score support (if not the bailouts it was hoping for), expropriate and sell off international aid such as that from Kuwait, and advance its agenda regarding the lifting of sanctions. France’s President Emmanuel Macron facilitated the sympathy optics by engaging in a deceptive trip that concluded with promises of sanctions relief as part of a “Grand Bargain,” and even suggested the possibility of US sanctions relief without first consulting with the US administration.

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Πηγή: besacenter.org