Opinion | The geopoliticization of tragedy

By Tom Fowdy

Yesterday, a horrific earthquake struck southeastern Turkey and the Levant region of Syria. The largest earthquake that the region has felt in a century, the death toll is in the thousands already and continues to grow. Images and videos relay the scale of sheer destruction as apartment buildings toppled like stacks of cards. The situation is tragic and grim, and it is little surprise that such a disaster was met with an outpouring of grief.

While both severely impacted, Turkey and Syria may be neighbors, but they both exist in very different geopolitical realities. Turkey is a member of NATO. Seen as occupying a critically geostrategic position by western countries, the Anatolian peninsula which forms a bridge between Asia and Europe, holding the gateway to the Black Sea, Ankara has always been an important country even during times when Recep Erdoğan has shown extreme unreliability and erratic behavior in his governance of the country, that has become more authoritarian over time.

Through its highly influential geography, Turkey has long been able to utilize a maverick foreign policy between the west and its enemies (including the USSR and now Russia), even occupying a semi-ambiguous position on the Ukraine war which has not been as forthright in its opposition to Moscow as Europe at large. It is no surprise on the back of all this, that the west sees the opportunity to support Turkey in the midst of this natural disaster as a means of extending its own political influence and swaying Ankara to their preferences.

Syria on the other hand, has no such privileges. Governed by Bashar Al-Assad, who is despised by the west, the country suffered a brutal civil war throughout the past decade wherein the US and its allies actively attempted to topple his regime through supporting rebels. The brutal and violent conflict, combined with heavy US sanctions placed on the country, had long produced a humanitarian crisis long before the earthquake came. Given this, western diplomatic messaging towards Syria was severely limited in the midst of the tremor, with the most focus being on Turkey. There is already talk on social media as to how delivery of aid has been blocked or obstructed due to sanctions, such as for example fundraisers being taken down, or airliners refusing to ship goods.

While of course western ideology, derived from Christianity, teaches "universality" in practice, that is believing humans have a moral obligation to help all humanity, "love thy neighbor", in reality geopolitics continues to be driven exclusively by the national interests of stakes as opposed to any altruistic or moral sentiment. This strongly applies to how states distribute aid to natural disasters. It is a reality of geopolitics that aid is often made conditional on political and diplomatic preferences, and that "some countries are more important than others". While the United States of course will never admit this, and may make a few token gestures irrespective of the situation, it will be selective on the support it offers at a government level, or even take credit for the work of charities and NGOs should it choose to do nothing.

When it comes to countries severely sanctioned by the United States, such as Syria, the United States always claims that "humanitarian aid" and "essential supplies" are never blacklisted. However, as the United States has already blacklisted all financial and corporate means to do legitimate business with the target country, every single means of delivering aid has already been de-facto "unofficially" blocked. Therefore, all deliveries of humanitarian aid must go through an extremely strict process of US government approval, which of course allows the White House to leverage this based on political conditionalities to try and extract concessions from the target country. This was most evident with the history of US sanctions on North Korea, where approval and disapproval of humanitarian aid became a "carrot and stick" game against Pyongyang.

Because of this, Syria is for geopolitical and sanction-based reasons, at a massive disadvantage when it comes to Turkey in regard to the humanitarian disaster caused by the earthquake. Ravaged by war, crippled by sanctions and ruled by a government the west sought to remove, Syria will not get the same level of support or attention as the relatively prosperous NATO member Turkey will. In international politics, foreign aid is never distributed out of sheer goodwill. The west don't care about suffering in Assad's Syria, the same country they had no qualms about completely destroying, but they certainly care about seeking to twist Erodgan's arm with support to try and win him more firmly in their camp on the matter of Ukraine.

The author is a well-seasoned writer and analyst with a large portfolio related to China topics, especially in the field of politics, international relations and more. He graduated with an Msc. in Chinese Studies from Oxford University in 2018.

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

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