Germany, Ozil and Loew: The Clay Triumvrate.

Watching the FIFA 2018 World Cup match between Germany and South Korea that has just ended, it was damn difficult believing it was the same German team that thumped Brazil 7-1 in the semi-finals of the 2014 edition of the same tournament that was on the field. The

magnificent squad that later went on to win the cup at the expense of Argentina. It is charitable saying the team was a shadow of its former self. No shadow, no matter how miserable, would want to be associated with this pathetic performance. Is this not the same team that used to be called the 'German Machine' by admirers all over the world? A moniker earned for competence, ruthless efficiency, crisp passing and wondrous organization. The squad we've just seen rather looked like a chapped-out car, a contraption coughing badly and no amount of pushing was going to make it start. Plenty of pushing there was, as strenuous as hell, millions of German fans at home and abroad doing all they can to urge on their team to glory, but Joachim Loew's team was simply dire. It was a car they couldn't even get to the mechanic. The fire-high passion of supporters would eventually get damped by a performance nothing short of a damp squib.
The prime architect of the heinous 2-0 defeat  was Loew himself, World Cup winner in 2014, now diving steeply and very fast from hero to zero. If Mesut Ozil and Sami Khedira played so poorly in the first match defeat to Mexico, and the team managed to win against highly-organized Sweden in the second match, why field them again in the final match? A crucial match that they had to win, take their own fate in their own hands and avoid the risk of depending on other results from the group. Perhaps he thought Mexico would beat Sweden. Perhaps he underestimated South Korea. Perhaps he has lost his gravitas for caution, shrewdness, alertness and judgment.
He had an able lieutenant in Ozil, the hero of 2014 that started Germany's precipitous slip in the current edition long before the tournament started by that notorious photo-op with Erdogan, the Turkish president, a rabble-rouser as loud and violent as they come. With Ilkay Gundogan, another German player of Turkish origins, it was not a little rumpus they caused team preparations by posing with Erdogan and calling him 'my president'. Only God knows the inspiration they hoped to gain from the pugnacious lout? And if they thought that muzzling opposition, clamping opponents into jail without trial and screaming at real or imagined threats were all going to be insightful, the idiocy of it all was ruthlessly exposed by Mexico and South Korea. Loew shouldn't have taken the pair to Germany. Just as he was with Arsenal, his performances were slow, lethargic and horribly sloppy and his body language bespoke that of a spoiled brat, a lout quarreling with team mates and himself. The upside of it all is that he knows he is finished in international football and needs a huge redemption at club level. He might have won the World Cup but hanging around his neck now is the unwanted medal of Germany exiting the tournament at a group stage since 1938, before the 2nd World War.
It is that bad. 

Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 2

So President Erdogan  sends troops, tanks and warplanes into Syria at will to attack the Kurds while President Trump and Secretary Tillerson look on numbly like rabbits caught plumb in powerful headlights. It does not really matter that Syria is supposed to be a sovereign state, the country had long been partitioned among Russians, Iranians, The Gulf States, Saudis, Turks, Kurds and just anybody that could arm a miscreant with a rifle. This inaction, even silent acquiescence, on the part of the US is even more baffling in the sense that the Kurds remain the only sensible option for securing the porous borders and crossing points  from Syria to Iraq and even to Turkey itself. Hence the decision of the US to convert the YPG to a border force is a well thought out policy, the only effective way to stop the IS from regrouping. After all, Turkey with all its huge army and security paranoia was unable to prevent would-be militants from Europe and elsewhere from using the country as transit points to join  the shitty caliphate in Syria and Iraq at the height of IS ascendancy. Hordes of them were crossing the borders in broad daylight and Turkish officials were looking the other way as a result of compromise or sheer incompetence. The Kurds represent the only credible and capable buffer force in those climes, a fact Trump well recognizes. Hence shrugging helplessly while Erdogan attacks and decimates the forces required to carry out the all-important policing can only be as a result of a foreign policy that is at best, formulated in tweets. Trump is horribly incoherent in his foreign policy and in no instance is this more demonstrated than his inertia in coming to the defense of his most dependable allies in the Middle East. It seems as if he had gathered the Kurds in a police compound for training and then he sends in a bomb-laden suicide truck to blow up the whole place. When policies are set out in tweets, or on a glib tongue, the obvious victims are organization, logic and unity. Senselessness supplanting sense and vice versa.
Maybe Trump thinks that it is a choice between NATO and the Kurds. Then it is equally a choice between where he could put his two feet in and a place that could, in all honesty, admit in other feet. It is leaving immediate, pressing certainty for a long-term certainty, if we can even qualify it as such. It is the Kurds that are in the demand books of the US now, not the Turks. A country that the EU would not even allow in.
Someone said he was confused as to what the US could have done when Turkey sent in its forces into Afrin. Very simple, a couple of US soldiers stationed in very visible places in the enclave. There was no need to do anything combative. No need to unleash warplanes to protect her allies. Something very symbolic would have stopped the tanks. Erdogan's attack on Afrin was no more than a diplomatic test of will, just like Hitler's re-militarization of Rhineland. He was really expecting a firmness from Trump that an attack on YPG and Kurds would be an attack on US troops itself. A couple of  unarmed Green Berets placed on Afrin roads would have driven that home quite trenchantly.
Just like Hitler, all he got in response was sordid appeasement.
After Rhineland, Austria was next and then Czechoslovakia. After Afrin, Manbij, Raqqa and other Kurdish enclaves.
Appeasement is defined as letting a bully have his way always. 

Trump, Turks and Kurds: Leaving Allies to Fry 1

President Trump's most coherent foreign policies are on his lips, so it is a huge wonder that he is presently tongue-tied as Turkey sends tanks and troops to attack the only slice of influence the US has left in Syria: the sliver of territories controlled by Kurds in the eastern margins of the country. Putin and his Iranian allies call all the shots now in wider Syria, committing men and materiel to underline an influence growing by leaps and bounds every hour while the US has been hiding in the deserts of eastern Syria. Right from Obama, the country didn't even have a plan A in Syria, not to talk of a plan B or C. In other words, Russia had a focus it was going to enforce with a trenchant ruthlessness now yielding immense results while the US simply did not know what to do, looking back fearfully at an American public that had grown so weary of war.
But the US was lucky, so to say. It did not have to move in thousands of troops or an aircraft carrier brimming with warplanes. Like in Afghanistan during the invasion, all it needed on ground was a proxy army. And no proxy army could ever be more reliable than the Kurds, sturdy individuals with fighting skills and resilience that easily put to flight the famed capabilities of the Northern Alliance. Their heroics in Kobane is well known, a battle that showed everyone that the Islamic State was not an invincible evil horde before which every resistance must melt. The Islamic State impaled itself on the chimneys of Kobane and once they were defeated there, their days were numbered, just as Nazi Germany days were numbered after Stalingrad. The Kurds, under their YPG militia, were to later play the crucial role in driving the IS out of their fiefdoms in Raqqa, Manbij and several other towns and territories in eastern parts of the country, aided by Arab allies and US airstrikes. Without the Kurds, maybe IS would have been defeated but there was little doubt it would have been a very protracted conflict: infinitely sapping on morale and public opinion.
Faithful and largely peaceable individuals the pugnacious, rabble-rousing Erdogan now label as terrorists despite the fact that not a single instance of terrorism on Turkish soil, whether tenuous or even contrived, has ever been linked to the YPG. The border crossings now controlled by the YPG used to be manned by the evil IS fighters and not a single shot was fired by Turkey into Syrian territory then. Naturally, Erdogan would be more comfy with Daesh. Convoys of trucks laden with fuel stolen from Syrian oilfields were crossing the Turkish border in broad daylight on a daily basis, driven by IS terrorists while they held sway in areas now controlled by Kurds. Perhaps Erdogan feared a bullet would ignite one of the trucks and set off a fearsome conflagration.
So it is easy to understand Erdogan's contrived animosity towards the Syrian Kurds. What is far more nebulous is the US silence and inaction. Save for a couple of rhetorics that do not even qualify for a whimper, Trump and his Secretary, Tillerson, have watched with soporific eyes as Turkey rolls its tanks deeper and deeper into the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria.