Three hundred and forty years and one day before, on 15 July 1683, a lone Ottoman officer approached the walls of Vienna asking for the surrender of the city. He carried a message from Sultan Mehmet IV, delivered to a Croatian soldier: «Accept Islam and live in peace under the Sultan! Surrender Vienna and live peacefully under the Sultan as Christians.
If some of you prefer to leave at your leisure, taking your belongings with you! But if you resist, then the fate of all of you will be death, desolation and slavery,» the firman said.
This threat was not empty. Behind the anonymous Ottoman officer was a huge army of 150,000 men. Many more than in 1529 when the Ottomans, under Suleiman the Magnificent, had attempted - without success - to take Vienna.
But now things were much more difficult: The imperial garrison of Vienna numbered only 12,000 men and another 37,000 soldiers were barricaded outside the walls. The chances of victory over the Ottomans were slim. Any resistance seemed futile.
The military commander of Vienna, Count Ernst Rüdiger Graf von Staureberg, however, rejected the Ottoman firman. He refused to surrender the city, and as a result, perhaps the most important and decisive siege in the modern history of Western Europe began.
For the record, it was the allied Germans, Poles and Austrians who prevailed, while the Ottomans left some 15,000 dead and wounded on the battlefield, as well as 5,000 prisoners.
With this victory, the Ottomans' march to the West was finally halted, central Europe was saved from total submission to the Ottoman Empire and its slow but steady decline began. .
Almost 340 years later, another «Sultan» tried, this time with blackmail and threats, to dominate Europe. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has agreed to ratify Sweden's membership of NATO. The West did not oppose it as it did the siege of Vienna.
He submitted and even proclaimed the «Sultan» as a key protagonist in international developments. And they gave him promises and many rewards: Dozens of new F-16 aircraft and the military modernization of another 80 in order to lift his objections. And use them where? But against Greece and Cyprus, no matter how much Erdogan was quick to deny it. Besides, the 11,000 violations of Greek airspace and the 254 overflights over the Greek islands in 2022 were not made by Turkish F-16s, but by ... wild ducks.
But let's be serious. NATO's geopolitical and strategic goals may be understandable, but the West will never ensure the integration of Erdogan's Turkey.
In Washington, there is a perception that Turkey - because of its geography, geopolitical position, the size of its population and its military power - is too important for NATO to have an open break. America and the West would possibly want the end of the Erdogan era more than anything else. It would like the rebirth of a Kemalist state on the political scene, to obediently follow the guidelines from the United States.
So far this has not happened. Nor will it happen as long as Erdogan is at the helm of Turkey. The Turkish president knows his power and the eastern bargaining. He does not hesitate to anger Russia, but without seriously endangering relations with Moscow. And he pulls the sleeves of NATO countries that are supposed to defend Western values.
NATO has unfortunately chosen to let Erdogan do his own thing. And the other 30 member countries will not pay for this, but perhaps only Greece...
