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The Economist April 25th 2020
2 lapse. But he may end up with both. His
government has suspended all interna-
tional flights, closed schools, cancelled
communal prayers at mosques, and or-
dered people above 65 and below 20 to re-
main at home. But it has also kept the econ-
omy running, albeit in low gear.
This piecemeal approach is starting to
backfire. On April 10th the government im-
posed a weekend curfew in the country’s
biggest cities with only two hours’ notice.
Within minutes, hundreds of thousands of
people stormed supermarkets and baker-
ies to stock up on food. Turkey’s infection
rate was already rising rapidly. In the first
three weeks of April, confirmed cases
spiked from under 16,000 to over 90,000.
The botched curfew will have made things
even worse.
The economy, which rebounded late
last year, is reeling again. Exports in March No one more vulnerable
were down by 18% compared with the same
period in 2019. Tourism, which generated
$35bn last year, is bracing for a lost sum-
mer. The central bank, having burned
through billions of dollars to prop up the
Turkish lira, has nearly run out of foreign
reserves. The currency is sliding, placing
yet more pressure on companies with for-
eign-currency debt.
No one is more vulnerable than the mi-
grants and refugees who have made Turkey
their home over the past decade. Some 70%
of the 3.7m Syrians in Turkey are poor or
nearly poor. The vast majority work
informally, which makes them ineligible
for compensation or unemployment bene-
fits. A recent survey revealed that only 3%
of employed Syrians had official work per-
mits. “They were hired for being the cheap-
est labour and they will be the most dispos-
able ones,” says Omar Kadkoy, a researcher
at tepav, a think-tank in Ankara.
Scores have already been sacked. May-
sarah, an Egyptian who worked at a stall
selling dried fruit in Istanbul’s once bustl-
ing Grand Bazaar, says his bosses fired him
and dozens of other migrants when the ba-
zaar closed in March. Waseem, a Syrian
who drives a food-delivery truck, says he
managed to hold on to his job. Four of his
five Syrian flatmates have lost theirs. Be-
cause refugees generally work off the
books, there is no telling how many have
been laid off since the start of the crisis.
The jobless rate is 14%, but that figure dates and cancelled in March. But the lessons of
back to January. Economists fear it will eas- the truncated drill are vital for Western war says Mr Lété. The planning efforts “were a
ily pass 20% by the summer.
The government has tried to help the
economy weather the storm with a 100bn-
lira ($15bn) stimulus package, which allows
affected businesses to defer loan and tax
payments and offers support to house-
holds in need. Parliament has also passed a
law banning companies from sacking
workers over the coming three months and
offering those forced to take unpaid leave
roughly $6 a day. None of this applies to
migrants or refugees.
Turkey may soon turn to a familiar
source for additional funding. In 2015 the
eu offered Turkey $6bn if it agreed to look
after the refugees and prevent them from
crossing to Greece. Mr Erdogan deserves no
reward for playing with their hopes to put
pressure on European governments. But
the migrants and refugees knocking on Eu-
rope’s doors do deserve better. Against the
approaching storm, many of them are de-
fenceless. Once again, the eu will probably
be obliged to clench its teeth, loosen its
purse-strings and entrust Turkey’s leader
with lots more money. 7
NATO in Europe
Yankees go home
America’s dry run to defend Europe is
derailed by covid-19
t was to be America’s largest deploy-
Iment of troops across the Atlantic since
the cold war. Instead, “Defender 20”, an ex-
ercise designed to test America’s ability to
moveadivision(20,000orsosoldiers)into
andacrossEurope,wasstrickenbycovid-19
plans, which depend on armies being able
to dash east over Europe’s disjointed road
and rail system in a crisis.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in
2014, a revived nato strung 5,000 or so
troops in four modest battlegroups
through the Baltic states and Poland to de-
ter more adventurism. These would slow
rather than halt a Russian advance. If at-
tacked, they would need massive rein-
forcement, and fast. So the allies agreed
Europe 43
that by this year they would have 30 battal-
ions, 30 warships and 30 air squadrons—all
available to nato within 30 days.
But shoring up the frontline depends
not only on having units ready but also on
whether they can get to where they are
needed, something planners call military
mobility. Ben Hodges, a retired general
who commanded American army forces in
Europe in 2014-17, says shifting troops and
equipment across borders was a bureau-
cratic and logistical headache. It still is, ac-
cording to a recent report he co-wrote, pub-
lished by the International Centre for
Defence and Security and the Centre for
European Policy Analysis, think-tanks in
Estonia and Washington respectively.
Some obstacles are procedural, like bor-
der checks on military goods. Others are to
do with infrastructure. The difference in
European and Baltic rail gauges requires
switching trains at the Polish-Lithuanian
border, for instance, while the key Poznan-
Warsaw highway, like many roads in east-
ern Europe built to handle lighter Warsaw
Pact armour, cannot take America’s m1
Abrams tanks. All told, it would take 60
days to get a heavy division from America
to the Baltic region and five to six months
for a corps (up to 45,000 troops), says the
report. By that time, Russian invaders
could be well ensconced.
General Hodges says he eventually real-
ised that European interior ministries and
border agencies were better interlocutors
than his fellow generals. “I also discovered
that the European Union was actually the
better institution for addressing most of
the challenges,” he says. While nato had
the plans, “they had the authorities and
processes and money.” In recent years the
eu has been working more closely with
nato. In 2018 it put the Dutch in charge of a
project to improve military mobility.
Even so, under current eu rules it could
still take a leisurely five days to issue
“movement permissions” for most units.
“Europe is in a bad place,” concludes Bruno
Lété of the German Marshall Fund, another
think-tank. He points out that the Euro-
pean Commission’s latest budget proposal
suggests that funds for military mobility
could shrink from €6.5bn ($7.1bn) to zero.
“Scaling back Defender 20 is really a lost
opportunity to effectively test that logisti-
cal knowledge of Europe’s infrastructure,”
huge success”, insists Rear-Admiral Pete
Stamatopoulos, the director of logistics for
us European Command. But only 6,000 or
so American troops had arrived in Europe
when the plug was pulled. The fact that
America was prepared to spend hundreds
of millions of dollars in an election year on
an exercise is a sign of commitment and a
signal to the Kremlin, says General Hodges.
But whether American troops could get
east in a hurry remains unproven. 7