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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

Saudi Arabia carried out an extrajudicial killing in a small, neighboring state. This was carried out in the US. And for all intents and purposes could be considered an act of war against a state that has an unlimited war chest.

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Turkey isn’t small in any way. It’s a regional powerhouse.

Not to mention and I guess a lot of people dont know this but Turkey was one of the main allies of the USA not too long ago for quite a while at that. It was quite a strategic alliance too. Just look at Turkeys neighboring countries sometime.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey%E2%80%93United_States...

Turkey has the second largest military in NATO (after US) and by quite a margin

Turkey leadership may well be sympathetic to the Saudis to some extent. Freedom of press doesn't exactly seem like their biggest concern, and they have an authoritarian Muslim ruler.

They might be, no doubt. I was mainly objecting (unrelated to the article) to the 'smallness' of the neighboring state and to the fact that if something could be considered an act of war doesn't mean it will be one. Bottomless oil well is a good counter to an unlimited war chest.

They 'may be', but they're not. They are on opposing sides of a huge regional political divide, and pretty much in cold war against eachother.

I would argue that in the ME everyone is and is not in cold war with everyone else, at any given time. Erdogan and the Saudis, for example, both helped ISIS... until they didn't.

There isn't a fundamental ideological divide, everyone is just jockeying for a few more square-meters of this or that.

The jockeying isn't for some square meter of land. It's for influence over the muslim world.

It was a figure of speech. Influence is what gives you control, of course.

Turkey is totally not friends with Saudi Arabia right now.

Turkey has gone downhill in the last five years due to the actions of Turkish leadership. I no longer see them returning to the path of democracy sadly. The Trump administration are saints in comparison.

A superpower doesn't go to war over an isolated assassination of (with all due respect to the victim and his family) some random rich kid. Casus belli is invoked only where there was a pre-existing ambition. I don't think the US have any ambition to take over Saudi Arabia, when they couldn't even run Iraq.

You don't need to go to war. But you certainly also don't need to defend them. See how the UK responded to the Skripal case or Litivenko.

> small, neighboring state

That "small, neighboring state" is a №2 state in NATO

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