Turkey:
What Ally?
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Last week, the U.S. Secretaries of State and Defense, John Kerry and
Chuck Hagel, were in the Turkish capital, one after the other, to ask for
Turkey's contribution to a coalition of allies in a U.S.-led war on the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS, aka The Islamic State].
Not only will Ankara take no military action, it will also forbid the
U.S. from using a critical U.S. air base in southern Turkey to conduct
strikes against the jihadist terrorists, the Turks told Messrs. Kerry and
Hagel.
Earlier during the week, Turkey also abstained from signing a
communiqué which Arab nations penned, seeking stronger action against
ISIS.
Some call Turkey "a U.S. frenemy," others refer to it as
"NATO's Qatar." Unsurprisingly, on Sept. 9 the U.S. Congress
delivered its staunchest warning to date that Turkey and Qatar could face
financial and other penalties if they continue to support Hamas and other
U.S.-designated terrorist organizations.
Jonathan Schanzer, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said
that Congress could start exploring alternatives to the U.S. air base
at al-Udeid in Qatar. Echoing that view, the Wall Street Journal
claimed in its Sept.
13 editorial that it is the "unavoidable conclusion" that
the U.S. needs to find a better regional ally than Turkey to fight ISIS,
and suggested that the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey should be
moved somewhere else, perhaps to Iraqi Kurdistan. The Wall Street
Journal argued that the Turkish government, a member of NATO, long
ago stopped acting like an ally of the U.S. or a friend of the West.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardone said
that the Turkish government "frankly worked" with the al-Nusrah
Front—the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria—along with other terrorist groups.
It is an open secret that Ankara also looked the other way as foreign
radical groups used Turkey as a transit point on their way to Syria and
Iraq.
Ironically, on the exact day as the Turks were telling American
dignitaries, "We are sorry, but don't count us in," the
Transatlantic Trends Survey 2014 revealed that Western institutions still
matter for Turks.[1]
Turks have a confused mind about their six decade-long alliance with
the West. After twelve years of systematic indoctrination by their
government that their country is on a fast journey to revive its glorious
imperial past, the Turks believed that it would soon be "Turkey's
rules" first in their region, rather than elsewhere. Sadly, they had
to wake up to regional realities instead: Their country is the only one
in the world without ambassadors in Jerusalem, Damascus and Cairo; and at
various degrees of cold wars with several countries in its vicinity. Its
citizens are high-value currency in the Middle East's hostage market. The
abduction of 49 Turks -- diplomats and their family members, including the
consul general -- on June 11 in Mosul, northern Iraq has made the wannabe
regional power itself a hostage to ISIS too. The safe return of the
hostages on September 20 does not mean that Turkey has freed itself from
captivity: Ankara, fearing a wave of terrorist attacks on its soil,
cannot openly clash with ISIS.
Despite a slight improvement in the Turks' perceptions of the West and
its institutions, it is, once again, "directionless Turkey."
The Americans pretend to be disappointed by their part-time ally. They
looked "shocked." They should not be. As NATO official Michael
Ruehle once reminded us, Noah's rule is: "Predicting rain does not
count, building arks does."
Under the Islamist rule of former Prime Minister, now President, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey was already on a path to become a challenge to
NATO. That journey of "fading likemindedness" did not begin
last week. Turkey's case has been quite conspicuous since 2009 when
then-Foreign Minister, now Prime Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu took the helm
of foreign policy.
Taking refuge from the August heat at Alexei Kosygin's Kremlin
banquette back in cold war-stricken 1965, Turkish Prime Minister Suat
Hayri Urguplu said that he was "very pleased to be witnesses to the
gradual and confident development of mutual understanding with the Soviet
Union." The next day, an Istanbul daily commented that:
"Improvement of Turkey's relations with the Soviets is fine on one
condition: that we always remain an ally of the United States and in
NATO."
Forty-two years after, in 2007, some bigwigs in Turkey's security
bureaucracy began weighing the merits and demerits of a non-aggression
pact with Russia.
Two years after that, in April 2009, military teams from Turkey and
Bashar al-Assad's Syria crossed the border and visited outposts during
joint military drills. That was the first time a NATO army was exercising
with Syria's.
In September 2010, Turkish and Chinese air force aircraft conducted
joint exercises in Turkish airspace. That, too, was the first time a NATO
air force was conducting military exercises with China's.
In 2011, a Transatlantic Trends survey revealed that Turkey was the
NATO member with the lowest support for the alliance: just 37% (down from
53% in 2004, but up to 49% this year).
The same year, before finally providing NATO forces with limited
logistical support, Turkey's then-Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
now President, angrily asked: "What business can NATO have in
Libya?" Also in 2011, the Turkish government announced plans
eventually to build a ballistic missile with a range of 2,500 kilometers.
Military experts were left pondering which city could be the potential
target: London? Moscow? Tel Aviv? Brussels?
In 2012, Turkey joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization [SCO] as
a dialogue partner. (Other dialogue partners are Belarus and Sri Lanka;
observer nations are Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran and Mongolia).
Since then, Erdogan has, at least a few times, publicly said that Ankara
would abandon its quest to join the European Union if it were offered
full membership of the SCO.
In September 2013, Turkey announced that it had selected a Chinese
company (on a U.S. sanctions list) for the construction of its first
long-range air and anti-missile defense architecture. Turkish officials
claimed that local engineering would make the Chinese system
inter-operable with the U.S. and NATO assets deployed on Turkish soil.
It took the Turks a year, dozens of warnings from NATO's HQ and
hundreds of visits to warn Ankara that a Chinese air defense system could
not be made inter-operable with U.S. or NATO assets. It also took threats
of putting Turkish firms on the same U.S. sanctions list before they
reversed course and started talks with a European bidder.
At the beginning of this year, the Financial Act Task Force, an
international body setting the global rules and standards for combating
terrorist financing, ruled that Turkey should remain on its "gray
list." Once again, Turkey was the odd one out: the only NATO member
country on the gray list (the others are Algeria, Ecuador, Ethiopia,
Myanmar, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen).
Being
NATO's only Muslim member for several decades was fine. Being NATO's
only Islamist member ideologically attached to the Muslim Brotherhood
and Hamas is quite another thing.
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Experts have since warned that troubling questions remain about
Ankara's relationships with Iranian gold traders, Hamas leaders, al-Qaeda
in Syria and persons designated under the U.S. sanctions regime.
All that was enough to make Turkey a bizarre ally: It is a NATO member
in which only a third of the nation supported membership merely three
years ago; its air force engages in exercises with China's air force; the
government commissions a Chinese company on a U.S. sanctions list to
build a NATO-inter-operable air defense architecture. Meanwhile Turkey
seeks full membership in SCO while remaining on an international list of
potential terrorist sponsors -- sharing this list with, among others,
Syria and Yemen.
It is true that Turkey's position is convergent with NATO's on
Ukraine; and that Turkey has other converging interests as well, such as
preserving the stability of the global commons: air, sea, space.
But while NATO wishes to reinforce its outreach to like-minded
democracies (such as Australia and Japan), Turkey is trying to forge,
though often unsuccessfully, regional and wider partnerships with the
Arab world, Africa, Russia, China, Central Asia and the Caucasus -- and
with a bunch of terrorist organizations including Hamas, the Muslim
Brotherhood, Ahrar al-Sham and the al-Nusrah Front.
With all those credentials, Turkey remains only a part-time ally of
the West, and NATO's odd-one-out.
In all reality, for its Western partners, Turkey is a portmanteau of
ally and antagonist. Being NATO's only Muslim member for several decades
was fine. Being NATO's only Islamist member ideologically attached to the
Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas is quite another thing.
Burak Bekdil, based in Ankara, is a Turkish columnist for the
Hürriyet Daily News and a Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
[1]
The survey found that 45% of Turks -- a 10 percentage point increase from
2013 -- described their opinion of the EU as favorable. For the first
time since 2010, a majority of Turks (53%, or up eight percentage point
from 2013) thought that EU membership would be good for their country.
Turkey was also slightly less likely than in the past to prefer
unilateralism: 33% of Turkish respondents said that Turkey should act
alone on international matters (down five percentage points since 2013)
while 28% said that Turkey should work with the EU (up seven percentage
points since 2013).
Turks were also more positive on NATO, with 49% saying it
remained essential to their security -- a 10 percentage point increase
from 2013 and the highest level of support measured since 2005. When
asked what NATO should be doing, Turks were divided. Fifty-seven percent
supported its role in the territorial defense of Europe; a 42% percent
plurality opposed its operating out of area, and a 47% plurality opposed
its providing arms and training to other countries.
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