Fire Hydrant of Freedom
Politics, Religion, Science, Culture and Humanities => Politics & Religion => Topic started by: Crafty_Dog on July 31, 2007, 01:05:38 PM
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Woof All:
With this analysis of the geopolitics of Turkey by the ever impressive Stratfor.com , we open this thread.
TAC,
Marc
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The Geopolitics of Turkey
By George Friedman
Rumors are floating in Washington and elsewhere that Turkey is preparing to move against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an anti-Turkish group seeking an independent Kurdistan in Turkey. One report, by Robert Novak in the Washington Post, says the United States is planning to collaborate with Turkey in suppressing the PKK in northern Iraq, an area the PKK has used as a safe-haven and launch pad to carry out attacks in Turkey.
The broader issue is not the PKK, but Kurdish independence. The Kurds are a distinct ethnic group divided among Turkey, Iran, Iraq and, to a small extent, Syria. The one thing all of these countries have agreed on historically is they have no desire to see an independent Kurdistan. Even though each has, on occasion, used Kurdish dissidents in other countries as levers against those countries, there always has been a regional consensus against a Kurdish state.
Therefore, the news that Turkey is considering targeting the PKK is part of the broader issue. The evolution of events in Iraq has created an area that is now under the effective governance of the Iraqi Kurds. Under most scenarios, the Iraqi Kurds will retain a high degree of autonomy. Under some scenarios, the Kurds in Iraq could become formally independent, creating a Kurdish state. Besides facing serious opposition from Iraq's Sunni and Shiite factions, that state would be a direct threat to Turkey and Iran, since it would become, by definition, the nucleus of a Kurdish state that would lay claim to other lands the Kurds regard as theirs.
This is one of the reasons Turkey was unwilling to participate in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Americans grew close to the Kurds in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm, helping augment the power of an independent militia, the peshmerga, that allowed the Iraqi Kurds to carve out a surprising degree of independence within Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The Turks were never comfortable with this policy and sent troops into Iraq in the 1990s to strike against the PKK and pre-empt any moves toward more extensive autonomy. Before the war started in 2003, however, the Turks turned down a U.S. offer to send troops into northern Iraq in exchange for allowing the United States to use Turkish territory to launch into Iraq. This refusal caused Turkey to lose a great deal of its mobility in the region.
The Turks, therefore, are tremendously concerned by the evolution of events in Iraq. Whether northern Iraq simply evolves into an autonomous region in a federal Iraq or becomes an independent state as Iraq disintegrates is almost immaterial. It will become a Kurdish homeland and it will exist on the Turkish border. And that, from the Turkish point of view, represents a strategic threat to Turkey.
Turkey, then, is flexing its muscles along the Iraqi border. Given that Turkey did not participate in the 2003 invasion, the American attitude toward Ankara has been complex, to say the least. On one hand, there was a sense of being let down by an old ally. On the other hand, given events in Iraq and U.S. relations with Iran and Syria, the United States was not in a position to completely alienate a Muslim neighbor of Iraq.
As time passed and the situation in Iraq worsened, the Americans became even less able to isolate Turkey. That is partly because its neutrality was important and partly because the United States was extremely concerned about Turkish reactions to growing Kurdish autonomy. For the Turks, this was a fundamental national security issue. If they felt the situation were getting out of hand in the Kurdish regions, they might well intervene militarily. At a time when the Kurds comprised the only group in Iraq that was generally pro-American, the United States could hardly let the Turks mangle them.
On the other hand, the United States was hardly in a position to stop the Turks. The last thing the United States wanted was a confrontation with the Turks in the North, for military as well as political reasons. Yet, the other last thing it wanted was for other Iraqis to see that the United States would not protect them.
Stated differently, the United States had no solution to the Turkish-Kurdish equation. So what the United States did was a tap dance -- by negotiating a series of very temporary solutions that kept the Turks from crossing the line and kept the Kurds intact. The current crisis is over the status of the PKK in northern Iraq and, to a great degree, over Turkish concerns that Iraqi Kurds will gain too much autonomy, not to mention over concerns about the future status of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. The United States may well be ready to support the Turks in rooting out PKK separatists, but it is not prepared to force the Iraqi Kurds to give them up. So it will try to persuade them to give them up voluntarily. This negotiating process will buy time, though at this point the American strategy in Iraq generally has been reduced to buying time.
All of this goes beyond the question of Iraq or an independent Kurdistan. The real question concerns the position of Turkey as a regional power in the wake of the Iraq war. This is a vital question because of Iran. The assumption we have consistently made is that, absent the United States, Iran would become the dominant regional power and would be in a position, in the long term, to dominate the Arabian Peninsula, shifting not only the regional balance of power but also potentially the global balance as well.
That analysis assumes that Turkey will play the role it has played since World War I -- an insular, defensive power that is cautious about making alliances and then cautious within alliances. In that role, Turkey is capable of limited assertiveness, as against the Greeks in Cyprus, but is not inclined to become too deeply entangled in the chaos of the Middle Eastern equation -- and when it does become involved, it is in the context of its alliance with the United States.
That is not Turkey's traditional role. Until the fall of the Ottomans at the end of World War I, and for centuries before then, Turkey was both the dominant Muslim power and a major power in North Africa, Southeastern Europe and the Middle East. Turkey was the hub of a multinational empire that as far back as the 15th century dominated the Mediterranean and Black seas. It was the economic pivot of three continents, facilitating and controlling the trading system of much of the Eastern Hemisphere.
Turkey's contraction over the past 90 years or so is not the normal pattern in the region, and had to do with the internal crisis in Turkey since the fall of the Ottomans, the emergence of French and British power in the Middle East, followed by American power and the Cold War, which locked Turkey into place. During the Cold War, Turkey was trapped between the Americans and Soviets, and expansion of its power was unthinkable. Since then, Turkey has been slowly emerging as a key power.
One of the main drivers in this has been the significant growth of the Turkish economy. In 2006, Turkey had the 18th highest gross domestic product (GDP) in the world, and it has been growing at between 5 percent and 8 percent a year for more than five years. It ranks just behind Belgium and ahead of Sweden in GDP. It has the largest economy of any Muslim country -- including Saudi Arabia. And it has done this in spite of, or perhaps because of, not having been admitted to the European Union. While per capita GDP lags, it is total GDP that measures weight in the international system. China, for example, is 109th in per capita GDP. Its international power rests on it being fourth in total GDP.
Turkey is not China, but in becoming the largest Muslim economy, as well as the largest economy in the eastern Mediterranean, Southeastern Europe, the Middle East, the Caucasus and east to the Hindu Kush, Turkey is moving to regain its traditional position of primacy in the region. Its growth is still fragile and can be disrupted, but there is no question that it has become the leading regional economy, as well as one of the most dynamic. Additionally, Turkey's geographic position greatly enables it to become Europe's primary transit hub for energy supplies, especially at a time when Europe is trying to reduce its dependence on Russia.
This obviously has increased its regional influence. In the Balkans, for example, where Turkey historically has been a dominant power, the Turks have again emerged as a major influence over the region's two Muslim states -- and have managed to carve out for themselves a prominent position as regards other countries in the region as well. The country's economic dynamism has helped reorient some of the region away from Europe, toward Turkey. Similarly, Turkish economic influence can be felt elsewhere in the region, particularly as a supplement to its strategic relationship with Israel.
Turkey's problem is that in every direction it faces, its economic expansion is blocked by politico-military friction. So, for example, its influence in the Balkans is blocked by its long-standing friction with Greece. In the Caucasus, its friction with Armenia limits its ability to influence events. Tensions with Syria and Iraq block Syrian influence to the south. To the east, a wary Iran that is ideologically opposed to Turkey blocks Ankara's influence.
As Turkey grows, an interesting imbalance has to develop. The ability of Greece, Armenia, Syria, Iraq and Iran to remain hostile to Turkey decreases as the Turkish economy grows. Ideology and history are very real things, but so is the economic power of a dynamic economy. As important, Turkey's willingness to accept its highly constrained role indefinitely, while its economic -- and therefore political -- influence grows, is limited. Turkey's economic power, coupled with its substantial regional military power, will over time change the balance of power in each of the regions Turkey faces.
Not only does Turkey interface with an extraordinary number of regions, but its economy also is the major one in each of those regions, while Turkish military power usually is pre-eminent as well. When Turkey develops economically, it develops militarily. It then becomes the leading power -- in many regions. That is what it means to be a pivotal power.
In 2003, the United States was cautious with Turkey, though in the final analysis it was indifferent. It no longer can be indifferent. The United States is now in the process of planning the post-Iraq war era, and even if it does retain permanent bases in Iraq -- dubious for a number of reasons -- it will have to have a regional power to counterbalance Iran. Iran has always been aware of and cautious with Turkey, but never as much as now -- while Turkey is growing economically and doing the heavy lifting on the Kurds. Iran does not want to antagonize the Turks.
The United States and Iran have been talking -- just recently engaging in seven hours of formal discussions. But Iran, betting that the United States will withdraw from Iraq, is not taking the talks as seriously as it might. The United States has few levers to use against Iran. It is therefore not surprising that it has reached out to the biggest lever.
In the short run, Turkey, if it works with the United States, represents a counterweight to Iran, not only in general, but also specifically in Iraq. From the American point of view, a Turkish invasion of northern Iraq would introduce a major force native to the region that certainly would give Iran pause in its behavior in Iraq. This would mean the destruction of Kurdish hopes for independence, though the United States has on several past occasions raised and then dashed Kurdish hopes. In this sense, Novak's article makes a great deal of sense. The PKK would provide a reasonable excuse for a Turkish intervention in Iraq, both in the region and in Turkey. Anything that blocks the Kurds will be acceptable to the Turkish public, and even to Iran.
It is the longer run that is becoming interesting, however. If the United States is not going to continue counterbalancing Iran in the region, then it is in Turkey's interest to do so. It also is increasingly within Turkey's reach. But it must be understood that, given geography, the growth of Turkish power will not be confined to one direction. A powerful and self-confident Turkey has a geographical position that inevitably reflects all the regions that pivot around it.
For the past 90 years, Turkey has not played its historic role. Now, however, economic and politico-military indicators point to Turkey's slow reclamation of that role. The rumors about Turkish action against the PKK have much broader significance. They point to a changing role for Turkey -- and that will mean massive regional changes over time.
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stratfor.com
TURKEY: The Turkish military will safeguard a secular and democratic Turkey against the "evil" Islamic forces in the upcoming presidential election, military chief Gen. Yasar Buyukanit states on the military's Web site. The military has seized power from civilian governments three times in the past and has threatened to do so again if presidential candidate Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul wins the election.
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Geopolitical Diary: Envisioning Turkey under the AK Presidency
The Turkish parliament on Tuesday elected a former Islamist as the staunchly secularist republic's 11th president. After close to four months marred by controversy and contention, Abdullah Gul, the No. 2 man in Turkey's ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, made it into the president's chair after the 3rd round of voting. He secured 339 votes in the 550-seat legislature, but he only needed a simple majority of 276.
Gul's election brings to an end the latest chapter of a long struggle between religiously inclined political forces and Turkey's ultra-secularist military establishment -- with this round going to the Islamists. By no means does this mean that the men in uniform have thrown in the towel. Far from it: the generals will be closely watching the AK, and especially the behavior of the 56-year-old Gul. This much was spelled out by military chief Gen. Yasar Buyukanit on Monday in an Internet statement that said "our nation has been watching the behavior of centers of evil who systematically try to corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic," and warned that "the military will, just as it has so far, keep its determination to guard social, democratic and secular Turkey."
Modern Turkey was founded by Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" in 1923 following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, an essentially Islamic polity. Kemal, who himself was a military commander, implemented radical changes whereby the Turkish republic was established as a secular entity along the lines of European states. Since then the military has served as the praetorian guards responsible for preserving the Kemalist character of the constitution and the secular fabric of the republic.
To this end, the military has intervened on four separate occasions (three of them being coups) -- in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 -- and has banned four of the AK's predecessor groups because their Islamist ideology was seen as a threat to the secular order. Therefore, the military establishment is all too aware of what happened Tuesday. The Turkish political system has entered an unprecedented phase in its evolution, where a single party not only has been able to form two consecutive governments on its own, but also now controls the presidency -- which by extension means it controls the judiciary, because the president appoints key judges.
As far as civil-military relations are concerned, the military clearly has lost the current (and what appears to be a decisive) battle -- but the ideological struggle and the contention over secularism is far from over. More importantly, for the first time since the founding of the Turkish republic more than 80 years ago, a political force rooted in Islamism essentially controls all of the key civilian institutions of the state.
There is a lot of trepidation both within and outside Turkey that this will lead to a major Islamist-secular struggle in the country -- which could lead to a period of domestic instability, despite the fact that the AK took 47 percent of the vote and controls a lion's share of seats in Parliament. This is certainly a possibility. It will not be long before Gul will be caught between his national duties as the head of an ultra-secularist state and his commitment to his party's conservative ideology. One cannot expect him simply to behave as a neutral president.
But the AK did not fight hard to win the presidency just for the sake of winning. The party will gradually want to use the position to further consolidate its hold over the state, trying to redefine the secular character of the state -- moving away from the French style, which expressly renounces religious activity, toward the American model, which provides for more tolerance. Undoubtedly, this will lead to a new wave of struggle between the ruling party and the military.
Two factors are tying the military's hands at the moment. First, of course, is the AK's parliamentary majority. Second is the fear that any direct intervention by the military into politics could have serious repercussions, not just for stability and security in Turkey, but also for the economy. A coup would adversely affect foreign investment in the country, taking it back to the financial crisis that hit prior to the AK's rise to power in 2002. This would explain the uneasy accommodation reached in the past five years between the AK government and the generals.
For its part, the AK might have won the presidency, but it will still continue to tread carefully as far as the domestic policies are concerned, and will avoid tampering with the secular order of things. Over time, however, the party will become emboldened, because of the lack of any serious moves by the military to undercut its power. This is when there will be a behavioral change in Turkey, as the AK government begins to feel confident in engaging in policies that it currently might not want to risk.
Such a change will be most apparent and immediate in the foreign-policy arena, given the changes under way in the region. Iran has for the most part moved away from negotiating with the United States over Iraq and is now trying to take advantage of the expected U.S. drawdown of forces from the country. We have already discussed at length Turkish interests in Iraq with regard to Kurdish separatism. This issue undoubtedly will be of a primary concern to the Turks, especially now that a settlement on Iraq appears highly unlikely. Of even greater significance will be future Turkish behavior toward the larger emerging conflict surrounding Iraq: Iran and the Shia versus the Arab states and the Sunnis.
Here is where an AK regime will be forced to balance pan-Islamic issues with Turkish nationalist objectives. On one hand, Turkey will focus on making sure that the ethno-sectarian conflict does not enable Iraqi Kurds (and by extension Turkish Kurds) to further their separatist agenda. On the other hand, Ankara will have to decide whether to side with the Arab states -- who are fellow Sunnis -- against Iran, or align with Iran, or chart a more neutral course.
This would not have been a complicated matter under a purely secular Turkish government, which would have viewed the issue solely from the point of view of Turkish national interest. But because the AK has pan-Islamic ties to various actors in the Arab/Muslim world, the matter becomes complex. The Saudis and the Iranians subscribe to competing notions of Islam -- not just in the sectarian sense but in ideological terms. That will put an AK-ruled Turkey in a difficult spot.
stratfor.com
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And here's the WSJ's take on this:
President Gül
August 29, 2007
Turkey's political process reached its expected conclusion yesterday, when the parliament elected Abdullah Gül of the neo-Islamist AK Party as the country's new president. Despite continued grumbling from a wary military, Ankara may finally be able to resume politics as usual.
Yesterday's election, in which Mr. Gül won 339 votes from the 550-member legislature, caps a turbulent four months. The AKP first nominated its co-founder back in April. The result was an electoral boycott by the main opposition party, a threatened coup by the army and a seemingly extralegal annulment of the balloting up to that point by the nation's highest court. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also of the AKP, called early elections to secure a new mandate. Last month his party won a solid victory.
The military tried scare tactics again Monday, writing on its Web site that "centers of evil" were trying to "corrode the secular nature of the Turkish Republic." Yet a word to the wary of all kinds: Mr. Gül promised during the recent parliamentary campaign to uphold secularism and Turkey's constitution, and the electorate displayed its confidence in him.
Given the military's record of four coups since 1960, its threats can't be taken lightly. Even so, Turkey's generals are traditionally very sensitive to the desires of the country's silent majority, which right now wants stability above all else.
Fortunately, that's what the AKP most likely wants right now, too. It will try to avoid rocking the boat so that it can stay in government. It's been in power for five years now, and parties typically become less, not more, radical the longer they rule. Should the AKP drift from its program of reforms designed to propel Turkey toward European Union membership, its supporters will become agitated.
The Turkish president's authority is fairly limited in any case, though Mr. Gül will wield important veto powers. Under his secularist predecessor, that was seen as a check on any ambitions the AKP might have of foisting Islamism on the country.
So far, there is no indication that Mr. Gül has any hidden agenda for marked change in Turkey. "Secularism -- one of the main principles of our republic -- is a precondition for social peace as much as it is a liberating model for different lifestyles," he said after yesterday's parliamentary vote. "As long as I am in office, I will embrace all our citizens without any bias." Until Mr. Gül gives us cause to believe otherwise, we'll take him at his word.
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Yet another post this AM on Turkey:
WSJ
Well Connected,
A Saudi Mogul
Skirts Sanctions
By GLENN R. SIMPSON
August 29, 2007; Page A1
ISTANBUL, Turkey -- Yassin Qadi is a well-known multimillionaire, founder of a large supermarket chain here and a close friend of the Turkish premier. "I trust him the same way I trust my father," Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on national television last year.
But the Saudi businessman also is a major financier of Islamic terrorism with close business associates who are members of al Qaeda, according to the U.S. Treasury and the United Nations Security Council. At Washington's request, the Security Council ordered Mr. Qadi's assets frozen a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the U.S.
The asset freeze has largely crippled Mr. Qadi's international business empire. But previously undisclosed records show he has managed to free up millions of dollars of holdings in Turkey, in apparent violation of the Security Council sanctions -- and without incurring punishment by Turkish authorities.
The case of Mr. Qadi shows the challenges Washington faces in separating friend from foe in the Islamic world. The records detailing his business activities also suggest how easy it can be to skirt sanctions designed to restrict funding of terrorism -- especially for well-connected figures.
Mr. Qadi's friendship with the prime minister also plays into the growing debate in Turkey over the role of Islam in a secular society. Turkey's Parliament for the first time yesterday elected a politician with an Islamist background, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul, to the presidency. Immediately after being sworn in, Mr. Gul pledged impartiality, saying, "Secularism -- one of the main principles of our republic -- is a precondition for social peace." But the development nonetheless has heightened concern about the direction this pivotal nation, poised between East and West, is taking.
Within Turkey, a Muslim nation of 70 million with a constitutionally mandated secular government, the role of Islam has been the subject of intense debate in recent years, as rising religious sentiment clashes in some quarters with the country's longstanding commitment to secularism. Mr. Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party are broadly popular, but their Islamist roots draw criticism and provoke controversy, especially among critics in the military.
Amid this debate, Mr. Erdogan has been blasted for his ties to Mr. Qadi by political opponents in Turkey and some conservatives in Washington, who say the Turkish government has a hidden Islamist agenda. Mr. Qadi -- who lives near the Red Sea city of Jidda, the Saudi business capital -- denies all links to terrorism and says his U.N. blacklisting is unjust. Officials of Mr. Erdogan's Justice and Development Party and aides to the prime minister didn't respond to requests for comment.
Pro-Western Rule
Since coming to power in 2002, the Justice and Development Party has run one of the most pro-Western governments to rule Turkey. It has encouraged a Western-style market economy and made painful overhauls in a bid to join the European Union. The party just won an overwhelming new mandate in parliamentary elections.
But tensions are likely to persist. U.S. diplomats lodged strong objections last year when the Erdogan government intervened in Turkish courts to try to lift the freeze on Mr. Qadi's Turkish assets, according to U.S. officials. The Turkish government reversed course.
"That Erdogan personally vouches for this man...raises the possibility that the prime minister of Turkey is far less interested in combating terrorism than he says," said former Defense Department aide Michael Rubin, a conservative critic of the Turkish government who has close ties to top officials in the Bush administration.
The cosmopolitan Mr. Qadi is an architect by profession who trained with the Chicago-based firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the 1970s. He speaks fluent English and has a son who is an American citizen. Mr. Qadi, whose own father belonged to Jidda's business elite, inherited several million dollars in 1988. He also married into money by wedding a member of the Jamjoom family, one of Saudi Arabia's leading business clans, and is now an influential business figure whom the Saudi media and other Saudi businessmen often defend against U.S. and U.N. terrorism allegations.
The sanctions prohibit international travel by Mr. Qadi, a longtime globe-trotter. It is unclear whether his assets are frozen in Saudi Arabia, which some U.S. officials and private-sector experts claim has failed to take action against powerful business figures suspected of supporting terrorism. In an effort to reclaim his reputation, Mr. Qadi has filed civil suits in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Turkey and other countries. He has also submitted voluminous briefs to the U.S. Treasury in Washington. All of these efforts have been unsuccessful to date.
Mr. Erdogan has defended his friendship with Mr. Qadi, saying the Security Council's terrorist blacklist doesn't prove someone is a terrorist.
Guy Martin, a London-based lawyer for Mr. Qadi, called his terrorist designation "a gross and ongoing miscarriage of justice."
Mr. Qadi, whose business empire is based mostly in Saudi Arabia, is a longtime partner of Turkish businessman Cüneyd Zapsu, as well as other key Justice and Development Party figures. Over the past year, Turkish media and opposition leaders have disclosed that Turkey's financial police investigated the activities of Mr. Qadi and alleged al Qaeda supporters in Turkey. That led them to delve into the relationships of Mr. Qadi and other Saudis with senior Justice and Development figures, including Mr. Erdogan.
Among Mr. Qadi's largest Turkish investments is the discount-supermarket chain BIM, one of Turkey's biggest companies, with more than 1,500 outlets and annual sales of about $1.5 billion. BIM, which trades on the Istanbul Stock Exchange, is a discounter modeled in part on Wal-Mart and other low-price chains. Mr. Zapsu also was among BIM's founding partners.
Mr. Zapsu, who in 2001 helped Mr. Erdogan found the Justice and Development Party, also supported an Islamic charity Mr. Qadi founded that is at the center of the U.S. and Security Council decision to freeze the Saudi businessman's assets. A Turkish financial-police report seen by The Wall Street Journal found that in the 1990s, Mr. Zapsu and his mother gave $300,000 to Mr. Qadi's Muwafaq charity, which U.S. officials labeled a front for al Qaeda shortly after 9/11.
Central Intelligence Agency reports say Muwafaq, now defunct, specialized in purchasing and smuggling arms for Islamic radicals. The U.S. government's special commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, attack and law-enforcement agencies have cited Saudi-backed Islamic charities as a primary source of funding for al Qaeda.
Mr. Zapsu also has business ties to two Islamic banks funded with Saudi capital -- Dallah Al Baraka and Dar Al Mal Al Islam -- that were accused of supporting al Qaeda in civil suits filed by families of Sept. 11 victims in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Both defendants adamantly deny the allegations, and the court dismissed claims against Al Baraka.
Mr. Zapsu said in an email that his business and personal relationships with Mr. Qadi were investigated by Turkish police. He said prosecutors decided last year "that there was no reason for a court case and no wrongdoing." Mr. Zapsu said he sold his interest in BIM in 2003 and no longer is involved with the company.
Finance Probes
Two reports by Turkey's financial police allege potential money-laundering and other possible crimes by Mr. Qadi and unnamed associates. But Turkish prosecutors declined to bring criminal cases in both 2004 and 2006, citing a lack of evidence. Mr. Erdogan's political opponents say the probes were quashed by the Finance Ministry. The top officer on the case was recently fired. According to the government, he abused his authority to investigate top politicians.
Mr. Qadi arrived in Turkey in 1996, within a month of alleged al Qaeda logistics coordinator Wael Julaidan. The two men are longtime business partners and engaged in large transactions with a Turkish firm controlled by two of al Qaeda's top leaders, according to business records and U.S. intelligence files. Lawyers for Mr. Julaidan say he denies supporting al Qaeda.
A lengthy paper trail involving an offshore company in the Isle of Man shows how millions of dollars of assets in Turkey once controlled by Mr. Qadi have been shifted in recent years to his associates, in potential violation of the U.N.'s asset freeze. Corporate records show a 26.4% stake in BIM that was originally controlled by Mr. Qadi passed to two of his business partners, through a company called Worldwide Ltd. in the Isle of Man, a tax haven in the U.K.
Worldwide originally was controlled by several people who use the same Jidda business address as Mr. Qadi. In 2004, two Jidda businessmen who are longtime associates of Mr. Qadi took control of Worldwide, Isle of Man filings state. The following year, when BIM released a new financial report, Worldwide disappeared from its list of major shareholders and the two businessmen appeared on the list for the first time. Together with another Isle of Man company, they control precisely 26.4% of BIM shares.
One of the men, Abdul Ghani Al Khereiji, is a longtime business partner of Mr. Qadi who co-founded the Muwafaq charity, records show. He didn't respond to requests for comment. The other new BIM shareholder, architect Zuhair Fayez, also is a longtime associate of Mr. Qadi. Mr. Fayez said in an email that his shares in Worldwide "were not purchased from Mr. Qadi," but he didn't elaborate.
Transferred Stake
In a statement, BIM said Worldwide transferred its stake to the two men in March 2005. "Our information...is that the assignment procedures were made in accordance with the law," BIM said. The company said it "has no knowledge of the share structure of Worldwide." If Mr. Qadi benefited from the sale of Worldwide shares, that would breach the U.N. sanctions against him.
Some of Mr. Qadi's dealings in Turkey are recounted in a 2006 book, "Charitable Terrorist," by Nedim Sener. Mr. Qadi has filed a defamation suit in an Istanbul court against Mr. Sener, who in the Turkish daily Milliyet also wrote of a real-estate deal involving Mr. Qadi that may also violate the Security Council sanctions. The sanctions, legally binding on U.N. member states, ban any large financial transactions or international travel by the roughly 350 individuals designated as terrorists or their sponsors.
Christophe Payot, a spokesman for the U.N.'s sanctions committee, declined to discuss any possible violations by Turkey or Mr. Qadi. The panel's chairman announced in May it would examine "possible instances of noncompliance" with the al Qaeda sanctions.
The U.N. sanctions aren't always effective, according to experts on the subject. Many countries either don't write or police laws to enforce them, or aren't equipped to track designees who use offshore companies and complex corporate structures. In the case of Mr. Qadi's Turkish assets, the problem is that "there are so many ways of structuring and layering things, they are not clearly his assets," said Victor Comras, an attorney and former U.N. terror-finance expert.
Write to Glenn R. Simpson at glenn.simpson@wsj.com
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6988697.stm
Last Updated: Tuesday, 11 September 2007, 10:30 GMT 11:30 UK
Police in Turkey's capital, Ankara, have prevented a large bomb from exploding, the city's governor said.
Sniffer dogs detected a van stuffed with explosives in the centre of the city, preventing a "possible catastrophe", Governor Kemal Onal said.
Security had been tightened in the city ahead of the sixth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
Bomb attacks against the UK consulate, a bank and synagogues in Istanbul killed more than 60 people in 2003.
Six people were killed in Ankara in May by a suicide bomb blamed on Kurdish separatists.
'Meticulous police work'
Ankara's governor said a large quantity of explosives had been left in the van which had a false licence plate.
It was parked in a multi-storey garage in Kurtulus, a densely populated area of central Ankara.
The garage and nearby houses and businesses were evacuated while the police bomb squad worked to defuse the explosives.
"The meticulous work of the police averted a possible catastrophe," said Mr Onal.
"I do not even want to think about what would have happened if the attack had succeeded."
Security fears were heightened elsewhere in Europe as police in Germany moved to help secure Spangdahlen USAFE, air base after a bomb threat was made by telephone.
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Turkey: Pressure to Send Forces into Northern Iraq
Summary
Turkey said Oct. 9 that it might send forces into northern Iraq. The announcement came two days after Kurdish rebels, in their largest attack against Turkish security forces in more than a decade, killed 13 soldiers. Pressure arising from domestic political situations and regional geopolitics has driven Ankara to the point where it can no longer avoid military action inside northern Iraq. Any such undertaking will not be major, however, because of the limited strategic objective and tactical options.
Analysis
A day after chairing a meeting of top civilian and military officials, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a statement saying his government has authorized all necessary action against the Kurdish rebel group the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), including a possible military operation across the border in northern Iraq. The move comes two days after PKK guerrillas killed 13 Turkish troops in the largest such attack in more than a decade. All of these developments follow the signing of a counterterrorism agreement between Ankara and Baghdad.
The security agreement does not do much to counter the threat from the PKK. On the contrary, it seems to have only emboldened the militants, because it appears that Turkey is unwilling to follow through on its threats of cross-border unilateral military action. The Turks also are watching how the PKK's patrons -- the Iraqi Kurds who enjoy far-reaching autonomy in northern Iraq -- are growing bolder in their moves to forge energy deals with international firms independent of the Iraqi central government in Baghdad, and to gain control over the oil-rich region of Kirkuk. Additionally, Ankara knows that neither the PKK nor the Iraqis -- nor even Washington -- take its threats of action seriously anymore.
But more important, Turkey's ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party, which recently won control of both parliament and the presidency, is under increasing pressure from the military, which accuses it of being soft on Kurdish separatism. Therefore, the AK Party government can no longer afford to avoid military action.
That said, Turkey's military options are limited. The Turkish military already has a special forces presence in northern Iraq, and Turkish artillery has fallen on Iraqi soil plenty of times before. However, northern Iraq is a large area with an inhospitable terrain, and winter is coming. PKK rebel hideouts are concentrated in the Qandil Mountains along the Iranian border. Furthermore, to effectively root out the PKK, Turkey would have to commit to a long-term military incursion -- and in a country currently occupied by a fellow NATO member (though the United States has few troops in far northern Iraq).
Because of the magnitude of the undertaking, and because Turkey lacks the necessary intelligence for such a mission, any cross-border military operation will not be geared toward rooting out the PKK from its sanctuaries in northern Iraq. The purpose of such action will be to force Baghdad to pressure Arbil and try to instigate internal divisions among the Kurds -- likely between Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani's hawkish Kurdistan Democratic Party and the more moderate Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. The Turks also want to get the attention of the United States, which thus far has had no incentive to do anything regarding the PKK because it could upset its Iraqi calculus, and because Washington does not expect the Turks to do much beyond rhetoric and small-scale action. However, Turkey itself has substantial room to escalate the situation.
Helicopter gunships already are reportedly operating on the Turkish side of the border. Both helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft can deliver ordnance across the border quickly. Turkey's modest unmanned aerial vehicle fleet also might find use in targeting and reconnaissance. But even though Turkish aircraft can dash quickly in and out of northern Iraq, the U.S. Air Force closely monitors Iraqi airspace. Turkish artillery and multiple rocket launchers are an attractive alternative. Ankara is well-equipped to deliver punishing artillery strikes as far as 20 miles inside Iraq. (And it has a limited ability, depending on the ammunition available, to strike perhaps as far as 30 miles). Turkey's special forces presence in northern Iraq could be expanded or more aggressively employed. However, any expansion would probably come from Ankara's five commando brigades, rather than from the heavily conscripted regular units of the Turkish army that might not be particularly well-suited to the kind of subtlety and operations necessary in a situation other than war across the border.
Meanwhile, Iran would be more than eager to jump into the fray and warm up to Ankara by taking action against the PKK. Tehran has an interest in helping the Turks keep the Kurds boxed in and making the United States look bad in Turkey's eyes.
With the KRG facing pressure from Turkey on one side and most likely Iran on the other, it will be forced to order the peshmerga to crack down on the PKK. (Peshmerga-PKK clashes have occurred in recent months whenever Ankara has increased the rhetorical pressure.) Turkey also can use the PKK issue to sustain pressure on the Iraqi Kurds on other issues -- especially oil deals and Kirkuk autonomy. The Iraqi Kurds' current priority is to protect the flow of foreign investment, which involves keeping the Turks at bay. The KRG will be willing to rein in the PKK for this purpose.
stratfor
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NY Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and CARL HULSE
Published: October 11, 2007
WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 — A House committee voted on Wednesday to condemn the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey in World War I as an act of genocide, rebuffing an intense campaign by the White House and warnings from Turkey’s government that the vote would gravely strain its relations with the United States.
President Bush Wednesday urged the House not to take up a resolution on the Armenian genocide.
Opponents of the House resolution on the Armenian genocide wore stickers expressing their position at the session on Wednesday.
The vote by the House Foreign Relations Committee was nonbinding and so largely symbolic, but its consequences could reach far beyond bilateral relations and spill into the war in Iraq.
Turkish officials and lawmakers warned that if the resolution was approved by the full House, they would reconsider supporting the American war effort, which includes permission to ship essential supplies through Turkey and northern Iraq.
President Bush appeared on the South Lawn of the White House before the vote and implored the House not to take up the issue, only to have a majority of the committee disregard his warning at the end of the day, by a vote of 27 to 21.
“We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915,” Mr. Bush said in remarks that, reflecting official American policy, carefully avoided the use of the word genocide. “This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.”
The resolution was introduced early in the current session of Congress and has quietly moved forward over the last few weeks. But it provoked a fierce lobbying fight that pitted the politically influential Armenian-American population against the Turkish government, which hired equally influential former lawmakers like Robert L. Livingston, Republican of Louisiana, and Richard A. Gephardt, the former Democratic House majority leader, who backed a similar resolution when he was in Congress.
Backers of the resolution said Congressional action was overdue.
“Despite President George Bush twisting arms and making deals, justice prevailed,” said Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat of California and a sponsor of the resolution. “For if we hope to stop future genocides we need to admit to those horrific acts of the past.”
The issue of the Armenian genocide, beginning in 1915, has perennially transfixed Congress and bedeviled presidents of both parties. Ronald Reagan was the only president publicly to call the killings genocide, but his successors have avoided the term.
When the issue last arose, in 2000, a similar resolution also won approval by a House committee, but President Clinton then succeeded in persuading a Republican speaker, J. Dennis Hastert, to withdraw the measure before the full House could vote. That time, too, Turkey had warned of canceling arms deals and withdrawing support for American air forces then patrolling northern Iraq under the auspices of the United Nations.
The new speaker, Nancy Pelosi, faced pressure from Democrats — especially colleagues in California, New Jersey and Michigan, with their large Armenian populations — to revive the resolution again after her party gained control of the House and Senate this year.
There is Democratic support for the resolution in the Senate, but it is unlikely to move in the months ahead because of Republican opposition and a shortage of time. Still, the Turkish government has made it clear that it would regard House passage alone as a harsh American indictment.
The sharply worded Turkish warnings against the resolution, especially the threats to cut off support for the American war in Iraq, seemed to embolden some of the resolution’s supporters. “If they use this to destabilize our solders in Iraq, well, then shame on them,” said Representative Joseph Crowley, a Democrat from New York who voted for it.
The Democratic leadership, however, appeared divided. Representative Rahm Emanuel, the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, who worked in the Clinton White House when the issue came up in 2000, opposes the resolution.
In what appeared to be an effort to temper the anger caused by the issue, Democrats said they were considering a parallel resolution that would praise Turkey’s close relations with the United States even as the full House prepares to consider a resolution that blames the forerunner of modern Turkey for one of the worst crimes in history.
“Neither of these resolutions is necessary,” a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, said Wednesday evening. He said that Mr. Bush was “very disappointed” with the vote.
A total of 1.5 million Armenians were killed beginning in 1915 in a systematic campaign by the fraying Ottoman Empire to drive Armenians out of eastern Turkey. Turks acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died but contend that the deaths, along with thousands of others, resulted from the war that ended with the creation of modern Turkey in 1923.
Mr. Bush discussed the issue in the White House on Wednesday with his senior national security aides. Speaking by secure video from Baghdad, the senior American officials in Iraq, Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, raised the resolution and warned that its passage could harm the war effort in Iraq, senior Bush aides said.
Appearing outside the West Wing after that meeting, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates noted that about 70 percent of all air cargo sent to Iraq passed through or came from Turkey, as did 30 percent of fuel and virtually all the new armored vehicles designed to withstand mines and bombs.
“They believe clearly that access to airfields and to the roads and so on in Turkey would be very much put at risk if this resolution passes and the Turks react as strongly as we believe they will,” Mr. Gates said, referring to the remarks of General Petraeus and Mr. Crocker.
Turkey severed military ties with France after its Parliament voted in 2006 to make the denial of the Armenian genocide a crime.
As the committee prepared to vote Wednesday, Mr. Bush, the American ambassador to Turkey, Ross Wilson, and other officials cajoled lawmakers by phone.
Representative Mike Pence, a conservative Republican from Indiana who has backed the resolution in the past, said Mr. Bush persuaded him to change his position and vote no. He described the decision as gut-wrenching, underscoring the emotions stirred in American politics by a 92-year-old question.
“While this is still the right position,” Mr. Pence said, referring to the use of the term genocide, “it is not the right time.”
The House Democratic leadership met Wednesday morning with Turkey’s ambassador to Washington, Nabi Sensoy, and other Turkish officials, who argued against moving ahead with a vote. But Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, who now holds Mr. Gephardt’s old job as majority leader, said he and Ms. Pelosi would bring the resolution to the floor before Congress adjourned this year.
In Turkey, a fresh wave of violence raised the specter of a Turkish raid into northern Iraq, something the United States is strongly urging against. A policeman was killed and six others were wounded in a bomb attack in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey on Wednesday, the state-run Anatolian News Agency reported.
The Associated Press reported from the town of Sirnak that Turkish warplanes and helicopters were attacking positions along the southern border with Iraq that are suspected of belonging to Kurdish rebels who have been fighting Turkish forces for years.
The Turkish government continued to prepare to request Parliament’s permission for an offensive into Iraq, with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan suggesting that a vote could be held after the end of Ramadan. Parliamentary approval would bring Turkey the closest it has been since 2003 to a full-scale military offensive into Iraq.
Sedat Laciner, from the International Strategic Research Institution, said that the Turkish public felt betrayed by what was perceived as a lack of American support for Turkey in its battle against the Kurds.
“American officials could think that Turkish people would ultimately forget about the lack of U.S. support in this struggle,” Mr. Laciner said, using words that could apply equally to views about the Armenian genocide. “Memories of Turks, however, are not that easy to erase once it hits sensitive spots.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting from Istanbul, and Sabrina Tavernise from Baghdad.
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Second post of the morning:
stratfor
Geopolitical Diary: Turkey's Designs on Northern Iraq
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan might ask parliament to authorize a move by Turkey's military into northern Iraq. Erdogan said on Wednesday that, "A request for approval of a cross-border operation could be sent to parliament tomorrow. After the holiday, we plan to gain authorization for one year." Erdogan should have no difficulty gaining parliament's approval after attacks by Kurdish rebels belonging to the Kurdistan Workers' Party killed 15 Turkish soldiers.
How far the Turks plan to move in Iraq is the important question. During the 1990s, the Turks moved into Iraq to create buffer zones against Kurdish attack, so there is a precedent for a move of that nature. The Turkish government is under public pressure to do something about these attacks, and the re-creation of a buffer zone is one thing it could do that would be effective and satisfy public opinion.
A Turkish incursion into northern Iraq at this time would be opposed by the European Union and the United States. However, the European Union has lost a great deal of leverage with the Turks by not admitting them to the union and making it fairly clear that they will never be admitted. As for the United States, the Turkish view is that they opposed the invasion of Iraq and refused to participate in it. Their expectation is that the United States, having created the situation, should take steps to stop attacks inside Turkey. Since the United States clearly can't do that, the Turks will act by themselves. Put simply, the United States and the European Union do not have leverage with Turkey, and Turkey will pursue its own interests.
The resolution does not mean that the Turks will immediately move into northern Iraq, but we are not as sure as others are that the Turks aren't quite serious. First, there is the security issue. It is not a trivial matter for the Turks. It is difficult for the government not to take some steps, and the fact that the United States and the European Union oppose such a move will simply make it that much more popular.
There also is a more important geopolitical issue: The Turks oppose the creation of an independent Kurdish state in Iraq because they feel it will encourage Kurdish separatism in Turkey. The future of Iraq is up in the air, to say the least, and the most important issue for the country is whether an independent or highly autonomous Kurdish region will emerge. This uncertainty is something the United States can live with; it is not something the Turks will live with. Therefore, the Turks view American policy in Iraq with extreme concern on this issue. Moving into Iraqi Kurdistan, however limited the incursion, would serve as a signal to both Kurds and Americans that there are limits beyond which Turkey is not prepared to go. It also would put Turkish troops into position to exercise control in the region in the event that the situation in Iraq gets completely out of hand.
There is another factor. As we have said previously, there is increasing activity by Western oil companies in the Kurdish region. That oil revenue is an attractive prize. Whatever Turkish intentions are now, the process of preventing the emergence of an independent Kurdistan would put Ankara in the position of being able to at least participate in -- if not control -- the development of this oil. The Turks are not talking about this, and they might not be thinking about it, but the solution to the security problem could lead there.
The United States must be very careful. Turkey is an ally, but at this moment the Americans need the Turks more than the Turks need the Americans. Apart from logistical support in Iraq, the United States sees Turkey as a counterweight to Iran in the region. However, Turkish and Iranian interests converge on the question of an independent Kurdistan. Turkey has little in common with Iran ideologically, but should the United States adamantly oppose Turkey on this, it would bring Ankara and Tehran closer, and this is the last thing Washington wants right now.
U.S.-Turkish tensions are exacerbated by Congress' consideration of a resolution accusing Turkey of carrying out genocide in Armenia early in the 20th century. This is an incredibly sore point with the Turks right now, increasing domestic political pressure on Turkey to refuse to bend to the United States. Therefore, we take Turkey's resolution seriously and think that a move into Iraqi Kurdistan, at least to create a buffer zone, is a very real possibility -- and one that could lead to more far-reaching consequences.
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Secretary of State Pelosi
October 16, 2007; Page A20
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, famous for donning a head scarf earlier this year to commune for peace with the Syrians, has now concluded that this is the perfect moment to pass a Congressional resolution condemning Turkey for the Armenian genocide of 1915. Problem is, Turkey in 2007 has it within its power to damage the growing success of the U.S. effort in Iraq. We would like to assume this is not Speaker Pelosi's goal.
To be clear: We write that we would like to assume, rather than that we do assume, because we are no longer able to discern whether the Speaker's foreign-policy intrusions are merely misguided or are consciously intended to cause a U.S. policy failure in Iraq.
Where is the upside in October 2007 to this Armenian resolution?
The bill is opposed by eight former U.S. Secretaries of State, including Madeleine Albright. After Tom Lantos's House Foreign Affairs Committee voted out the resolution last week, Turkey recalled its ambassador from Washington. Turkey serves as a primary transit hub for U.S. equipment going into both Iraq and Afghanistan. After the Kurdish terrorist group PKK killed 13 Turkish conscripts last week near the border with Iraq, Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, asked the parliament to approve a huge deployment of the army along the border, threatening an incursion into Kurdish-controlled Iraq. This of course is the one manifestly successful region of post-Saddam Iraq. In a situation teetering on a knife-edge, President Bush has been asking Mr. Erdogan to show restraint on the Iraq border.
Somehow, none of this is allowed to penetrate Speaker Pelosi's world. She is offering various explanations for bringing the genocide resolution to the House floor. "This isn't about the Erdogan government," she says. "This is about the Ottoman Empire," last seen more than 85 years ago. "Genocide still exists," insists Ms. Pelosi. "We saw it in Rwanda; we see it now in Darfur."
Yes, but why now, with Turkey crucial to an Iraq policy that now has the prospect of a positive outcome? The answer may be found in the compulsive parochialism of the House's current edition of politicians, mostly Democrats. California is home to the country's largest number of politically active Armenians. Speaker Pelosi has many in her own district. Mr. Lantos represents the San Francisco suburbs. The bill's leading sponsors include Representatives Adam Schiff, George Radanovich and Anna Eshoo, all from California.
Pointedly, Jane Harman, the Southern California Democrat who Speaker Pelosi passed over for chair of the intelligence committee, wrote an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times Friday, questioning the "timing" of the resolution and asking why it is necessary to embarrass a "moderate Islamic government in perhaps the most volatile region in the world."
Why indeed? Perhaps some intrepid reporter could put that question to the three leading Democratic Presidential candidates, who are seeking to inherit hands-on responsibility for U.S. policy in this cauldron. Hillary Clinton has been a co-sponsor of the anti-Turk genocide resolution, but would she choose to vote for it this week?
Back when Bill Clinton was President, Mr. Lantos took a different view. "This legislation at this moment in U.S.-Turkish relations is singularly counterproductive to our national interest," he said in September 2000, when there was much less at stake in the Middle East. According to Reuters, he added that the resolution would "humiliate and insult" Turkey and that the "unintended results would be devastating."
If Nancy Pelosi and Tom Lantos want to take down U.S. policy in Iraq to tag George Bush with the failure, they should have the courage to walk through the front door to do it. Bringing the genocide resolution to the House floor this week would put a terrible event of Armenia's past in the service of America's bitter partisanship today. It is mischievous at best, catastrophic at worst, and should be tabled.
WSJ
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Turkey: Re-evaluating the U.S. Alliance
Summary
A pending resolution before the U.S. Congress that calls the 1915 killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks genocide has brought to light a growing strain in U.S.-Turkish relations. This latest episode seriously threatens to complicate U.S. military logistics into Iraq should Turkey carry out threats to limit U.S. access to the air base in the southeastern Turkish city of Incirlik. The Armenian genocide issue, as well as U.S. protests over Turkish incursions into northern Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels, strike at the core of Turkish geopolitics, and will push Ankara into re-evaluating its long-standing alliance with the United States.
Analysis
New U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen called up his Turkish counterpart, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, on Oct. 15 to discuss the repercussions to U.S.-Turkish relations from the proposed Armenian bill before the U.S. Congress. The bill labels the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman Turks genocide. The big fear in the Pentagon is that if the resolution passes, Turkey will follow through with threats to further limit use of Incirlik Air Base in southeastern Turkey for support of operations in Iraq.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the current strain between Washington and Ankara with a Turkish idiom, saying recently, "Where the rope is worn thin, may it break off." Such big threats coming out of Ankara over a symbolic resolution on an event that occurred almost a century ago might seem odd at first glance. But they become clearer once it is understood that the Armenian issue, as well as Turkey's military push into northern Iraq against Kurdish rebels, are issues that cut to the heart of Turkish geopolitics -- and thus carry significant implications for the future of U.S.-Turkish relations.
Prior to World War I, Turkey was a model multiethnic and multireligious empire that commanded the Mediterranean and Black Sea trade routes. The Ottoman Empire was the geopolitical pivot between Europe, Russia and Persia, allowing it to develop into a global economic and military power. The outcome of World War I, however, drastically altered the geopolitical landscape of the region as the West infected the empire with ethnic nationalism that broke the bonds of Ottoman control. Turkey then faced a choice: Try (and fail) to continue as a multiethnic empire as its minorities broke away, or jump on the bandwagon and consolidate its own emerging nationalism. It chose the latter. The geography of Turkey is not amenable to clearly defined borders, however, which meant the birth of the modern Turkish republic defined by nationality inevitably would entail ugly episodes such as the 1915 Armenian mass killings and repeated killing of Kurds in order to solidify a self-sufficient Turkish state.
This takes us back to a pivotal point in Turkish history: the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which sealed the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. At that time, the victorious European powers drew up a treaty to dismember the Ottoman Empire by ceding territory to Greece (including the key northern shore of the Dardanelles), giving Armenia more territory than it could manage and creating the conditions for an independent Kurdish state. The West, in essence, had abolished Turkish sovereignty.
These were, of course, unacceptable terms to the Turks, who then spent the next three years regaining their territory from the Greeks, Armenians and Kurds and reversing the terms of the treaty to ensure the survival of the Turkish nation-state as opposed to the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. But the damage had still been done. To this day, Turkey is locked into a sort of Sevres syndrome, under which any Western interference in Turkey's ethnic minority issues must be confronted as long as Turkey defines itself by its nationality. So, if Turkey feels the need to set up a solid buffer zone along its border with northern Iraq to contain the Kurds and swoop in with troops when it sees fit, there is little the United States can do to stop it.
The same argument was taking place in Turkey following the 1991 Gulf War, when the Iraqi Kurds were granted autonomy. Soon enough, Turkey in 1995 sent 35,000 troops into northern Iraq to crush Kurdish rebels and squash Iraqi Kurdish aspirations for independence. The same episode is repeating itself today, as Iraqi Kurdistan has made strides in attracting foreign investment and extending its autonomy since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Turkey opposed the invasion by refusing U.S. access to Turkish military bases, and now is threatening to set up roadblocks along the U.S. military's logistics chain into Iraq and upset Washington's relations with the Kurds.
And this probably is just the beginning. Since the end of the Cold War, Turkey's neighborhood -- and its relationship with Washington -- has drastically changed. Attempts to become a Central Asian or European power have failed, and the Turks are looking in different directions for opportunities. The Iraq war has proven that U.S. and Turkish security concerns are no longer in lockstep, leading Turkey to re-evaluate its alliance with the United States.
From the Turks' viewpoint, the United States can no longer be viewed as a stabilizing force, as it has been since World War II. Moreover, Turkey no longer is a weak economic force and is not as reliant on the United States for its security. Turkey's rapid economic growth and its strong military tradition are creating the conditions for Ankara to pull itself out of its post-World War I insularity and extend itself in the region once again. As a result, Turkey's foreign policy no longer needs to tie itself to the United States, and Ankara can afford to make bold moves concerning issues -- whether those issues relate to the Kurds, Armenians or Greeks -- without losing too much sleep over any follow-on damage to its relationship with the United States. If the United States is going to act as the destabilizing force in the region through creating a major upheaval in Iraq, Turkey must at the very least attempt to take control of the situations within its old sphere of influence.
But this does not mean Turkey can make a clean break from the United States either, at least not any time in the near future. Turkey's growth is still fragile and needs more time to become consolidated. Turkey also faces resistance in every direction that it pushes, from Greece in the Balkans, Iran, Iraq and Syria in the Middle East and Russia in the Caucasus. Turkey's current position puts it into a geopolitical context where Iran is rising to Turkey's southeast and a resurgent Russia is bearing down on the Caucasus and even hinting at returning its naval fleet to the Mediterranean. In the near term, a major power is needed in Iraq to keep the Iranians at bay, and the Turks would prefer that the Americans do the heavy lifting on this since Iraq already is in disarray. Meanwhile, Turkey will move forward with its grand strategy of keeping Iraqi Kurdistan in check.
stratfor
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Not exactly a perfect ally, but a valuable one according to this WSJ editorial:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110010760
The Turkish Front
The path to a better Middle East goes through Ankara.
Saturday, October 20, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Some day, we may look back on this week as a turning point in America's relations with its closest Muslim ally, Turkey, and perhaps for the entire Middle East. Unfortunately, only a seer can say whether it'll be a turn for the better.
The ructions over the House's foray into Ottoman history and Turkey's threat to invade northern Iraq don't look good. But clear-eyed leaders will spot an opportunity in this crisis to renew an alliance for this difficult new era. American and Turkish interests overlap, and the countries need each other as much as they did during the Cold War.
The more sober politicians in Washington and Ankara understand this. Wednesday's parliamentary approval of a possible Turkish incursion to chase down Kurdish terrorists in their Iraqi hideouts was remarkable for its restraint. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan waited more than a week after the latest strike by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (or PKK) killed 13 Turkish soldiers to bring up the measure. No democratic government could ignore such attacks and the growing public outrage.
The Turks have also ruled out any rash move into northern Iraq. Ankara would prefer that the Iraqi Kurds and U.S. squeeze the PKK hiding in the Qandil mountains and avoid the risks of launching its own incursion. The vote this week is a wake-up call from the Turks--not least to the Iraqi Kurds, who have an opening to improve ties with their most important neighbor.
Meanwhile, with uncanny timing, Congressional Democrats this week were about to stick a finger in Turkey's eye. Whether the massacres of up to 1.5 million Armenians in eastern Anatolia in 1915 constitute "genocide," as a nonbinding House resolution declares, is a matter for historians. In the here and now, the resolution would erode America's influence with Ankara and endanger the U.S. effort in Iraq. Worse, Mr. Erdogan's ability to work with Washington would be constrained by an anti-American backlash.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi began the week promising to bring the resolution to the House floor. But she is now having second thoughts--if not out of good sense, then because her rank-and-file are peeling away as they are lobbied against the anti-Turk resolution by the likes of General David Petraeus. Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert tabled a similar resolution when asked by President Clinton in 2000, and we'll soon see if Ms. Pelosi will do the same for a Republican President.
The PKK also reads the papers, and its leaders timed their attacks on consecutive weekends this month as the resolution moved through the House. The Marxist separatist group, whose 20-year war has claimed almost 40,000 lives, would love to divide the U.S. from Turkey. Unless managed right, the Turkish response this week also imperils improving bilateral ties between Ankara and Baghdad; the countries had only recently signed a counterterrorism pact. In Turkey itself, PKK support is dwindling, and Mr. Erdogan's ruling party swept the Kurdish-majority areas in July's elections.
To avoid the trap set by the PKK, the U.S. needs to press the Iraqi Kurds to act against them. This doesn't have to hurt America's friendly dealings with the Kurds. But someone has to remind Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq's Kurdish region, that the PKK poses a grave threat to the economic boom and stability of northern Iraq. His aggressive rhetoric toward Turkey, and the Kurdish peshmerga militia's disinterest in cracking down on the PKK, gives the wrong impression of complicity with the terrorists. With typical bluster, Mr. Barzani yesterday said he'd fight the Turks--hardly helpful.
Short of declaring war on the PKK, the peshmerga could easily cut off supply lines of food and arms into the Qandil mountains. The Turks want the U.S. to nab a few big PKK fish, which is easier said than done. But Ankara isn't unreasonable to expect to see more of an effort. In return, its troops can stay on their side of the border.
This hasn't been an easy year for Turkey. For most of it, Mr. Erdogan and his neo-Islamist party fought a cold war with the country's secular establishment, led by the military. His commanding election victory in July ended that political crisis, only to see Congress and the PKK distract anew from his primary task, which is building the Muslim world's most vibrant free-market democracy.
Turkey wants a unitary, stable and prosperous Iraq, and should know that any wrong moves in the north could jeopardize that. The Turks unabashedly support Israel's right to exist and can't abide a nuclear Iran. On these and other issues, Ankara is an indispensable partner for America. Mr. Erdogan is expected to meet President Bush next month to discuss Iraqi Kurdistan and probably the Armenian resolution. The U.S.-Turkey friendship is too important to let it be ruined by parochial politics in either country.
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Tends to agree that militant Kurds are undermining our relation with Turkey:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22872
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WSJ
A Kurdish Lesson
Terrorist groups often have nine lives.
BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, October 23, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
A debate among U.S. military brass over whether to declare victory over al Qaeda in Iraq coincides with threats by Turkey to strike terrorist camps in northern Iraq belonging to the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK. Note the irony: The PKK, which in recent days has killed scores of Turkish soldiers, was itself declared dead as a terrorist group in 1999.
There are excellent reasons to avoid pronouncements concerning AQI's defeat. One is to deny the group the chance to offer testaments in blood to its own resilience. A second is to avoid another political embarrassment of the "Mission Accomplished" kind. But the main reason is that the experience of terrorist organizations world-wide shows that even in defeat they are rarely truly finished. Like Douglas MacArthur's old soldiers, terrorist groups never die. At best they just fade away.
Some examples: In its heyday in the 1980s, Peru's Maoist Shining Path was every bit as brutal as al Qaeda. The 1992 capture of its charismatic leader, former philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, was supposed to have dealt a fatal blow to the group's capacity to operate, as was the capture seven years later of his successor, Óscar Ramírez. Yet as recently as last year, the Peruvian government was forced to declare a state of emergency in the Huánuco region to deal with terrorist activities by the group.
Or take the Taliban. In April 2005, American Gen. David Barno told reporters he believed that, with the exception of a few bitter-enders, the Taliban would be a memory within two years. The opposite happened. In 2006, the rate of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan soared, and the Bush administration was forced to deploy 6,000 additional troops to recover territory lost to the Taliban and turn back their anticipated spring offensive.
What about the PKK? Late in 1998 Turkey massed troops on its border with Syria, with the declared intention of expelling the PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan from Damascus if the Syrians didn't do so themselves. (A banner headline in the Turkish paper Hurriyet declared "We're going to say 'shalom' to the Israelis on the Golan Heights.") The late Syrian strongman Hafez Assad got the message, and sent Öcalan packing. He was eventually captured by Turkish intelligence in Nairobi, and sentenced to death by a Turkish court (commuted to a life sentence when Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2002). Öcalan has since apologized to the Turkish people for the 37,000 deaths he caused in the 1980s and '90s and called for a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue. The PKK itself declared a ceasefire.
That should have been the end of it. As Turkish analyst Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy observes, Öcalan was a cult-of-personality figure in an organization that, unlike the cellular structure of al Qaeda, was run along strictly hierarchical lines.
For the next few years the Turkish government made real, if limited, strides in accommodating peaceful ethnic Kurdish cultural demands in education and broadcasting. What remained of the PKK--5,000 or so fighters--mainly retreated to northern Iraq, where their bases were attacked by Turkish forces no fewer than 24 times.
So might things have remained had the U.S. invasion of Iraq not rearranged the strategic chessboard. The Turks did not help themselves by failing to support the war, which caused strains with Washington and prevented them from carrying out further cross-border raids. That, in turn, created an opening for Iran, which until then had been the PKK's sole remaining state sponsor. Concerned about its isolation in the region, and sensing an opportunity to make common cause with the moderately Islamist government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Tehran abruptly switched sides, going so far as to shell PKK positions in northern Iraq. Not surprisingly, the Turks began to take a more favorable view of Iran.
The U.S. role is scarcely more creditable. The Ankara government has been pressing the Bush administration to hit PKK bases for at least four years. The administration has responded with a combination of empty promises of future action and excuses that U.S. forces are already overstretched in Iraq. For the Turks, who contribute more than 1,000 troops to NATO's mission in Afghanistan, U.S. nonfeasance is a mystery, if not an outright conspiracy. "How is it that Turkey fights America's terrorists, but America does not fight Turkey's terrorists?" is how Mr. Cagaptay sums up the prevailing mood.
Yet the real mystery isn't U.S. behavior, which was mainly dictated by a desire not to rock the boat in what was (at least until this month), the only relatively stable region of Iraq. It is the forbearance shown to the PKK by Massoud Barzani, Kurdistan's president, who has otherwise sought to cultivate better relations with Ankara and Kurdish moderates in Turkey, and who would have much to lose if an invading Turkish army turned his province into a free-fire zone. One theory is that Mr. Barzani wants to use the PKK as a diplomatic card, to be exchanged for Turkish concessions in some future negotiation. But all that depends on his ability to rein in the PKK at the last minute and avert a Turkish invasion. Yesterday's kidnapping (or killing) of another eight Turkish troops puts that in doubt.
Meanwhile, the PKK has fully reconstituted itself as an effective fighting force under the leadership of Murat Karayilan, who was canny enough to see Congress's Armenian genocide resolution as an opportunity to take scissors to the already frayed U.S.-Turkish relationship. The resolution was turned back at the 11th hour, but it remains to be seen whether it has already done its damage.
All the more reason, then, for the U.S. to pre-empt the Turks by taking the decisive action against the PKK it has promised for too long. But the story of the PKK's resurgence should also remind us of the dangers of premature declarations of victory against terrorist groups, especially when such declarations foster the illusion that you can finally come home. Against this kind of enemy, there are no final victories, and no true homecomings, and no real alternatives other than to keep on fighting.
Mr. Stephens is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal Tuesdays.
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Second post of the AM:
Iraq, Turkey: Igniting the Kurdish Rivalry
Summary
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said Oct. 21 that the rebel Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) will announce a cease-fire on the evening of Oct. 22. With no love lost between the PKK and Iraq's Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq has every reason to use its leverage with the PKK to keep the Turks at bay, thereby safeguarding KRG interests and remaining the darling of energy investors. But the motivation behind Turkey's troop buildup along its border with Iraq extends far beyond the PKK issue: Ankara is keen on reigniting an intra-Kurdish rivalry in order to keep Iraqi Kurdistan in check.
Analysis
After saying that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) would not even hand over a Kurdish cat to Ankara if Turkey did not back off, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani hinted Oct. 22 that Iraqi Kurdish forces already have moved against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) when he announced an end to PKK activities against Turkish troops scheduled to start the same evening. Talabani's statement comes against the backdrop of 100,000 Turkish troops stationed along the Turkish-Iraqi border in preparation for a large-scale offensive against PKK elements in northern Iraq. This situation became even tenser after a provocative attack Oct. 21 by Kurdish rebels that killed at least 17 Turkish soldiers.
The KRG might be able to rein in the PKK and stave off a Turkish incursion in the short term. But its ability to prevent an incursion in the long run is doubtful, especially in light of the underlying reasons for a Turkish move into Iraq.
The KRG is well aware that the conflict with Ankara extends far beyond the PKK issue. Turkey has every interest in putting a stranglehold on Iraqi Kurdish aspirations for greater autonomy. In an effort to do so, Turkey has approved a yearlong military operation that will involve building up its forces on the border, moving into Iraq and creating a buffer zone for rooting out the PKK and keeping the Iraqi Kurds in check. An integral part of Ankara's long-term plan for containing Iraqi Kurdistan involves reigniting the conflict between Iraq's two main Kurdish parties: Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the southeastern Iraqi Kurdish region, and Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which controls the Northwest.
The Kurds occupy the mountainous territory where Syria, Turkey, Iran and Iraq come together. But the mountains that have provided them a refuge also have given birth to deep-seated tribal rivalries that are regularly exploited by neighboring powers. The worst infighting in recent years occurred in 1994, when the PUK and KDP were engaged in a full-blown civil war. The fighting became so intense that Barzani called on Saddam Hussein for help battling the PUK. Moreover, the KDP worked alongside Turkey during the 1997 Turkish invasion of Iraq aimed at fighting the PKK, with the PKK and the PUK working together against the KDP. The PUK also received some help from Iran in reclaiming territory from KDP forces during the Kurdish civil war. These events demonstrate that more often than not, intra-Kurdish rivalries will take precedence -- even in the face of a common enemy (be it Turkey or Hussein).
The current unity between Iraqi Kurdish leaders is highly anomalous. Barzani and Talabani set aside their differences in 2003, just prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in order to maximize Kurdish benefits in post-Hussein Iraq. This united Kurdish front allowed the Kurdish region to develop into the country's oasis, with energy investors worldwide hungrily eyeing its vast oil fields -- much to Turkey's displeasure. But Turkey also is well aware that the Barzani-Talabani truce is extremely fragile. Everything from telecom companies to peshmerga units still are clearly divided between the PUK and KDP in Iraqi Kurdish territory. The fate of Kirkuk also has caused friction between the two parties as they compete to claim the legacy of having gotten the city officially designated Kurdish territory.
Turkey has every reason to exacerbate intra-Kurdish tensions through military action in an effort to break the KRG apart. Should Turkish troops move deep into Kurdish territory -- to Dohuk and beyond -- clashes between peshmerga and Turkish forces are highly likely. This could further strain the PUK-KDP alliance. Turkey also could drive a wedge between the parties by attempting to align with Talabani, whom Ankara views as a more pragmatic leader, over Barzani, whom the Turks see as a belligerent tribal warlord. And 74-year-old Talabani's worsening health itself could very well ignite another intra-Kurdish power struggle. Should Talabani feel threatened by Barzani's political ambitions, Ankara could find another opening to intervene and keep the Kurdish parties split.
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WSJ
Storm Clouds Over Northern Iraq
By NORMAN STONE
November 5, 2007; Page A19
ANKARA -- Condoleezza Rice stepped from an aircraft onto Turkish soil last week for a short, and surely uncomfortable, visit. The U.S. secretary of state fielded sharply pointed and well-informed questions about Iraq and the ongoing attacks on Turkish troops just across the border. Many of those questions will no doubt be repeated in Washington during today's scheduled meeting between Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and President Bush.
Despite assurances from Ms. Rice that Turkey and the U.S. share a "common enemy" in Kurdish militants, the situation boils down to something of a conundrum: What for America is a solution -- the Kurds -- is for Turkey a terrible problem. In the last few months a terrorist organization, the PKK (it stands for Kurdish Workers' Party) has been killing young Turkish soldiers -- reportedly, at times, with American weapons -- and has established safe havens just over the Iraqi border.
The PKK is -- along with Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and the Basque terrorists in Spain -- the last of the Mao-inspired "National Liberation Fronts" that caused such mayhem in what we have to call the developing world. The PKK was founded in 1979, by Turkish-educated students, and in the 1980s and 1990s it was responsible for 37,000 deaths, most of them Kurdish.
Now, from its apparent safe haven in Kurdish northern Iraq, and with an office in Armenia -- was the timing of the U.S. Congress resolution anent the "genocide" coincidental? -- the PKK is back, and this time in a much more dangerous form. The attacks in Turkey have been well-organized, and seemingly on the basis of serious intelligence. So it was that Ms. Rice landed in a Turkey in uproar -- and with an increasingly anti-American citizenry.
One must remember that Turkey and the U.S. have long been key allies, if not dear friends. Adnan Menderes, the first Turkish prime minister to be democratically elected (in 1950), said "whatever America does, is right for us." Menderes opened up the economy and joined NATO. Turkey is a relatively new country, established in 1923 in the rubble of the old Ottoman Empire, and foreign models have been very important. The dominant one was once French, but is now American; and if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Americans in Turkey have good reason to be pleased.
Turkey is now in the same league as, say, South Korea or Taiwan or even Japan as a testimony to the incredible positive influence of postwar America. With her geographical location and her demographic problem, she could have been an Egypt. Instead, she is a Spain -- industrialized, literate, and the only place between Athens and Singapore where people actually want to live: Turkey is home to two million refugees, many from Iran.
American hard power is here, in the shape of NATO institutions and the great air base at Incirlik; and the IMF has been called upon to support the Turkish currency. But it is the "soft power" that you cannot miss. The Turks have even set up private universities on the American model, far more of them than in Western Europe, and thousands of Turkish students make for the States each year.
So, will the PKK and the troubles in northern Iraq bring this so positive relationship to an end? Probably not. Mr. Erdogan and the Turkish elite understand the value of their alliance with the U.S. -- and are unlikely to let the mess of Iraq undo it.
The Turks know Iraq historically and very well. In the days of the Ottoman Empire, three disparate provinces had been ruled from Baghdad, which the Turks had taken in 1638. The empire had originally been Balkan-based, looking to Europe. But the long war with Persia sucked the Turks into the Middle East, and the character of the empire changed.
In the 19th century, following French precepts, the Sultans tried to centralize it, but over Iraq they gave up, and simply did deals with the local powers-that-be, whether the Sunni elite in Baghdad, the Shia (and proto-Iranian) groupings in the south, or various Kurdish tribal chiefs in the mountainous north. One way of controlling them was to set up a "tribal school" in Istanbul, where the sons were educated (they often fought).
One result was that, of all the elements in Iraq, it was the Kurds who were in the end closest to Turkey. After World War I, the British took over Iraq, and there were also shadowy ideas of dividing eastern Turkey between Armenian and Kurdish nation-states. The Kurds, on the whole, opted for Turkey, and contributed much to her war of independence. They were good fighters, which the Armenians, mainly traders, were not, and the Turks won in a remarkable comeback.
At the time, they drew up a "National Pact," and the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq were included as a territorial claim. The British, then occupying Iraq, did not intend to let these oil-rich areas fall into Turkish hands, and manipulated the League of Nations into leaving the Kurdish area in the British-dominated Iraqi colony (or "mandate" as it was known). They then faced a war of all against all, and their chief expert, Lawrence of Arabia, sagely wondered why it was that the British, with 100,000 men, tanks, aircraft and poison gas, could not control a region that the Turks had run with a native army of 14,000 men, executing 90 men per annum. Then, as now.
The Turks' National Pact had much to be said for it, and when the first Iraq War occurred, the then Turkish leader, Turgut Özal (himself half-Kurdish) might even just have annexed Kurdish northern Iraq, if the first Bush administration had been in a creative mode.
Iraq in the end is just another of those artificial, post-1918 creations, like Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia. Kurds, nomadic tribes for the most part, are settled all over the Middle East, even in Afghanistan, but the Kurdish state is really Turkey; and Istanbul, where (after Black Sea migrants) Kurds are the largest group, is the biggest Kurdish city.
These millions of Kurdish migrants are rapidly becoming assimilated, speaking Turkish among themselves, with, in heated moments, some Kurdish words. Some have become very successful indeed; many have intermarried; even Black Sea taxi drivers, fulminating against dirt and thievery, will say that they have several Kurdish friends.
The Istanbul-based Kurds do not vote for a Kurdish nationalist party at all, and just follow the Turkish ones, secularist, religious (they like the present government) or middle-of-the-road. The fact is that most Kurds in Turkey just want their children to go ahead in the national language -- the more so as there is not even a single Kurdish language: there are four, or even seven, depending on how you classify dialects.
However, in the southeast of Turkey there is a huge Kurdish problem. The region is far poorer than anywhere else: Hakkari on the Iraqi border has a tenth of the GDP per head of Istanbul, and there is a terrible demographic problem, of endless raggedy children, little girls of four dragging tiny tots of two across motorways. The tots will in some cases grow up to hate the Turkish state, to join the PKK, and to look at northern Iraq as the future Kurdistan.
And there they will encounter some sympathy. Northern Iraq is uneasily settled as a Kurdish entity, as the result of a compromise between the chiefs of two tribal federations, Massoud Barzani on the border, Jalal Talabani to the east, and now, formally, president of Iraq. They have fought, in the recent past, but made up their differences in a flood of dollars (which, incidentally, flow back to Turkey, where the dollar and even the euro have been plunging as a result).
Mr. Barzani's own family has a long history of fighting for Kurdistan, and all Turks think that he is playing politics. He does not like the PKK: let the Turks deal with them. On the other hand, with the PKK out of the picture, he will be the lion of the Kurds, as his father tried (with Soviet help) to be.
Meanwhile, if American-Turkish relations are soured, then so much the better: The Americans in Iraq cannot do without him. There is also huge money to be made out of oil, and out of the smuggling of heroin and hashish, as 500,000 trucks go back and forth every year through Mr. Barzani's fiefdom.
So he plays his game, allowing the PKK to raid southeastern Turkey, in the expectation that the resulting trouble can only bring him profit. Mr. Bush and Mr. Erodgan, in their meeting today, should make certain he's wrong.
Mr. Stone is a professor of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara and author of "World War I: A Short History" (Penguin, 2007).
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Iraq, Turkey: Border Problems Resolved
November 12, 2007 21 50 GMT
A political advisor to Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council head Abdul Aziz al-Hakim said border problems between Iraq and Turkey had been resolved, Fars News Agency reported Nov. 12. He said steps taken by the Iraqi central government to soothe Turkey's concerns had helped to reduce "Kurdish Workers' Party-related problems." He also said Kurd officials in northern Iraq helped the central government in taking these steps.
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Geopolitical Diary: Reading Turkey's Airstrike in Iraq
Turkey announced on Sunday that it had bombed Kurdish targets in northern Iraq in a predawn raid. According to Turkish media, the attacks involved more than 50 planes, began at 1 a.m. local time on Sunday, continued for three hours and were followed by artillery attacks. They reportedly focused on the areas of Zap, Avasin and Hakurk, but went as deep as Qandil, where senior leaders of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), the targeted group, reportedly were based. This is a much more substantial strike than the last notable one, which occurred in mid-November.
Notably, Gen. Yasar Buyukanit said that the United States cleared the attack, opening Iraqi airspace and also providing intelligence. According to Reuters, a U.S. Embassy official in Ankara said in response, "We have not approved any decision. It is not for us to approve. However, we were informed before the event." We interpret this statement to mean that the United States did in fact approve the attacks, since "it is not for us to approve" is not Washington's position on foreign powers launching airstrikes on Iraq.
Most interesting is the Turkish claim that the United States provided intelligence to the Turks for the airstrikes. This makes sense. The Americans definitely do not want a major Turkish invasion into Iraq at this time. Washington is trying to stabilize the country, and a Turkish invasion is the last thing the United States needs. At the same time, the Turkish government is under intense domestic political pressure to do something about PKK actions inside Turkey. It is politically impossible for Ankara to remain passive.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with U.S. President George W. Bush earlier in the month, and the two sides undoubtedly laid out their concerns: The United States didn't want an invasion, but Turkey had to do something effective. Non-PKK Kurds were loath to provide intelligence on PKK facilities and personnel that would benefit the Turks, regardless of intra-Kurdish political differences. The solution was for the United States to provide intelligence to the Turks, and for Turkey to warn the Americans so that the airspace would be clear and no U.S. personnel would be in the strike zone.
That was the price the United States had to pay to avoid a Turkish ground invasion. The decision might strain U.S.-Kurdish relations, but that is the price Iraqi Kurds have to pay to keep Turkey out. For the Turks, it was the most effective measure they could take without having a confrontation with the United States. All the players are looking for the lowest cost possible. But it's not clear that they bought the outcome they were hoping for.
It is difficult to strike a guerrilla group from the air and be successful. Airstrikes alone are unlikely to stop the PKK -- the militants would have to be engaged on the ground in order to be defeated. Therefore, if all that took place Sunday morning was an airstrike, the PKK will be back striking Turkish targets in no time. If, on the other hand, the airstrikes were cover for covert ground action against the PKK -- either by Turkish special forces or by those of another country -- then it might be that the PKK was in fact hurt badly enough to interrupt, if not end, the cycle of violence. In that case, the crisis might subside.
Over the next few weeks we will get a better sense of what happened before dawn on Sunday, based on whether the PKK hits back.
Situation Reports
0922 GMT -- IRAQ, TURKEY -- The Iraqi government has demanded that Turkey stop conducting airstrikes in northern Iraq, saying the Dec. 16 strikes destroyed hospitals, schools and bridges, Press TV reported Dec. 17, citing the Iraqi Foreign Ministry. "We demand that Turkish authorities stop such actions against innocent people," the statement said. Turkish Foreign Minister Ali Babacan denied the strikes hit civilian areas. To protest the strikes, Baghdad has summoned Turkey's ambassador to Iraq.
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Turkey's Terror Problem Is Ours
By MICHAEL RUBIN
December 18, 2007; Page A21
It's been nearly two months since the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) sparked an international crisis with a major attack inside Turkey, and more than six weeks since President Bush promised Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that Washington would aid Turkey's fight against terrorism. Heady talk of intelligence sharing and cooperation followed and, indeed, may have been a factor in this weekend's Turkish air strikes on PKK targets in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yet at the same time the Bush administration -- more precisely its increasingly assertive State Department -- has embraced an ill-advised diplomatic strategy toward the PKK that will likely backfire on our long-standing NATO ally, and could serve to undermine what is left of President Bush's "global war on terrorism."
Rebels of the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, near the Turkish border in the remote village of Lewzhe, in northern Iraq, July 2007.
With 100,000 Turkish troops amassed alongside the Iraqi frontier, it is understandable that U.S. diplomats want to avert a military crisis. But, rather than take a zero-tolerance policy toward terrorism, the State Department is counseling Turkey to offer political concessions. On Dec. 13, for example, State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Dell Dailey said, "We have not looked at a military solution as the solution to the PKK. Our preference is a political solution," both inside Iraqi Kurdistan and inside Turkey.
The desired political solution seems to be Iraqi Kurdish action to close down the safe haven on Iraqi soil in exchange for a general amnesty law in Turkey to forgive most PKK members and perhaps other Kurdish-language broadcasting and constitutional reforms as well.
Such a deal at this time would be cockeyed. Turkey has a legitimate grievance against both the PKK and Iraqi Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani. During its Oct. 21 attack on Turkish troops, PKK tactics mirrored those taught by U.S. Special Forces to Mr. Barzani's peshmerga fighters, suggesting its complicity in training terrorists. A diplomatic solution should not reward such behavior.
This needn't mean solely a military solution either. Rather, U.S. officials should threaten isolation and a cessation of all financial assistance until Mr. Barzani ceases his safe haven. Confronted with such demands since 2003, Mr. Barzani has always begged for more time, only to let his promises lag when the diplomatic spotlight passed.
It is trendy to seek "root causes" of terror and to discount terrorist ideology. For State Department officials who believe the PKK is just an outgrowth of inequality and discrimination in Turkey, a deal may seem logical. The group's ideology should negate such a compromise. The PKK has its roots in the revolutionary turmoil of the 1970s. Its leader, a university drop-out named Abdullah Öcalan, immersed himself in the Marxism and Maoism fashionable among intellectuals of the day and became a committed revolutionary. Cloaking himself in Kurdish nationalism, Öcalan's first target was not the Turkish military, but rather nonviolent Kurdish civil rights groups.
In August 1984, the PKK launched an insurgency in southeastern Turkey. Like Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, it targeted the educated and modern. PKK terrorists executed school teachers for being public servants. PKK gangs burned medical clinics and murdered their staff. Health care collapsed. As al Qaeda would do two decades later in Iraq, the PKK destroyed critical infrastructure to drive a wedge between the state and the local population. Before ending in 1997, the PKK campaign claimed 30,000 lives, the majority ethnic Kurds killed by the PKK itself.
The terror campaign ended not with political concession, but coercion: Turkey threatened to expand its military campaign to Syria, which sheltered the PKK. As the Turkish military mobilized along Syria's frontier, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad blinked and order the PKK out. Öcalan sought Greek protection. Rather than try to negotiate compromise with a terrorist, U.S. forces took a no-nonsense approach. U.S. (and Israeli) intelligence tipped Ankara off to Öcalan's whereabouts. On Feb. 16, 1999, Turkish Special Forces captured the PKK leader outside the Greek Embassy in Nairobi. Today, Öcalan serves his life sentence time on the prison island of Imrali, but controls his organization through trusted lieutenants.
Every time the PKK finds a safe haven, it renews violence. Iran briefly sheltered PKK fighters after their expulsion from Syria. No sooner had the PKK established camps than it restarted its terrorism. Turkey responded by bombing both PKK targets and Iranian Revolutionary Guards posts around the Iranian town of Piranshahr. While Tehran seldom takes diplomatic demarches or deals seriously, faced with a military red-line, the ayatollahs, too, backed down. No U.S. official, obviously, counseled that Turkey should compromise.
And yet, in the name of diplomacy, the Bush administration now does. The White House validates Mr. Barzani's decision to play the terror card. For the State Department to accept Mr. Barzani's excuse -- that Kurdish solidarity prohibits a crackdown upon the PKK -- is naïve. Kurdish solidarity is an oxymoron. Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Barzani fought the group he now protects. His change of heart came after the Turkish parliament's 2003 decision not to participate in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Overestimating the chill in U.S.-Turkish relations, he took a hard line against Ankara. As Turkey at the time offered amnesty to those rank-and-file PKK members without blood on their hands, Mr. Barzani welcomed the PKK leaders he once fought. Turkish authorities say they have photographs of senior PKK commanders receiving medical treatment in Erbil hospitals and meeting with Barzani associates in nearby restaurants. Last spring, Mr. Barzani threatened in an al-Arabiya television interview to unleash insurgency inside Turkey.
So as Mr. Barzani denies complicity in terrorism, he nevertheless seeks to leverage it into diplomatic gain. To link demands for Mr. Barzani to crack down with any Turkish political concession suggests that President Bush has learned nothing from his predecessors' failures. The Bush administration's strategy today mirrors the Clinton administration's approach to late Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat, in which the State Department matched every empty Arafat promise with demands for good-faith concessions from Israel, the democracy he victimized. While Kurdish officials tell credulous diplomats that the PKK threat would disappear if only Ankara offered greater concessions, the opposite is true: Concessions fuel terror.
Any Turkish compromise prior to a complete disarmament and expulsion of PKK terrorists from northern Iraq could encourage Syria and its Lebanese proxies to demand concessions in exchange for insincere promises to cease terror support. Pakistan, too, may once again leverage its support and safe haven for the Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership into demands upon both Washington and Kabul.
Turkey has been a poor ally in recent years, but fighting terror requires alliances to trump politics. Every country has the right to defend its citizens from terrorism. Mr. Barzani may give silk carpets to diplomats, provide lavish spreads during their visits, and have his praises sung by high-powered Beltway lobbyists, but so long as he provides the PKK a safe haven, he is a terror enabler. Forcing Turkey to negotiate with the PKK or its intermediaries would only justify its terrorism, and would be no wiser than counseling compromise with Hezbollah, Hamas, or al Qaeda.
Mr. Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
WSJ
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Turkish Regress
FROM TODAY'S WALL STREET JOURNAL EUROPE
June 19, 2008
Turkey's soccer team scored three goals in the last 15 minutes against the Czechs the other night to make the quarterfinals of the European championship. Now if only miracles happened in Turkish politics.
The country needs one to get out of its latest self-inflicted crisis. For the second time in a year, a clash between the old secular establishment and an elected government with roots in Islam has split and paralyzed Turkey. Tensions look bound to escalate, putting the Muslim world's strongest democracy in peril.
The current fight is ostensibly over Islam and its most potent symbol, the headscarf. But that's a proxy for a broader struggle over political power. The so-called secularists have run the place since Kemal Atatürk founded modern Turkey through their control of the military, state bureaucracy and schools, and the courts. But in this century, the ruling Justice and Development Party, AKP, has claimed the votes and the reform credentials.
Now the Kemalists have the AKP on a back foot. In coming weeks, Turkey's highest court will -- barring the miracle -- outlaw the AKP for "anti-secular activities." The court tipped its hand recently by striking down an AKP-backed law to lift the prohibition against women wearing headscarves at public universities. The law led a Kemalist prosecutor to bring the case against the AKP in the first place. Seventy-one politicians, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, also face a five-year ban from belonging to any party. Such a decision would undo the outcome of last summer's elections. The AKP won 47% of the vote, a landslide by Turkish standards.
Other consequences are harder to predict, but none is welcome. Turkey's negotiations on membership with the European Union, along with its modernization drive, would be put on hold -- again. Political infighting has already stalled reform, and Turkey would be consumed for many more months with sorting out who should run the government.
A ban on Mr. Erdogan's party would amount to a judicial coup. It's also perfectly legal. Under the 1982 constitution, the courts can outlaw parties and have done so on nearly two dozen occasions. The secular elite says the military and the courts are the only checks and balances Turkish democracy has against an AKP with a wide majority in Parliament and its own man in the presidency. Never mind that the AKP won those offices fair and square.
The crux of the secular case against the AKP has always been a hypothetical fear that its secret agenda is to Islamize Turkey. If women are allowed to wear headscarves at university, goes the oft-heard argument, all women will soon be forced to wear them everywhere. Stories are told of AKP mayors who outlaw alcohol or force girls to cover their hair.
Some Turkish Islamists can be as pushy in telling women how to dress modestly as some secularists can be in telling them not to. Yet these tend to be isolated incidents, and the AKP's record in power tells a wholly different story. In his first term in office, Mr. Erdogan did more than any Turkish leader in the past two decades to strengthen democractic institutions and open up the economy. Minority rights, especially for the Kurds, were expanded. So were civil liberties. Turkey's economy flourished. Membership talks started with the EU.
Critics say the AKP is aggressive and intolerant. If anything, the party has been so obliging of the opposition that its reform efforts have suffered. In deference to the secularists, Mr. Erdogan backed off on plans to decriminalize certain political speech and liberalize the law on political parties to make it harder to ban them. In the headscarf case, the AKP moved only at the behest of the secular Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP. The MHP, naturally, isn't in the high court facing a ban. In retrospect, Mr. Erdogan may have walked into a trap. This supposedly overbearing Prime Minister these days looks weak.
The AKP's rise reflects that of a new elite in a fast-changing Turkey. Its supporters tend to hail from blue-collar families, from the rural areas as well as the lower-class suburbs that rose around Istanbul and other cities in recent decades. They tend to work in the booming private sector. They also tend to be more socially and culturally conservative.
The urban, educated secular establishment is a minority that finds this emerging reality discomfiting. They don't trust ordinary Turks to make up their own minds about whom to vote for, and claim to know what's better for them.
Here's an irony. Through their actions these past few months, the secularists are now the leading opponents of the West and pose a threat to secularism itself. Under the AKP, Turkey was moving at a dizzying pace to try to reconcile Islam and democracy, turning away from the mildly authoritarian precepts of Kemalism toward Western liberalism.
In the Turkish context, that would mean keeping Islam and politics separate while giving Turks greater space to practice their religion (or not). The job was imperfectly and barely half done. Now that modernization drive, watched closely across the Muslim world, has been stopped cold. The next neo-Islamist Turkish government may not be as eager to liberalize as this one has been.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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Turkey's Islamists
Inspire a New
Climate of Fear
By ZEYNO BARAN
August 2, 2008; Page A11
Istanbul
This week's verdict by Turkey's Constitutional Court -- which rejected an attempt to ban the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) for undermining the country's secular foundations -- has been hailed by the U.S. and the EU as a great step forward for democracy and rule of law. Fair enough. Banning a party that last year renewed its mandate in office with 47% of the vote would have been a huge setback for Turkey. But that doesn't mean we should all sigh with relief and conclude that liberal democracy is flourishing under the Islamic-oriented AKP's rule.
Government surveillance of AK Party critics and leaks to media of personal phone conversations have created a climate of fear. There is concern among some liberals that the country is becoming a police state. The foundation of a healthy democracy -- the right to dissent and hold an elected government accountable -- is gradually being undermined.
When asked about mass wire-tapping, Minister of Transportation Binali Yildirim gave a Kafkaesque response: "It is not possible to prevent being listened to; the only way is not to talk [on the phone]. If there is nothing illegal in our actions, we should not be concerned about such things."
Some examples of recent intrusive practices in Turkey include the appearance on YouTube of voice recordings of prominent figures either from the military or antigovernment circles. Several anti-Islamist senior military officers have reportedly resigned over the past few years when faced with the possibility that their private conversations would be leaked. The leaks involve some top-secret military documents, so they are also highly illegal and might pose a serious security breach for the NATO alliance.
In this context, several aspects of the so-called Ergenekon trial are worth highlighting. Ergenekon is alleged to be a secret antigovernment organization named after a pre-Islamic Turkish myth. The case involves a network of ultranationalists -- including journalists, military, business and civil society leaders -- who allegedly have been involved in a range of terror attacks since the early 1990s, and most recently conspired to attempt a coup against the AKP.
The investigation began in June 2007, when over two dozen hand grenades were found in an Istanbul house. The same type of grenade was used in the attacks on the Istanbul offices of the prominent anti-Islamist newspaper Cumhuriyet in 2006. At the time, many believed the attack against the newspaper was carried out by Islamists. Now, according to the prosecution, this and other such attacks were not carried out by Islamists, but by Ergenekon conspirators.
The indictment reads like a Solzhenitsyn novel; it includes private conversations between suspects, who discuss their conversations with prominent figures, such as former president Suleyman Demirel and business tycoon Rahmi Koc. While these do not by themselves make a case, they are highly embarrassing when reprinted on the front pages of major newspapers. The message that many people took from the indictment is that those critical of the government are officially on notice.
The case is built around retired Brig. Gen. Veli Kucuk, an alleged leader of Ergenekon, who is accused of a number of illegal activities, including some of the most shocking crimes in recent Turkish history. Ergenekon conspirators are also accused of planning to murder the current chief of the Turkish military's general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk (among others), and of planning attacks on NATO facilities.
Most Turks would welcome the elimination of such furtive armed networks, and the clear restoration of the rule of law. However, the timing of this case, as well as the movie-like aspects of the indictment, have aroused suspicions that the AKP or its supporters are behind a campaign of intimidation -- and that they are striking back in the legal arena against the same people who tried to ban the party.
First, the timing. The Istanbul court declared its acceptance of the indictment and released the 2,455 page document on July 25 -- the weekend prior to the start of the AKP closure case. While AKP and its supporters claim the two cases are not related, those in opposition see the two closely linked, and point to the headline of the strongly antimilitary daily Taraf the next day: "Founded in 1923, cleansed in 2008" -- i.e., it declared the collapse of Mustafa Kemal's secular Turkish Republic.
Second, the leading opposition paper Cumhuriyet seems to be a key target. The phones of its senior journalists have been tapped, and some conversations deemed anti-AKP leaked to the press -- including one involving a readout of an off-the-record conversation between the paper's U.S. correspondent and members of U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney's staff. The paper's senior editor and columnist, Ilhan Selcuk, was arrested in March as a result of the information extracted from his private phone conversations. He is one of the leading figures among the 86 people charged with being a member of a "terrorist organization."
A third point made by those who managed to go through those 2,455 pages is that the indictment is full of unsubstantiated speculation, and that its attempt to blame all kinds of terror attacks and assassinations on Ergenekon is far-fetched. These include the killing of prominent anti-Islamist scholars and journalists, and what were thought to be Kurdish acts of terror and killings by the Islamist group Hezbullah (unrelated to the Lebanese organization).
The Ergenekon trial has so far raised more questions than answers. If the allegations can be proven, it would be a huge success for the AKP for having the courage to tackle such a horrendous entity. If, however, it turns out to be mostly a show trial, then those concerned about Turkish democracy and rule of law need to reconsider where Turkey is headed.
Ms. Baran, a native of Turkey, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of its Center for Eurasian Policy.
See all of today's editorials and op-eds, plus video commentary, on Opinion Journal.
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Summary
Turkey’s international profile has risen as a result of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s criticism of Israel in the wake of the conflict in Gaza. Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party are making use of the Gaza crisis to further their goals of reasserting Turkey’s leadership of the Arab Middle East, and of the wider Muslim world. While there are not many external obstacles to this goal, there is significant domestic resistance that could not only hobble Turkey’s ascent, but also plunge the country back into domestic instability.
Analysis
Related Special Topic Page
Turkey’s Re-Emergence
Turkey considers itself a key player in efforts to secure a bilateral cease-fire ending Israel’s military operations in Gaza, because Ankara has been able to convince Hamas to stop fighting, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s top foreign policy adviser, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Jan. 19.
Turkey is not the only regional player that has influence over Hamas — Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt do as well — but unlike its Arab neighbors, Turkey has openly criticized its ally Israel over the Gaza operation. Erdogan on Jan. 4 said Israel was “perpetrating inhuman actions which would bring it to self-destruction,” warning that “Allah will sooner or later punish those who transgress the rights of innocents.” Erdogan’s comments are not entirely unprecedented, as he also has criticized previous Israeli operations in the Palestinian territories — but his past comments have been nowhere near as severe.
There has been considerable concern, both within Turkey and internationally, that these comments could indicate that Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party is reverting to its Islamist roots. That is unlikely to happen, however. A significant chunk of the party is composed of non-Islamists, and the party itself was founded by individuals who broke with the Islamist core of Fazeelat, the AK Party’s predecessor, which was outlawed in 2001. In addition, the Turkish republic’s firm grounding in secularism makes it difficult or impossible for the ruling party to trend too far toward Islamism without being disbanded by the establishment.
The reason for Ankara’s harshly critical position toward Israel’s Operation Cast Lead can be found, rather, in the politics of the Arab world. At a time when the Arab masses perceive their leaders as either actively supporting Israel or at least doing nothing to stop it, Erdogan is gaining tremendous respect and appreciation in the Arab street for his condemnation of the Israeli offensive and his rhetorical defense of the Palestinians.
Opportunity in the Middle East
Turkey was not the only one taking a firm stance against Israel, however; Iran was actually helping Hamas, not just rhetorically, but militarily. Tehran’s support for both Hezbollah and Hamas has earned it and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a considerable degree of popularity in Arab societies, along with fear and loathing among the Arab palaces. But Iran, an ethnically Persian and religiously Shiite state, can go only so far in positioning itself as a leader of the Muslim world, which is predominantly Sunni and Arab. Iran’s weak economic situation also limits its possibilities as a regional hegemon.
Turkey, which boasts the world’s 17th-largest economy, has no such problems. While it is true that Turks are ethnically different from Arabs, both are Sunni. Much more importantly, the Arabs lived for some four centuries under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, whose Turkish rulers were seen as caliphs — leaders of Sunni Muslims — by many Muslims around the world.
This political arrangement, rooted in Islam, came to an end with World War I as Turkish and Arab nationalism accelerated the disintegration of the Ottoman sultanate. Some 90 years later, however, Arab nationalism is all but dead. Islamism has been instrumental in undermining, to varying degrees, the legitimacy of the largely secular Arab states, while the AK Party has brought religion back into the Turkish public arena. Furthermore, the Arab masses generally view their own leaders as corrupt and inept.
Meanwhile, Turkey has somewhat settled itself after 70 years of internal religious-secular struggle. The issue is not completely resolved by any means, but there is general agreement within Turkey that it is time for the country to expand its international influence again. Taken together, these factors have created conditions under which Turkey could emerge as the region’s powerhouse and the leader of the Islamic world.
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Because Turkey’s attempt to gain entry into the European Union has for all intents and purposes been blocked, Turkey has been turning its attention to the other regions it borders — The Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East. Where the first two of these represent opportunities because of historical and ethnic links, they also pose significant challenges, because attempting to expand there would place Turkey into conflict with Russia — a battle Ankara is not eager to join at this time. So while the Turks will certainly lay some groundwork in Central Asia and the Caucasus, any movement there will be tentative and with only long-term results in mind. By comparison, the Middle East is wide open — and there is great precedent for Turkish involvement there.
The view among the Arab masses is that Turkey’s leaders are far more politically competent than their Arab counterparts; Erdogan is seen by the Arab street not only as genuine in his support for the Palestinians, but also as bearing qualities that Arab leaders lack. It is this opportunity that is motivating Ankara’s decision to break with the past and criticize Israel harshly. Growing Muslim solidarity in the region, especially in Turkey, helps explain massive demonstrations organized by Turks protesting the war in Gaza. These demonstrations and Erdogan’s statements have had a deep impact on the Arab psyche at a time when the masses in the Arab world are in search of leadership. (For that matter, even the Arab regimes would welcome Turkey on a certain level as a counterweight to Iran, and to radical Islamist actors in the region.)
Relations with Israel and the West
Meanwhile, Turkey’s pursuit of leadership of the Middle East and the Muslim world does not automatically damage Ankara’s relations with Israel and the West. Turkish ties to both are built on solid footing. Turkey was among the first states to recognize Israel after the birth of the Jewish state in 1948, and since then the two countries have had close diplomatic and military relations.
Even the AK Party’s attempts to create more balance between its relations with Israel and with the Arab states have not altered the historical relationship between Turkey and Israel. In fact, under the Erdogan administration, Ankara has been mediating indirect peace talks between Israel and Syria. Despite the AK Party’s Islamist roots, the current Turkish leadership is much more pragmatic in its strategic outlook than Iran and other radical Islamist actors in the region.
The AK Party government is well aware that close relations with Israel, the United States and the West will allow it to enhance its influence in the Middle East and the wider Islamic world. Conversely, Ankara is trying to position itself as a go-between for the Arab/Muslim world and the West — but to do that, it needs to enhance its influence among Arabs and Muslims. Hence the harsh criticism against Israel.
In many ways, Israel and the West would actually prefer Turkish leadership in the Middle East and the Islamic world to that of Iran or the Arab states. Turkey is a secular, Westernized Muslim state and a NATO ally, and it is well-positioned between the Islamic and Western spheres. From the Israeli and Western point of view, Turkish leadership could serve as a counter to radical Islamist tendencies from Iran and from Sunni nonstate actors.
Roadblocks At Home
The Islamist roots of Erdogan and his AK Party could help provide an opening for Turkish leadership in the Islamic world, but these same roots pose a threat to Turkey’s domestic stability. Though the AK Party government has achieved a considerable degree of accommodation with the country’s secular establishment (led by the armed forces), tensions remain. The government’s move toward Islamic solidarity on the foreign policy front raises fears among the secularists that the country is headed in the wrong direction.
Turkish nationalism, and the subsequent establishment of the modern republic in the aftermath of World War I, grew out of the view that Turkey should shed its Islamic past and, especially, disassociate itself from the Arab world. Attempts to reverse course now could therefore lead to greater tensions between the government and the country’s praetorian military, which is very wary of the possibility that a drive by the AK Party government toward greater alignment with the Arab/Muslim world could undermine the secular foundations of the republic.
This does not mean that the Turkish military is not interested in expanding Ankara’s influence. It fully supports such plans, but not at the cost of weakening the secular fabric of the republic (and the army’s own position in the state). Historically, the military has wanted to steer the country away from the Muslim world and toward the West. Entry into the European Union, however, requires that the armed forces come fully under the control of the civilian leadership — a prospect the military establishment abhors, especially with the AK Party at the helm. The military does not want to give up its ability to stage coups to throw out governments it dislikes — especially those it perceives as undoing the legacy of the founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
This is why the Turkish general staff is willing to live with the European Union’s refusal to accept Turkey as a member. But the military does view Turkey’s return to its old stomping grounds in the Arab world with great trepidation. Thus, while external conditions might be ripe for a resurgence of Turkish influence in the Arab/Muslim world (and by extension internationally), there are strong countervailing forces that could hold back the country — or even reverse course toward domestic political instability.
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Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan created a stir at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday with a lengthy condemnation of Israel’s recent actions in the Gaza Strip.
Erdogan’s speech was clearly prepared beforehand — read directly from papers he was holding — so this was no off-the-cuff comment that could be written off. And sitting right next to the Turkish prime minister the whole time was none other than Israeli President Shimon Peres. After Peres delivered a counterpoint, Erdogan went on what detractors would probably label a rant, which ended with a brief argument with the moderator about time limits before he abruptly walked off the stage, having said, “I do not think I will return to Davos.”
Back in Turkey, the response was mixed: Some were surprised by their leader’s actions, and some were thrilled to see him lambaste both Israel and the European elites at Davos. Indeed, it is a matter for debate both within and outside Turkey just where Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party are taking Turkish policy in the near future. There are those who see his bold criticisms of Israel as a clear bid to seize a leadership position for Islamic sentiment throughout the Middle East. Others see Turkey asserting itself in order to counter, or perhaps collaborate with, a resurgent Russia. Still others see Turkey pushing to join, or perhaps utterly reject, the European Union. The one thing that is clear is that Turkey is moving more assertively than it has in decades.
It has been almost 90 years since the world has seen Turkey as a place that projects any power on its own. Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks have been extremely insular, dabbling only rarely in events beyond their borders. Granted, Turkey was a key participant in the NATO alliance during the Cold War, given that it shared borders with the Middle East, Iran, the Soviet bloc (Bulgaria) and the Soviet Union itself. It has been a long time, however, since Turkey pursued an activist foreign policy — and most of the world has forgotten just what that means.
Turkey occupies on some of the most valuable real estate in the world. The Anatolian plateau is high and easily defensible, and as a peninsula it also supports a thriving maritime culture. Both are excellent assets for growing a successful state. But Turkey’s most important feature is its critical location. It sits astride the land routes connecting Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East — not to mention the straits connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It is the only country in the world that is positioned to project influence readily into all of these regions.
A deeper look reveals that the territory that comprises modern-day Turkey has been at or near the center of the human story for thousands of years. It was the home of the Hittite empire some 3,300 years ago, and afterward its Aegean coast was part of Classical Greece. Not only was Anatolia a key component of the Roman Empire, but Byzantium — based in what is now Istanbul — was Rome’s immediate political, cultural, religious and economic successor. That entity in turn was succeeded by the Ottomans, who crafted what was at the time the world’s greatest empire — which almost unilaterally enabled humanity to emerge from the Dark Ages, even at times conquering a good portion of what would eventually become Western civilization. For about half of the past two millennia, Anatolia has commanded the world’s most powerful economic and military forces.
The bottom line is this: Any time in human history that the Anatolian Peninsula has not been a leading force in geopolitics has been an aberration. The land that links Europe to the Eurasian steppe to the mountains of Asia to the Mediterranean basin and the deserts of Arabia is geographically destined to play a major role on the global stage. If the world has a pivot, it lies in Turkey.
And although the direction of its movement remains up for debate, Turkey — after more than 90 years of quiescence — is moving again.
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Turkey, U.S.: Strengthening Ties as Ankara Rises
STRATFOR Today » March 19, 2009 | 1837 GMT
ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip ErdoganSummary
U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Turkey on April 6-7 and meet with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The United States and Turkey have many areas of mutual interest, including Iraq, Middle Eastern diplomatic efforts, Iran and Central Asia. Obama’s visit indicates that his administration recognizes Turkey’s growing prominence, and it gives the United States a chance to coordinate policy with a rising power.
Analysis
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed late March 18 that U.S. President Barack Obama will be visiting Turkey on April 6-7. In an interview with Turkish news channel Kanal 7, Erdogan said he had invited Obama to attend a meeting of the Alliance of Civilizations initiative in Istanbul on April 7, but “did not expect” Obama to arrive a day early for an official state visit to Ankara. “Combining the two occasions is very meaningful for us,” he added. Obama’s trip to Turkey will follow a visit to London for the G-20 summit on the global financial crisis, a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France, and a trip to Prague to meet with EU leaders.
Obama’s decision to visit Turkey this early in the game highlights his administration’s recognition of Turkey’s growing prominence in the region. The Turks have woken up after 90 years of post-Ottoman hibernation and are in the process of rediscovering a sphere of influence extending far beyond the Anatolian Peninsula. The Americans, on the other hand, are in the process of drawing down their presence in the Middle East in order to free up U.S. military capabilities to address pressing needs in Afghanistan. With the Turks stepping forward and the Americans stepping back, there are a number of issues of common interest that Obama and Erdogan will need to discuss.
The first order of business is Iraq. The United States is putting its exit strategy into motion and is looking to Turkey to serve as an exit route for U.S. troops and equipment from Iraq. The Turks would not have a problem with granting the United States such access, but they also want to make sure that U.S. withdrawal plans will not interfere with Turkey’s intentions of keeping Iraqi Kurdistan in check. With key Kurdish leader and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani retiring soon and Kurdish demands over the oil-rich city of Kirkuk intensifying, the Turks want to make clear to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq that Ankara promptly will shut down any attempts to expand Kurdish autonomy. Turkey will not hesitate to use the issue of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) fighters hiding out in northern Iraq as a pretext for future military incursions should the need arise to pressure the KRG in a more forceful way, but such tactics could run into complications if the United States intends to withdraw the bulk of its forces through northern Iraq. Therefore, the decision on where to base U.S. troops during the withdrawal process will be a political one, and one that will have to address Turkish concerns over the Kurds. Washington likely will see this as a reasonable price to pay, as it has other problems to handle.
Related Special Topic Page
Turkey’s Re-Emergence
Beyond Iraq, the United States is looking to Turkey as the Muslim regional heavyweight to take the lead in handling some of the knottier issues in the Middle East. The Israeli-Syrian peace talks that went public in 2008 were a Turkish initiative. These negotiations are now in limbo, with the Israelis still working to form a new government, but the Turks are looking to revive them in the near future. Turkey, Israel, the United States and the Arab states all share an interest in bringing Syria into a Western alliance structure, with the aim of depriving Iran of its leverage in the Levant. However, the Syrians are setting an equally high price for their cooperation: Syrian domination over Lebanon. These negotiations are packed with potential deal breakers, but Turkey intends to take on the challenge in the interest of securing its southern flank.
Iran is another critical area where the United States and Turkey see eye to eye. The fall of Saddam Hussein and the rise of the Shia in Iraq have given Iran a platform for projecting influence in the Arab world. But the Turks far outpace the Iranians in a geopolitical contest and will be instrumental in keeping Iranian expansionist goals in check. Erdogan’s outburst over Israel’s Gaza offensive was just one of many ways Turkey has been working to assert its regional leadership, build up its credibility among Sunnis in the Arab world and override Iranian attempts to reach beyond its borders. At the same time, the Turks carry weight with the Iranians, who view Turkey as a fellow great empire of the past and non-Arab partner in the Middle East. Washington may not necessarily need the Turks to mediate in its rocky negotiations with Iran, but it will rely heavily on Turkish clout in the region to help put the Iranians in their place.
Some problems may arise, however, when U.S.-Turkish talks venture beyond the Middle East and enter areas where the Turkish and Russian spheres of influence overlap. Turkey’s influence extends into Central Asia and deep into the Caucasus, where the Turks have a strong foothold in Azerbaijan and ties to Georgia, and are in the process of patching things up with the Armenians. As the land bridge between Europe and Asia, Turkey is also the key non-Russian energy transit hub for the European market, and through its control of the Bosporus, it is the gatekeeper to the Black Sea. In each of these areas, the Turks bump into the Russians, another resurgent power that is on a tight timetable for extracting key concessions from the United States on a range of issues that revolve around Russia’s core imperative of protecting its former Soviet periphery from Western meddling.
The U.S. administration and the Kremlin have been involved in intense negotiations over these demands. Washington is still sorting out which concessions it can make in return for Russian cooperation in allowing the United States access to Central Asia for supply routes to Afghanistan, and in applying pressure on Iran. As part of these negotiations, Obama will be meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev at the G-20 summit and later in the summer in Moscow. Though it is still unclear just how much the United States is willing to give the Russians at this juncture — and how flexible the Turks will be in challenging Russia — Washington wants to make sure its allies, like Turkey, are on the same page.
But as STRATFOR has discussed in depth, Russia and Turkey now have more reason to cooperate than collide, and recent diplomatic traffic between Moscow and Ankara certainly reflects this reality. In areas where the United States will want to apply pressure on Russia, such as on energy security for the Europeans, the Turks likely will resist rocking the boat with Moscow. The last thing Turkey wants at this point is to give Russia a reason to politicize its trade relationship with Ankara, cause trouble for the Turks in the Caucasus or meddle in Turkey’s Middle Eastern backyard. In short, there are real limits to what the United States can expect from Turkey in its strategy against Russia.
Obama and Erdogan evidently will have plenty to talk about when they meet in Ankara. Though the United States and Turkey have much to sort out regarding Iraq, Syria, Iran and Russia, this visit will give Obama the stage to formally recognize Turkey’s regional prowess and demonstrate a U.S. understanding of Turkey’s growing independence. Washington can see that the Turks are already brimming with confidence in conducting their regional affairs, and can expect some bumps down the road when interests collide. But the sooner the Americans can start coordinating policy with a resurgent power like Turkey, the better equipped Washington will be for conducting negotiations in other parts of the globe.
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Turkey and Obama’s Deeper Game
But it was not simply a matter of domestic politics. It is becoming clear that Obama is playing a deeper game. A couple of weeks before the meetings, when it had become obvious that the Europeans were not going to bend on the issues that concerned the United States, Obama scheduled a trip to Turkey. During the EU meetings in Prague, Obama vigorously supported the Turkish application for EU membership, which several members are blocking on grounds of concerns over human rights and the role of the military in Turkey. But the real reason is that full membership would open European borders to Turkish migration, and the Europeans do not want free Turkish migration. The United States directly confronted the Europeans on this matter.
During the NATO meeting, a key item on the agenda was the selection of a new alliance secretary-general. The favorite was former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Turkey opposed his candidacy because of his defense on grounds of free speech of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed published in a Danish magazine. NATO operates on consensus, so any one member can block just about anything. The Turks backed off the veto, but won two key positions in NATO, including that of deputy secretary-general.
So while the Germans won their way at the meetings, it was the Turks who came back with the most. Not only did they boost their standing in NATO, they got Obama to come to a vigorous defense of the Turkish application for membership in the European Union, which of course the United States does not belong to. Obama then flew to Turkey for meetings and to attend a key international meeting that will allow him to further position the United States in relation to Islam.
The Russian Dimension
Let’s diverge to another dimension of these talks, which still concerns Turkey, but also concerns the Russians. While atmospherics after the last week’s meetings might have improved, there was certainly no fundamental shift in U.S.-Russian relations. The Russians have rejected the idea of pressuring Iran over its nuclear program in return for the United States abandoning its planned ballistic missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. The United States simultaneously downplayed the importance of a Russian route to Afghanistan. Washington said there were sufficient supplies in Afghanistan and enough security on the Pakistani route such that the Russians weren’t essential for supplying Western operations in Afghanistan. At the same time, the United States reached an agreement with Ukraine for the transshipment of supplies — a mostly symbolic gesture, but one guaranteed to infuriate the Russians at both the United States and Ukraine. Moreover, the NATO communique did not abandon the idea of Ukraine and Georgia being admitted to NATO, although the German position on unspecified delays to such membership was there as well. When Obama looks at the chessboard, the key emerging challenge remains Russia.
The Germans are not going to be joining the United States in blocking Russia. Between dependence on Russia for energy supplies and little appetite for confronting a Russia that Berlin sees as no real immediate threat to Germany, the Germans are not going to address the Russian question. At the same time, the United States does not want to push the Germans toward Russia, particularly in confrontations ultimately of secondary importance and on which Germany has no give anyway. Obama is aware that the German left is viscerally anti-American, while Merkel is only pragmatically anti-American — a small distinction, but significant enough for Washington not to press Berlin.
At the same time, an extremely important event between Turkey and Armenia looks to be on the horizon. Armenians had long held Turkey responsible for the mass murder of Armenians during and after World War I, a charge the Turks have denied. The U.S. Congress for several years has threatened to pass a resolution condemning Turkish genocide against Armenians. The Turks are extraordinarily sensitive to this charge, and passage would have meant a break with the United States. Last week, they publicly began to discuss an agreement with the Armenians, including diplomatic recognition, which essentially disarms the danger from any U.S. resolution on genocide. Although an actual agreement hasn’t been signed just yet, anticipation is building on all sides.
The Turkish opening to Armenia has potentially significant implications for the balance of power in the Caucasus. The August 2008 Russo-Georgian war created an unstable situation in an area of vital importance to Russia. Russian troops remain deployed, and NATO has called for their withdrawal from the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. There are Russian troops in Armenia, meaning Russia has Georgia surrounded. In addition, there is talk of an alternative natural gas pipeline network from Azerbaijan to Europe.
Turkey is the key to all of this. If Ankara collaborates with Russia, Georgia’s position is precarious and Azerbaijan’s route to Europe is blocked. If it cooperates with the United States and also manages to reach a stable treaty with Armenia under U.S. auspices, the Russian position in the Caucasus is weakened and an alternative route for natural gas to Europe opens up, decreasing Russian leverage against Europe.
From the American point of view, Europe is a lost cause since internally it cannot find a common position and its heavyweights are bound by their relationship with Russia. It cannot agree on economic policy, nor do its economic interests coincide with those of the United States, at least insofar as Germany is concerned. As far as Russia is concerned, Germany and Europe are locked in by their dependence on Russian natural gas. The U.S.-European relationship thus is torn apart not by personalities, but by fundamental economic and military realities. No amount of talking will solve that problem.
The key to sustaining the U.S.-German alliance is reducing Germany’s dependence on Russian natural gas and putting Russia on the defensive rather than the offensive. The key to that now is Turkey, since it is one of the only routes energy from new sources can cross to get to Europe from the Middle East, Central Asia or the Caucasus. If Turkey — which has deep influence in the Caucasus, Central Asia, Ukraine, the Middle East and the Balkans — is prepared to ally with the United States, Russia is on the defensive and a long-term solution to Germany’s energy problem can be found. On the other hand, if Turkey decides to take a defensive position and moves to cooperate with Russia instead, Russia retains the initiative and Germany is locked into Russian-controlled energy for a generation.
Therefore, having sat through fruitless meetings with the Europeans, Obama chose not to cause a pointless confrontation with a Europe that is out of options. Instead, Obama completed his trip by going to Turkey to discuss what the treaty with Armenia means and to try to convince the Turks to play for high stakes by challenging Russia in the Caucasus, rather than playing Russia’s junior partner.
This is why Obama’s most important speech in Europe was his last one, following Turkey’s emergence as a major player in NATO’s political structure. In that speech, he sided with the Turks against Europe, and extracted some minor concessions from the Europeans on the process for considering Turkey’s accession to the European Union. Why Turkey wants to be an EU member is not always obvious to us, but they do want membership. Obama is trying to show the Turks that he can deliver for them. He reiterated — if not laid it on even more heavily — all of this in his speech in Ankara. Obama laid out the U.S. position as one that recognized the tough geopolitical position Turkey is in and the leader that Turkey is becoming, and also recognized the commonalities between Washington and Ankara. This was exactly what Turkey wanted to hear.
The Caucasus is far from the only area to discuss. Talks will be held about blocking Iran in Iraq, U.S. relations with Syria and Syrian talks with Israel, and Central Asia, where both countries have interests. But the most important message to the Europeans will be that Europe is where you go for photo opportunities, but Turkey is where you go to do the business of geopolitics. It is unlikely that the Germans and French will get it. Their sense of what is happening in the world is utterly Eurocentric. But the Central Europeans, on the frontier with Russia and feeling quite put out by the German position on their banks, certainly do get it.
Obama gave the Europeans a pass for political reasons, and because arguing with the Europeans simply won’t yield benefits. But the key to the trip is what he gets out of Turkey — and whether in his speech to the civilizations, he can draw some of the venom out of the Islamic world by showing alignment with the largest economy among Muslim states, Turkey.
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For the record I do not agree with some of this article, but think it worth reading:
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Published: April 6, 2009
Istanbul
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AS a Turkish journalist who for years covered the United States, I’ve spent the last few days repeatedly answering the inevitable question from my fellow Turks: “Does Washington see Turkey as a moderate Islamic republic?” That description may sound like a compliment to American ears. But in Turkey, it is an outright insult.
Since 2004, when the “moderate Islamic” formulation was innocently introduced by Colin Powell, the American secretary of state at the time, Turks have believed that Washington values Turkey’s religious identity over its secular democracy — that it would rather Turkey become a conservative American ally in the Muslim world than evolve into a European democracy.
“Who describes Belgium or Britain as a moderate Christian country?” people ask here. In a nation where the religion-versus-state debate is the hottest topic, secularists have elevated the “moderate Islam” controversy to an all-encompassing theory.
They claim that Washington supports — or, at least, that the George W. Bush administration supported — the Islamic-oriented government of the Justice and Development Party so that it might serve as a compliant model to the rest of the Muslim world. (Paradoxically, Islamic fundamentalists also hate the term “moderate Islam,” assuming that it implies a watered-down version of religion.)
Even if the “moderate Islam” conspiracy theorists were off base, it is true that ever since Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan came to power in 2003, Washington has viewed Turkey as a simplistic duality: pious masses led by the Justice and Development Party against the small secular elite and the military. As Americans banked on the government’s electoral majority, they lost touch with the rest of the population.
No doubt President Obama was briefed, just as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was before she came here last month, to never speak of “moderate Islam.” And he hasn’t so far. In fact, he has done the opposite. The new American president — whose dark skin and Muslim middle name of Hussein have made him a folk hero here — went out of his way on Monday to acknowledge Turkey’s plurality in all its colors, and telling Europe that in welcoming Turkey it would gain “by diversity of ethnicity, tradition and faith.”
Mr. Obama’s visit to Ankara was a carefully calibrated series of messages and symbolic gestures that spoke to Turkey’s different segments. He met with the government leadership as well as opposition leaders from secular, nationalist and Kurdish parties. He pledged to support “Ataturk’s vision of Turkey as a modern and prosperous democracy," as he wrote in the guestbook at the mausoleum of the founder of secular Turkey.
In our eternal identity crisis, we Turks have lately been thinking only in opposites — that you are either secular or religious, Kurd or Turk, European or Middle Eastern. It took a young foreign leader on his first visit here to remind us that we are all of those things, and much more.
It wasn’t all roses, of course. In his speech to Parliament, President Obama urged Ankara to face up to the mass killings of Armenians in 1915, something most voters here object to.
And Mr. Obama’s brief mention in Parliament that Turkey should undertake further democratic reforms seemed insufficient. Since 2007, Prime Minister Erdogan has become more authoritarian, lashing out at his critics, suing journalists and alienating liberal Turks who once supported him. Last Sunday, voters in municipal elections delivered a serious warning: the party’s overall support fell to 39 percent, from 47 percent two years ago. The elections revealed a divided map, four different Turkeys: the liberal coastline, the conservative inland, the ultra-nationalist middle and the Kurdish nationalist southeast. The Justice and Development Party will grow when it embraces all Turkey’s colors and shrink as it denies them.
It is wonderful that the president reminded Europeans that Turkey’s place is in Europe. But let’s hope he also reminds Turks that getting there requires more tolerance and reform. This trip will undoubtedly improve America’s popularity in the Muslim world — with Mr. Obama’s scheduled visit to the Blue Mosque here on Tuesday likely resonating far beyond Turkey’s borders. But so far, it has been all about us — our own democracy struggling between Europe and Islam.
Asli Aydintasbas is a former Ankara bureau chief of the newspaper Sabah.
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http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/04082009/postopinion/opedcolumnists/os_amateur_hour_163368.htm
O'S AMATEUR HOUR
By RALPH PETERS
April 8, 2009 --
THE real climax of President Obama's Spring Apologies Tour wasn't his photo op with our troops in Baghdad or even his "American Guilt" concerts in Western Europe.
While fans in the press cheered wildly at every venue, the real performance came in Turkey. And it was a turkey.
Obama means well. Just as Jimmy Carter, his policy godfather, meant well. But the road to embassy takeovers and strategic humiliation is paved with good intentions -- coupled with distressing naivete.
On every stage, Obama draped Lady Liberty in sackcloth and ashes, drawing plentiful applause but no serious economic or security cooperation in return. Then, in Turkey, he surrendered our national pride, undercut our interests and interfered in matters that aren't his business.
On the latter point: Suppose the European Union president went to Cuba and insisted that the world's sunniest concentration camp should be welcomed into NAFTA? That's the equivalent of what our president did in Ankara on Monday when he declared that he supports Turkey's bid for EU membership.
The Europeans don't want Turkey in their club. Because Turkey isn't a European state, nor is its culture European. And it isn't our business to press Europe to embrace a huge, truculent Muslim country suffering a creeping Islamist coup.
The Europeans were appalled by Turkey's neo-Taliban tantrum on-stage at last week's NATO summit. The Turks fought to derail the appointment of a great Dane, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, as the new NATO secretary general. Why? Because he didn't stone to death the Danish cartoonist who caricatured Mohammed.
Which brings us to the even bigger problem: Obama has no idea what's going on in Turkey. By going to Ankara on his knees, he gave his seal of approval to a pungently anti-American Islamist government bent on overturning Mustapha Kemal's legacy of the separation of mosque and state.
Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party, the AKP, means headscarves, Korans, censorship and stacked elections. The country's alarmed middle class opposes the effort to turn the country into an Islamic state. Obama's gushing praise for the AKP's bosses left them aghast.
Obama's embrace of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan (now orchestrating show trials of his opponents) was one step short of going to Tehran and smooching President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
What was Obama thinking? He wasn't. He relied on advice from State Department appeasement artists who understand neither Turkey, Islam nor the crises raging between the Bosporus and the Indus. State's answer is always "More love, more humility, more aid."
Well, I, for one, don't think our country has anything to apologize for, either to Turkey or to Europe.
Insisting that America's always guilty, Obama omitted any mention of Turkey's wartime betrayals of our troops, its continuing oppression of its Kurd minority or the AKP's determination to turn a state with a secular constitution into a Wahhabi playground.
When it came to the Armenian genocide, Obama bravely ducked: He never dared use the g-word.
And Obama's disdainful remarks about President Bush were just shabby.
After those overpriced tour T-shirts have shrunk in the wash (trust me -- they will), what will we have gained from Obama's superstar act?
He told the Europeans that the global economic crisis is all our fault. No mention of European greed, overleveraged governments, destructive Euro-loans or Chinese currency manipulation. We did it. Whip us, please.
In return, the Europeans gave him . . . nothing.
Even though Obama was right when he said that Europe faces a greater terror threat than we do, the entire continent only ponied up 2,500 short-term non-combat troops for Afghanistan. The Europeans know we'll do the heavy lifting.
He gave the Russians yet another blank check, too. (Meanwhile, in Moscow, Putin's thugs beat an aging pro-democracy dissident to a pulp.) In return, the Russians promised to . . . well, actually, they didn't promise anything.
Then Obama went to Turkey, undercut secular political parties, infuriated the Europeans -- and disclaimed our country's Judeo-Christian heritage. (Did Turkey's leaders respond by denying Islam's importance to them? Naw.)
In Turkey, Obama got . . . nothing we didn't already have.
Then he went to Iraq and told its prime minister that Iraq would get nothing.
I believe that our president wants to do the right thing. But he doesn't have a clue how. For now, he's enraptured by the applause. But he hasn't tried to charge his fans for their tickets. And they've already made up their minds they won't have to pay.
Ralph Peters is Fox News' strategic analyst and the author of "Looking for Trouble."
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It's been a decade since Turkey threatened to invade Syria because Damascus was harboring Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdish PKK terrorist group. "We will say 'shalom' to the Israelis on the Golan Heights" is how one Turkish newspaper then described the country's mood, capturing its attitude toward Syrians and Israelis alike.
Times change—and so do countries. Earlier this month, Turkey cancelled an annual multinational air force exercise because Israel was scheduled to participate in it, despite historically close ties between the Turkish and Israeli militaries. In a recent interview with Britain's Guardian newspaper, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that "there is no doubt he is our friend."
Mr. Erdogan was also among the first to offer Ahmadinejad a congratulatory call after June's fraudulent elections and has called Iran's nuclear program "peaceful and humanitarian." As for Syria, relations have never been warmer: The two countries are even planning joint military exercises.
Nations do not have the luxury of picking their neighbors, and the Turks can certainly be forgiven for not wanting to be at daggers drawn along several hundred miles of common borders. But what's happened to Turkey's foreign policy—and the values that inform those policies—since Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist AKP party came to power in 2003 looks more like a fundamental shift in Turkey's strategic priorities than it does a mere relaxing of regional tensions.
In January, for instance, Mr. Erdogan publicly rebuked Shimon Peres at a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, calling the Israeli President a "liar" and saying—in connection to the war in Gaza—that "when it comes to killing, you know well how to kill." Soon thereafter, Mr. Erdogan hosted a dinner in honor of Ali Osman Taha, the vice president of Sudan. Apparently, there were no lectures about Darfur.
Nor has Israel been the only country in the Middle East affected by Turkey's changing attitudes. As analyst Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy notes, "the AKP's foreign policy has not promoted sympathy toward all Muslim states. Rather, the party has promoted solidarity with Islamist, anti-Western regimes (Qatar and Sudan, for example) while dismissing secular, pro-Western Muslim governments (Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia)." That also goes among the Palestinians, where Mr. Erdogan has called on the world to recognize Hamas while being dismissive of Mahmoud Abbas, the Authority's more secular-minded president.
In other words, Mr. Erdogan's turn against Israel is symptomatic of a broader shift in Turkish policy, one that cannot bode well for core U.S. interests. As a secular Muslim state, Turkey has been a pillar of NATO and a bulwark against the political radicalism (Communist, Baathist, Islamist) of its various neighbors. Now Mr. Erdogan may be gambling that Turkey's future lies at the head of the Muslim world, rather than at the tail of its Western counterpart.
Perhaps none of this should be all that surprising, given how long Europe has brushed off Turkish ambitions to join its Union. One may hope that the Turks, who have long been proud of their traditions of secularism, tolerance, freedom, and as a bridge between East and West, may not be so tempted to trade them in for darker glories.
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Turkey's Ongoing Resurgence
TURKISH ENERGY MINISTER TANER YILDIZ joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdimukhammedov at a Jan. 6 ceremony in southeastern Turkmenistan to inaugurate a natural gas pipeline running from the central Asian state to Iran. Just prior to the ceremony the top Turkish official held a meeting with the two heads of state in Ashgabat. Yildiz’s visit to Turkmenistan was previously unannounced and reportedly took place at the invitation of President Berdimukhammedov a day before.
That the Turkish energy minister was present at the event — a largely Turkmen-Iranian bilateral matter — is extremely interesting from an energy point of view. But events like these provide an opportunity for STRATFOR to step back and take a strategic view of Turkey’s ongoing resurgence on the global scene. Obviously, attendance at the pipeline ceremony was about the Turks trying to enhance ties with a historical foe — the Persians — and attempting to get closer to their fellow Turkic brethren in the Central Asian stomping grounds of their forefathers.
Looking to the east constitutes just one small aspect of Turkey’s plans to reassert itself as a player in the various regions it once ruled or influenced. After an interregnum of nearly a century, Turkey, under the ruling Justice and Development Party, has embarked upon a policy of cautiously expanding its influence into Europe, the Caucuses, the Middle East, Central, South and even East Asia.
Ankara has not been under any illusion regarding the extent it would be able to successfully expand into these various regions. Centuries of experience — beginning with the difficulties in establishing its empire in medieval times to losing turf to superior forces in the modern age — prove how challenging that prospect would be. And now, in an age where the nation-state has been firmly established as the pre-eminent international actor, it is well aware of how far it can go.
“After an interregnum of nearly a century, Turkey has embarked upon a policy of cautious expansion.”
More importantly, in each of its target regions, Turkey is running into varying degrees of resistance from a variety of players. In Europe, there is no shortage of countries that have made it abundantly clear that they won’t accept Turkey as an equal member in their political and economic bloc, the European Union. European opposition to Turkey rivals Turkey’s desire to become a member, which is why Ankara continues to push for membership despite overwhelming odds against it. In this regard, Turkey is trying to use its ethnic and religious ties to the Balkans to recreate an enclave in southeastern Europe.
After all, the Ottomans became a player on the European continent over a century prior to taking over the Middle East. In contrast, the trajectory of modern Turkey reveals far more success in the Middle East. Unlike in the past, there are no rival Muslim powers in the form of the Mamluk Sultanate in the Arab world or the successive dominions in Persia.
The growing conflict between the Sunni Arab states and Iran and its Arab Shia allies provides the Turks with an opportunity to mediate between the Iranians and the Arab states that seek to use Ankara to its advantage. The complex Arab-Israeli conflict coupled with the U.S. role in the Middle East creates additional space for the Turks to advance their interests. While it has been busy re-emerging in the Middle East, Turkey has also been very active in the northern rim of the Caucuses.
The Caucuses, however, have proven to be a very tough region because of Russia, which is also in the middle of a resurgence. The region has been a historic battleground between the Turks and the Russians: the Turks lost the region to the Russians nearly a century ago, and the Russians ruled it directly as recently as the early 1990s. Moscow therefore has more leverage over the two principal regional rivals — Azerbaijan and Armenia — which is why Ankara has failed to create a meaningful space there.
The Russian advantage also keeps Central Asia largely out of Turkey’s reach despite being its region of origin during the late 13th and early 14th centuries. The countries even continue to share ethnolinguistic ties to the largely Turkic Central Asian republics. Russia has not stopped them from continuing to develop creative ways to try to expand into Central Asia.
Taking advantage of its close ties to the United States coupled with Washington’s interest in Ankara taking a lead in the affairs of the Middle East, Turkey is inserting itself in Southwest Asia in the Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. This is particularly true in Afghanistan, where it is trying to use its influence among ethnic minorities that share ties with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The jihadist complexity of southwest Asia and the strong Russian influence to its north will, however, continue to limit Turkish moves.
Ultimately, what we have is a careful Turkish strategy that involves probing into its various surrounding regions, attempting to take advantage of potential opportunities. Where the Turks find resistance, they retreat. In places where they encounter little or no resistance, they advance. These very preliminary and exploratory moves will define Turkish attempts at geopolitical revival for some time to come.
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Not a particularly reliable source, but an apparently important event is flagged:
February 22, 2010
Turkey Detains Top Military Brass In Conspiracy Probe
By REUTERS
Filed at 1:39 p.m. ET
ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkish police detained former heads of the air force and navy on Monday among 40 people held in an investigation into an alleged plot to undermine the Islamist-rooted government and trigger a military coup.
The swoop, one of the largest against the secularist armed forces, added to a growing sense of foreboding in the Muslim nation, where a clash between the government and the judiciary had already raised fears of a political crisis.
A NATO member with hopes of EU membership, Turkey is locked in a long power struggle between the AK Party, which has its roots in political Islam, and conservative, nationalist secularists, whose bastions remain the military and judiciary.
Armed forces chief General Ilker Basbug postponed a trip to Egypt as a result of the detentions, state-run Anatolian news agency said.
Among those held, according to broadcasters, were former Air Force Commander Ibrahim Firtina, former Naval Commander Ozden Ornek and ex-Deputy Chief of the General Staff General Ergin Saygun.
Speaking in Madrid at the start of an official visit, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said more than 40 people were detained in the raids.
News channel CNN-Turk put the number at 49, including 17 retired generals, four serving admirals, 27 officers and one enlisted man.
MARKETS UNEASY
The detentions would have been unthinkable in the past for a military that has ousted four governments since 1960.
But its powers have waned in recent years because of democratic reforms aimed at securing EU membership and most analysts doubt that the armed forces would mount a coup.
The suspects held in Ankara were flown to Istanbul for questioning over the "Sledgehammer" plot after police raids in the cities of Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.
According to media reports the plot, denied by the military, dated from 2003 and involved provoking a crisis with old foe Greece and planting bombs in mosques and museums in Istanbul to stir chaos and justify a military takeover.
"I don't know what the result of this is, but after the security forces have finished this process the judiciary will make its assessment," Erdogan told a news conference.
Turkish markets were rattled by the prospects. The lira weakened to 1.5265 lira in Tuesday-dated trade from an intrabank close of 1.5180 on Monday, the level at which it ended last week, and the main share index ended 1.36 percent lower, having begun the day nearly 1 percent higher.
"The government is now embroiled in an open and bitter power struggle with the judiciary and the military, raising the risk of a head-on confrontation that would badly damage political stability," Wolfango Piccoli from the Eurasia political risk consultancy said.
REFERENDUM THREAT
Erdogan also said he would call a referendum on constitutional reform to overhaul the judicial system, if he fails to get parliament's backing for change to curb the power of judges and prosecutors.
The AK Party, which first swept to power in 2002 ending the secularists' decades-old grip, has enough votes in the 550-seat parliament to pass a bill calling for a referendum.
"The judicial system should be objective and independent at the same time," Erdogan said.
He did not give any timeframe for a possible referendum.
Turkey is due to hold its next general elections in 2011 and Erdogan has repeatedly denied he plans to call an early vote.
The clash with the judiciary followed the arrest of a prosecutor who had investigated Islamic groups.
That prosecutor has been accused of links to an alleged far-right militant network, "Ergenekon." More than 200 people, including military officers, lawyers and politicians, have been arrested in the case since it came to light 2-1/2 years ago.
Critics of the government say the Ergenekon investigation has also been used to hound political opponents.
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2010/...0arrest&st=cse
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TWO EVENTS OCCURRED ON THURSDAY that involved Turkey. In the first, the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs forwarded a resolution to the House floor for full debate, which called for the condemning of Turkish actions in what many Armenians refer to as the 1915 genocide. The response from the Turkish Foreign Ministry was vitriolic, complete with an ambassadorial recall and threats to downgrade Turkish-American relations at a time when the Americans sorely need Turkish help in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the second development, which preceded the events on Capitol Hill by several hours, the Turkish government announced it would host its own version of the World Economic Forum (WEF) this October in Istanbul. The WEF gathers several hundred business and political leaders every year to discuss pressing global issues in Davos, Switzerland. Invited are all of the leaders from the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Arab world.
Here at STRATFOR these developments generated a bit of a “hmmm.” It is not that we are strident followers of the discussions in Congress (much less at Davos), or that we are blindly impressed or appalled by anything Turkey does. However, we are students of history, and seeing Turkey reaching for the position of a regional opinion leader at the same time it has an almost allergic reaction to criticism is something that takes us back a few hundred years to another era.
Much of Turkey’s rich history is bracketed within the period known as the Ottoman Empire — to date one of the largest and most successful empires in human history. But what truly set the Ottomans apart from the rest of history’s governments was not the size or wealth of the territory it controlled, but the way the Turks controlled it. We have to dive into a bit of a geography lesson to explain that.
The core territory of the Ottoman Empire of the past — as well as the Turkey of today — is a crescent of land on the northwest shore of the Anatolian peninsula, including all of the lands that touch the Sea of Marmara. In many ways it is a mini-Mediterranean. It is rich in fertile land, has a maritime culture and wealth that comes from trade. It is a natural birthplace for a powerful nation, and in time it became the seat of an empire.
But the lands to its east — what is currently eastern Turkey — are not so useful. The further east one travels, the drier and less economically useful the Anatolian peninsula becomes. So in the early years of the Ottoman expansion, the Turks pushed not east into Asia, but north into the Balkans — moving up the rich Danube valley into the fertile Plains of Hungary before being stopped by a coalition of European forces at Vienna.
This expansion left the Turks in a bit of a quandary. The size of their conquered territories was now larger than their home territories. The wealth of their conquered territories was potentially larger than that of their home territories. The population of their conquered territories was comprised of different nationalities and religions, and combined was larger than that of their home territories. The Turks very quickly came to the uncomfortable realization that they not only needed their conquered peoples to make their empire functional, but that they needed those conquered peoples to be willing participants in the empire. The Ottomans may have started out as Middle Eastern, but their early successes made them European.
This realization shaped imperial policy in a great many ways. One was the development of a Millet system of city organization where the Turks only control a portion of the city, leaving the rest of the population to live among, and police, their own. One was the establishment of the Janissary corps, an elite military force that reported directly to the sultan, but was stocked exclusively with non-Turks. Another was the simple fact that the chief vizier, the second most powerful man in the empire, was almost always not a Turk. And it was all held together by a governing concept the Turks called suzerainty: regional governments would pay taxes to the center and defer to Istanbul on all issues of foreign and military policy, but would control the bulk of their own local affairs. By the standards of the Western world of the 21st century, the system was imperial and intrusive, but by the standards of 16th century European barbarity, it was as exotic as it was enlightened.
“After more than 90 years of being in a geopolitical coma, the Turks are on the move again, and are deciding what sort of power they hope to become.”
But things change — particularly when borders shift. During two centuries of retreat following twin defeats at the gates of Vienna, the empire’s northern border crept ever further south. The demographic balance of Turks to non-Turks reverted to the Turks’ favor. The need for a multinational government system lessened, and by the Ottoman Empire’s dying days, the last threads of multinationalism were being ripped out.
But the Turks were not alone in what would soon come to be known as the Turkish Republic. There were also substantial populations of Armenians and Kurds. But unlike the Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians who dwelt in the fertile, economically valuable lands of Southeastern Europe — and whose cooperation the Turks needed to sustain a viable empire — the Armenians and Kurds called the steep, desiccated, low-fertility valleys of eastern Anatolia home. These lands held little value, and so the Turks had scarce need of its inhabitants. The Turks felt these lands held negligible promise, and that the need for an egalitarian governing system had passed: one result was 1915.
In our minds, today’s twin events highlight the challenge that Turkey faces. After more than 90 years of being in a geopolitical coma, the Turks are on the move again, and are deciding what sort of power they hope to become. Within that debate are two choices.
The first would herald a “Great Turkey” rooted in the founding of the Turkish Republic that celebrates its Turkish-ness. This is a very comfortable vision, and one that does not challenge any of the tenets that modern Turks hold dear. But it is also a vision with severe limitations. There are very few Turks living beyond the borders of modern Turkey, and even Turkey’s ethnic cousins in Central Asia and Azerbaijan are extremely unlikely to join any such entity. This vision would always rail at any challenge to its image. This is the Turkey that objects so strenuously whenever the 1915 topic is broached.
The second would herald a “Greater Turkey,” a multinational federation in which the Turks are the first-among-equals, but in which they are hardly alone. It would resurrect the concept of Turkey as primarily a European, not Middle Eastern, power. In this more pluralist system, Turkey’s current borders would not be the end, but the beginning. It is this version of Turkey that could truly — again — become not simply a regional, but a global power. And it is this Turkey that calls all interested, perhaps even the Armenians, to Istanbul in October to honestly and openly see what they think of the world.
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Turkey's Struggle to Become a Major Player
TURKISH PRESIDENT ABDULLAH GUL MET WITH his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev, in Ankara on Wednesday. The Russian president described his country’s relations with Turkey as having entered a new “strategic” phase. Medvedev and Gul also signed several energy deals worth some $25 billion, which are likely to increase Russia’s energy influence over the Turks.
While Medvedev’s trip to Turkey may give the impression that relations between the two historic rivals are improving, it should not be forgotten that this visit takes place against the backdrop of a successful move by the Russians to frustrate Turkish plans to expand the latter’s influence in the Caucuses. STRATFOR has written extensively on how the Kremlin was able to undermine Turkey’s moves to normalize relations with its historic foe Armenia by creating problems between Turkey and its ally Azerbaijan. This incident, along with its attempts to play nice with Russia, shows that Turkey, while on the path of regional resurgence, is not in a position to compete with its traditional rival to its north.
More importantly, this weakness vis-a-vis Russia highlights a key obstacle to the Turkish objective of trying to serve as a bridge between the East and the West. During the nearly eight years of the rule of the Justice & Development Party, Turkey has been in the process of reviving itself as a major player on the international scene. One of the ways in which it has been trying to realize this aim is by trying to be a transit state supplying the West with oil and gas.
From Russia’s point of view, this Turkish policy is unacceptable because it undermines European dependence on Russian energy resources. But it is also not in Russia’s interest to adopt a hostile attitude toward Turkey. Hence the Kremlin’s move to engage Turkey in a complex set of bilateral and multilateral relationships in the Caucuses, and thereby successfully checkmating Ankara.
“It is not in Russia’s interest to adopt a hostile attitude toward Turkey.”
One can explain this outcome as a function of Russia being in a far stronger position than Turkey. However, there is more to it than the simple notion of Moscow having a better deck of cards than Ankara. There is also a deeper geopolitical problem that has to do with Turkey awakening from a nearly 90-year geopolitical coma, which could explain Turkey’s miscalculation –- leading it to not only fail in its attempts to normalize ties with Armenia, but also upset relations with its longtime ally, Azerbaijan.
Acting as a state, and following the lead of the West in terms of foreign policy, has led the Turkish leadership to struggle to assume a more independent and leading role. After the implosion of the Ottoman dominion, its successor, the modern Turkish republic based on the Ataturkian model, was an entity that was content to be part of the West. The current leadership has broken with that doctrine and is steering the country toward an increasingly independent foreign policy. But its track record so far indicates that it has a long way to go before the country actually is able to shape geopolitical events and increase its influence on the international scene. This is because the state is dealing with internal problems. Its political and business elite is expanding influence and levers while having to learn how to maneuver on the ground.
Russia is a principal obstacle in its path to great power status, but Turkey is not having much luck elsewhere either. Ankara has been pursuing the role of mediator in a number of disputes to increase its geopolitical influence in the regions it straddles. Key among these disputes has been the Israeli-Syrian peace talks, which floundered and eventually led to deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations. More recently, Ankara has been increasingly involved in Iraq as well as the Iranian nuclear controversy.
In Iraq, Turkey has run up against Iran, which is far better placed, given that Tehran has had a long head start. On the Iranian nuclear front, it appears to be doing better, but again finds itself caught between Washington and Tehran. Elsewhere, the Turks are trying to make inroads into southeastern Europe –- another former stomping ground. The prospects here look more promising due to the European Union crisis, but again, Turkey has a long way to go.
These initial setbacks do not mean that Turkey is not moving toward great power status, but they do show that the Turks are having to learn from scratch what it means to be a major player. Turkey will eventually get there, but for the time being it appears as though its current leadership may be getting ahead of itself.
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http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=belligerent-on-all-fronts-turkish-pm-raises-misgivings-2010-04-12
With bruising criticism of Israel and defense of Iran, and onslaughts against Turkey's military and secularists, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has stoked questions on where he is steering his country.
During a visit to Paris last week, Erdoğan branded Israel — once Turkey's top regional ally — "the principal threat to peace" in the Middle East, and objected to fresh sanctions against Iran — a newfound friend — over its nuclear activities.
Such outbursts have become an Erdoğan hallmark since Israel's devastating war on the Gaza Strip last year, feeding doubts — both at home and abroad — on what vision he is nourishing for Turkey, NATO's only mainly Muslim member and a candidate to join the European Union.
The rupture in ties with Israel has been accompanied by an unprecedented drive by Erdoğan's government for closer links with the Arab world, notably Syria.
Much to the bewilderment of Western allies, Erdoğan has also jumped to the defense of Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, indicted for war crimes in Darfur, arguing that "no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide."
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Stratfor has been very clear that it sees Turkey as returning to its natural role as a major player in the region. With the US being led , , , as it is, it is no surprise that Turkey is going with the strong horses in the region. With President Obama tuirning on Israel as he has, it is entirely predictable that Turkey is changing course as it apparently is.
The decision to send the flotilla to Gaza is a major piece of news with important big picture implications:
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Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion
May 31, 2010
By George Friedman
On Sunday, Israeli naval forces intercepted the ships of a Turkish nongovernmental organization (NGO) delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Israel had demanded that the vessels not go directly to Gaza but instead dock in Israeli ports, where the supplies would be offloaded and delivered to Gaza. The Turkish NGO refused, insisting on going directly to Gaza. Gunfire ensued when Israeli naval personnel boarded one of the vessels, and a significant number of the passengers and crew on the ship were killed or wounded.
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon charged that the mission was simply an attempt to provoke the Israelis. That was certainly the case. The mission was designed to demonstrate that the Israelis were unreasonable and brutal. The hope was that Israel would be provoked to extreme action, further alienating Israel from the global community and possibly driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The operation’s planners also hoped this would trigger a political crisis in Israel.
A logical Israeli response would have been avoiding falling into the provocation trap and suffering the political repercussions the Turkish NGO was trying to trigger. Instead, the Israelis decided to make a show of force. The Israelis appear to have reasoned that backing down would demonstrate weakness and encourage further flotillas to Gaza, unraveling the Israeli position vis-à-vis Hamas. In this thinking, a violent interception was a superior strategy to accommodation regardless of political consequences. Thus, the Israelis accepted the bait and were provoked.
The ‘Exodus’ Scenario
In the 1950s, an author named Leon Uris published a book called “Exodus.” Later made into a major motion picture, Exodus told the story of a Zionist provocation against the British. In the wake of World War II, the British — who controlled Palestine, as it was then known — maintained limits on Jewish immigration there. Would-be immigrants captured trying to run the blockade were detained in camps in Cyprus. In the book and movie, Zionists planned a propaganda exercise involving a breakout of Jews — mostly children — from the camp, who would then board a ship renamed the Exodus. When the Royal Navy intercepted the ship, the passengers would mount a hunger strike. The goal was to portray the British as brutes finishing the work of the Nazis. The image of children potentially dying of hunger would force the British to permit the ship to go to Palestine, to reconsider British policy on immigration, and ultimately to decide to abandon Palestine and turn the matter over to the United Nations.
There was in fact a ship called Exodus, but the affair did not play out precisely as portrayed by Uris, who used an amalgam of incidents to display the propaganda war waged by the Jews. Those carrying out this war had two goals. The first was to create sympathy in Britain and throughout the world for Jews who, just a couple of years after German concentration camps, were now being held in British camps. Second, they sought to portray their struggle as being against the British. The British were portrayed as continuing Nazi policies toward the Jews in order to maintain their empire. The Jews were portrayed as anti-imperialists, fighting the British much as the Americans had.
It was a brilliant strategy. By focusing on Jewish victimhood and on the British, the Zionists defined the battle as being against the British, with the Arabs playing the role of people trying to create the second phase of the Holocaust. The British were portrayed as pro-Arab for economic and imperial reasons, indifferent at best to the survivors of the Holocaust. Rather than restraining the Arabs, the British were arming them. The goal was not to vilify the Arabs but to villify the British, and to position the Jews with other nationalist groups whether in India or Egypt rising against the British.
The precise truth or falsehood of this portrayal didn’t particularly matter. For most of the world, the Palestine issue was poorly understood and not a matter of immediate concern. The Zionists intended to shape the perceptions of a global public with limited interest in or understanding of the issues, filling in the blanks with their own narrative. And they succeeded.
The success was rooted in a political reality. Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. And on a matter of only tangential interest, governments tend to follow their publics’ wishes, however they originate. There is little to be gained for governments in resisting public opinion and much to be gained by giving in. By shaping the battlefield of public perception, it is thus possible to get governments to change positions.
In this way, the Zionists’ ability to shape global public perceptions of what was happening in Palestine — to demonize the British and turn the question of Palestine into a Jewish-British issue — shaped the political decisions of a range of governments. It was not the truth or falsehood of the narrative that mattered. What mattered was the ability to identify the victim and victimizer such that global opinion caused both London and governments not directly involved in the issue to adopt political stances advantageous to the Zionists. It is in this context that we need to view the Turkish flotilla.
The Turkish Flotilla to Gaza
The Palestinians have long argued that they are the victims of Israel, an invention of British and American imperialism. Since 1967, they have focused not so much on the existence of the state of Israel (at least in messages geared toward the West) as on the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Since the split between Hamas and Fatah and the Gaza War, the focus has been on the plight of the citizens of Gaza, who have been portrayed as the dispossessed victims of Israeli violence.
The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis. The way this resistance was carried out, from airplane hijackings to stone-throwing children to suicide bombers, interfered with the first part of the campaign, however. The Israelis could point to suicide bombings or the use of children against soldiers as symbols of Palestinian inhumanity. This in turn was used to justify conditions in Gaza. While the Palestinians had made significant inroads in placing Israel on the defensive in global public opinion, they thus consistently gave the Israelis the opportunity to turn the tables. And this is where the flotilla comes in.
The Turkish flotilla aimed to replicate the Exodus story or, more precisely, to define the global image of Israel in the same way the Zionists defined the image that they wanted to project. As with the Zionist portrayal of the situation in 1947, the Gaza situation is far more complicated than as portrayed by the Palestinians. The moral question is also far more ambiguous. But as in 1947, when the Zionist portrayal was not intended to be a scholarly analysis of the situation but a political weapon designed to define perceptions, the Turkish flotilla was not designed to carry out a moral inquest.
Instead, the flotilla was designed to achieve two ends. The first is to divide Israel and Western governments by shifting public opinion against Israel. The second is to create a political crisis inside Israel between those who feel that Israel’s increasing isolation over the Gaza issue is dangerous versus those who think any weakening of resolve is dangerous.
The Geopolitical Fallout for Israel
It is vital that the Israelis succeed in portraying the flotilla as an extremist plot. Whether extremist or not, the plot has generated an image of Israel quite damaging to Israeli political interests. Israel is increasingly isolated internationally, with heavy pressure on its relationship with Europe and the United States.
In all of these countries, politicians are extremely sensitive to public opinion. It is difficult to imagine circumstances under which public opinion will see Israel as the victim. The general response in the Western public is likely to be that the Israelis probably should have allowed the ships to go to Gaza and offload rather than to precipitate bloodshed. Israel’s enemies will fan these flames by arguing that the Israelis prefer bloodshed to reasonable accommodation. And as Western public opinion shifts against Israel, Western political leaders will track with this shift.
The incident also wrecks Israeli relations with Turkey, historically an Israeli ally in the Muslim world with longstanding military cooperation with Israel. The Turkish government undoubtedly has wanted to move away from this relationship, but it faced resistance within the Turkish military and among secularists. The new Israeli action makes a break with Israel easy, and indeed almost necessary for Ankara.
With roughly the population of Houston, Texas, Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation, meaning this event has profound geopolitical implications.
Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation. Israel is not a fundamental interest to other nations. The ability to generate public antipathy to Israel can therefore reshape Israeli relations with countries critical to Israel. For example, a redefinition of U.S.-Israeli relations will have much less effect on the United States than on Israel. The Obama administration, already irritated by the Israelis, might now see a shift in U.S. public opinion that will open the way to a new U.S.-Israeli relationship disadvantageous to Israel.
The Israelis will argue that this is all unfair, as they were provoked. Like the British, they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard? As with a tank battle or an airstrike, this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction.
Internationally, there is little doubt that the incident will generate a firestorm. Certainly, Turkey will break cooperation with Israel. Opinion in Europe will likely harden. And public opinion in the United States — by far the most important in the equation — might shift to a “plague-on-both-your-houses” position.
While the international reaction is predictable, the interesting question is whether this evolution will cause a political crisis in Israel. Those in Israel who feel that international isolation is preferable to accommodation with the Palestinians are in control now. Many in the opposition see Israel’s isolation as a strategic threat. Economically and militarily, they argue, Israel cannot survive in isolation. The current regime will respond that there will be no isolation. The flotilla aimed to generate what the government has said would not happen.
The tougher Israel is, the more the flotilla’s narrative takes hold. As the Zionists knew in 1947 and the Palestinians are learning, controlling public opinion requires subtlety, a selective narrative and cynicism. As they also knew, losing the battle can be catastrophic. It cost Britain the Mandate and allowed Israel to survive. Israel’s enemies are now turning the tables. This maneuver was far more effective than suicide bombings or the Intifada in challenging Israel’s public perception and therefore its geopolitical position (though if the Palestinians return to some of their more distasteful tactics like suicide bombing, the Turkish strategy of portraying Israel as the instigator of violence will be undermined).
Israel is now in uncharted waters. It does not know how to respond. It is not clear that the Palestinians know how to take full advantage of the situation, either. But even so, this places the battle on a new field, far more fluid and uncontrollable than what went before. The next steps will involve calls for sanctions against Israel. The Israeli threats against Iran will be seen in a different context, and Israeli portrayal of Iran will hold less sway over the world.
And this will cause a political crisis in Israel. If this government survives, then Israel is locked into a course that gives it freedom of action but international isolation. If the government falls, then Israel enters a period of domestic uncertainty. In either case, the flotilla achieved its strategic mission. It got Israel to take violent action against it. In doing so, Israel ran into its own fist.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704875604575281392195250402.html?mod=WSJ_article_related
Descending into islam.
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Turning East, Turkey Asserts Economic Power
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
Published: July 5, 2010
ISTANBUL — For decades, Turkey has been told it was not ready to join the European Union — that it was too backward economically to qualify for membership in the now 27-nation club. That argument may no longer hold. Today, Turkey is a fast-rising economic power, with a core of internationally competitive companies turning the youthful nation into an entrepreneurial hub, tapping cash-rich export markets in Russia and the Middle East while attracting billions of investment dollars in return.
For many in aging and debt-weary Europe, which will be lucky to eke out a little more than 1 percent growth this year, Turkey’s economic renaissance — last week it reported a stunning 11.4 percent expansion for the first quarter, second only to China — poses a completely new question: who needs the other one more — Europe or Turkey?
“The old powers are losing power, both economically and intellectually,” said Vural Ak, 42, the founder and chief executive of Intercity, the largest car leasing company in Turkey. “And Turkey is now strong enough to stand by itself.”
It is an astonishing transformation for an economy that just 10 years ago had a budget deficit of 16 percent of gross domestic product and inflation of 72 percent. It is one that lies at the root of the rise to power of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has combined social conservatism with fiscally cautious economic policies to make his Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., the most dominant political movement in Turkey since the early days of the republic.
So complete has this evolution been that Turkey is now closer to fulfilling the criteria for adopting the euro — if it ever does get into the European Union — than most of the troubled economies already in the euro zone. It is well under the 60 percent ceiling on government debt (49 percent of G.D.P.) and could well get its annual budget deficit below the 3 percent benchmark next year. That leaves the reduction of inflation, now running at 8 percent, as the only remaining major policy goal.
“This is a dream world,” said Husnu M. Ozyegin, who became the richest man in Turkey when he sold his bank, Finansbank, to the National Bank of Greece in 2006. Sitting on the rooftop of his five-star Swiss Hotel, he was looking at his BlackBerry, scrolling down the most recent credit-default spreads for euro zone countries. He still could not quite believe what he was seeing.
“Greece, 980. Italy, 194 and here is Turkey at 192,” he said with a grunt of satisfaction. “If you had told me 10 years ago that Turkey’s financial risk would equal that of Italy I would have said you were crazy.”
Having sold at the top to Greece, Mr. Ozyegin is now putting his money to work in the east. His new bank, Eurocredit, gets 35 percent of its profit from its Russian operations.
Mr. Ozyegin represents the old guard of Turkey’s business elite that has embraced the Erdogan government for its economic successes. Less well known but just as important to Turkey’s future development has been the rapid rise of socially conservative business leaders who, under the A.K.P., have seen their businesses thrive by tapping Turkey’s flourishing consumer and export markets.
Mr. Ak, the car leasing executive, exemplifies this new business elite of entrepreneurs. He drives a Ferrari to work, but he is also a practicing Muslim who does not drink and has no qualms in talking about his faith. He is not bound to the 20th-century secular consensus among the business, military and judicial elite that fought long and hard to keep Islam removed from public life.
On the wall behind his desk is a framed passage in Arabic from the Koran, and he recently financed an Islamic studies program just outside Washington at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., where Mr. Erdogan recently spoke.
Whether he is embracing Islam as a set of principles to govern his life or Israeli irrigation technology for his sideline almond and walnut growing business, Mr. Ak represents the flexible dynamism — both social and economic — that has allowed Turkey to expand the commercial ties with Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria that now underpin its ambition to become the dominant political actor in the region.
Other prominent members of this newer group of business executives are Mustafa Latif Topbas, the chairman and a founder of the discount-shopping chain BIM, the country’s fastest-growing retail chain, and Murat Ulker, who runs the chocolate and cookie manufacturer Yildiz Holding.
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With around $11 billion in sales, Yildiz Holding supplies its branded food products not just to the Turkish market but to 110 markets globally. It has set up factories in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine and now owns the Godiva brand.
The two billionaires have deep ties to the prime minister — Mr. Erdogan once owned a company that distributed Ulker-branded products, and Mr. Topbas is a close adviser — but the trade opportunities in this part of the world are plentiful enough that a boost from the government is now no longer needed.
In June, Turkish exports grew by 13 percent compared with the previous year, with much of the demand coming from countries on Turkey’s border or close to it, like Iraq, Iran and Russia. With their immature manufacturing bases, they are eager buyers of Turkish cookies, automobiles and flat-screen televisions.
This year, for example, the country’s flagship carrier, Turkish Airlines, will fly to as many cities in Iraq (three) as it does to France. Some of its fastest growing routes are to Libya, Syria and Russia, Turkey’s largest trading partner, where it flies to seven cities. That is second only to Germany, which has a large population of immigrant Turks.
In Iran, Turkish companies are building fertilizer plants, making diapers and female sanitary products. In Iraq, the Acarsan Group, based in the southeastern town of Gaziantep, just won a bid to build five hospitals. And Turkish construction companies have a collective order book of over $30 billion, second only to China.
On the flip side, the Azerbaijani government owns Turkey’s major petrochemicals company and Saudi Arabia has been a big investor in the country’s growing Islamic finance sector.
No one here disputes that these trends give Mr. Erdogan the legitimacy — both at home and abroad — to lash out at Israel and to cut deals with Iran over its nuclear energy, moves that have strained ties with its chief ally and longtime supporter, the United States. (Turkey has exported $1.6 billion worth of goods to Iran and Syria this year, $200 million more than to the United States.)
But some worry that the muscle flexing may have gone too far — perhaps the result of tightening election polls at home — and that the aggressive tone with Israel may jeopardize the defining tenet of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: peace at home, peace in the world.
“The foreign policy of Turkey is good if it brings self-pride,” said Ferda Yildiz, the chairman of Basari Holding, a conglomerate that itself is in negotiations with the Syrian government to set up a factory in Syria that would make electricity meters.
Even so, he warns that it would be a mistake to become too caught up in an eastward expansion if it comes at the expense of the country’s longstanding inclination to look to the West for innovation and inspiration.
“It takes centuries to make relations and minutes to destroy them,” he said.
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BTW, for those not familiar with Turkey or POTH (Pravda on the Hudson a.k.a. The NY Times) "socially conservative" in the article of the previous post is POTH's term of the moment for "Islamist".
With this in mind, Turkey's demand for Israel's apology for the flotilla brouhaha when it really supported creating an interantional incidennt to burnish its credentials in the Arab world ()see GM's post this morning in the Israel thread) and its move east as described in the POTH piece is understood.
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Part 5: Turkey
We arrived in Istanbul during the festival of Eid al-Adha, which commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Ishmael on God’s command and praises the God who stayed his hand. It is a jarring holiday for me; I was taught that it was Isaac who God saved. The distinction between Ishmael and Isaac is the difference between Hagar and Sarah, between Abraham and the Jews and Abraham and the Muslims. It ties Muslims, Jews and Christians together. It also tears them apart.
Muslims celebrate Eid with the sacrifice of animals (sheep and cattle). Istanbul is a modern commercial city, stunningly large. On this day, as we drove in from the airport, there were vacant lots with cattle lined up for those wishing to carry out the ritual. There were many cattle and people. The ritual sacrifice is widely practiced, even among the less religious. I was told that Turkey had to import cattle for the first time, bringing them in from Uruguay. Consider the juxtaposition of ancient ritual sacrifice so widely practiced that it requires global trade to sustain it.
The tension between and within nations and religions is too ancient for us to remember its beginnings. It is also something that never grows old. For Turkey, it is about a very old nation at what I think is the beginning of a new chapter. It is therefore inevitably about the struggles within Turkey and with Turkey’s search for a way to find both its identity and its place in the world.
Turkey’s Test
Turkey will emerge as one of the great regional powers of the next generation, or so I think. It is clear that this process is already under way when you look at Turkey’s rapid economic growth even in the face of the global financial crisis, and when you look at its growing regional influence. As you’d expect, this process is exacerbating internal political tensions as well as straining old alliances and opening the door to new ones. It is creating anxiety inside and outside of Turkey about what Turkey is becoming and whether it is a good thing or not. Whether it is a good thing can be debated, I suppose, but the debate doesn’t much matter. The transformation from an underdeveloped country emerging from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire to a major power is happening before our eyes.
At the heart of the domestic debate and foreign discussion of Turkey’s evolution is Islam. Turkey’s domestic evolution has resulted in the creation of a government that differs from most previous Turkish governments by seeing itself as speaking for Islamic traditions as well as the contemporary Turkish state. The foreign discussion is about the degree to which Turkey has shifted away from its traditional alliances with the United States, Europe and Israel. These two discussions are linked.
At a time when the United States is at war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and in confrontation with Iran, any shift in the position of a Muslim country rings alarm bells. But this goes beyond the United States. Since World War II, many Turks have immigrated to Europe, where they have failed to assimilate partly by choice and partly because the European systems have not facilitated assimilation. This failure of assimilation has created massive unease about Turkish and other Muslims in Europe, particularly in the post-9/11 world of periodic terror warnings. Whether reasonable or not, this is shaping Western perceptions of Turkey and Turkish views of the West. It is one of the dynamics in the Turkish-Western relationship.
Turkey’s emergence as a significant power obviously involves redefining its internal and regional relations to Islam. This alarms domestic secularists as well as inhabitants of countries who feel threatened by Turks — or Muslims — living among them and who are frightened by the specter of terrorism. Whenever a new power emerges, it destabilizes the international system to some extent and causes anxiety. Turkey’s emergence in the current context makes that anxiety all the more intense. A newly powerful and self-confident Turkey perceived to be increasingly Islamic will create tensions, and it has.
The Secular and the Religious
Turkey’s evolution is framed by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the creation of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk’s task was to retain the core of the Ottoman Empire as an independent state. That core was Asia Minor and the European side of the Bosporus. For Ataturk, the first step was contraction, abandoning any attempt to hold the Ottoman regions that surrounded Turkey. The second step was to break the hold of Ottoman culture on Turkey itself. The last decades of the Ottoman Empire were painful to Turks, who saw themselves decline because of the unwillingness of the Ottoman regime to modernize at a pace that kept up with the rest of Europe. The slaughter of World War I did more than destroy the Ottoman Empire. It shook its confidence in itself and its traditions.
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For Ataturk, Turkish national survival depended on modernization, which he equated with the creation of a secular society as the foundation of a modern nation-state in which Islam would become a matter of private practice, not the center of the state or, most important, something whose symbols could have a decisive presence in the public sphere. This would include banning articles of clothing associated with Islamic piety from public display. Ataturk did not try to suppress Muslim life in the private sphere, but Islam is a political religion that seeks to regulate both private and public life.
Ataturk sought to guarantee the survival of the secular state through the military. For Ataturk, the military represented the most modern element of Turkish society and could serve two functions. It could drive Turkish modernization and protect the regime against those who would try to resurrect the Ottoman state and its Islamic character. Ataturk wanted to do something else — to move away from the multinational nature of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk compressed Turkey to its core and shed authority and responsibility beyond its borders. Following Ataturk’s death, for example, Turkey managed to avoid involvement in World War II.
Ataturk came to power in a region being swept by European culture, which was what was considered modern. This Europeanist ideology moved through the Islamic world, creating governments that were, like Turkey’s, secular in outlook but ruling over Muslim populations that had varying degrees of piety. In the 1970s, a counter-revolution started in the region that argued for reintegrating Islam into the governance of Muslim countries. The most extreme part of this wave culminated in al Qaeda. But the secularist/Europeanist vision created by Ataturk has been in deep collision with the Islamist regimes that can be found in places like Iran.
It was inevitable that this process would affect Turkey. In 2002, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power. This was a defining moment because the AKP was not simply a secular Europeanist party. Its exact views are hotly debated, with many inside and outside of Turkey claiming that its formal moderation hides a hidden radical-Islamist agenda.
We took a walk in a neighborhood in Istanbul called Carsamba. I was told that this was the most religious community in Istanbul. One secularist referred to it as “Saudi Arabia.” It is a poor but vibrant community, filled with schools and shops. Children play on the streets, and men cluster in twos and threes, talking and arguing. Women wear burqas and headscarves. There is a large school in the neighborhood where young men go to study the Koran and other religious subjects.
The neighborhood actually reminded me of Williamsburg, in the Brooklyn of my youth. Williamsburg was filled with Chasidic Jews, Yeshivas, children on the streets and men talking outside their shops. The sensibility of community and awareness that I was an outsider revived vivid memories. At this point, I am supposed to write that it shows how much these communities have in common. But the fact is that the commonalities of life in poor, urban, religious neighborhoods don’t begin to overcome the profound differences — and importance — of the religions they adhere to.
That said, Carsamba drove home to me the problem the AKP, or any party that planned to govern Turkey, would have to deal with. There are large parts of Istanbul that are European in sensibility and values, and these are significant areas. But there is also Carsamba and the villages of Anatolia, and they have a self-confidence and assertiveness that can’t be ignored today.
There is deep concern among some secularists that the AKP intends to impose Shariah. This is particularly intense among the professional classes. I had dinner with a physician with deep roots in Turkey who told me that he was going to immigrate to Europe if the AKP kept going the way it was going. Whether he would do it when the time came I can’t tell, but he was passionate about it after a couple of glasses of wine. This view is extreme even among secularists, many of whom understand the AKP to have no such intentions. Sometimes it appeared to me that the fear was deliberately overdone, in hopes of influencing a foreigner, me, concerning the Turkish government.
But my thoughts go back to Carsamba. The secularists could ignore these people for a long time, but that time has passed. There is no way to rule Turkey without integrating these scholars and shopkeepers into Turkish society. Given the forces sweeping the Muslim world, it is impossible. They represent an increasingly important trend in the Islamic world and the option is not suppressing them (that’s gone) but accommodating them or facing protracted conflict, a kind of conflict that in the rest of the Islamic world is not confined to rhetoric. Carsamba is an extreme case in Istanbul, but it poses the issue most starkly.
This is something the main opposition secularist party, the People’s Republican Party (CHP), can’t do. It has not devised a platform that can reach out to Carsamba and the other religious neighborhoods within the framework of secularism. This is the AKP’s strength. It can reach out to them while retaining the core of its Europeanism and modernism. The Turkish economy is surging. It had an annualized growth rate of 12 percent in the first quarter of 2010. That helps keep everyone happy. But the AKP also emphasizes that it wants to join the European Union. Now, given how healthy the Turkish economy is, wanting to join the European Union is odd. And the fact is that the European Union is not going to let Turkey in anyway. But the AKP’s continued insistence that it wants to join the European Union is a signal to the secularists: The AKP is not abandoning the Europeanist/modernist project.
The AKP sends many such signals, but it is profoundly distrusted by the secularists, who fear that the AKP’s apparent moderation is simply a cover for its long-term intentions — to impose a radical-Islamist agenda on Turkey. I don’t know the intentions of the AKP leadership, but I do know some realities about Turkey, the first being that, while Carsamba can’t be ignored, the secularists hold tremendous political power in their own right and have the general support of the military. Whatever the intentions imputed to the AKP, it does not have the power to impose a radical-Islamist agenda on Turkey unless the secularists weaken dramatically, which they are not going to do.
The CHP cannot re-impose the rigorous secularism that existed prior to 2002. The AKP cannot impose a radical-Islamist regime, assuming it would want to. The result of either attempt would be a paralyzing political crisis that would tear the country apart, without giving either side political victory. The best guard against hidden agendas is the inability to impose them.
Moreover, on the fringes of the Islamist community are radical Islamists like al Qaeda. It is a strategic necessity to separate the traditionally religious from the radical Islamists. The more excluded the traditionalists are, the more they will be attracted to the radicals. Prior to the 1970s this was not a problem. In those days, radical Islamists were not the problem; radical socialists were. The strategies that were used prior to 2002 would play directly into the hands of the radicals. There are, of course, those who would say that all Islamists are radical. I don’t think that’s true empirically. Of the billion or so Muslims, radicals are few. But you can radicalize the rest with aggressive social policies. And that would create a catastrophe for Turkey and the region.
The problem for Turkey is how to bridge the gap between the secularists and the religious. That is the most effective way to shut out the radicals. The CHP seems to me to have not devised any program to reach out to the religious. There are some indications of attempted change that came with the change in leadership a few months ago, but overall the CHP maintains a hostile suspicion toward sharing power with the religious.
The AKP, on the other hand, has some sort of reconciliation as its core agenda. The problem is that the AKP is serving up a weak brew, insufficient to satisfy the truly religious, insufficient to satisfy the truly secular. But it does hold a majority. In Turkey, as I have said, it is all about the AKP’s alleged hidden intentions. My best guess is that, whatever its private thoughts and political realities are, the AKP is composed of Turks who derive their traditions from 600 years of Ottoman rule. That makes Turkish internal politics, well, Byzantine. Never forget that at crucial points the Ottomans, as Muslim as they were, allied with the Catholics against the Orthodox Christians in order to dominate the Balkans. They made many other alliances of convenience and maintained a multinational and multireligious empire built on a pyramid of compromises. The AKP is not the party of the Wahhabi, and if it tried to become that, it would fall. The AKP, like most political parties, prefers to hold office.
Turkey and the World
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Turkey and the World
The question of the hidden agenda of the AKP touches its foreign policy, too. In the United States, nerves are raw over Afghanistan and terror threats. In Europe, Muslim immigration, much of it from Turkey, and more terror threats make for more raw nerves. The existence of an Islamist-rooted government in Ankara has created the sense that Turkey has “gone over,” that it has joined the radical-Islamist camp.
This is why the flotilla incident with Israel turned out as it did. The Turks had permitted a fleet to sail for Gaza, which was blockaded by Israel. Israeli commandos boarded the ships and on one of them got into a fight in which nine people were killed. The Turks became enraged and expected the rest of the world, including the United States and Europe, to join them in condemning Israel’s actions. I think the Turkish government was surprised when the general response was not directed against Israel but at Turkey. The Turks failed to understand the American and European perception that Turkey had gone over to the radical Islamists. This perception caused the Americans and Europeans to read the flotilla incident in a completely unexpected way, from the Turkish government’s point of view, one that saw the decision to allow the flotilla to sail as part of a radical-Islamist agenda. Rather than seeing the Turks as victims, they saw the Turks as deliberately creating the incident for ideological reasons.
At the moment, it all turns on the perceptions of the AKP, both in Turkey and the world. And these perceptions lead to very different interpretations of what Turkey is doing.
In this sense, the ballistic missile defense (BMD) issue was extremely important. Had the Turks refused to allow BMD to be placed in Turkey, it would have been, I think, a breakpoint in relations with the United States in particular. BMD is a defense against Iranian missiles. Turkey does not want a U.S. strike on Iran. It should therefore have been enthusiastic about BMD, since Turkey could argue that with BMD, no strike is needed. Opposing a strike and opposing BMD would have been interpreted as Turkey simply wanting to obstruct anything that would upset Iran, no matter how benign. The argument of those who view Turkey as pro-Iranian would be confirmed. The decision by the Turkish government to go forward with BMD was critical. Rejecting BMD would have cemented the view of Turkey as being radical Islamist. But the point is that the Turks postured on the issue and then went along. It was the AKP trying to maintain its balance.
The reality is that Turkey is now a regional power trying to find its balance. It is in a region where Muslim governments are mixed with secular states, predominantly Christian nations and a Jewish state. When you take the 360-degree view that the AKP likes to talk about, it is an extraordinary and contradictory mixture of states. Turkey is a country that maintains relations with Iran, Israel and Egypt, a dizzying portfolio.
It is not a surprise that the Turks are not doing well at this. After an interregnum of nearly a century, Turkey is new to being a regional power, and everyone in the region is trying to draw Turkey into something for their own benefit. Syria wants Turkish mediation with Israel and in Lebanon. Azerbaijan wants Turkish support against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh. Israel and Saudi Arabia want Turkish support against Iran. Iran wants Turkey’s support against the United States. Kosovo wants its support against Serbia. It is a rogue’s gallery of supplicants, all wanting something from Turkey and all condemning Turkey when they don’t get it. Not least of these is the United States, which wants Turkey to play the role it used to play, as a subordinate American ally.
Turkey’s strategy is to be friends with everyone, its “zero conflict with neighbors” policy, as the Turks call it. It is an explicit policy not to have enemies. The problem is that it is impossible to be friends with all of these countries. Their interests are incompatible, and in the end, the only likely outcome is that all will find Turkey hostile and it will face distrust throughout the region. Turkey was genuinely surprised when the United States, busy finally getting sanctions into place against Iran, did not welcome Turkey’s and Brazil’s initiative with Iran. But unlike Brazil, Turkey lives in a tough neighborhood and being friendly with everyone is not an option.
This policy derives, I think, from a fear of appearing, like the Ottoman Empire, so distrusted by secularists. The Ottoman Empire was both warlike and cunning. It was the heir to the Byzantine tradition and it was worthy of it. Ataturk simplified Turkish foreign policy radically, drawing it inward. Turkey’s new power makes that impossible, but it is important, at least at this point in history, for Turkey not to appear too ambitious or too clever internationally. The term neo-Ottoman keeps coming up, but is not greeted happily by many people. Trying to be friendly with everyone is not going to work, but for the Turks, it is a better strategy now than being prematurely Byzantine. Contrary to others, I see Turkish foreign policy as simple and straightforward: What they say and what they intend to do are the same. The problem with that foreign policy is that it won’t work in the long run. I suspect the Turkish government knows that, but it is buying time for political reasons.
It is buying time for administrative reasons as well. The United States entered World War II without an intelligence service, with a diplomatic corps vastly insufficient for its postwar needs and without a competent strategic-planning system. Turkey is ahead of the United States of 1940, but it does not have the administrative structure or the trained and experienced personnel to handle the complexities it is encountering. The Turkish foreign minister wakes up in the morning to Washington’s latest demand, German pronouncements on Turkish EU membership, Israeli deals with the Greeks, Iranian probes, Russian views on energy and so on. It is a large set of issues for a nation that until recently had a relatively small foreign-policy footprint.
Turkey and Russia
Please recall my reasons for this journey and what brought me to Turkey. I am trying to understand the consequences of the re-emergence of Russia, the extent to which this will pose a geopolitical challenge and how the international system will respond. I have already discussed the Intermarium, the countries from the Baltic to the Black seas that have a common interest in limiting Russian power and the geopolitical position to do so if they act as a group.
One of the questions is what the southern anchor of this line will be. The most powerful anchor would be Turkey. Turkey is not normally considered part of the Intermarium, although during the Cold War it was the southeastern anchor of NATO’s line of containment. The purpose of this trip is to get some sense of how the Turks think about Russia and where Russia fits into their strategic thinking. It is also about how the Turks now think of themselves as they undergo a profound shift that will affect the region.
Turkey, like many countries, is dependent on Russian energy. Turkey also has a long history with Russia and needs to keep Russia happy. But it also wants to be friends with everyone and it needs to find new sources of energy. This means that Turkey has to look south, into Iraq and farther, and east, toward Azerbaijan. When it looks south, it will find itself at odds with Iran and perhaps Saudi Arabia. When it looks east, it will find itself at odds with Armenia and Russia.
There are no moves that Turkey can make that will not alienate some great power, and it cannot decline to make these moves. It cannot simply depend on Russia for its energy any more than Poland can. Because of energy policy, it finds itself in the same position as the Intermarium, save for the fact that Turkey is and will be much more powerful than any of these countries, and because the region it lives in is extraordinarily more complex and difficult.
Nevertheless, while the Russians aren’t an immediate threat, they are an existential threat to Turkey. With a rapidly growing economy, Turkey needs energy badly and it cannot be hostage to the Russians or anyone else. As it diversifies its energy sources it will alienate a number of countries, including Russia. It will not want to do this, but it is the way the world works. Therefore, is this the southern anchor of the Intermarium? I think so. Not yet and not forever, but I suspect that in 10 years or so, the sheer pressure that Russian energy policy will place on Turkey will create enough tensions to force Turkey into the anchor position.
If Moldova is the proof of the limits of geopolitical analysis, Turkey is its confirmation. There is endless talk in Turkey of intentions, hidden meanings and conspiracies, some woven decades ago. It is not these things that matter. Islam has replaced modernism as the dynamic force of the region, and Turkey will have to accommodate itself to that. But modernism and secularism are woven into Turkish society. Those two strands cannot be ignored. Turkey is the regional power, and it will have to make decisions about friends and enemies. Those decisions will be made based on issues like energy availability, economic opportunities and defensive positions. Intentions are not trivial, but in the case of Turkey neither are they decisive. It is too old a country to change and too new a power to escape the forces around it. For all its complexity, I think Turkey is predictable. It will go through massive internal instability and foreign tests it is not ready for, but in the end, it will emerge as it once was: a great regional power.
As a subjective matter, I like Turkey and Turks. I suspect I will like them less as they become a great power. They are at the charming point where the United States was after World War I. Over time, global and great powers lose their charm under the pressure of a demanding and dissatisfied world. They become hard and curt. The Turks are neither today. But they are facing the kind of difficulties that only come with success, and those can be the hardest to deal with.
Internally, the AKP is trying to thread the needle between two Turkish realities. No one can choose one or the other and govern Turkey. That day has passed. How to reconcile the two is the question. For the moment, the most difficult question is how to get the secularists to accept that, in today’s Turkey, they are a large minority. I suspect the desire to regain power will motivate them to try to reach out to the religious, but for now, they have left the field to the AKP.
In terms of foreign policy, they are clearly repositioning Turkey to be part of the Islamic world, but the Islamic world is deeply divided by many crosscurrents and many types of regimes. The distance between Morocco and Pakistan is not simply space. Repositioning with the Islamic world is more a question of who will be your enemy than who will be your friend. The same goes for the rest of the world.
In leaving Turkey, I am struck by how many balls it has to keep in the air. The tensions between the secularists and the religious must not be minimized. The tensions within the religious camp are daunting. The tensions between urban and rural are significant. The tensions between Turkey and its allies and neighbors are substantial, even if the AKP is not eager to emphasize this. It would seem impossible to imagine Turkey moving past these problems to great power status. But here geopolitics tells me that it has to be this way. All nations have deep divisions. But Turkey is a clear nation and a strong state. It has geography and it has an economy. And it is in a region where these characteristics are in short supply. That gives Turkey relative power as well as absolute strength.
The next 10 years will not be comfortable for Turkey. It will have problems to solve and battles to fight, figuratively and literally. But I think the answer to the question I came for is this: Turkey does not want to confront Russia. Nor does it want to be dependent on Russia. These two desires can’t be reconciled without tension with Russia. And if there is tension, there will be shared interests with the Intermarium, quite against the intentions of the Turks. In history, intentions, particularly good ones, are rarely decisive.
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4th post of the morning
Summary
Despite reservations on NATO’s proposed ballistic missile defense (BMD) network, Turkey agreed Nov. 20 at the alliance’s summit in Lisbon to participate in the plan. Ankara will experience some fallout from this decision in managing its delicate relationships with Russia and Iran. Nonetheless, the decision to join the NATO BMD network allows Ankara to keep ties with Washington on a more solid footing — a critical factor in enabling Turkey to consolidate its geopolitical gains in its near abroad.
Analysis
Turkey agreed Nov. 20 to integrate itself into NATO’s planned ballistic missile defense (BMD) network during the alliance’s summit in Lisbon.
Though a potential Iranian missile threat is often cited as the motivation for the U.S.-led BMD project, a deeper, strategic purpose lies in its ability to provide the United States with a platform to underwrite a Eurasian alliance aimed at containing Russia’s growing influence in its former Soviet territory. Turkey is also concerned about Russia’s growing influence, but until this point has been reluctant to sign on to a BMD proposal. However, sensing a geopolitical opportunity in its near abroad, Ankara believes that its relationship with the United States — which has frayed over the past year — must be strengthened in order to take full advantage of its blossoming role. Washington welcomes Turkey playing that role, particularly in the Middle East, as long as Ankara remains a strong partner with the West, something it is attempting to affirm with its consent to the deal.
The United States had already secured bilateral commitments from Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Romania to participate in the project. Turkey, given its prime geographic positioning in the region, remained a key component to the project. A forward-deployed sensor, like the portable X-band radar currently positioned in Israel, would provide additional sensors closer to the Middle East to more rapidly acquire, track and plot an intercept of ballistic targets.
Turkey’s Opportunity
Turkey has reached a point where it has the wherewithal to assert its regional autonomy, which has manifested in it taking very public positions against the United States regarding Israel and Iran. Naturally, Turkey does not want to be seen as part of a military project that singles out Iran at a time when Ankara has invested a great deal of diplomatic capital in trying to earn Tehran’s trust to mediate the long list of disputes Iran has with its adversaries. In addition, Turkey currently depends on Russia for the bulk of its energy supplies, and has little interest in provoking a confrontation with its historic rival, especially as Turkey is trying to expand its foothold in the Caucasus and Central Asia, where Moscow carries substantial influence.
But other strategic considerations eventually outweighed Turkey’s reasons to resist the project. Turkey, under the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party, has seen its relations deteriorate considerably with the United States over the past year, only exacerbated by Turkey’s crisis in relations with Israel over the flotilla incident. A movement, which is making some progress, has more recently developed in both Washington and Ankara to put U.S.-Turkish relations back on a strategic track in light of more pressing geopolitical demands.
The United States needs to militarily extricate itself from its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, in particular, Turkey faces an historic opportunity to fill a vacuum created by the U.S. exit and reclaim its influence in the broader Middle East. The United States sees Turkey as a strong regional ally whose interests are most in line with those of Washington, especially when it comes to the need to contain Iran, manage thorny internal Iraqi affairs, elicit more cooperation from Syria and balance against Russia in the Caucasus. If Turkey is to reap the geopolitical gains in its surrounding region, it cannot afford a rupture in relations with the United States triggered by Ankara turning its back on BMD.
Negotiating the Deal
Turkey thus bargained hard over its BMD participation, taking care to assert its autonomy in these negotiations and avoid grouping itself with countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, which are looking for a highly visible U.S. commitment against Russia. The Turkish demands were for its BMD participation to take place under the aegis of NATO, as opposed to a bilateral treaty with the United States. The project also had to ensure that all of Turkish territory be protected by the BMD systems placed within the country, and command-and-control over the system. Finally, Turkey demanded that no countries (like Russia, Iran or Syria) be cited as the source of the missile threat.
In signing on to the deal at Lisbon, Turkish President Abdullah Gul claimed that Turkey’s NATO allies met all of Ankara’s demands. Earlier, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu defiantly asserted that Turkey was not forced into this project against its will, and that Turkey’s demands over command-and-control of the system were “misinterpreted.” In fact, the United States rejected this demand (the design of the system would not allow for Turkey to operate the system autonomously) and it appears that Turkish officials were finding a way to back down from this stipulation. Turkey did, however, achieve its aim of removing mention of specific targets and made clear it was only signing on to the NATO BMD plan, as opposed to a bilateral BMD commitment to the United States.
Behind the scenes, U.S. officials made clear that it would be unwise for Turkey to risk a rupture in relations with Washington at this time, and that its commitment to the project was critical to securing U.S. cooperation on other issues important to Turkey. The United States also argued that Turkey’s desire to avoid a military confrontation in the Persian Gulf over Iran’s nuclear ambitions was best met with Turkish participation in a missile shield that would (theoretically) increase the region’s defenses and thus reduce the need for military action. The NATO alliance aims to complete discussions over the details of what the system will entail and how control of the system will be distributed by June 2011.
Fallout with Iran and Russia?
Having taken the BMD leap, Turkey will now have to downplay the strategic significance of this deal to Russia and Iran to prevent a fissure in relations with both countries.
With Iran, Ankara will have to convince Tehran that Turkey’s maintaining a close relationship with the United States — and thus preserving the leverage it holds with Washington in the region — is the Iranians’ best buffer against an attack. There are likely serious limitations to this argument, but Iran is also not about to sacrifice a crucial diplomatic ally as tensions continue to escalate with the United States.
Turkey will likely face a much more difficult time ahead in dealing with Russia. Turkey is watching nervously as the U.S.-Russian “reset” of relations is weakening with snags over the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, continued U.S. support for allies in the former Soviet periphery and, of course, the more obvious U.S. push for BMD. Turkey has been among those supporting Russian inclusion in the NATO BMD plan. This is a move that would at least symbolically dilute the very premise of the project, but does not preclude the significance of the United States working directly with critical NATO allies in installing and operating missile defense installations in the region. The details of what Russian inclusion would actually entail have yet to be sorted out, and it remains unlikely that Russia would be integrated into the system in terms of operational control or veto over the system’s use. So far, Moscow has agreed to discuss its inclusion in the project, but this idea remains very much in limbo.
For Turkey, this means Ankara must keep a close watch on the trajectory of U.S.-Russian relations to decide its next moves. As Turkey continues its difficult balancing act, it will rely primarily on its trade and energy deals with Russia in an attempt to mitigate the rising pressure it is already facing from Moscow. No amount of diplomatic statements can ignore the fact that Ankara is giving its symbolic commitment to a defense shield that has Russia squarely in its sights.
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I've only read the first page of the piece, but it looks to be interesting in a POTH sort of way , , ,
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/magazine/23davutoglu-t.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha210
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Turkey's Moment of Reckoning
In a high-powered visit to Cairo, Turkish President Abdullah Gul and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met Thursday with the members of Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). In addition to meeting with the military elite, the Turkish leaders are also talking to the opposition forces. On Thursday, Gul and Davutoglu met with Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and over the course of the next three days they are expected to meet with opposition figures Mohamed ElBaradei and Arab League chief Amr Mousa, as well as the Jan. 25 Youth Coalition.
” Whether Ankara is ready or not, the Middle East is accelerating Turkey’s rise.”
Turkey’s active role in trying to mediate the unrest developing in its Islamic backyard should not come as a surprise (at least not for STRATFOR readers). Turkey has been on a resurgent path, using its economic clout, geographic positioning, military might and cultural influence to expand its power throughout the former Ottoman territory. In more recent years, this resurgence has largely taken place at Turkey’s own pace, with it managing a post-Saddam Iraq, intensifying hostilities with Israel for political gain, fumbling with the Russians in the Caucasus over Armenia and Azerbaijan, fiddling with Iranian nuclear negotiations, and so on. With geopolitical opportunities presenting themselves on all of its borders, Turkey, having been out of the great power game for some 90-odd years, could afford some experimentation. In this geopolitical testing phase, Turkey could spread itself relatively far and wide in trying to reclaim influence, all under the Davutoglu-coined “zero problems with neighbors” strategy.
The invisible hand of geopolitics teaches that politicians, regardless of personality, ideology or anything else, will pursue strategic ends without being necessarily aware of their policies’ contributions to (or detractions from) national power. The gentle nudges guiding Turkey for most of the past decade are now transforming into a firm, unyielding push.
The reasoning is quite simple. The Iraq War (and its destabilizing effects) was cold water thrown in Turkey’s face that snapped Ankara to attention. It took some time for Turkey to find its footing, but as it did, it sharpened its focus abroad in containing threats and in exploiting a range of political and economic opportunities. Now, from the Sahara to the Persian Gulf, Turkey’s Middle Eastern backyard is on fire, with mass protests knocking the legs out from under a legacy of Arab cronyism. Whether Ankara is ready or not, the Middle East is accelerating Turkey’s rise.
In surveying the region, however, Turkish influence (with the exception of Iraq) is still in its infant stages. For example, in Egypt (where the Turks ruled under the Ottoman Empire for 279 years from 1517-1796), there is not much Turkey can do or may even need to do. The Egyptian military very deliberately managed a political transition to force former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak out and is now calling the shots in Cairo. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) welcomes the stability ushered in by the military, but would also like to see Egypt transformed in its own image. Having lived it for decades, the AKP leadership has internalized the consequences of military rule and has made the subordination of the military to civilian (particularly Islamic) political forces the core of its political agenda at home. Turkey’s AKP has a strategic interest in ensuring the military in Egypt keeps its promise of relinquishing control to the civilians and providing a political opening for the Muslim Brotherhood, which has tried to model itself after the AKP. Davutoglu has in fact been very open with his assertion that if the military fails to hand over power to the civilians and hold elections in a timely manner, Turkey’s support will go to the opposition. The Egyptian SCAF is unlikely to be on the same page as the AKP leadership, especially considering the military’s concerns over the Muslim Brotherhood. This will contribute to some tension between Turkey and Egypt moving forward, but Turkey will face serious arrestors if it attempts to change the military’s course in Egypt.
Where Turkey is needed, and where it actually holds significant influence, is in the heart of the Arab world, Iraq. The shaking out of Iraq’s Sunni-Shia balance (or imbalance, depending on how you view it) is the current pivot to Persian Gulf stability. With the United States withdrawing from Iraq by year’s end and leaving little to effectively block Iran, the region is tilting heavily toward the Shia at the expense of U.S.-allied Sunni Arab regimes. Exacerbating matters is the fact that many of these Arab regimes are now facing crises at home, with ongoing uprisings in Bahrain, Oman and Yemen and simmering unrest in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. This is spreading real concerns that Iran is seizing an opportunity to fuel unrest and destabilize its Arab neighbors. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on March 2, in the first public acknowledgment of this trend, that the Iranians were directly and indirectly backing opposition protests in Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen, and “doing everything they can to influence the outcomes in these places.”
Another piece fell into place that same day when Saudi Deputy Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Sultan said during a meeting with Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gonul in Riyadh said that the Saudi royals “want to see Turkey as a strategic partner of Saudi Arabia.” Egypt and Saudi Arabia are the pillars of Arab power in the region, but that power is relative. Egypt is just now reawakening after decades of insularity (and enjoys a great deal of distance from the Iran issue) and Saudi Arabia is feeling abandoned by the United States, that, for broader strategic reasons is doing whatever it can to militarily extricate itself from the Islamic world to regain its balance. The Saudis are thus issuing a distress signal and are doing so with an eye on Turkey.
Will Turkey be able to deliver? Ankara is feeling the push, but the country is still in the early stages of its revival and faces limits in what it can do. Moreover, filling the role of an effective counter to Iran, as the United States and Saudi Arabia are eager to see happen, must entail the AKP leadership abandoning their “zero problems with neighbors” rhetoric and firming up a position with the United States and the Sunni Arabs against the Iranians. Regardless of which path Ankara pursues, Turkey’s time has come.
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Colin: According to Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the United States joint Chiefs, the airstrikes over Libya have destroyed between 20 and 25 percent of Gadhafi’s forward forces, which means at least three quarters are still intact. And Mullen says Libyan tanks and armored vehicles outnumber the opposition 10 to one. Across the Mediterranean, unrest in Syria and the possibility of war between Israel and Hamas is unsettling Turkey. It’s from Istanbul that STRATFOR founder gives us a different perspective on the Middle East conflicts.
Colin: Welcome to Agenda with George Friedman.
George: I’m in Istanbul right now, in a hotel room overlooking the Bosphorus, which is not only an extraordinary site for a tourist, but is really exciting for anyone who’s in geopolitics. This is the point where Asia meets Europe; this is the point where the Black Sea meets the Mediterranean Sea. This is one most fought after spots in the entire world and it’s quite an experience to sit in a hotel room, having a drink and looking out over the Bosphorus.
Colin: It’s a very good place to observe what’s happening in the Middle East.
George: Indeed, one of the reasons I’m here is to get a sense from the Turks, and officials and people of what exactly is going on. This is a wonderful listening post and at this point it is also very important because the Turks are playing a more active role in everything that’s happening.
Colin: George, I’d like to come back to the Turks in the moment. Let’s just look briefly at Libya as it enters the third week of the civil war. We have the military assessment, but on the other side we have the defection of one of Gadhafi’s men with blood on his hands, Moussa Koussa, the former intelligence chief and foreign minister. He’s shown up in Britain and is being debriefed in a safe house. How much of a blow is this to Gaddafi?
George: It’s not clear that’s it very much of a blow. This was his foreign minister. As for blood on his hands, this is a regime that for 42 years had blood on its hands. It’s fairly extraordinary the world is suddenly discovering that Gadhafi and the people around him are monsters. But, on the other hand, that’s important to bear in mind that Gadhafi is on the whole winning. The airstrikes are not effective. They’re certainly not stopping him; he’s been able to move from the defensive to the offense. He’s retaken some territory and the eastern alliance that NATOs clearly backing, whatever it says, is simply not able to gel into an effective military force. I think the Turkish position from the very beginning was that this was a fairly arbitrary war. The decision to move into Libya instead of any of these other countries was random, but, more to the point, that it didn’t be provide any stability for the region. And in fact probably destabilized it somewhat, opening a door they feared for some very radical Islamists and moreover not being able to get rid of Gadhafi. They’re certainly very concerned about what’s happening in Syria. That’s right on their border. They’re also always concerned about what the Iranians are doing, although they try to reach out and have decent relations with them. They’re worried about what’s happening in Iraq. The Turks are generally worried. They’re especially worried about the possibility of another Hamas-Israeli war and the reason they’re worried about Hamas-Israeli war is that if Hamas were to carry out strikes that the Israelis chose to counter with another attack in Gaza, this might strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; it could destabilize the regime there. And the Turks don’t want to see that happen right now. They want to see a stable Egypt; they want to see a stable Mediterranean. So the Turks have many, many things that made him uneasy, and one of the things that makes them uneasy is their NATO partners. They can’t quite figure out what it is they think they’re doing.
Colin: As you said, the Turks are concerned about what’s happening in Syria.
George: It is not so much about democracy versus repression. It is, however, a very long-standing struggle between the minority Alawite regime, which is minority of Shia, and the majority Sunni Muslims. The Sunni Muslims were brutally repressed by the current president’s father years ago. Tens of thousands were killed. This is a rising by them again. The rhetoric, which is used to appeal for Western support, is about democracy and they certainly do mean democracy in a certain sense, but the really important question is the role of the Sunnis in Syria and of the radical Islamists within the Sunni movement. The Turks, however much they move toward the Islamic position in the AKP, are not really interested in the radicalization of their borderland and they’re very concerned about what Syria is going to do. They also I think feel helpless. I don’t think that Assad is particular to taking advice from the Turks. I don’t think the demonstrators are asking for Turkish mediation, although the Turks are prepared to provide it. I think it’s a very uncomfortable position for the Turks to be in.
Colin: Looking ahead, what do you think Turkey’s strategy will be?
George: The Turkish strategy has been to try to avoid entanglements. It’s a policy of 360 degrees, as they put it, and it’s a policy of having no enemies, of being friends with everyone. But of course the greater Turkish power is, the weaker their neighbors become, the more the Turks get involved. And as the United States has found a long time ago, as soon as you get involved, you’re involved on somebody’s side. There’s no such thing as a neutral intervention. That’s a fantasy. As the Turks are drawn deeper into mediation, they will try to resist the temptation to side with one side or the other, but they’re too powerful to simply do that. Every step they take will favor someone. So they’re going to be drawn into a position that they don’t want to be drawn into of taking sides. They’ve liked the past two years of growing prestige, but not really confronting particularly the other Muslim countries.
Colin: But presumably they’ll continue to look east, given that the European Union is deeply divided about Turkey’s possible future membership.
George: I doubt very much that the Turkish leadership at this point is keen on joining the EU. Turkey grew last year 8.9 percent, far outstripping the birthrates of the EU countries. They keep it on the table as something they want to do, because it’s a symbol of their commitment to, if not secularism at least a respect for secular desires to be regarded as a European rather than an Islamic state. So the government will continue to try to become a member, knowing full well that the Europeans won’t accept them and being utterly delighted that they aren’t part of the European Union that’s suffering all of the diseases of the European Union right now. And particularly at a time when you have such a deep divide between France and Germany over a host of issues, but particularly over the Libyan war, the Europeans are not a force to be reckoned with as a whole and the Turks are happy to be staying out of their way.
Colin: George, we’ll leave it there and look forward to hearing more from you in Turkey. George Friedman ending Agenda this week. Until the next time, goodbye.
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Turkey put on a democratic clinic yesterday for the rest of the Muslim world with another free and spirited national election. In their wisdom, the Turks chose to reward Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan for their recent run of good economic fortune, while putting a check on his largest political ambitions.
His ruling Justice and Development Party, whose roots are in Turkey's Islamist movement, won half the vote and 325 seats in parliament, according to preliminary results. Mr. Erdogan will be only the second man in the history of the Turkish republic to claim the premiership for a third term. But his party, known by the acronym AKP, fell shy of the 330 votes needed to send changes to Turkey's constitution to a referendum—and far short of Mr. Erdogan's dream of a "super majority" of 367 to get them adopted by parliament alone.
Mr. Erdogan wants a French-style republic with a strong presidency and himself as the president. But his often divisive rhetoric and his attacks on the media and opponents had stoked fears of creeping authoritarianism. In his victory speech last night, Mr. Erdogan claimed to get the message. "We'll go to the opposition and we'll seek consultation and consensus," he said. "We will bring democracy to an advanced level, widening rights and freedoms. The responsibility has risen, and so has our humility."
Turkey needs a legitimate overhaul of its political system to become a true liberal democracy. Its judiciary and military are still too much powers in themselves, and minority rights and checks and balances are missing in a flawed structure that dates to modern Turkey's founding in 1923. But any reform needs to be implemented with a national consensus, with clear checks on the power of any one man, party or institution.
The AKP's capable stewardship of Turkey's economy explains its run of electoral success. Exports have quadrupled in a decade and per capita income has nearly tripled. Turkey shows the merits of free market policies, including open trade and sound fiscal management. The AKP has also alleviated many concerns about creeping Islamization, which wasn't an issue in this campaign. If Mr. Erdogan stays true to his word last night and smooths his intolerant edges, Turkey could become a true model for liberty in the Middle East.
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Turkey's Elections and Strained U.S. Relations
June 14, 2011
By George Friedman
Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won Parliamentary elections June 12, which means it will remain in power for a third term. The popular vote, divided among a number of parties, made the AKP the most popular party by far, although nearly half of the electorate voted for other parties, mainly the opposition and largely secularist Republican People’s Party (CHP). More important, the AKP failed to win a super-majority, which would have given it the power to unilaterally alter Turkey’s constitution. This was one of the major issues in the election, with the AKP hoping for the super-majority and others trying to block it. The failure of the AKP to achieve the super-majority leaves the status quo largely intact. While the AKP remains the most powerful party in Turkey, able to form governments without coalition partners, it cannot rewrite the constitution without accommodating its rivals.
One way to look at this is that Turkey continues to operate within a stable framework, one that has been in place for almost a decade. The AKP is the ruling party. The opposition is fragmented along ideological lines, which gives the not overwhelmingly popular AKP disproportionate power. The party can set policy within the constitution but not beyond the constitution. In this sense, the Turkish political system has produced a long-standing reality. Few other countries can point to such continuity of leadership. Obviously, since Turkey is a democracy, the rhetoric is usually heated and accusations often fly, ranging from imminent military coups to attempts to impose a religious dictatorship. There may be generals thinking of coups and there may be members of AKP thinking of religious dictatorship, but the political process has worked effectively to make such things hard to imagine. In Turkey, as in every democracy, the rhetoric and the reality must be carefully distinguished.
Turkey’s Shifting Policy
That said, the AKP has clearly taken Turkey in new directions in both domestic and foreign policy. In domestic policy, the direction is obvious. While the CHP has tried to vigorously contain religion within the private sphere, the AKP has sought to recognize Turkey’s Islamic culture and has sought a degree of integration with the political structure.
This has had two results. Domestically, while the AKP has had the strength to create a new political sensibility, it has not had the strength to create new institutions based on Islamic principles (assuming this is one of its desired goals). Nevertheless, the secularists, deriving their legitimacy from the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, have viewed his legacy and their secular rights — one of which is the right of women not to have to wear headscarves — as being under attack. Hence, the tenor of public discourse has been volatile. Indeed, there is a constant sense of crisis in Turkey, as the worst fears of the secularists collide with the ambitions of the AKP. Again, we regard these ambitions as modest, not because we know what AKP leaders intend in their heart, but simply because they lack the power to go further regardless of intentions.
The rise of the AKP and its domestic agenda has more than just domestic consequences. Since 2001, the United States has been fighting radical Islamists, and the fear of radical Islamism goes beyond the United States to Europe and other countries. In many ways, Turkey is both the most prosperous and most militarily powerful of any Muslim country. The idea that the AKP agenda is radically Islamist and that Turkey is moving toward radical Islamism generates anxieties and hostilities in the international system.
While the thought of a radical Islamist Turkey is frightening, and many take an odd pleasure in saying that Turkey has been “lost” to radical Islamism and should be ostracized, the reality is more complex. First, it is hard to ostracize a country that has the largest army in Europe as well as an economy that grew at 8.9 percent last year and that occupies some of the most strategic real estate in the world. If the worst case from the West’s point of view were true, ostracizing Turkey would be tough, making war on it even tougher, and coping with the consequences of an Islamist Turkey tougher still. If it is true that Turkey has been taken over by radical Islamists — something I personally do not believe — it would be a geopolitical catastrophe of the first order for the United States and its allies in the region. And since invading Turkey is not an option, the only choice would be accommodation. It is interesting to note that those who are most vociferous in writing Turkey off are also most opposed to accommodation. It is not clear what they propose, since their claim is both extreme and generated, for the most part, for rhetorical and not geopolitical reasons. The fear is real, and the threat may be there as well, but the solutions are not obvious.
Turkey’s Geopolitical Position
So I think it is useful to consider Turkey in a broader geopolitical context. It sits astride one of the most important waterways in the world, the Bosporus, connecting the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. That alone made Ataturk’s desire for an inward Turkey not playing great power games difficult to attain. Given that it is part of the Caucasus, shares a border with Iran, borders the Arab world and is part of Europe, Turkey inevitably becomes part of other countries’ plans. For example, in World War II both powers wanted Turkey in the war on their side, particularly the Germans, who wanted Turkish pressure on the Baku oil fields.
After World War II, the Cold War drove Turkey toward the United States. Pressure in the Caucasus and the Soviet appetite for controlling the Bosporus, a historic goal of the Russians, gave Turkey common cause with the United States. The Americans did not want the Soviets to have free access to the Mediterranean, and the Turks did not want to lose the Bosporus or be dominated by the Soviets.
From the American point of view, a close U.S.-Turkish relationship came to be considered normal. But the end of the Cold War redefined many relationships, and in many cases, neither party was aware of the redefinition for quite some time. The foundation of the U.S.-Turkish alliance rested on the existence of a common enemy, the Soviets. Absent that enemy, the foundation disappeared, but in the 1990s there were no overriding pressures for either side to reconsider its position. Thus, the alliance remained intact simply because it was easier to maintain it than rethink it.
This was no longer the case after 2001, when the United States faced a new enemy, radical Islamism. At this point, the Turks were faced with a fundamental issue: the extent to which they would participate in the American war and the extent to which they would pull away. After 2001, the alliance stopped being without a cost.
The break point came in early 2003 with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which came after the AKP election victory in late 2002. The United States wanted to send a division into northern Iraq from southern Turkey, and the Turks blocked the move. This represented a critical break in two ways. First, it was the first time since World War II that the Turks had distanced themselves from an American crisis — and in this case, it was one in their very neighborhood. Second, it was a decision made by a government suspected by the United States of having sympathies for Islamists. The Turks did not break with the United States, eventually allowing U.S. air operations to continue from Turkey and participating in assistance programs in Afghanistan.
But for the United States, the decision on Iraq became a defining moment, when the United States realized that it could not take Turkish support for granted. The Turks, on the other hand, decided that the United States was taking actions that were not in their best interests. The relationship was not broken, but it did become strained.
Turkey was experiencing a similar estrangement from Europe. Since medieval times, Turkey has regarded itself as a European country, and in the contemporary era, it has sought membership in the European Union, a policy maintained by the AKP. At first, the European argument against Turkish membership focused on Turkey’s underdeveloped condition. However, for the last decade, Turkey has experienced dramatic economic growth, including after the global financial crisis in 2008. Indeed, its economic growth has outstripped that of most European countries. The argument of underdevelopment no longer holds.
Still, the European Union continues to block Turkish membership. The reason is simple: immigration. There was massive Turkish immigration to Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Germany and France have significant social strains resulting from Muslim immigration, and allowing Turkey into the European Union would essentially open the borders. Now, a strong argument could be made that EU membership would be disastrous for Turkey economically, but for Turkey it is not the membership that matters nearly as much as the rejection. The European rejection of Turkey over the immigration issue alienates Turkey from the Europeans, making it harder for the AKP to counter allegations that it is “turning its back on the West.”
Thus, the Turks, not wanting to participate in the Iraq war, created a split with the United States, and the European rejection of Turkish membership in the European Union has generated a split with Europe. From a Turkish point of view, the American invasion of Iraq was ill conceived and the European position ultimately racist. In this sense, they were being pushed away from the West.
Turkey and the Islamic World
But two other forces were at work. First, the Islamic world changed its shape. From being overwhelmingly secular in political outlook, not incidentally influenced by Ataturk, the Islamic world began to move in a more religious direction until the main tendency was no longer secular but Islamic to varying degrees. It was inevitable that Turkey would experience the strains and pressures of the rest of the Muslim world. The question was not whether Turkey would shift but to what degree.
The other force was geopolitical. The two major wars in the Muslim world being fought by the United States were not proceeding satisfactorily, and while the main goal had been reached — there were no further attacks on the United States — the effort to maintain or create non-Islamic regimes in the region was not succeeding. Now the United States is withdrawing from the region, leaving behind instability and an increasingly powerful and self-confident Turkey.
In the end, the economic and military strength of Turkey had to transform it into a major regional force. By default, with the American withdrawal, Turkey has become the major power in the region on several counts. For one, the fact that Turkey had an AKP government and was taking a leadership position in the region made the United States very uncomfortable. For another, and this is the remarkable part, Turkey moved moderately on the domestic front when compared to the rest of the region, and its growing influence was rooted in American failure rather than Turkish design. When a Turkish aid flotilla sailed to Gaza and was intercepted by the Israelis in 2010, the Turkish view was that it was the minimum step Turkey could take as a leading Muslim state. The Israeli view was that Turkey was simply supporting radical Islamists.
This is not a matter of misunderstanding. The foundation of Turkey’s relationship with Israel, for example, had more to do with hostility toward pro-Soviet Arab governments than anything else. Those governments are gone and the secular foundation of Turkey has shifted. The same is true with the United States and Europe. None of them wants Turkey to shift, but given the end of the Cold War and the rise of Islamist forces, such a shift is inevitable, and what has occurred thus far seems relatively mild considering where the shift has gone in other countries. But more important, the foundation of alliances has disappeared and neither side can find a new, firm footing. As exemplified by Britain and the United States in the late 19th century, rising powers make older powers uneasy. They can cooperate economically and avoid military confrontation, but they are never comfortable with each other. The emerging power suspects that the greater power is trying to strangle it. The greater power suspects that the emerging power is trying to change the order of things. In fact, both of these assumptions are usually true.
By no means has Turkey emerged as a mature power. Its handling of events in Syria and other countries — consisting mostly of rhetoric — shows that it is has yet to assume a position to influence, let alone manage, events on its periphery. But it is still early in the game. We are now at a point where the old foundation has weakened and a new one is proving difficult to construct. The election results indicate that the process is still under way without becoming more radical and without slowing down. The powers that had strong relationships with Turkey no longer have them and wonder why. Turkey does not understand why it is feared and why the most ominous assumptions are being made, domestically and in other countries, about its government’s motives. None of this should be a surprise. History is like that.
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Monday, June 20, 2011 STRATFOR.COM Diary Archives
Turkey's Inevitable Problems With Neighbors
Syrian President Bashar al Assad delivered a long and uneventful speech Monday, during which he basically divided Syria’s protest society into three categories: the good, the criminal and the Salafi. Assad claimed that instability caused by the latter two was to blame for the delay in implementing reforms. Rather than promising concrete reforms that have been strongly urged by the Turks, the Syrian president emphasized that security had to come first, while trying to present himself as a neutral mediator between the population and security forces. Not surprisingly, the speech fell on deaf ears throughout Syria, but also in Ankara, where the government let its growing impatience show and told the Syrian president once again that he isn’t doing enough to satisfy the demands of his people.
With more than 10,000 Syrian refugees spilling across the Turkish border to escape the army’s siege, the situation in Syria is undoubtedly growing desperate. However, we have not yet seen the red flags that would indicate the al Assad regime is in imminent danger of collapse. The reasons are fairly straightforward. The al Assad clan belongs to Syria’s Alawite minority, who only 40 years ago were living under the thumb of the country’s majority Sunni population. Four decades in power is not a long time, and vengeance is a powerful force in this part of the world. The Alawites understand that they face an existential crisis, and if they allow their grip over the Baath-dominated political system — and most importantly, over the military — to loosen even slightly, they will likely become the prime targets of a Sunni vendetta aiming to return the Alawites to their subservient status. This may explain why al Assad felt the need to stress in his speech that his minority government would not take “revenge” against those who stand down from their protests.
“Washington is trying to push Turkey into a role it’s not quite ready for; meanwhile, Turkey is trying to sort out its growing pains while appearing influential abroad.”
Turkey is understandably nervous about what is happening next door in Syria. Ankara would prefer a Syria ruled by a stable Sunni regime, especially one that would look to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) for political guidance. However, the Turks can see that Syria’s Alawite leadership will not surrender power without a long and bloody fight. Recreating a sphere of Turkish-modeled Sunni influence in the Levant may be a long-term goal for Ankara, but the Turkish government is certainly not prepared to pay the near-term cost of civil strife in Syria spilling across Turkish borders.
Turkey has so far addressed this dilemma mainly through rhetoric, issuing angry speeches against Syrian leadership, while floating the idea of a military buffer zone for Syrian refugees. For awhile, assuming the role of regional disciplinarian played well to an AKP public-relations strategy that portrayed Turkey as the model for the Arab Spring and the go-to mediator for the Mideast’s problems. But the more Syria destabilizes — and with each time it ignores Ankara’s demands — the more Turkey risks appearing impotent.
The crisis in Syria will likely lead to a recalibration of Turkish foreign policy. The architect of Turkey’s foreign policy, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, coined the phrase “zero problems with neighbors” to describe the guiding principle of Turkey’s interactions with surrounding regimes. Turkey obviously has a problem with Syria’s leadership, and not a small one. It is becoming increasingly apparent that Turkey may not yet have what it takes to deal with Syria, beyond issuing rhetorical censures. Establishing a military buffer zone as a haven for Syrian refugees not only would call for an international mandate, but would entail Turkish troops occupying foreign land — which would likely set off alarm bells among Arabs who already suspect Turkey of harboring a so-called neo-Ottoman agenda. Turkey’s ardent support for Libyan rebels against Moammar Gadhafi and public backing for Syrian opposition forces have already unnerved Arab monarchist regimes that are trying to undermine the effects of the Arab Spring and are growing distrustful of Turkish intentions.
Moreover, any move construed as Turkey trying to facilitate the downfall of the al Assad regime would undoubtedly create problems with Iran, a neighbor Turkey has taken great care to avoid aggravating. Iran relies heavily on the Alawite regime in Syria to maintain a foothold in the Levant through groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Since the return of Syria to Sunni control would unravel a key pillar of Iranian deterrent strategy, we can expect that Iran is doing everything possible to undermine the very Syrian opposition forces looking to Ankara for support. Turkey has avoided confrontation with Iran thus far while working quietly to build a Sunni counterbalance to Iranian-backed Shia in Iraq in the face of an impending U.S. withdrawal. A power vacuum in Syria filled by Turkish-backed Sunnis would reinforce a nascent confrontation between Iran and Turkey with deep geopolitical underpinnings.
Nations do not have friends; they have interests. And Turkey, a historically influential country sitting on one of the most geopolitically complex pieces of real estate in the world, is now finding that a foreign policy built on avoiding problems with neighbors grinds against reality. In STRATFOR’s view, this was inevitable, which is why we took interest in Monday’s issue of Today’s Zaman, an English-language outlet loyal to the movement of Fethullah Gulen and strongly supportive of the ruling AKP. Two editorials in Monday’s publication held that the Syrian crisis has exposed the coming demise of Turkey’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy.
That this idea is being introduced into the public discourse is revealing, not only of Turkey’s internal debate on this issue, but also of the message that Ankara may be trying to send to the United States and others: It needs time to develop the wherewithal to meaningfully influence its neighborhood. The United States wants Turkey to help shoulder the burden of managing the Middle East as it looks to extricate its military from Iraq. Washington especially needs to develop a strong counterbalance to Iran — a role historically filled by Turkey. This obviously presents a conflict of interests: Washington is trying to push Turkey into a role it’s not quite ready for; meanwhile, Turkey is trying to sort out its growing pains while appearing influential abroad.
Turkey’s evolution will be difficult and uncomfortable, but this should not come as a surprise. “Zero problems with neighbors” worked well for Turkey at the start of this century, as it came out of its domestic shell, yet took care to avoid being seen as a resurgent power with imperial interests. After a decade of regional conflict, Turkey is finding that problems with neighbors are not only unavoidable, but may even be necessary as the Turkish state redefines its core interests.
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August 2, 2011
VIDEO: DISPATCH: SHIFTING TURKEY'S MILITARY TO FOREIGN POLICY
Analyst Kamran Bokhari examines how the resignations of four Turkish generals signal
the changing role of Turkey's military from the dominant domestic political actor
to the foreign policy tool of the civilian government.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology.
Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Turkey's civilian government has gained the upper hand in its power struggle with
the country's military after four top generals of the Turkish armed forces tendered
their resignations last Friday. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is at
a point where it would like to put the domestic balance of power to rest so as to be
able to use the military for its assertive foreign policy agenda. However, it will
be many years before the civilian government in Ankara will be able to do so,
because it's a long process to go from the military having dominance over the
political system to a civilian government using the military on the foreign policy
front.
Initially, when the top four generals of the Turkish armed forces – the air chief,
the army chief, the naval chief, and the joint chief – all tendered their
resignations collectively, it appeared that we were at the cusp of yet another and
much more fierce civil-military tug-of-war in Ankara. But the way in which the
civilian government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan handled the situation and
the fact that there has not been a backlash from the military establishment shows
that civilians are finally gaining the upper hand in what has been a decades-long
struggle between the men in uniform and the civilians in Turkey.
From the point of view of the ruling party, with the military seemingly under
civilian control, the AKP will want to move from the domestic arena to the foreign
policy front. And on that foreign policy front, the AKP has already been pursuing an
assertive agenda in terms of trying to bring the country back onto the world stage,
at least in terms of the regions that Turkey straddles: the Caucasus, Southeastern
Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia.
The intent and desire of the AKP is one thing, but the reality is that it takes a
long time to prepare a military to become an instrument of an assertive foreign
policy agenda. In the case of Turkey, it is much more difficult because this is a
military that was heavily geared towards securing or being the guardian of the
country's secular foundations, and now it has to move from that role to one in
which: a) It respects the constitutional government in Ankara and pledges loyalty to
it; and b) Serves the agenda of that government onto the foreign policy front. And
that requires a lot steps and a lot of changes that will take time – if not decades,
at least several years.
More Videos - http://www.stratfor.com/theme/video_dispatch
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http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/20110802215355.aspx
Turkey's Military Resigns
by Austin Bay
August 2, 2011
In a democracy, when senior military officers can no longer support the policies of the elected civilian government they serve, they are supposed to resign their posts and retire -- not launch a coup.
This is one way to initially frame the complex circumstances surrounding last week's mass resignation by the most senior armed forces commanders in Turkey, the culturally Islamic nation bridging Europe and Asia and possessing NATO's second-largest military establishment.
It is a frame, however, with both encouragingly optimistic and oppressively pessimistic interpretations.
Let's start with the optimism. The Turkish military sees itself as the defender of Turkey's secular democracy. Ironically, in the process of defending democracy, on four occasions since 1960 the Turkish military has toppled an elected government, or threatened the government and precipitated its collapse. Coup leaders claimed they were protecting Turkey's political secularism and thereby ultimately defending democracy from the threat posed by Muslim recidivists and political extremists of the far left and right.
In the historical lens, the military insists it is forwarding the political and social modernization process begun by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. Ataturk was a visionary, a dedicated secularist modernizer who pursued a socially transformational agenda. For example, between 1922 and his death in 1938, he emancipated Turkish women and liberalized and expanded public education.
As a war-winning general, Ataturk used the military as the primary (though not sole) instrument in his modernization process. The army had prestige, organization and educated officers -- all valuable assets in a land devastated by its loss World War I and the subsequent carnage of its victory in the ugly little conflict known as the Greco-Turkish War. When Ataturk died, however, he left Turkey with a democratic structure, not a democracy.
The optimists now argue that the modernization process Ataturk initiated has succeeded. Twenty-first century Turkey now possesses a robust and resilient democracy supported by a free press, eclectic civil society and a middle class interested in expanding economic opportunities. It no longer needs military intervention in domestic politics.
Moreover, the 1980 coup tarnished Turkey's armed forces when it imposed a constitution that circumscribed democratic rights and enshrined military privileges -- a praetorian constitution is a phrase used by its many critics. Protection of democracy decayed to coups by a praetorian guard cadre intent on determining political outcomes. Democratic Turks don't want that.
The pessimists, however, see recidivist Islamists launching a systematic, stealthy coup to end democracy and create a religious tyranny. In the pessimists' interpretation, the late July military resignations signal that current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) have succeeded in sidelining, arresting or retiring military secularists. Once Erdogan and his cronies have removed the military secularists, they will rapidly replace other secular institutions with Islamic organizations and "re-Islamize" Turkey.
Erdogan's opponents argue that the very curious Ergenekon investigation is one of several noxious examples of Erdogan's plan to slowly strangle secular institutions. Erdogan's government alleges Ergenekon is a plot by secularists to destabilize Turkey and set the stage for another military coup. The government has accused hundreds of people of being involved in the murky conspiracy, including senior military officers.
The pessimists say Ergenekon and the so-called Sledgehammer coup conspiracy are poppycock and paranoia that serve Erdogan's dark motives. In pursuing the investigations, they argue that Erdogan has used state powers to intimidate, smear and imprison his secular opponents. His electoral triumph this June, which gave the AKP a large parliamentary majority, have convinced him he cannot be stopped. The mass resignations are all that a weakened general staff can manage -- they no longer have the power to act to stop the Islamist threat Erdogan represents.
Erdogan's harshest critics, however, recognize his commitment to economic development. Arguably, he has tied his own political future to sustaining economic growth. The economic disaster in neighboring Islamic Iran serves as a reminder of the wages of dogma: ossification, corruption, poverty and violent repression.
Economic growth requires adaptation, creativity and agility -- traits the Ataturk-inspired Turkish democracy possesses. Mr. Erdogan, take note.
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.ISTANBUL—Turkey is showing signs of trading its vaunted "zero problems with neighbors" foreign policy for a more muscular approach to its bid to become the leading power in the Middle East and North Africa.
The shift, analysts and diplomats say, could trigger clashes with Israel and force Washington to choose between its closest allies in the region.
In recent weeks the policy change has been on display as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to deploy his country's navy in a dispute with Israel, approved a major aerial bombing campaign against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and pressed Egypt to let him make a politically provocative visit to Hamas-run Gaza.
A Turkish cabinet minister also threatened that Turkey would use its navy to prevent Cyprus and Israel from developing offshore natural gas fields without the involvement of Turkish-backed Northern Cyprus.
Shifting Approach
IRAN
Before Arab Spring: Turkey votes against sanctions on Tehran at U.N.
After: Turkey Agrees to host radar for missile-defense directed at Iran. (MARC: Made necessary by Baraq buying off the Russians by not placing anti-rocket missiles in eastern Europe as promised to the E-Euros because he wanted to have Russia allow alternate supply routes for Afghanistan)
KURDS
Before: Pursues 'democratic opening.'
After: Launches missile strikes.
CYPRUS
Before: Protests natural-gas drilling.
After: Threatens to deploy navy.
.On Monday, Mr. Erdogan departs for high-profile visits to Egypt, Tunisia and Libya—three core battlegrounds in the wave of popular revolutions that have swept the Arab world in the past year.
Turkey isn't shifting from soft power to hard, says Ibrahim Kalin, senior adviser to Mr. Erdogan, but is using "smart power" by turning to force where necessary. "The soft power is still there," he says.
The Arab Spring forced Turkey to retool its foreign policy, analysts and diplomats say, after the revolutions rocked the regimes of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Libya's Col. Moammar Gadhafi—partners in Turkey's "zero problems" approach—and for a time put Ankara in conflict with popular Arab sentiment.
Mr. Assad's crackdown also drove Ankara into more direct competition with Syrian ally Iran, whose regime Turkey had courted assiduously. Last week, Ankara agreed to host the forward radar for a North Atlantic Treaty Organization missile-defense system directed at Iran.
While the Obama administration has expressed alarm over the confrontational approach to Israel, U.S. officials said they have been coordinating closely with Turkey in responding to political upheavals in Arab countries—and Washington views Ankara as central to any efforts to stabilize the Mideast.
Turkish officials see the Arab upheavals of 2011 as playing to Turkey's strengths as a model Muslim democracy. They say their "zero problems" policy remains in tune with the Arab Spring, because it shares the same values as the protesters.
The officials now feel ready to press those advantages with Mr. Erdogan's trip next week. "We have made it clear we never had any kind of imperial intentions, but there is demand from the Arab street," Mr. Kalin said in a phone interview on Thursday.
How much Turkish leadership Arab leaders will accept remains an open question. Mr. Erdogan pushed hard, for example, to secure Egyptian permission to cross its border into Gaza, where he would likely receive a hero's welcome for his vocal opposition to Israeli policy. Egypt so far appears to have refused permission for the trip.
So far there is little sign that Israel will bow to threats and meet Turkey's demand that it should apologize for the deaths of nine people in the seizure of the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara ship in May 2010.
Nor does Cyprus appear to be rushing to compromise in reunification talks, while Syria's President Assad has so far rebuffed pressure to reform from Ankara, as well as from other capitals. Israel sees Turkey's campaign for an end to the blockade of Gaza as part of a strategic decision to gain prominence in the Muslim world at the expense of their old strategic alliance.In Iran, ex-justice minister Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi complained that Turkey is promoting "liberal Islam."
The policy shift doesn't have universal appeal at home, either. Turkey's main opposition party leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu caused a storm of protest from government officials on Wednesday when he said Turkey's foreign policy had turned from one of zero problems to "zero gains."
For now though, surveys suggest Mr. Erdogan is the most popular leader in the Middle East.
In Egypt, a new zeal for revolutionary change has cast Mr. Erdogan's more confrontational attitude toward Israel and his moderate approach toward political Islam as a model for the democratic experiment. Activists are reportedly planning a welcome party to greet Mr. Erdogan's arrival.
Egyptian foreign-policy institutions are less likely to look to Turkish regional leadership with the same enthusiasm, said an official in Egypt's ministry of foreign affairs. "Egypt is not in the business of following," he said.
Mr. Erdogan, in a speech at Cairo University on Monday, will set out Turkey's vision for the region's future, one defined by "not occupation, not authoritarianism, not dictatorship," said Mr. Kalin.
Mr. Erdogan will also sign bilateral energy and other economic agreements, attend a high-level joint political-security council, meet representatives of the prodemocracy movement and address a meeting of Arab League foreign ministers, according to Mr. Kalin.
Yet Mr. Erdogan's outreach to the Arab world comes with a visibly tougher approach to foreign policy. That includes a series of warnings to Cyprus and Israel in recent days against drilling offshore for natural gas without the involvement of Turkish-backed Northern Cyprus.
"That's what naval forces are for," Egemen Bagis, Turkey's Europe minister told the Sunday's Zaman newspaper.
"In this game of brinksmanship accidents can happen, not least because parts of the Israeli government are prone to high risk-taking," says Professor Ilter Turan, professor of international relations at Istanbul's Bilgi University.
Mr. Turan sees the Turkish government's more aggressive stance as part of a wider confidence that is the result of the ruling Justice and Development Party's sweeping re-election in June.
In a sign of that confidence, Ankara—once careful to court the European Union—this summer threatened to freeze relations with the bloc over Cyprus reunification talks.
Then, in August, Turkey's once all-powerful generals effectively admitted defeat in a power struggle with the government; a new slate of top commanders appears to have accepted civilian control, boosting government confidence.
It isn't clear how far Turkey will go. For example, while Ankara has threatened to send out naval patrols, it has yet to do so. The assault on bases of the outlawed Kurdish Workers' Party, known as the PKK, is only the first in several years and hasn't expanded into a land campaign.
According to Henri Barkey, Turkey specialist and professor of international relations at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, Turkey is using the latest conflict with Israel in "a bid to recover lost prestige in the Arab world" after the Arab Spring. At the same time, he said, Ankara is bidding for regional leadership and challenging the U.S. to choose between its two closest regional allies.
"It's a very high stakes approach, but they are also very confident," he said.
—Joshua Mitnick in Tel Aviv, Matt Bradley in Cairo and Jay Solomon in Washington contributed to this article.
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Associated Press
ANKARA—Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stepped up his belligerent rhetoric against Israel, saying that the country's warships will escort Turkish Gaza-bound aid ships in the future to prevent a repeat of last year's Israeli raid on a flotilla that killed nine people.
Erdogan's comments to Al-Jazeera television broadcast on Thursday was the first time Turkey said it will send warship to help attempts to break Israel's blockade of Gaza. The country had already announced it would increase navy patrols in the eastern Mediterranean in response to Israel's refusal to apologize for the raid.
"At the moment, there is no doubt that the Turkish military ships' primary duty is to protect [Turkish] ships," Anatolia quoted Mr. Erdogan as telling Al-Jazeera. "We will be making humanitarian aid. This aid will no longer be subjected to any kind of attack as the Mavi Marmara was."
Eight Turks and a Turkish American were killed aboard the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, that was part of an international flotilla trying to break the blockade, which Israel imposed in 2007 to keep militants from bringing weapons into Gaza.
Dan Meridor, the Israeli Cabinet minister in charge of intelligence, said Friday that Mr. Erdogan's threat was "grave and serious."
"Turkey, which declares that Israel is not above international law, must understand that it isn't either," he said.
"I do not think it would be correct to get into verbal saber rattling with him now," Mr. Meridor told Army Radio. "I think that our silence is the best answer, and I hope this will pass."
"I think anyone who is listening can make their own mind up about him and the direction he has chosen," Mr. Meridor said.
A United Nations report into the raid, released last week, said violent activists on board the Mavi Marmara had attacked the raiding naval commandos and described the blockade of Gaza as legitimate, although it also accused Israel of using disproportionate force against the activists.
Turkey rejected the report's findings saying it would never recognize the blockade's legitimacy and insisted on an Israeli apology as well as compensation for the deaths as a precondition for normalization of a relationship once seen as a cornerstone of regional stability.
Last week, it slapped a series of sanctions on Israel—once a top military trading partner—that included the expelling of senior Israeli diplomats and the suspension of all military deals. It has also wowed to back the Palestinians bid for recognition of their statehood at the U.N.
Israel has expressed regret for the loss of lives aboard the flotilla but has refused to apologize saying its forces acted in self-defense. It has also said it was time for the two countries to restore their former close ties.
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Second post
Agenda: With George Friedman on Turkish-Israeli Relations
September 9, 2011 | 1359 GMT
Click on image below to watch video:
STRATFOR CEO Dr. George Friedman explains the deterioration of the long-standing relationship between Israel and Turkey and how both sides’ geopolitical interests will affect whether that relationship can be re-established.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Related Links
Ankara’s Tougher Regional Stance
Colin: The once close relationship between Turkey and Israel has deteriorated further after a United Nations legal panel report on an incident in May last year, when a Turkish aid convoy to Gaza was attacked by Israeli forces, resulting in the death of nine Turkish activists. The report upheld the Israeli government’s right to impose the blockade, but criticized the troops for excessive force. Turkey has now cut all military ties to Israel, and the relationship seems to be in tatters.
Welcome to Agenda with George Friedman. Two questions: to what extent does the U.N. report really escalate the problems between Israel and Turkey; and to what extent does that matter?
George: I don’t think the report itself escalates the situation in any direction. It simply creates a moment in which the crisis that occurred a year ago during a flotilla incident resumes. I think that really the problem between Israel and Turkey hasn’t been resolved — it’s been put on hold — and it really doesn’t revolve around either the flotilla or apologies. It really revolves around the question of whether Turkey and Israel can maintain their relationship they maintained during the Cold War and the years immediately after it. The world has changed fairly dramatically since the Cold War. The region in which Turkey operates is no longer threatened by the Soviet Union. It doesn’t have a common interest with Israel in fighting the Soviets. Turkey is living in a world that is increasingly Islamist as opposed to secular. It’s accommodating itself to it. Israel, in the meantime, has its own interests in trying to preserve what it thinks are its territorial interests, and they simply don’t coincide with what Turkey is saying. Therefore, these are two countries that were once linked with common interests. Those interests have withered, and the relationship is seriously in trouble.
Colin: In this context, do you think Israel and Turkey can repair their relationship and, if they can, what will that new relationship be?
George: Well this is not like a marriage that gets repaired or unrepaired. These are more like businesses who have interests and the question is: will those interest realign? And there are certainly some common interests, though they’re not as deep as they were 20 or 30 years ago. Because the foundation of the relationship has changed, the nature of the relationship is going to change. Also, the tolerance on the part of each side is going to change. From the Israeli point of view, the Turks have changed to becoming unrecognizable, they say. It used to be a secular republic, and they fear that it has become a religious one. From the Turkish point of view, the Israelis have become inflexible and unrealistic in their policies inside the Palestinian Territories 3.18, and the Israelis have simply not been willing to change their visions. So you have two countries — the basis of the relationship having very much dissolved in the past years — each having a view of the other as having changed irrevocably and neither really desperately needing the other. If you look at it on balance, Israel probably needs Turkey more than Turkey needs Israel simply because if Turkey were to throw its weight behind anti-Israeli forces in the region, which it has not done to this point, that would represent a serious challenge to Israel. On the other hand, there is relatively little that Israel can do to Turkey, certainly not in order to change its foreign policy. So you have had deterioration in the relationship. It is hard to imagine it being repaired, certainly not on the basis of which it was before and certainly not to the depth at which it operated before. And also there is a suspicion on both sides that the other has drifted in directions that are not acceptable.
Colin: The relationship degrades. To what extent will this affect Turkey’s relationship with the United States?
George: Well, Turkey is trying very hard not to allow its relationship with the United States to be affected by its problems with Israel. It has gone out of its way to try to draw a distinction between the two. The United States frankly needs Turkey a great deal, particularly as it withdrawals from Iraq, as Iran becomes more assertive in the region. It needs a Turkey that is prepared to align with the United States. Turkey, on the other hand, is not prepared to go it alone yet. It is not in a position to police the region, if you will, simply without U.S. support. So the Turks are trying to be very careful with the Americans to make it very clear that the cause of this rift comes from Israel and Israel’s unwillingness to apologize; Israel’s unwillingness to accept Turkey as it is today; Israel’s intransigence. The Israelis, at the same time, are very aggressive in trying to make it clear that Turkey has moved into the camp of the enemy of the United States by joining with the Islamists and trying to make the case that it alone is the only secure ally the United States has in the region. Those are public relations campaigns. The fact of the matter is that United States has uses for both countries. The use of Israel is certainly declined over the years since the end of the Cold War, but it still has uses in intelligence sharing and other matters, whereas Turkey is an ascendant power and, as an ascendant power, the United States is going to want to have a close relationship with it. The United States is not going to choose between Turkey and Israel and it won’t allow itself to be maneuvered in that direction. But, on the other hand, it is also not going to allow itself to be split off from either country by the other.
Colin: And this begs another question. With much of the Middle East in turmoil, especially its other neighbor, Syria, isn’t there an opportunity for Turkey to assert itself — to take some kind of leadership role?
George: Well, a leadership role is one of those things that people love to use. With leadership comes responsibility; with responsibility comes decisions; and with decisions comes possibility of error and bogging down. So, everybody likes the idea of leadership. The question is: what’s the price for it? Now I think the Turks, very reasonably, are looking around at a region that the United States wasn’t able to pacify, and it doesn’t have the appetite to get engaged in that. For example, it doesn’t know what the price of pacifying Syria would be; it doesn’t know what the future would hold, and, therefore, it evades it. Leadership is a very heavy burden, and the Turks are not going to adopt that before they’re ready.
Colin: George, we’ll leave it there. Thank you. George Friedman, ending this week’s Agenda. Back again next week and, until then, bye for now.
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Turkey's Rhetoric May Lead To Choppy Waters
Texas-based energy firm Noble Energy began exploratory drilling in Cyprus’ Exclusive Economic Zone on Monday, defying Turkish demands to cease and desist. Since the island of Cyprus is divided into two, with one part internally recognized as part of Greece and the other, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, recognized only by Turkey, Noble Energy was already venturing into controversial waters. What Noble Energy, Cyprus, the United States and much of Europe likely did not anticipate, however, was that Turkey — for lack of better options — would try using this drilling dispute to herald its return to the eastern Mediterranean.
Turkey finds itself in an exciting, albeit uncertain position these days. Regional developments — from Iran filling a power vacuum in Iraq, to protracted unrest in Syria and a brewing Egypt-Israel crisis — are pushing Turkey into action. The United States is certainly aware of the problems that are quickly piling up in the Middle East, but Washington is still trying to regain its footing after more than a decade of fighting wars in the Islamic world. Turkey is in a position to ease the United States’ burden in this region. Washington and Ankara will have their fair share of disagreements, but Turkey’s considerable military, political and economic power can help Washington manage the neighborhood while pursuing common strategic interests on other issues, such as the containment of Russia.
“Turkey, unprepared to deal with the more difficult issues, is instead expending a great deal of effort on low-cost rhetorical moves designed to enhance its regional clout.”
Turkey, however, is not quite ready to fulfill this role, and is especially unprepared to project influence in the eastern Mediterranean. It takes time to build up regional clout, and to be credible a country needs to display military strength and political willpower. This may mean losing friends in some places, but for a country with ambitions like Turkey, that could be a small price to pay if it means Turkey’s neighbors will start taking Ankara more seriously. But hard power is, well, hard. Turkey, unprepared to deal with the more difficult issues, is instead expending a great deal of effort on low-cost rhetorical moves designed to enhance its regional clout.
As Turkey is learning in its dealings with Israel, however, rhetoric is of little use when not backed by substance. Condemnations against Israel are a great way for Turkey to enhance its appeal in the Arab street, especially amid pro-Palestinian fervor in the region as the United Nations vote over Palestinian statehood approaches. This led Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan last week to make a high-profile visit to Cairo, where he tried to evince a fatherly image, that of a regional caretaker come to help Egypt fend off an intractable neighbor. Yet there are no strong indications Turkey is prepared to follow through on threats to deploy frigates to escort Turkish aid ships to Gaza.
Israel finds itself in an increasingly vulnerable position, and cannot afford to alienate a regional neighbor like Turkey, but it also knows that Turkey does not want to get into a shooting war with Israel Defense Forces. Israel and Turkey also have little interest in a covert battle of pitting militant proxies against one another, as Israel’s firebrand Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened recently, announcing that Israel would support the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey. That bold statement may not have enjoyed the backing of all of Israel’s leadership, but it did give the Turks pause.
As Turkey realized the limits of its actions with Israel, it quickly turned its attention to the island of Cyprus. On the surface, Cyprus appeared to Turkey a far easier target in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkey thus reacted quickly to the news of Noble Energy’s drilling plans, and said that frigates, gunboats and the Turkish air force would be closely monitoring their actions. Moreover, Turkish officials have threatened to send their own oil platform to drill in the disputed waters off the coast of Cyprus, under a continental shelf agreement with the Turkish Cypriot government, and even to provide naval exports for its exploration crews.
Turkey reckons that Europe is far too distracted with the eurozone crisis to come up with a coherent policy for Greece’s troubled finances, much less an energy dispute in Cypriot waters. Ankara also assumed that the United States, already dealing with multiple, growing crises in the eastern Mediterranean, and looking for Turkish assistance to put out many of these fires, would defend Turkey and pressure the Greek Cypriots and Noble Energy to hold back on drilling.
But the Turks appear to have miscalculated. The United States has been extremely quiet in recent days, but an “unnamed senior U.S. official” leaked to reporters that Washington supports “the right” of Cyprus to explore for energy. In other words, Washington was sending a careful, yet deliberate message to Turkey: to not count on U.S. backing in this fight, and to back down. In many ways, Turkey was using the Cyprus dispute as a litmus test in its relationship with the United States. Although Washington has a strategic need to develop a much stronger relationship with Turkey, it does not appear ready to fend for Ankara in this particular dispute. This is bound to cause friction in the coming days between Washington and Ankara.
The Turkish government may need to factor in an additional concern. Greece may indeed be far too distracted with its financial crisis to react decisively to Turkey’s actions against Cyprus. But if Turkey actually tries to follow through with its threat — carrying out overflights and providing naval escorts to energy exploration crews in disputed Cypriot waters — things could get messy. And if a hard-pressed Greek government is looking for a distraction to rally public support, a conflict with Turkey may not be a bad idea — especially if it’s one the Turks weren’t anticipating.
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second post of day:
Turkey has been an American ally and a member of NATO since 1952. Sometimes it even acts like one.
The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan—the popular three-term prime minister who lately has made his reputation abroad by bashing Israel and distancing Turkey from the West—agreed last week to host a powerful American radar on Turkish territory. The deal helps protect Turks and Europeans from Iranian missiles and deter Tehran's nuclear and regional aspirations.
The X-band radar station, located some 400 miles west of the Iranian border, will be a linchpin of a new missile defense system. The U.S. plans to put 48 interceptors in Romania and Poland that could intercept small- and medium-range missiles. Two years ago, the Obama Administration pulled the plug on plans to build a broader defense shield based in Europe that also protected the continental U.S. against a long-range missile attack. That was a mistake, but this new system is better than none at all.
For Turkey and NATO, the agreement is a security and diplomatic win. During the Cold War, Turkey stood on the frontline against the Soviets. Mr. Erdogan may pal around with Iran's despotic leaders and promote a booming cross-border trade, but he seems to realize the threat from Tehran's atomic ambitions.
This thaw was long in coming. Ankara damaged the U.S. at the onset of the Iraq war in 2003 by, at the last minute, forbidding American troops from invading through Turkey. The security relationship has never recovered, even as Turkey sent troops to Afghanistan and backed this year's Libya intervention. Also welcome are talks to base American drones in Turkey to fight Kurdish militants. The U.S. has been a steadfast ally against Kurdish terrorism, though it gets little credit from Turkey's leaders or public.
The Erdogan government did manage to spoil last week's moment by making even the radar about Israel, leaking that Israel wouldn't get any data gathered by the radar. U.S. officials say they will share any information from the U.S.-owned radar with all allies.
Israel poses no danger to Turkey, even as terrorism and nuclear proliferation do. Were Mr. Erdogan to temper his antipathy for Israel and confront those security challenges squarely, he'd become a more credible leader in the Middle East and a more respected partner for the West.
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With several remarkable asides thrown in and several years behind the curve,Pravda on the Hudson tries catching up with Stratfor:
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ISTANBUL — Not so long ago, the foreign policy of Turkey revolved around a single issue: the divided island of Cyprus. These days, its prime minister may be the most popular figure in the Middle East, its foreign minister envisions a new order there and its officials have managed to do what the Obama administration has so far failed to: position themselves firmly on the side of change in the Arab revolts and revolutions.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, front left, prayed with Libyan and Turkish leaders in Tripoli on Sept. 16.
No one is ready to declare a Pax Turkana in the Middle East, and indeed, its foreign policy is strewn this year with missteps, crises and gains that feel largely rhetorical. It even lacks enough diplomats. But in an Arab world where the United States seems in retreat, Europe ineffectual and powers like Israel and Iran unsettled and unsure, officials of an assertive, occasionally brash Turkey have offered a vision for what may emerge from turmoil across two continents that has upended decades of assumptions.
Not unexpectedly, the vision’s center is Turkey.
“Turkey is the only country that has a sense of where things are going, and it has the wind blowing on its sails,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Istanbul Bilgi University.
The country’s foreign policy seized the attention of many in the Middle East and beyond after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tour this month of three Arab countries that have witnessed revolutions: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Even Mr. Erdogan’s critics were impressed with the symbolism of the trip.
Though many criticize his streak of authoritarianism at home, the public abroad seemed taken by a prime minister who portrayed himself as the proudly Muslim leader of a democratic and prosperous country that has come out forcefully on the side of revolution and in defense of Palestinian rights.
One Turkish newspaper, supportive of Mr. Erdogan, called the visits the beginning “of a new era in our region.” An Egyptian columnist praised what he called Mr. Erdogan’s “leadership qualities.” And days later, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spoke boldly of an axis between Egypt and Turkey, two of the region’s most populous and militarily powerful countries, that would underpin a new order in the region, one in which Israel would stay on the margins until it made peace with its neighbors.
“What’s happening in the Middle East is a big opportunity, a golden opportunity,” a senior Turkish official said in Ankara, the capital. He called Turkey “the new kid on the block.”
The trip marked a pivot after what many had viewed as a series of setbacks for a country that, like most of the world, utterly failed to predict the revolts in the region.
After long treating the Arab world with a measure of disdain — Israel and Turkey were strategic allies in the 1990s — Turkey had spent years cultivating ties with Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. More than 25,000 Turks worked in Libya, and Syria was seen as the gateway to Turkey’s ambitions to economically integrate part of the Middle East.
Even after the uprisings erupted, Turkey opposed NATO’s intervention in Libya. Until last month, it held out hope that Mr. Assad, despite evidence to the contrary, could oversee a transition in Syria.
Though Mr. Erdogan came out early in demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down in Egypt — at the very time American officials were trying to devise ways for him to serve out his term — that stance came with little cost. Mr. Mubarak and Mr. Erdogan were not fond of each other, and Egyptian officials resented Turkey’s growing profile.
“The old policy collapsed, and a new policy is required now toward the Middle East,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, a professor of political science at Sabanci University in Istanbul.
In an interview, Mr. Davutoglu, viewed by many as the architect of Turkey’s engagement with the region, laid out that new policy. In addition to a proposed alliance with Egypt, he said Turkey would position itself on the side of the revolts, especially in neighboring Syria, which represents Turkey’s biggest challenge. He insisted that Turkey could help integrate the region by virtue of its economy, with its near tripling of exports since Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party took power in 2002.
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The outline suggested an early version of the European Union for the Middle East — economic integration and political coordination — and Mr. Davutoglu said such an arrangement would eventually require at least a degree of military cooperation.
“There should be regional ownership,” he said. “Not Turkish, not Arab, not Iranian, but a regional ownership.”
The vision is admittedly ambitious, and Mr. Davutoglu’s earlier prescription of “zero problems” with neighbors has run up against the hard realities of the region. Turkey faces a growing crisis over rights to gas in the sea off Cyprus, still divided between Greek and Turkish regions and still a foreign policy mess for Turkey. Relations with Israel collapsed after Israeli troops killed nine people on board a Turkish flotilla trying to break the blockade of Gaza last year.
Iran, Turkey’s neighbor to the east and competitor in the region, is bitter over a Turkish decision to accede to American pressure and host a radar station as part of a NATO missile defense system. Syrian and Turkish leaders no longer talk with one another.
But the sense of rising Turkish power and influence is so pronounced in the country these days that it sometimes borders on jingoism. It has touched on the country’s deep current of nationalism, and perhaps a hint of romanticism, harbored by the more religious, for Turkey’s return to an Arab world it ruled for more than four centuries.
“We’re not out there to recreate the Ottoman Empire, but we are out there to make the most of the influence we have in a region that is embracing our leadership,” said Suat Kiniklioglu, deputy chairman of external affairs for Mr. Erdogan’s party.
Even those who bristle at what they see as Mr. Erdogan’s arrogance acknowledge that he represents a phenomenon, at home and abroad. He brought his populism to the Arab world, where he displayed an intuitive sense of the resonance that the Palestinian issue still commands, in contrast to American officials who have misunderstood it, failed to appreciate it or tried to wish it away. In speeches, he catered to the West and his domestic critics by embracing a secular state, even as he prayed in suit and tie in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.
For a region long stirred with anger at seemingly impotent leaders, submissive to American and Israeli demands, Mr. Erdogan came across as independent and forceful.
Cengiz Candar, a Turkish columnist with a résumé in the Arab world dating from the early 1970s, called it Mr. Erdogan’s “animal-like political intuitions.”
He added: “And these intuitions tell him, apart from the emotions, that you’re on the right track. As along as you take these steps, Turkey is consolidating its stature as a regional power more and more and you will be an actor on the international stage.”
There remains a debate in Turkey over the long-term aims of the engagement. No one doubts that officials with his party — deeply pious, with roots in political Islam — sympathize with Islamist movements seeking to enter mainstream Arab politics, namely the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and, more so, the Nahda Party in Tunisia. Mr. Candar calls them “kinsmen.” “They speak a common dialect,” he said.
But relations remain good with the United States, even if American officials accuse Mr. Erdogan of overconfidence. Some Turkish officials worry that the crisis with Israel will end up hurting the relationship with Washington; others believe that Turkey is bent on supplanting Israel as the junior partner of the United States in the Middle East.
The bigger challenges seem to be within Turkey. Although Turkey has opened new embassies across Africa and Latin America, its diplomatic staff remains small, and the Foreign Ministry is trying to hire 100 new employees per year. Mr. Kiniklioglu, the party official, estimated that no more than 20 people were devising foreign policy.
The exuberance of Turkish officials runs the risk of backlash, too. The Arab world’s long-held suspicion toward Turkey has faded, helped by the soft power of popular Turkish television serials and Mr. Erdogan’s appeal. Yet senior officials acknowledge the potential for an Arab backlash in a region long allergic to any hint of foreign intervention. Somewhat reflexively, Egyptian Islamists, piqued last week by Mr. Erdogan’s comments about a secular state, warned him against interfering in their affairs.
And across the spectrum in Turkey, still wrestling with its own Kurdish insurgency in the southeast, critics and admirers acknowledge that the vision of a Turkish-led region, prosperous and stable, remains mostly a fleeting promise amid all the turmoil. “The image is good,” said Mr. Kalaycioglu, the professor. “Whether it’s bearing any fruit is anyone’s guess. Nothing so far seems to be happening beyond that image.”
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And across the spectrum in Turkey, still wrestling with its own Kurdish insurgency in the southeast, critics and admirers acknowledge that the vision of a Turkish-led region, prosperous and stable, remains mostly a fleeting promise amid all the turmoil. “The image is good,” said Mr. Kalaycioglu, the professor. “Whether it’s bearing any fruit is anyone’s guess. Nothing so far seems to be happening beyond that image.”
Not too far in the future, the Kurds will outnumber the Turks. We'll see who the insurgents are then.
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Interesting. I have not seen any discussion of respective population growth , , ,
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**To quote Mark Steyn "The future belongs to those who show up".
http://pajamasmedia.com/spengler/2011/09/09/turkey-cant-act-rationally/
Turkey Can’t Act Rationally
September 9, 2011 - 1:07 pm - by David P. Goldman
Why Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan chose the year 2038 as the point at which his country will cease to exist, I do not know, but that’s what he’s been saying in stump speeches to his home audience, as I report in my new book, How Civilizations Die. He can’t be too far off. A generation from now, Turkey will cease to exist in its present form. The ratio of Turks to Kurds today (defined by cradle tongue) is about 4:1, but Turks have 1.5 children on average, while Kurds have 4.5. In little over a generation, Kurds will comprise half the military-age population of Anatolia. After decades of civil war and 40,000 casualties, Turkey’s Kurdish problem is as vivid as ever.
Erdogan, like Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is inherently incapable of rationality. Turks and Persians both show a total fertility rate of 1.5, which portends national disaster–as both leaders have said repeatedly in public. In Turkey, Iran, and almost everywhere in the Muslim world, women with a high school (let alone university education) stop having children. Paradoxically, the best-educated populations–Tunisia, Algeria, Turkey and Iran–have the same fertility rate as the Europeans. Demographically, the Muslim world has passed from childhood to senescence without ever having reached adulthood.
What’s the rational self-interest of a doomed culture? Rather than return to the Western fold, Turkey is likely to become more and more erratic. “Fatalism” does not begin to describe the mindset of the new Turkish Islamism. Its guru, Fethullah Gulen, whose movement controls several Turkish banks, the Zaman news organization, and billions of dollars of other business assets, is a madman by Western standards. He is less a modern Islamic thinker than an Anatolian shaman who lives in a world infested by magic beings, by jinn and sorcerers, as one can verify by consulting his published writings. Erdogan, the small-town Anatolian boy made good, comes from this magical world. He has a peasant’s shrewdness and self-preservation instincts, and a politician’s knack for the pulse of his constituents. The conjunction of his magical world-view and the misery of his country’s long-term prospects, though, cannot have a good outcome.
Update, Sept. 27: Erdogan’s security personnel beat up UN security guards when they attempted to stop the Turkish delegation from going through the wrong door on the way to the General Assembly. The New York Post account includes video. Erdogan mistakenly headed for the visitors’ gallery rather than the General Assembly room, and the guards were attempting to direct him to the correct entrance. That’s without precedent. What planet is this guy from? Hmmmm…. Short temper, craving for sugar? You know who Erdogan reminds us of.
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Director of Analysis Reva Bhalla discusses the risks Turkey will likely consider in deciding how far it wants to go in supporting the Syrian opposition.
Editor’s Note: Transcripts are generated using speech-recognition technology. Therefore, STRATFOR cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Related Links
• Intelligence Guidance: Iran’s Next Move, Eurozone Crisis, Pressure on Syria
• The Syrian Regime, Under Pressure but Holding
• The Syrian Opposition: Perception and Reality
Syrian activists claimed Wednesday that army defectors belonging to the Free Syrian Army fired machine guns and RPGs at an Air Force Intelligence base in Hastara, just north of Damascus, around 2:30 a.m. local time. They also claimed to have targeted military checkpoints in the suburbs of Douma, Qaboun, Arabaeen and Saqba. There has been no independent confirmation of these claims, but the reports are directing attention toward the capabilities of the Free Syrian Army and just how far the Turkish government is willing to go in supporting this group of army defectors.
The Free Syrian Army is a group of mostly Sunni conscripts and mid- to low-rank officers who fled to Turkey. This group, led by a Col. Riad al-Asaad, has, with the permission of the Turkish government, set up a base of operations in southern Turkey and has announced the creation of what it calls a temporary military council to oust the regime of Syrian President Bashar al Assad.
This group of army defectors is operating under extremely heavy constraints considering that the Syrian security apparatus is dominated by the country’s Alawite minority, the vast majority of which view the current struggle as an existential crisis against the Sunni majority. Unless serious cracks in the army occur among this Alawite command, it will be very difficult for lower ranking Sunni members to find the opening they need to wage a successful coup. Another factor greatly hampering this group is that they need a sanctuary to organize and sustain an armed resistance within effective operating range of the main areas of resistance.
Turkey’s willingness to host the Free Syrian Army raises the question of whether Turkey would be willing to go further in supporting an armed opposition in Syria. Speculation has been raised over whether the refugee camps in southwestern Turkey, where the Free Syrian Army leadership is located, could be extended into a staging ground for Syria’s fledgling armed opposition. Turkey has many options in terms of arming, advising and training these forces, and an idea that has also been raised prominently in the Turkish press and in private talks among Turkish officials is that of Turkey establishing a military buffer zone along the Syrian-Turkish border with Arab League and possibly U.N. backing. Speculation over how far such a buffer zone would actually extend into Syrian territory varies greatly and there is no clear indication that Turkey is close to a decision on this matter.
Though Turkey has been trying to demonstrate that it has real clout — beyond rhetoric — in pressuring Syria, there are also risks in escalating matters and going so far as to commit forces to the problem. First, it’s important to keep in mind that the areas where the opposition is concentrated — in Homs and Hamas, as well as the Damascus suburbs and Daraa in the southwest — are a fair distance from the northern border with Turkey.
Second, Turkey’s primary security imperative in dealing with Syria is to ensure the instability in Syria does not reach a level that would encourage Kurdish separatist activity from spilling across the border. So far, Kurdish protesters in Syria have been relatively contained. And while there are several thousands of Syrian refugees living in Turkish refugee camps, Turkey is no longer facing an imminent crisis of refugees flooding across the border since most of the Syrian military’s crackdowns have been focused much further south.
Further Turkish escalation would make Turkey vulnerable to Syrian and Iranian militant proxy attacks, a factor that is likely weighing heavily on the minds of the Turkish leadership as they are already dealing with a significant rise in PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) activity and are more interested in focusing their military assets on uprooting PKK cells in southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq. Syria and Iran may not have a great deal of influence on the PKK’s command structure based out of Qandil mountain, but there are a number of splinter factions that could be exploited to demonstrate to the Turks the repercussions of pushing the al Assad regime over the edge.
If Turkey were to seriously contemplate further escalation in Syria and absorb the risks associated with such action, it would be more likely in response to their concerns over the Kurdish threat than their concerns for Syrian citizens. This is why it will be extremely important to watch for signs of unusual Kurdish militant activity in Turkey that the Turkish leadership could trace back to Syria. That would be the game changer that could lead to more serious action from the Turks.
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Dispatch: U.S. Defense Secretary Visits Turkey
December 14, 2011 | 2032 GMT
Click on image below to watch video:
Middle East Analyst Reva Bhalla examines the Iranian and Russian reactions to growing U.S.-Turkish strategic ties.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta will be traveling to Turkey Thursday for a high-profile visit to showcase a growing U.S.-Turkish strategic partnership. The United States has every reason to display its strategic alliance with Turkey, but with Russia and Iran watching closely, Turkey still has a complex balancing act to maintain.
Panetta’s visit to Turkey comes just two week before a U.S. radar system is scheduled to be installed in eastern Turkey as part of the U.S.-led ballistic missile defense shield. The meetings are also expected to cover a $111 million deal between Ankara and Washington for U.S. drones that would be transferred from Iraq to Turkey as well as the U.S. sale of three AH-1 Super Cobra helicopters to Turkey. These are all items that Turkey has long been requesting from the U.S. to show its support in Turkey’s fight against the Kurdish militant group, the PKK.
There are a lot of reasons why the United States is paying more attention to Turkey these days. The U.S. will next week complete its withdrawal from Iraq, leaving behind a power vacuum for Iran to rapidly fill and use to project influence in the wider region. Turkey, a Sunni, non-Arab country with deep economic, military and political reach in the Middle East, is the natural geopolitical counterweight to Iran in the U.S.’s absence. Mesopotamia, lying between these two powers, is where you can expect to see Iranian-Turkish competition at its fiercest. Though Iran undoubtedly has the strongest foreign hand in Iraq these days, Turkey has been outpacing Iran in building up its intelligence, military and economic assets in the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq.
The most obvious illustration of growing Turkish-Iranian competition can be seen in Syria, where Turkey has very publicly thrown its support behind the Syrian opposition, to the point of hosting Free Syrian Army defectors who are using their Turkish refuge to try and organize an insurgency against the regime in the Syria. Turkey, like the United States, Saudi Arabia and others in the region, see the regime crisis in Syria as the best possible way to cut through Iran’s Shiite arc of influence. Turkey’s moves have greatly unnerved Iran, which much preferred the days when Turkey attempted to be more of an honest broker between the U.S. and Iran and took care to avoid confrontation with its Persian neighbor. This is why the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps recently went so far as to directly threaten an attack on NATO’s missile defense installations on Turkish soil if the U.S. or Israel attacked the Islamic Republic. That was a warning that definitely caught Turkey’s attention, but has not prevented Turkey from following through in its BMD dealings with the United States.
Another key regional power eyeing Panetta’s visit in Turkey is Russia. Russia has already been escalating its protest against U.S. BMD plans in Central Europe in recent weeks, and even threatened to cut off a vital U.S. supply line to Afghanistan if Washington doesn’t reconsider its BMD plans. Russia is not happy with the thought of Turkey aligning itself more closely with the United States on such a strategic defense matter. The BMD installations themselves are not what’s important – what Russia cares about is the fact that the U.S. military is using the BMD shield to enlarge its military footprint in the former Soviet periphery with the ultimate aim of placing a check on Russian power. The Russians, however, do not want to provoke a confrontation with the Turks at this time. The last thing Russia wants is to give Turkey a reason to interfere in Russian designs in areas, like the Caucasus and the Black Sea, where Russian and Turkish influence overlap.
Turkey, highly conscious of its energy dependency on Russia and wary of inviting Iranian proxy attacks on Turkish soil, is not looking necessarily for a collision with Moscow or Tehran over BMD. At the same time, these three powers are operating in an extremely unique geopolitical environment in which all three regional powers — Turkey, Iran and Russia — are rising, while the global hegemon, the United States, is off balance. The growing Turkish-U.S. strategic relationship makes a great deal of sense in this context, but with that comes greater friction between Turkey and its historical regional rivals.
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The emergence of Turkey
The transition of this minor country into a great power means keeping its balance while the world around it is in chaos.
Turkey
Turkey is re-emerging as a significant regional power. In some sense, it is in the process of returning to its position prior to World War I when it was the seat of the Ottoman Empire. But while the Ottoman parallel has superficial value in understanding the situation, it fails to take into account changes in how the global system and the region work. Therefore, to understand Turkish strategy, we need to understand the circumstances it finds itself in today.
The end of World War I brought with it the end of the Ottoman Empire and the contraction of Turkish sovereignty to Asia Minor and a strip of land on the European side of the Bosporus. That contraction relieved Turkey of the overextended position it had tried to maintain as an empire stretching from the Arabian Peninsula to the Balkans. In a practical sense, defeat solved the problem of Turkey's strategic interests having come to outstrip its power. After World War I, Turkey realigned its interests to its power. Though the country was much smaller, it was also much less vulnerable than the Ottoman Empire had been.
The Russia Problem
At the same time, a single thread connected both periods: the fear of Russia. For its part, Russia suffered from a major strategic vulnerability. Each of its ports -- St. Petersburg, Vladivostok, Murmansk and Odessa -- was accessible only through straits controlled by potentially hostile powers. The British blocked the various Danish straits, the Japanese blocked access to Vladivostok and the Turks blocked access to the Mediterranean. Russian national policy had an ongoing focus of gaining control of the Bosporus both to prevent a blockade and to project power into the Mediterranean.
Therefore, the Russians had a particular interest in reshaping Turkish sovereignty. In World War I, the Ottomans aligned with the Germans, who were fighting the Russians. In the inter-war and World War II periods, when the Soviets were weak or distracted, Turkey remained neutral until February 1945, when it declared war on the Axis. After the war, when the Soviets were powerful and attempted covert operations to subvert both Turkey and Greece, the Turks became closely allied with the United States and joined NATO (despite their distance from the North Atlantic).
From 1945 until 1991 Turkey was locked into a relationship with the United States. The United States was pursuing a strategy of containing the Soviet Union on a line running from Norway to Pakistan. Turkey was a key element because of its control of the Bosporus, but also because a pro-Soviet Turkey would open the door to direct Soviet pressure on Iran, Iraq and Syria. A Soviet-allied or Soviet-influenced Turkey would have broken the center of the American containment system, changing the balance of power. Along with Germany, Turkey was the pivot point of U.S. and NATO strategy.
From a Turkish point of view, there was no other option. The Soviets had emerged from World War II in an extremely powerful position. Western Europe was a shambles, China had become communist and the surplus military capability of the Soviets, in spite of the massive damage they had endured in the war, outstripped the ability of nations on their periphery -- including Turkey -- to resist. Given the importance of the Bosporus and Asia Minor to the Soviets, Turkey was of fundamental interest. Unable to deal with the Soviets alone, Turkey thus moved into an extremely tight, mutually beneficial relationship with the United States.
During the Cold War, Turkey was a strategic imperative of the United States. It faced the Soviets to the north and two Soviet clients, Syria and Iraq, to the south. Israel drew Syria away from Turkey. But this strategic logic dissolved in 1991 with the fall of the Soviet Union. By then, the union had fragmented. Russian power withdrew from the southern Caucasus and Balkans and uprisings in the northern Caucasus tied the Russian military down. Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan gained independence. Ukraine also became independent, making the status of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea unclear. For the first time since the early years of the Soviet Union, Turkey was freed from its fear of Russia. The defining element of Turkish foreign policy was gone, and with it, Turkish dependence on the United States.
The Post-Soviet Shift
It took a while for the Turks and Americans to recognize the shift. Strategic relationships tend to stay in place, as much from inertia as intention, after the strategic environment that formed them disappears; it often takes a new strategic reality to disturb them. Thus, Turkey's relationship with the United States remained intact for a time. Its ongoing attempts to enter the European Union continued. Its relationship with Israel remained intact even after the American rationale for sponsoring Turkish-Israeli strategic ties had diminished.
It is much easier to forge a strategic policy in the face of a clear threat than in the face of an undefined set of opportunities. For Turkey, opportunities were becoming increasingly prevalent, but defining how to take advantage of them posed a challenge. For Turkey, the key breakpoint with the past was 2003 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. From Turkey's point of view, the invasion was unnecessary, threatened to empower Iran, and posed domestic political challenges. For the first time since World War II, the Turks not only refused to participate in an American initiative, they also prevented the Americans from using Turkish territory to launch the invasion.
Turkey had encountered a situation where its relationship with the United States proved more dangerous than the threat an alliance with the United States was meant to stave off. And this proved the turning point in post-Soviet Turkish foreign policy. Once Turkey decided not to collaborate with the United States -- its core principle for decades -- its foreign policy could never be the same. Defying the United States did not cause the sky to fall. In fact, as the war in Iraq proceeded, the Turks could view themselves as wiser than the Americans on this subject and the Americans had difficulty arguing back.
That left the Turks free to consider other relationships. One obvious option was joining with Europe, the leading powers of which also opposed the American invasion. That commonality, however, did not suffice to win Turkey EU membership. A host of reasons, from fear of massive Turkish immigration to Greek hostility, blocked Turkey's membership bid. Membership in the European Union was not seen in terms of foreign policy alone; rather, for secularists it symbolized the idea of Turkey as a European country committed to European values. But the decision on membership was not Turkey's to make. Ultimately, the European decision to essentially block Turkey's membership left Turkey with a more dynamic economy than most of Europe and without liability for Greece's debt.
The failure to integrate with Europe and the transformation of ties with the United States from an indispensible relationship to a negotiable (albeit desirable) one finally forced Turkey to create a post-Cold War strategy. That strategy grew out of three facts. First, Turkey faced no immediate existential threat, and even secondary threats were manageable. Second, Turkey was developing rapidly economically and had the most powerful military in its region. And third, Turkey was surrounded by increasingly unstable and dangerous neighbors. Iraq and Syria were both unstable. Iran was increasingly assertive, and a war between Iran and Israel and/or the United States remained a possibility. The Caucasus region was quiet, but the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and ongoing tensions between Azerbaijan and Armenia were still significant factors. The Balkans had quieted down after the Kosovo war, but the region remained underdeveloped and potentially unstable. In the past year, North Africa became unstable, Russia became more assertive and the United States began appearing more distant and unpredictable.
Three processes define Turkey's strategy. The first is its rise in relative power. In a region of destabilizing powers, Turkey's relative strength is increasing, which provides Ankara with new options. The second is the possible dangers posed to Turkish interests by the destabilization, which draws Turkey outward, as Ankara seeks ways to manage the instability. The third is the reality that the United States is in the process of redefining its role in the region following the Iraq War and no longer is a stable, predictable force.
The Transitional Stage
Turkey is emerging as a great power. It has not yet become one for a host of reasons, including limited institutions for managing regional affairs, a political base that is not yet prepared to view Turkey as a major power or support regional interventions, and a region that is not yet prepared to view Turkey as a beneficial, stabilizing force. Many steps are required for any power to emerge as a dominant regional force. Turkey is only beginning to take those steps.
At present, Turkish strategy is in a transitional stage. It is no longer locked into its Cold War posture as simply part of an alliance system, nor has it built the foundation of a mature regional policy. It cannot control the region and it cannot simply ignore what is happening. The Syrian case is instructive. Syria is Turkey's neighbor, and instability in Syria can affect Turkey. There is no international coalition prepared to take steps to stabilize Syria. Therefore Ankara has taken a stance in which it refrains from overt action, but keeps its options open should matters become intolerable to Turkey.
When we consider the Turkish periphery as a whole, we see this transitional foreign policy at work, whether in Iraq or in the Caucasus. With Iran, it avoids simply being part of the American coalition while refusing simply to champion the Iranian position. Turkey has not created a regional balance of power, as a mature regional power would. Rather, it has created a Turkish balance of power in the sense that Turkish power is balanced between subordination to the United States and autonomous assertiveness. This period of balancing for an emerging power is predictable; the United States went through a similar phase between 1900 and World War I.
Turkey obviously has two main domestic issues to address as it moves forward. We say "as it moves forward" because no nation ever solves all of its domestic problems before it assumes a greater international role. One is the ongoing tension between the secular and religious elements in its society. This is both a domestic tension and an occasional foreign policy issue, particularly in the context of radical Islamists, where every sign of Islamic religiosity can alarm non-Islamic powers and change their behavior toward Turkey. The other is the Kurdish problem in Turkey, as manifested by the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militant group.
The first problem is endemic in most societies these days; it defines American politics as well. It is something nations live with. The PKK problem, however, is unique. The Kurdish issue intersects with regional issues. For example, the question of Iraq's future involves the extent of autonomy enjoyed by Iraq's Kurdish region, which could have an effect on Turkish Kurds. But the major problem for Turkey is that so long as the Kurdish issue persists, foreign powers opposed to Turkey's rise will see the Kurds as a Turkish weakness and could see covert interventions into the Kurdish regions as an opportunity to undermine Turkish power.
Turkey is already wary of Syrian and Iranian efforts to constrain Turkey through Kurdish militancy. The more powerful Turkey gets, the more uncomfortable at least some in the region will become, and this actually increases Turkey's vulnerability to outside intervention. Therefore Turkey must address the Kurdish issue, since regional unrest and separatism fueled by outside enemies could undermine Turkey's power and reverse its current trend toward becoming a great power.
There is a paradox, which is that the more powerful a nation becomes, the more vulnerable it might be. The United States was undoubtedly safer between the Civil War and its intervention in World War I than any time since. So, too, Turkey was likely safer between 1991 and today than it will be when it becomes a great power. At the same time, it is unsafe to be simply a junior ally to a global power given to taking risks with other countries.
The idea of safety among nations in the long run is illusory. It doesn't last. Turkey's current strategy is to make it last as long as possible. This means allowing events around it to take their course on the reasonable assumption that at present, the outcome of these events doesn't threaten Turkey as much as Turkish intervention would. But as we have said, this is a transitional policy. The instability to its south, the rise of an Iranian sphere of influence, a deepening of Russian influence in the Caucasus and the likelihood that at some point the United States might change its Middle East policy again and try to draw Turkey into its coalition -- all of these argue against the transitional becoming permanent.
Turkey is interesting precisely because it is a place to study the transition of a minor country into a great power. Great powers are less interesting because their behavior is generally predictable. But managing a transition to power is enormously more difficult than exercising power. Transitional power is keeping your balance when the world around you is in chaos, and the ground beneath you keeps slipping away.
The stresses this places on a society and a government are enormous. It brings out every weakness and tests every strength. And for Turkey, it will be a while before the transition will lead to a stable platform of power.
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http://pjmedia.com/barryrubin/2012/06/07/this-week-turkey-went-a-long-way-toward-becoming-an-islamic-republic/
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Turkeys chances of staying a secular state are now close to zero - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-16447625
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Turkey's Cautious Approach to Syria
August 7, 2012 | 1100 GMT
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SAFIN HAMED/AFP/GettyImages
Kurdistan Regional Government President Massoud Barzani (R) with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu in Arbil on Aug. 1
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu met with the president of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, Massoud Barzani, in northern Iraq on Aug. 1. Their meeting was one of many diplomatic meetings and visits in the wider region regarding the conflict in Syria. Much attention is focused on Turkey in anticipation of a transition in Syria. But so far, Ankara has resisted pressure to expand its involvement in the Syrian conflict. Facing a litany of risks domestically and regionally, Turkey has pursued a pragmatic and cautious foreign policy, working with proxies and resisting pressure for direct military involvement. Although this strategy makes sense given the pressures and limits Turkey is facing, the many groups and governments across the region whose expectations of Turkey have grown in recent years will be disappointed.
Analysis
Turkey is on the cusp of becoming a regional power. The Syrian crisis has created an opening for Ankara to expand its influence into Syria and perhaps even into Iraq, both at Iran's expense.
.Last week, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and U.S. President Barack Obama discussed ways to accelerate the removal of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. Ankara has hinted that it would be willing to insert forces in Syria to create a buffer zone, ostensibly to help refugees fleeing regime forces. But Turkey has said it will do so only with help from the international community, in this case from NATO. Ankara even turned to NATO when Syria shot down a Turkish reconnaissance plane in late June. However, NATO has had no appetite for military intervention in Syria.
Despite its trepidations, Turkey already has played an active role in the Syrian crisis. It has supported Syrian rebels since the start of the conflict and has served as the main sanctuary and hub outside the conflict zone for the rebel Free Syrian Army. Turkey has denied supplying weapons, however. It also reportedly has opened a logistical and operations hub in cooperation with Saudi Arabia and Qatar in the southeastern Turkish city of Adana.
Obstacles to Direct Involvement
Turkey has held back on direct involvement, which would be risky on several fronts. Turkey cannot go into northern Syria against the Kurds without getting bogged down in the larger Syrian conflict. Rather than move against separatist Syrian Kurds, Ankara has relied on Barzani in northern Iraq. Ankara also is leaning heavily on its main ally on the Syrian National Council, Abdulbaset Sieda, to reach out to fellow Syrian Kurds to rein in Turkey's own militant Kurdistan Workers' Party, known by the Kurdish acronym PKK.
Military intervention would also likely provoke the Iranians, who are desperate to salvage their influence in Damascus. Tehran has issued vague threats of repercussions should Turkey intervene more formally in Syria. Were Turkey to intervene, it could find itself in conflict with Iran's allies in the Levant in addition to battling Syria's Kurds and jihadist elements.
And intervention is widely unpopular in Turkey. The Turkish media have portrayed any intervention as doing the United States' bidding, something of which the government certainly does not want to be accused. Opposition groups, from the smaller ultranationalist to the main opposition party to the pro-Kurdish party, already are trying to exploit the ruling Justice and Development Party's handling of Syria in general and the Kurdish issue in particular. Indeed, opposition reports and rumors in Turkey suggest Davutoglu will soon be replaced as foreign minister because of his handling of the Syrian situation.
Economic questions also demand a cautious approach. The ruling party does not want to risk involvement in an unpopular conflict when potential economic problems could already threaten the ruling party.
Finally, a leadership transition is under way in the ruling party as it seeks to position itself for an attempt to change the Turkish political system from a parliamentary to a presidential or semi-presidential one. Maintaining the party's domestic popularity is key to both efforts.
However, Turkey's ruling party may be prepping its domestic constituencies for expanded involvement. Turkey has seen a steady stream of news reports on the threat posed by separatist Syrian Kurds and on their relationship with the PKK. While regional attention has been focused on military activities in Syria, Ankara has been embroiled in a hard-fought campaign in Turkey's southeastern province of Hakkari on its border with Iran and Iraq. This past weekend, eight soldiers and more than 100 militants died and at least 1,000 villagers evacuated the province.
Still, Ankara may not be confident that the military would be on board with an intervention in Syria. Moreover, it does not want to put the armed forces in the lead over so controversial a subject. After all, the Justice and Development Party has spent the last decade reducing the role of the Turkish military in domestic affairs.
The Price of Caution
Though Turkey has slowly increased its visibility and role in the Middle East in recent years as it transitions to becoming a regional power, it is not yet able to shape or control events in the region. Instead, it has sought small and strategic relationships with regional players, both governments and smaller, non-state actors.
It may be keeping its options open while it watches Syria's other stakeholders jockey for position, namely Iran, Russia, the United States, France, Qatar, Israel, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia -- a country Turkey does not want a break with but does not want to see emerge as the main beneficiary of the Syrian collapse. (Riyadh is involved in a hostile rivalry with Tehran and has been backing rebels and jihadist groups in the Syrian rebellion.)
But Turkey's strategic pragmatism will come with a cost. High regional expectations of Turkish leadership would go unfulfilled. Thus, Turkey's relationships will not grow and its influence will not expand, at least in the near term. Although Turkey has ample reason to play it safe, it risks appearing overly meek -- hampering its ability to build relationships around the region and potentially benefiting its rivals, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
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Read more: Turkey's Cautious Approach to Syria | Stratfor
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Turkey's Kurdish Calculus
Ankara re-embraces its old allies in Washington, at the expense of Tehran and Damascus..
By SONER CAGAPTAY
The Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, has made a bloody comeback in Turkey. According to a recent report by the International Crisis Group, PKK-related violence has killed some 700 people since the summer of 2011. This deadly toll recalls the horrors of the 1990s, when thousands of civilians were killed in PKK terror attacks and a brutal war in eastern Turkey between the government and Kurdish militants.
The resurgence of PKK violence is no accident. It is directly related to Turkey's defiant posture in support of the Syrian uprising and against the Assad regime and its patrons in Iran. The upside for the West is that Ankara is starting to re-embrace its old friends in Washington.
The breakdown in Turkish-Syrian ties began in the summer of 2011. Since then, Damascus has once again allowed the PKK to operate in Syria. Meanwhile, to punish Ankara for its Syria policy, Iran's leaders have made peace with the Kurdish rebels they had been fighting, letting the PKK focus its energy against Turkey.
This was not Ankara's plan. When the Syrian uprising began in spring 2011, Turkish leaders initially encouraged Bashar Assad's regime to reform. In August 2011, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu spent six hours in Damascus asking Assad to stop killing civilians.
The Syrian tyrant not only disregarded Turkey's pleas; he also sent tanks into Hama hours after Mr. Davutoglu left the capital. Thereafter, Ankara broke from Assad and began calling for his ouster. Turkey began providing safe haven to Syrian opposition groups, and media reports have even indicated that Ankara has been arming the Syrian rebels.
Assad responded by letting the PKK operate in Syria after keeping a lid on the group for more than a decade. In 1998, Assad's father had cracked down on the longtime presence of Kurdish militants in Syria, after Turkey threatened to invade if Syria continued to harbor the PKK. This spring, Assad allowed the PKK to move some 2,000 militants into Syria from their mountain enclave in northern Iraq. Assad, in effect, signaled to Ankara: "Help my enemy, and I will help yours."
The Iranian regime has spoken in similar tones. In September 2011, immediately after Ankara started to confront the Assad regime, Tehran reconciled with the PKK's Iranian franchise, the Party for Freedom and Life in Kurdistan. Tehran had been fighting its Kurdish rebels since 2003, as part of a strategy to take advantage of the rift between Turkey and the U.S. at the onset of the Iraq War. By helping Turkey defeat Kurdish militias, Iran had hoped to win Ankara's favor at the expense of its own archenemy: Washington. But Iran flipped this posture last year, and by making peace Kurdish militants, it gave the PKK freedom to target Turkey.
The new stance on the PKK could not have worked so well against Turkey had the Syrian uprising not excited Kurds across the Middle East, including in Turkey. As Syrian rebels eroded the regime's power in northern Syria this summer, Kurds started taking control of cities there, just across the border with Turkey.
Encouraged by this development, the PKK has tried to wrest control of Turkish towns, targeting especially vulnerable spots in the country's rugged and isolated southernmost Hakkari province, which borders Iraq and Iran. Although the PKK has not yet secured any territory, the battle for Hakkari has caused hundreds of casualties over recent months.
Iran appears to be complicit in this new PKK assault, at least in part. Last month Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc told reporters that the government had "received information that [PKK] terrorists infiltrated from the Iranian side of the border" before launching a massive assault on the town of Semdinli in Hakkari. Tehran denies this.
Rejuvenated by its welcome in Syria and Iran, and also by Ankara's stunted "Kurdish Opening"—an aborted effort in 2009 that had aimed to improve Kurds' rights in Turkey—the PKK is now spreading tension beyond the Kurdish-majority areas of southeastern Turkey. On Aug. 20, the group killed nine people with a car bomb in Gaziantep, a prosperous and mixed Turkish-Kurdish city that had been spared from PKK violence. Once again, the Syrian-Iranian axis cast its shadow over the assault: Turkish officials alleged Syrian complicity in the Gaziantep attack, and when Iranian nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili met with Turkey's prime minister in Istanbul on Sept. 18, he was also reportedly admonished.
Ankara's Middle East policy rests on one basic premise: that anyone who supports the PKK is Turkey's enemy. It follows that Ankara has a problem with Damascus until Assad falls, and a long-term problem with Tehran even after Assad falls.
Accordingly, these shifting stones in the Middle East are also bringing Ankara closer to its longtime ally the U.S. Turkey has agreed to host NATO's missile-defense system, which aims to protect members of the Western alliance from Iranian and other nuclear threats.
After weeks of attacks and riots against their embassies elsewhere in the Middle East, Americans may well be wondering if the Arab Spring has had any positive consequences at all for the U.S. The severing of Turkish-Iranian ties, at least, can count as one.
Mr. Cagaptay is a Beyer Family Fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/movies/in-turkey-ottoman-nostalgia-returns.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121030
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Life Deteriorating for Turkish Women
Wed, December 12, 2012
by:
Abigail R. Esman
Secular and religious Turkish women took to the streets to protest against Prme Minister Erdogan, who sparked outrage when he delivered two fiery speeches attacking abortion and Caesarean births as "secret" plots designed to stall Turkey's economic growth in May 2012. (Photo: Reuters)At a casual café in Istanbul, a woman in her twenties sits and stares morosely at her plate, stirring her food absently with her fork. Her four-year-old son reaches out and starts to scramble across the table towards her; annoyed, she scolds him and pushes him back into his seat. Her husband, dark and swarthy, goes right on eating.
She is small, this woman, though growing plump. She wears no makeup; and on this street, the Istiklal Caddesi, where other Turkish girls sway their hips and saunter in micro-miniskirts and counterfeit Louboutins, her only form of adornment isn’t really adornment at all: A plain tan scarf splashed with dark brown and salmon-colored flowers, a hijab she wears not for fashion, but for piety.
One sees more and more of these women lately in Istanbul. They are part of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “new religious generation,” an active force in a movement that is turning Turkey, secularized nearly 100 years ago by Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic,Turkish women in a cafe in Istanbul, 2007. The situation of women in Turkey has deteriorated as the Islamists have gained more power. further and further from the West and more towards its Islamic – even Islamist – neighbors in the Middle East. It is a movement that can have profound consequences for the West – Turkey is, after all, a full member of NATO – as much as for the Turks themselves.
But right now, nobody is feeling it more than Turkish women.
This country, split between East and West, and for the past century a bridge between them, is now feeling a profound split from within, as religious groups gain power over the secular elite that has long held the country’s reins. “Young people are becoming more religious,” a friend tells me – significant when you consider that the majority of Turks are under the age of 30.
The effect this is having on women is two-fold. For the religious, it signals a return to patriarchal lifestyles: Not only are they willing to accept arranged marriages for themselves, but they insist on the same fate for their daughters. Few enter the workforce, reflecting the government’s increasing emphasis on family and the Prime Minister’s view, explicitly put forth in a This popular Turkish women's fashion magazine created a stir last year when it promoted a woman in a hijab on its cover for the first time.speech on International Women’s Day 2008, in which he called on his “dear sisters” to produce “at least” three children --- and preferably more. Two years later, he went even further: “I don’t believe in equality between men and women,” he said.
These changes have an even more profound effect on less religious women, the ones who prefer to marry for love, to work outside the home, to live a Western, secularized life. As Turkish men become more conservative – and younger, conservative men mature -- they are less willing to accept these kinds of behaviors in their wives and sisters, their nieces and their daughters – and the numbers show it.
Domestic and “honor” violence statistics have soared since Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came into power in 2003; recent studies show a nearly 15- fold increase reported in honor killings between 2002 and 2009. (It is also well worth noting that, while UN figures show the number of honor killings globally at 5,000 per year, a Christian Science Monitor report cited nearly 1,000 in Turkey alone for the first seven months of 2009 – which, if true, tells a lot about both Turkey and the real rate of honor killings worldwide. However, other reports put the number of honor murders at a high of 160 in 2011.
None of these figures, however, include statistics for Turkey’s latest trend, known as “honor suicide” – when a woman (or girl) chooses to end her own life rather than wait for her family to do it for her, or to endure a life of misery with a man her family has forced her to wed. (Honor suicides have also been reported among young gay Turkish men.) True ciphers for this trend are hard to come by, however, as more and more honor killings are being declared “suicides” in family-kept conspiracies aimed at keeping the murderers out of prison.
Other women simply succumb. In one unspeakable story, the family of an 18-year-old girl locked her in a room with the man they’d chosen for her husband -- and encouraged him to rapePromotion for the film "Voices Unveiled: Turkish Women Who Dare" shown in New York in 2010.The film addresses the obstacles and challenges women in Turkey face that prevent them from reaching their potential. her. If they had sex, the reasoning went, she would be forced to marry him for “honor.” Instead, she escaped, and both the family and the groom-to-be were arrested, though the family later released. The young woman, known only by her initials – O.A. -- subsequently recanted, and the couple married in September. One can only assume it was a marriage made in fear, and not in love.
But sexual molestation – family sanctioned and otherwise – is commonplace. Human Rights Watch cites a May, 2011 study that puts the number of Turkish women who have experienced “physical or sexual violence inflicted by a relative at some point in their lives” at a staggering 42 percent—reflecting the UN Development’s ranking of the country at number 83 on its Gender Inequality index – lower than Iran. (The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index for 2011 listed Turkey at number 122 out of 135 countries).
Is it any wonder the hijabed woman in the Istiklal Caddesi café looked so defeated?
In fairness, honor killings long predate the arrival of Erdogan and his Islamizing efforts, and so arguably the spike in numbers of reported incidents reflects not a rise in the incidence of such murders but rather, a growing awareness of them and willingness of women themselves to seek help. (Interestingly, of the 12 honor killings reported annually in the Muslim community in Holland, the majority take place in Turkish homes, even as it is the Moroccan immigrants who tend to be more inclined to radicalize.)
Supporters of the current government will argue that Erdogan has put into place several measures defending women against domestic abuse: New programs train women to combat violence with physical force, and judges are now permitted to impose restraining orders against non-spousal abusers (fiancés, brothers, boyfriends and so on).
But from all indications, this has hardly helped. Police usually send women back to their families, however bloodcurdling their abuse, however desperate the threat may be to their lives. Despite a law “recommending” women’s shelters for communities larger than 50,000, according to the Christian Science Monitor, “few have paid attention to the vaguely worded, noncompulsory legislation, and so far only 65 are operating, compared to the 1,400 that would exist with proper implementation.” The truth is, a government eager to be viewed as a friend to Iran – in part a the backlash against the EU’s continued rebukes – is not likely to step up to the plate for women’s rights.
Which is also likely why Human Rights Watch reports that “illiteracy figures released by the government show great disparities between men and women: 3.8 million of the 4.7 million people who are illiterate [in Turkey] are women.” Not coincidentally, they are also conservative Muslims (or the daughters and wives of conservative Muslims), trapped in homes ruled often by tribal and barbaric customs of misogyny and violence – in short, Salafist interpretations of the Koran.
They are women without hope.
But rather than work to educate these women, or to establish a culture that promotes their equality and freedom, the government’s primary emphasis is being placed on those things that create and perpetuate the violence in the first place: The building of a more conservative Muslim society that keeps women at home, supports a more pious lifestyle, and discourages women – and others – from pursuing their independence.
Turkish pianist Fazel SayThis, after all, is the government that has also imprisoned hundreds of journalists on trumped-up charges, and is now prosecuting pianist Fazel Say for “insulting Islam” in his Twitter feed.
Evidently, despite its name -- the Justice and Development Party – Turkey’s ruling politicians have a long way to go before they begin understanding what justice truly is. And until that time, the despicable abuse and the cowardly, heartless killing of Turkish women will go on.
Abigail R. Esman, an award-winning writer based in New York and the Netherlands, is the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West
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http://www.radicalislam.org/analysis/turkey-endorses-iranian-nuke-no-one-notices/#fm
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/6/trading-europe-for-the-shanghai-five/
Recent steps taken by the government of Turkey suggest it may be ready to ditch the NATO club of democracies for a Russian and Chinese gang of authoritarian states.
Here is the evidence:
Starting in 2007, Ankara applied three times, unsuccessfully, to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (informally known as the Shanghai Five). Founded in 1996 by the Russian and Chinese governments, along with three former Soviet Central Asian states (a fourth was added in 2001), the SCO has received little attention in the West, although it has grand security and other aspirations, including the possible creation of a gas cartel. More, it offers an alternative to the Western model, from NATO to democracy to the U.S. dollar as reserve currency. After being rejected for membership on the third try, Ankara applied for “Dialogue Partner” status in 2011. In June 2012, it won approval.
One month later, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reported that he had said to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, “Come, accept us into the Shanghai Five [as a full member] and we will reconsider the European Union.” Mr. Erdogan reiterated this idea on Jan. 25, noting stalled Turkish efforts to join the European Union: “As the prime minister of 75 million people,” he explained, “you start looking around for alternatives. That is why I told Mr. Putin the other day, ‘Take us into the Shanghai Five; do it, and we will say goodbye to the EU.’ What’s the point of stalling?” He added that the Shanghai Cooperation Organization “is much better, it is much more powerful [than the EU], and we share values with its members.”
On Jan. 31, the Foreign Ministry announced plans for an upgrade to “Observer State” at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. On Feb. 3, Mr. Erdogan reiterated his earlier point, saying, “We will search for alternatives,” and praised the Shanghai group’s “democratization process” while disparaging European “Islamophobia.” On Feb. 4, President Abdullah Gul pushed back, declaring, “The SCO is not an alternative to the EU. … Turkey wants to adopt and implement EU criteria.”
What does this all amount to?
The SCO feint faces significant obstacles: While Ankara leads the effort to overthrow Bashar Assad, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization firmly supports the beleaguered Syrian leader. NATO troops have just arrived in Turkey to staff Patriot batteries protecting that country from Syria’s Russian-made missiles. More profoundly, all six SCO members strongly oppose the Islamism that Mr. Erdogan espouses. Perhaps, therefore, Mr. Erdogan mentioned SCO membership only to pressure the European Union or to offer symbolic rhetoric for his supporters.
Both are possible. I take the half-year-long flirtation seriously for three reasons. First, Mr. Erdogan has established a record of straight talk, leading one key columnist, Sedat Ergin, to call the Jan. 25 statement perhaps his “most important” foreign policy proclamation ever.
Second, as Turkish columnist Kadri Gursel points out, “The EU criteria demand democracy, human rights, union rights, minority rights, gender equality, equitable distribution of income, participation and pluralism for Turkey. SCO as a union of countries ruled by dictators and autocrats will not demand any of those criteria for joining.” Unlike the European Union, Shanghai members will not press Mr. Erdogan to liberalize, but will encourage the dictatorial tendencies in him that so many Turks already fear.
Third, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization fits his Islamist impulse to defy the West and to dream of an alternative to it. The SCO, with Russian and Chinese as official languages, has a deeply anti-Western DNA, and its meetings bristle with anti-Western sentiments. For example, when Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the group in 2011, no one contradicted his conspiracy theory that Sept. 11 was a U.S. government inside job used “as an excuse for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and for killing and wounding over a million people.” Many backers echo Egyptian analyst Galal Nassar in his hope that ultimately the Shanghai Cooperation Organization “will have a chance of settling the international contest in its favor.” Conversely, as a Japanese official has noted, “The SCO is becoming a rival bloc to the U.S. alliance. It does not share our values.”
Turkish steps toward joining the Shanghai group highlight Ankara’s now-ambivalent membership in NATO, starkly symbolized by the unprecedented joint Turkish-Chinese air exercise of 2010. Given this reality, Mr. Erdogan’s Turkey is no longer a trustworthy partner for the West, but more like a mole in its inner sanctum. If not expelled, it should at least be suspended from NATO.
Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org) is president of the Middle East Forum
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/feb/6/trading-europe-for-the-shanghai-five/#ixzz2K85KoawW
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Summary
The recent thaw in tensions between Israel and Turkey will have little impact on the countries' long-term relationship. Though Israel and Turkey have certain common interests, the Turkish government in Ankara can be expected to maintain distance from Israel while attempting to exert influence in the surrounding region. Turkey will use its acceptance of the U.S.-brokered apology by Israel on March 22 over the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010 to try to secure stronger U.S. backing for its policies in the region. The United States, meanwhile, will continue to be selective in its involvement in the Middle East. Washington's recent diplomatic feat in Israel was intended to expand U.S. options, both by opening a door for greater coordination with Turkey and by reasserting U.S. primacy in its relationship with Israel.
Analysis
U.S. President Barack Obama's success in pressuring Israel to apologize may have appeared rushed and lacking in diplomatic fanfare, but it illustrated how the United States intends to manage the increasingly volatile region. For example, U.S. restraint in Syria has shown that Washington intends to involve itself less directly in the Middle East, to whatever extent this is possible, in order to focus more on other parts of the world. This strategy requires the United States to strengthen like-minded countries such as Turkey to maintain a balance of power in the region and reduce the need for a costly intervention.
The openly hostile relationship between Turkey and Israel has made it difficult politically for the White House to advance its relationship with Ankara without appearing to sacrifice the interests of its long-time ally. But Obama also needed to assert control over the U.S. relationship with Israel, which tried to force the United States into action on Iran by threatening to unilaterally strike the country and by using its relationships in the U.S. Congress to pressure the president. Any attempt by Israel to act unilaterally against Iran would face severe constraints, but the United States still needs to limit the possibility of getting pulled into a conflict it would rather avoid. Obama carefully appealed to Israeli concerns while in the country, but his ability to push Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into issuing an apology toward the end of the visit offered a tangible demonstration of U.S. dominance over Israeli foreign policy.
Turkey's Interests
Ever since Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan harshly criticized Israel at the World Economic Forum in 2009, Ankara has tried to use its confrontational stance toward Israel to build credibility in the Muslim world. But this strategy has limits: While Turkey may have gained favor among its neighbors, Ankara's ability to affect Israeli action has diminished. This reality was starkly on display during Israel's Pillar of Cloud operation in the Gaza Strip in late 2012. While Egypt demonstrated its ability to influence the behavior of both Israel and Hamas by negotiating and enforcing a cease-fire, Turkey appeared powerless to do much in spite of its mediation efforts.
VIDEO: Turkey's Geographic Challenge
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Turkey quibbled over the exact phrasing of the March 22 Israeli concession to ensure it was termed an "apology" rather than an "expression of regret." It did this because eliciting an apology from Israel, whose willingness to take unilateral action is strongly resented across the region, carries enormous symbolic value. The diplomatic victory came at a critical political juncture for Erdogan: The Turkish prime minister is trying to combat the growing perception that Ankara is impotent in foreign affairs while also attempting to negotiate a cease-fire with Kurdish militants and rewrite Turkey's constitution. Factions from across the Turkish political spectrum have praised the ruling party for securing the Israeli apology, eagerly heralding the move as a restoration of Turkish confidence in the region. Erdogan will use this newfound political capital as he pursues thornier domestic issues in the months ahead.
Turkey also hopes to use warmer relations with Israel to strengthen ties with the United States. Without U.S. backing, Turkey -- still early in its resurgence as a regional power -- has struggled to exert influence in the Middle East and achieve tangible results and is looking to Washington to reinforce its positions throughout the region. In Syria, Turkey has been pushing for stronger U.S. support for Sunni rebels. In Iraq, Turkey needs U.S. political backing to counter Iran more effectively and to strengthen energy ties with the Kurdistan Regional Government. In the Caucasus, Turkey wants greater U.S. involvement in Georgia and Azerbaijan to balance out Russia's growing influence. Though the United States is unlikely to become as involved in such areas as Turkey hopes, easing tensions with Israel could help facilitate a U.S.-Turkish strategic dialogue on many of these issues.
Turkey also had energy politics in mind when it considered restoring a working relationship with Israel. Over the past couple years, Ankara has watched in frustration as Israel and Cyprus attracted foreign investors to develop the countries' offshore natural gas reserves. To compensate for its soured ties with Turkey, Israel had aligned more closely with Greece and Cyprus, leaving Ankara on the sidelines of energy development in the eastern Mediterranean. Turkish officials have talked openly about Ankara's interest in developing an undersea pipeline with Israel to link the country to the European market -- a project that would involve a multitude of political and technical complications. For its part, Israel wants to use its energy assets to reinforce strategic political relationships in the region. But part of what Turkey hopes to achieve by establishing a working relationship with Israel is to undermine the Israeli-Cypriot energy partnership and deter further cooperation between Israel and Greece in what Ankara considers its geopolitical domain.
While Turkey may have mended ties with Israel, at least on the surface, Ankara will remain somewhat distant. For example, Turkey issued only a restrained response to Netanyahu's apology, and Erdogan said on March 25 that ties cannot be fully normalized until Israel lifts its blockade of Gaza. Turkey's goal is to reinforce its credibility as a regional alternative to the United States -- one capable of dealing effectively with Israel while retaining popular support both at home and in the near abroad.
In light of the supposed Israeli-Turkish reconciliation, the United States may hope to elicit stronger cooperation from Turkey against Iran, but Ankara will still need to exercise caution in how it deals with Tehran. Turkey has carefully balanced its competition with Iran in Syria and Iraq by cooperating with Tehran in other areas, such as helping the Iranian regime circumvent U.S. sanctions. Iran remains a significant supplier of natural gas to Turkey, and the robust trade links between the two countries have helped keep the geopolitical rivalry from escalating. Moreover, the prospect of closer coordination among Turkey, Israel and the United States against Iran -- while Ankara is trying to maintain a delicate truce with militants from the Kurdish Workers' Party -- could spur threats or attempts by the Iranian and Syrian regimes to facilitate Kurdish attacks. Turkey's sensitivity to Kurdish militancy and Iran's ability to exploit this concern will affect the degree of Ankara's cooperation with Jerusalem and Washington against Tehran.
Israel's Lack of Options
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Israel is facing the uncomfortable reality that the strategic foundation that has defined the U.S.-Israeli relationship since 1973 has weakened considerably. During the Cold War, Israel was an integral part of the U.S. strategy to balance Soviet-backed Egypt and Syria. Today, Israel can do little to substantially affect the conflicts happening near its borders. The violent fragmentation of Syria and Lebanon in the northern Levant is among the most urgent drivers of Israel's need to re-establish a working relationship with Turkey -- an impetus expressed by Netanyahu himself in a statement on March 23. And while Israeli leaders also frequently emphasize the urgency of the Iranian nuclear situation, Israel's inability to carry out a unilateral military strike against Iran and handle the political and military consequences of such an operation without the United States means it cannot detach itself from U.S. policy in the region.
If Israel cannot afford to alienate the United States while the Middle East is destabilizing, then it also cannot avoid Turkey. Ankara still faces substantial barriers to its influence in the Arab world, but it has succeeded in cultivating ties throughout the region, particularly among Islamist groups whose relevance has been growing at the expense of regimes relied upon by Israel for decades to maintain a regional balance of power. Moreover, despite Turkey's limitations, Washington sees strengthening relations with Ankara as a strategic way to influence the region, while the U.S. relationship with Israel is a liability toward this end. Therefore, Israel needs Turkey far more than Turkey needs Israel in order to maintain its relationship with the United States.
The subordination of Israeli policy to U.S. interests is not easily acknowledged, but it was arguably the most important result of Obama's trip to the region. The United States now has a much lower tolerance for Israeli efforts to force policy preferences on Washington. And the more Israel's vulnerabilities grow, the more it will need to rely on the United States to help mitigate threats on its borders. The United States would like to rely more on Turkey to help manage the region, but Washington first needs a closer relationship with Ankara to shape areas of common interest. Though Turkey will place limits on how far it goes in working with Israel, even a diplomatic gesture between these two powers could facilitate the U.S. strategy to manage this volatile region from a distance.
Read more: The U.S. Role in Warming Israeli-Turkish Relations | Stratfor
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The Political Benefits of a Nuclear Deal in Turkey
May 6, 2013 | 1002 GMT
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced May 3 during Abe's visit to Ankara that the Turkish government has selected a Japanese-French consortium to build a nuclear power plant on the Black Sea coast. The deal is still in its preliminary stages, and another costly nuclear deal between Turkey and Russia has seen little progress. Still, the announcement itself has the potential to shape perceptions on the revival of the nuclear power industry after Japan's Fukushima reactor disaster, maintain political relationships and drive investor interest in Turkey.
Analysis
The power plant, which would have a production capacity of 4,500-5,000 megawatts, would be located on the Sinop peninsula on Turkey's northern Black Sea coast. Japan's Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Itochu Corp., along with French utility firm GDF Suez, make up the consortium that beat out China Guangdong Nuclear Power Holding Co. in the final bidding round. The plan calls for the installation of four Atmea-design 1,100-megawatt reactors (a smaller and less expensive version of the third-generation European Pressurized Reactors) jointly developed by French nuclear engineering firm Areva and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The plant would be operated by GDF Suez with a local Turkish partner. No details have been released yet on the distribution of stakes or on a financing plan for the estimated $22 billion project, but a representative of Japan Bank for International Cooperation, a state-owned policy financing institution, was part of the Japanese delegation in Turkey. Turkey would also need to create a nuclear safety regulatory agency to provide building permits. Preliminary estimates aim to start construction in 2017 and begin operations by 2023, should the deal be finalized.
The road from a preliminary nuclear cooperation agreement to an operational nuclear facility is a long and difficult one. The government, engineering and utility firms, regulatory bodies, environmental lobby groups and banks need to sort out critical details, such as an environmentally safe location for the site, the disposal of nuclear waste, operational control over the facility, supply of nuclear fuel, questions over transfer of technology, competition from other energy sources and financing for the multibillion-dollar project. This process takes on average 10-15 years, an extensive investment period during which many things can change. Until the construction crews break ground and the loans are lined up, prospects for a nuclear power plant deal coming to fruition should be treated with caution.
That said, the mere signing of a deal can still yield notable benefits in creating favorable perceptions on nuclear energy and in maintaining strategic political relationships.
A Public Relations Boost for Nuclear Power
Demand for nuclear power took a substantial hit following the Fukushima nuclear crisis in 2011, affecting the bottom line for major nuclear industrial powers like Japan as well as France, which saw a slowdown in its overseas nuclear investments. At the same time, an increasingly competitive natural gas market has influenced countries who are already reticent toward nuclear power. For example, Germany, which has a developing political relationship with Russia and depends on Russia for 40 percent of its natural gas needs, has committed to completely phasing out nuclear power by 2022. At the same time, Central European countries like Hungary and Slovakia are being tempted by Russian offers to build and finance nuclear power plants as Moscow seeks to diversify its energy tools of influence in Europe.
The French nuclear industry -- including major firms Areva and EDF, with the government holding majority shares in both -- has been facing rising political and financial resistance to nuclear power at home and throughout Europe. Nuclear power plant projects involving EDF in Normandy and Areva in Finland are both running behind schedule and over budget. While not uncommon, these delays and risings costs come at a time when EU infrastructure funding is increasingly jeopardized. French industrial powers are therefore looking beyond Europe for business and a fresh vote of confidence. Areva, for example, is building two European Pressurized Reactors for China's Taishan plant and in late April signed a deal with China for a facility to process nuclear fuel. A multibillion-dollar deal in Turkey helps drive the perception that France's nuclear industry is recovering. On another level, nuclear cooperation between France and Turkey could help alleviate the growing strain in political relations between Paris and Ankara over Turkey's political estrangement from the European Union.
For Japan, the Turkish nuclear deal is a major public relations victory. Sinop is the first contract for Japanese companies to export a nuclear power plant since the Fukushima crisis. In the years preceding the disaster, Japan had embarked on a campaign to lock down nuclear cooperation agreements and infrastructure export deals with emerging markets. In addition to renewing existing agreements with Russia and South Korea, Japan signed agreements with Kazakhstan (2007), Indonesia (2007), Vietnam (2008), the United Arab Emirates (2009), Jordan (2009), Italy (2009) and Mongolia (2009). It also held talks with many other states in Southeast and East Asia, the Middle East and Central Europe. But with criticism rising over Fukushima, and the subsequent shutdown of all of its reactors (only two of which have restarted to date), Japan risked losing out in nuclear export deals to competitors.
But Japan was not willing to forgo nuclear technology as a core tenet of its economic strategy. The legislature approved preliminary nuclear agreements with Vietnam and Jordan in December 2011. And with the Liberal Democrats taking power in late 2012 and launching an economic revitalization program, new funds are becoming available to push nuclear exports more aggressively.
Turkey' Seismic Hazard
Japan already has a reputation for superior technology and the ability to provide quality human and technical support in these nuclear deals. The fundamental challenge that Japan faced in seeking the contract was in trying to present the crisis at Fukushima as something other than proof of faults in its engineering and construction. Japan needed to shift the narrative and emphasize the extraordinary circumstances at Fukushima (the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that breached the Daiichi plant's walls), and use them to stress the value of Japanese expertise and experience in coping with such a catastrophic scenario. The Turkish plant in Sinop lies on the Black Sea coast, just off the North Anatolian Fault, where the epicenters of Turkey's biggest earthquakes in recent decades have been located. Erdogan noted specifically that the decision to grant Japan the contract arose from the two countries' shared proneness to earthquakes and Japan's ability to give first-hand advice on security and safety measures. The Turkish decision also paves the way for Japan to pursue nuclear export deals in other emerging markets, especially in the Gulf Cooperation Council states, which can afford nuclear power, are trying to sustain their energy resources for the long term, and are not comfortable with allowing Iran to be the only nuclear power in the Persian Gulf region.
Turkey's Interest in Nuclear Power
Turkey in many ways is an obvious candidate for nuclear power. Turkey is the world's 17th-largest economy by GDP, and though its growth estimates will be tempered by the depressed European market, its industrial development and population of 73 million are rising steadily and are thus driving up electricity consumption. Turkey's lack of domestic resources to match this growing demand has forced it to import more than 90 percent of its energy resources. Beyond a ballooning current account deficit, this also creates major dependencies on energy suppliers like Russia and Iran, with which Turkey has complicated political relationships.
Turkey has been toying with nuclear proposals since 1970, but proposal after proposal has fallen by the wayside due to commercial feasibility issues, lack of demand up until the 1990s, the availability of cheaper energy alternatives and heavy environmental resistance. Most of Turkey is located in seismically active zones, making it difficult for the Turkish government to win the public's confidence in moving ahead with these projects. Under the Justice and Development Party, Turkey has the political continuity and popular support to carry its nuclear plans forward, but it still faces growing constraints in trying to finance these costly projects, especially with Europe in economic decline.
Turkey's Electricity Consumption and Generation
These nuclear deals, while difficult to bring to fruition, still carry political value for Turkey. In 2010, Turkey signed a deal with a Russian-led consortium led by Atomstroyexport and Inter RAO to build a $20 billion 4.8-gigawatt power plant near Turkey's southern coastal town of Akkuyu. This deal to build one of the largest nuclear power facilities in the world is still in the political phase and may well remain there. Though Ankara often expresses its desire to diversify its energy supply away from Russia, this is simply is not a realistic option for Turkey in the foreseeable future. Even if these two latest nuclear projects were implemented, they would only address a fraction of Turkey's electricity demand at an enormous cost. Moreover, the nuclear deal with Russia would not lessen Turkey's dependency on Russia. Russia pursues these deals, much like it is currently doing in Central Europe, with the strategic intent to maintain operational control of the project beyond the construction phase by supplying nuclear fuel and engineers to run the plant. Turkey is likely well-aware of the political conditions that could come attached to this deal, but having it on the table allows Ankara to maintain a careful balancing act with Russia, especially as they both have opposing interests in the Middle East, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Turkey has stated goals to build several nuclear power plants in the next decade, but those goals are probably overly ambitious. The Japanese-French nuclear deal likely has a higher chance of proceeding than the Russian deal, but it is still too early to tell. At the very least, the announcement of the multibillion-dollar energy project drives investor interest in Turkey as the country aims to rapidly develop infrastructure to meet the demands of its growing economy and to commemorate the 2023 centennial of the Turkish Republic. In the face of still-considerable financial and environmental resistance at home, Japan and France will meanwhile try to use this deal to revive interest in nuclear power beyond their borders.
Read more: The Political Benefits of a Nuclear Deal in Turkey | Stratfor
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second post of day
Turkey's Geographical Ambition
May 1, 2013 | 0912 GMT
Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan and Reva Bhalla
At a time when Europe and other parts of the world are governed by forgettable mediocrities, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's prime minister for a decade now, seethes with ambition. Perhaps the only other leader of a major world nation who emanates such a dynamic force field around him is Russia's Vladimir Putin, with whom the West is also supremely uncomfortable.
Erdogan and Putin are ambitious because they are men who unrepentantly grasp geopolitics. Putin knows that any responsible Russian leader ensures that Russia has buffer zones of some sort in places like Eastern Europe and the Caucasus; Erdogan knows that Turkey must become a substantial power in the Near East in order to give him leverage in Europe. Erdogan's problem is that Turkey's geography between East and West contains as many vulnerabilities as it does benefits. This makes Erdogan at times overreach. But there is a historical and geographical logic to his excesses.
The story begins after World War I.
Because Ottoman Turkey was on the losing side of that war (along with Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria), the victorious allies in the Treaty of Sevres of 1920 carved up Turkey and its environs, giving territory and zones of influence to Greece, Armenia, Italy, Britain and France. Turkey's reaction to this humiliation was Kemalism, the philosophy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (the surname "Ataturk" means "Father of the Turks"), the only undefeated Ottoman general, who would lead a military revolt against the new occupying powers and thus create a sovereign Turkish state throughout the Anatolian heartland. Kemalism willingly ceded away the non-Anatolian parts of the Ottoman Empire but compensated by demanding a uniethnic Turkish state within Anatolia itself. Gone were the "Kurds," for example. They would henceforth be known as "Mountain Turks." Gone, in fact, was the entire multicultural edifice of the Ottoman Empire.
Kemalism not only rejected minorities, it rejected the Arabic script of the Turkish language. Ataturk risked higher illiteracy rates to give the language a Latin script. He abolished the Muslim religious courts and discouraged women from wearing the veil and men from wearing fezzes. Ataturk further recast Turks as Europeans (without giving much thought to whether the Europeans would accept them as such), all in an attempt to reorient Turkey away from the now defunct Ottoman Empire in the Middle East and toward Europe.
Kemalism was a call to arms: the martial Turkish reaction to the Treaty of Sevres, to the same degree that Putin's neo-czarism was the authoritarian reaction to Boris Yeltsin's anarchy of 1990s' Russia. For decades the reverence for Ataturk in Turkey went beyond a personality cult: He was more like a stern, benevolent and protective demigod, whose portrait looked down upon every public interior.
The problem was that Ataturk's vision of orienting Turkey so firmly to the West clashed with Turkey's geographic situation, one that straddled both West and East. An adjustment was in order. Turgut Ozal, a religious Turk with Sufi tendencies who was elected prime minister in 1983, provided it.
Ozal's political skill enabled him to gradually wrest control of domestic policy and -- to an impressive degree -- foreign policy away from the staunchly Kemalist Turkish military. Whereas Ataturk and the generations of Turkish officers who followed him thought in terms of a Turkey that was an appendage of Europe, Ozal spoke of a Turkey whose influence stretched from the Aegean to the Great Wall of China. In Ozal's mind, Turkey did not have to choose between East and West. It was geographically enshrined in both and should thus politically embody both worlds. Ozal made Islam publicly respected again in Turkey, even as he enthusiastically supported U.S. President Ronald Reagan during the last phase of the Cold War. By being so pro-American and so adroit in managing the Kemalist establishment, in the West at least Ozal -- more than his predecessors -- was able to get away with being so Islamic.
Ozal used the cultural language of Islam to open the door to an acceptance of the Kurds. Turkey's alienation from Europe following the 1980 military coup d'etat enabled Ozal to develop economic linkages to Turkey's east. He also gradually empowered the devout Muslims of inner Anatolia. Ozal, two decades before Erdogan, saw Turkey as a champion of moderate Islam throughout the Muslim world, defying Ataturk's warning that such a pan-Islamic policy would sap Turkey's strength and expose the Turks to voracious foreign powers. The term neo-Ottomanism was, in fact, first used in the last years of Ozal's rule.
Ozal died abruptly in 1993, ushering in a desultory decade of Turkish politics marked by increasing corruption and ineffectuality on the part of Turkey's sleepy secular elite. The stage was set for Erdogan's Islamic followers to win an outright parliamentary majority in 2002. Whereas Ozal came from the center-right Motherland Party, Erdogan came from the more openly Islamist-trending Justice and Development Party, though Erdogan himself and some of his advisers had moderated their views over the years. Of course, there were many permutations in Islamic political thought and politics in Turkey between Ozal and Erdogan, but one thing stands clear: Both Ozal and Erdogan were like two bookends of the period. In any case, unlike any leader today in Europe or the United States, Erdogan actually had a vision similar to Ozal's, a vision that constituted a further distancing from Kemalism.
Rather than Ataturk's emphasis on the military, Erdogan, like Ozal, has stressed the soft power of cultural and economic connections to recreate in a benign and subtle fashion a version of the Ottoman Empire from North Africa to the Iranian plateau and Central Asia. Remember that in the interpretation of one of the West's greatest scholars of Islam, the late Marshall G. S. Hodgson of the University of Chicago, the Islamic faith was originally a merchants' religion, which united followers from oasis to oasis, allowing for ethical dealing. In Islamic history, authentic religious connections across the Middle East and the Indian Ocean world could -- and did -- lead to wholesome business connections and political patronage. Thus is medievalism altogether relevant to the post-modern world.
Erdogan now realizes that projecting Turkey's moderate Muslim power throughout the Middle East is fraught with frustrating complexities. Indeed, it is unclear that Turkey even has the political and military capacity to actualize such a vision. To wit, Turkey may be trying its best to increase trade with its eastern neighbors, but it still does not come close to Turkey's large trade volumes with Europe, now mired in recession. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, Turkey demands influence based on geographic and linguistic affinity. Yet, Putin's Russia continues to exert significant influence in the Central Asian states and, through its invasion and subsequent political maneuverings in Georgia, has put Azerbaijan in an extremely uncomfortable position. In Mesopotamia, Turkey's influence is simply unequal to that of far more proximate Iran. In Syria, Erdogan and his foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, thought -- incorrectly, it turns out -- that they could effectively mold a moderate Islamist Sunni opposition to replace President Bashar al Assad's Alawite regime. And while Erdogan has gained points throughout the Islamic world for his rousing opposition to Israel, he has learned that this comes at a price: the warming of relations between Israel and both Greece and the Greek part of Cyprus, which now permits Turkey's adversaries in the Eastern Mediterranean to cooperate in the hydrocarbon field.
The root of the problem is partly geographic. Turkey constitutes a bastion of mountains and plateau, inhabiting the half-island of the Anatolian land bridge between the Balkans and the Middle East. It is plainly not integral to a place like Iraq, for example, in the way that Iran is; and its Turkic language no longer enjoys the benefit of the Arabic script, which might give it more cultural leverage elsewhere in the Levant. But most important, Turkey is itself bedeviled by its own Kurdish population, complicating its attempts to exert leverage in neighboring Middle Eastern states.
Turkey's southeast is demographically dominated by ethnic Kurds, who adjoin vast Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The ongoing breakup of Syria potentially liberates Kurds there to join with radical Kurds in Anatolia in order to undermine Turkey. The de facto breakup of Iraq has forced Turkey to follow a policy of constructive containment with Iraq's Kurdish north, but that has undermined Turkey's leverage in the rest of Iraq -- thus, in turn, undermining Turkey's attempts to influence Iran. Turkey wants to influence the Middle East, but the problem is that it remains too much a part of the Middle East to extricate itself from the region's complexities.
Erdogan knows that he must partially solve the Kurdish problem at home in order to gain further leverage in the region. He has even mentioned aloud the Arabic word, vilayet, associated with the Ottoman Empire. This word denotes a semi-autonomous province -- a concept that might hold the key for an accommodation with local Kurds but could well reignite his own nationalist rivals within Turkey. Thus, his is a big symbolic step that seeks to fundamentally neutralize the very foundation of Kemalism (with its emphasis on a solidly Turkic Anatolia). But given how he has already emasculated the Turkish military -- something few thought possible a decade ago -- one should be careful about underestimating Erdogan. His sheer ambition is something to behold. While Western elites ineffectually sneer at Putin, Erdogan enthusiastically takes notes when the two of them meet.
Read more: Turkey's Geographical Ambition | Stratfor
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Summary
The rapid escalation of anti-government protests in Turkey in recent days has exposed a number of long-dormant fault lines in the country's complex political landscape. But even as the appeal of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party (also known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) is beginning to erode, it will remain a powerful force in Turkish politics for some time to come, with its still-significant base of support throughout the country and the lack of a credible political alternative in the next elections.
Analysis
The foundation for the current unrest was laid May 28, when a small group of mostly young environmentalists gathered in Istanbul's Taksim Square for a sit-in to protest a planned demolition of walls, uprooting of trees and the perceived desecration of historical sites in the square's Gezi Park. The initially peaceful demonstration turned violent the night of May 30, when police tried to break up what had grown to more than 100 protesters.
The environmental protesters were joined the next day by high-level representatives of the Justice and Development Party's main opposition, the secular Republican People's Party (known as CHP). The message of the protests soon evolved from saving Gezi Park's trees to condemning Erdogan and his party for a litany of complaints. Anti-government chants included "Down with the dictator," "Tayyip, resign," and "Unite against fascism."
The protests grew rapidly when the weekend began, with more than 10,000 people gathering in Taksim Square on June 1. Many of these made their way to the square from the district of Kadikoy, a Republican People's Party stronghold on the Asian side of Istanbul, by walking across the Bosphorus Bridge banging pots and pans in defiance of laws against pedestrian use of the bridge. Some reportedly threw Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones at police, prompting the use of tear gas and water cannons on the protesters. However, this quickly drew condemnation, leading the government to temporarily withdraw police at the cost of allowing more protesters to gather.
Erdogan's response was defiant. While admitting excessive force by the police and ordering an investigation of the matter, he said that he would not give in to "wild extremists" who belong to an "ideological" as opposed to "environmental" movement and that he would bring out a million supporters from his party for every 100,000 protesters. The same night, riots broke out and some 5,000 protesters threw stones at the prime minister's office in the Besiktas neighborhood in Istanbul.
On the morning of June 2, heavy rains kept protesters away from Taksim Square save for a few dozen who huddled around bonfires. More protesters made their way back to the square in the afternoon while Erdogan made another defiant speech blaming the Republican People's Party for the unrest and vowing to proceed with the development plans. Clashes between police and protesters have resumed, and close to 1,000 people have been detained and dozens injured.
Erdogan's Limits
The size and scope of the protests must be kept in perspective. By the end of June 1, protests had reportedly spread to Izmir, Eskisehir, Mugla, Yalova, Antalya, Bolu, Adana, Ankara, Kayseri and Konya. Many of the areas where protests were reported are also areas where the Republican People's Party would be expected to bring out a large number of supporters. Konya, Kayseri and Ankara, strong sources of support for the Justice and Development Party, were notable exceptions. The largest protests, in Istanbul and Izmir, brought out predominantly young protesters in the tens of thousands. The protests would be highly significant if they grow to the hundreds of thousands, include a wider demographic and geographically extend to areas with traditionally strong support for the ruling party.
The protests so far do not indicate that Erdogan's party is at serious or imminent risk of losing its grip on power, but they do reveal limits to the prime minister's political ambitions. Erdogan is attempting to extract votes from a slow-moving and highly fragile peace process with the Kurdistan Workers' Party to help him get enough support for a constitutional referendum. The referendum would transform Turkey from a parliamentary system to a presidential system and thus enable Erdogan, whose term as prime minister expires in 2015, to continue leading Turkey as president beyond 2014, when presidential elections are scheduled. The sight of protesters from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (known as the BDP) joining Republican People's Party supporters for the June 1 protests does not bode well for Erdogan's plan to rely on those votes in the constitutional referendum. Though the Justice and Development Party, which remains highly popular with Turkey's more conservative populace in the Anatolian interior, so far does not face a credible political contender for the October local elections or 2015 parliamentary elections, Erdogan's political maneuvering to become president will face more resistance.
The ruling party's main secular opposition is alarmed at Erdogan's policies that compromise the core founding principles of the state as defined by Kemal Ataturk. From social measures that ban the sale of alcohol after 10 p.m. to foreign policy measures that have Turkey trying to mold and influence Islamist rebel groups in Syria, these are policies that directly undermine the Ataturkian mandate that Turkey must remain secular and avoid overextending itself beyond the republic's borders. But the growing dissent against the party is not a simple Islamist-secular divide, either. A perception has developed among a growing number of Turks that the party is pursuing an aggressive form of capitalism that defies environmental considerations as well as Islamic values. Within business circles, frustration is building over the number of concessions handed out to Erdogan's closest allies.
Rising Dissent
The polarization of the state could be plainly seen in the reporting of the Gezi Park protests. The protests appear to have emboldened once critical newspapers such as Hurriyet to reassume an anti-ruling party stance unseen in the recent years of Erdogan's media taming. Hurriyet has broadcast Erdogan's "defeat" with headlines such as "Erdogan no longer almighty." On the other end of the political spectrum, the state-funded news agency Anatolia is reporting the protests as a "brawl" between police and firework-throwing youth extremists, while stressing a democratic message that the government permitted the Republican People's Party to demonstrate in Taksim.
Far more interesting is reporting from the Justice and Development Party's traditional sources of support. Yeni Safak, a newspaper close to the ruling party, has condemned the park project and sympathized with the protesters. The same was seen in Zaman newspaper, run by followers of the moderate Islamist Gulen movement. The Gulenists form a crucial component of the ruling party's broader support base but also keep their distance from the ruling party. The movement has been increasingly critical of Erdogan, strongly suggesting that he and his party have become too powerful. Editorials from the newspaper admonished Erdogan for his "excessive" behavior and sided with the protesters.
Though dissent is rising, Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party still have a substantial support base, and the opposition continues to lack a credible political alternative (local elections scheduled for October likely will indicate how much support for the party has waned). At the same time, Turkey is pursuing a highly ambitious agenda abroad, from negotiating peace with Kurdish militants and developing oil pipelines in Iraqi Kurdistan to trying to fend off Syrian-backed militant attacks. Turkey was already highly constrained in pursuing these foreign policy goals, but they will take second place to Turkey's growing political distractions at home as Erdogan prioritizes the growing domestic challenges and as foreign adversaries such as Syria try to take advantage of preoccupied Turkish security forces to try to sponsor more attacks inside Turkey.
Read more: Turkey's Violent Protests in Context | Stratfor
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WSJ;
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for calm on Monday and blamed a weekend of antigovernment protests on "extremist forces," while demonstrators vowed to press on with their occupation of a central Istanbul park and Turkish markets plummeted.
Faced with the biggest opposition to his rule since coming to power a decade ago, Mr. Erdogan didn't back down on Monday, telling reporters in Istanbul before leaving for a trip to North Africa that the protesters were a marginal group seeking to terrorize the public. Earlier Monday, the Turkish Medical Association said one protester, hit by a taxi while seeking to block traffic on a highway, had died. Still, Mr. Erdogan said the government, which still retains the 50% support it got in the 2011 elections, wouldn't yield to minority demands.
Turkey Prime Minister Erdogan calls for calm as anti-government protests on "extremist forces" continue. Photo: Associated Press.
"We will stand tall and not let those who are hand-in-hand with terrorism take over public institutions," said Mr. Erdogan.
But the prime minister's continued to draw rebukes, both domestically and abroad. The U.S., a North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally, reiterated its concern about the response to protests on Monday, with Secretary of State John Kerry calling for a full investigation into reports of excessive use of force by the police. And at home, senior officials differed over how to deal with the demonstrations as President Abdullah Gul said for the second time in three days that citizens had a right to protest peacefully.
Police detained about 2,000 protesters after violent clashes erupted in several Turkish cities over government plans to redevelop a park in Istanbul. Emre Peker looks at the real reasons for the demonstrations and the risks they pose to the country. Photo: AP
A collection of scenes gives a snapshot of the last 24 hours of Istanbul protests, which were going on for the sixth consecutive day on Sunday. Video by Ayla Albayrak via #WorldStream.
More Video from #WorldStream
Protestors camp out Monday morning in Istanbul's Gezi Park
Protestors set up food stalls in Gezi Park
In Gezi Park, people commemorate those killed in recent bombings
"Democracy doesn't only mean elections. If there are differing views, events, objections outside of elections, there is nothing more natural than those to be expressed in various ways. Naturally, peaceful demonstrations are a part of that," Mr. Gul said in televised comments.
The leader of the main opposition Republican People's Party, or CHP, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, met with the president in Ankara Monday evening to discuss the protests. Mr. Kilicdaroglu requested an audience with Mr. Gul after trading barbs with the prime minister over the weekend. Mr. Gul, who is a co-founder of the governing party led by the prime minister, is widely seen as a more moderate leader who better manages expectations and demands from different political factions.
Investors reacted negatively to the government's inability to quell protests that swelled after a series of police crackdowns on protesters that began Thursday. Turkey's benchmark Bourse Istanbul 100 index closed down 10.4%, its biggest daily drop in a decade. The index is down 15% since the demonstrations started, and off 1.6% in 2013. Meanwhile, the yield on two-year benchmark government bonds surged. The Turkish lira was down 0.68% against the dollar.
"Even though the Turkish markets are selling off today, investors are not necessarily waking up to a new reality," said Lars Christensen, chief analyst at Danske Bank DANSKE.KO -0.35% . Politics in Turkey is becoming more polarized, he said in a note. "Sooner or later this will have negative consequences for political stability. However, in the case of Turkey, markets should certainly not be surprised by these risks."
Also on Monday, the Confederation of Public Workers' Unions known as KESK announced a nationwide strike for Tuesday in solidarity with the antigovernment protests, now popularly called Occupy Gezi after the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. KESK said it moved ahead a previously planned walkout for Wednesday to demand better workplace and income security, calling on its 240,000 members to wear black and start the strike at noon Tuesday.
The explosion of unrest reflects a wellspring of frustration among a large and diverse section of Turkey's population. The prime minister's Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has delivered strong economic growth and political stability, but a growing number of Turks say it has also adopted increasingly authoritarian tactics and has attempted to more aggressively Islamize Turkey's secular state.
More
Gunshots Reported at Iraq Border
Clashes With Kurdish Rebels
Heard on the Street: Chill Wind Blows Over Turkey
Blog: Amid Turkey Unrest, Social Media Becomes a Battleground
The protest started as a small effort to save Gezi Park in central Istanbul's Taksim Square from being turned into a mixed-use building modeled after an Ottoman barracks, but mushroomed into a countrywide protest as police repeatedly attacked peaceful protesters with tear gas and water cannons. Fueled by social-media images of the showdown, protests ricocheted around Turkey, and by the end of the weekend, hundreds of people had been injured and almost 2,000 detained in demonstrations that spread to roughly half of Turkey's 81 provinces, the government said.
Mr. Erdogan has won national elections three times and remains Turkey's most popular politician, without a clear rival in his party or the opposition. His popularity has emboldened him to take a tougher line on everything from alcohol consumption to the media.
Enlarge Image
Associated Press
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks to the media in Istanbul on Monday.
While recent opinion polls continue to show Mr. Erdogan retaining a strong lead over Turkey's opposition, some pollsters have said that Turkish society has become more polarized under the AKP government.
On Saturday and Sunday, some demonstrators turned violent, attacking police with stones and bottles, burning official vehicles and city buses and setting up barricades by ripping up sidewalks.
Yet following the police withdrawal Saturday evening from the park, the only green space in central Istanbul, relative calm returned to Taksim. Most of the demonstrators worked together with municipal workers to clean the park and other areas littered during the protests.
Mr. Erdogan on Monday continued to paint the demonstrators as radicals who were aligned with the CHP in a bid to remove the ruling AKP from power. There are radical groups among the protesters, but the majority of those demonstrating were middle-class Turks, alongside a broadening coalition including socialists, nationalists and conservatives.
Sitting at a barricade around Gezi Park on Monday, university students said they wouldn't budge until the government resigned. Some said they wanted an apology by Mr. Erdogan for the police intervention that has left more than 1,500 people hospitalized. The prime minister warned that he was telling AKP backers who want to mobilize against the protesters to stay home, implying that he alone was holding back clashes among different social factions.
"Previously, the government used to say it wouldn't enact policies despite the people, but now, that's exactly what they are doing," said Mustafa, 26, who declined to give his last name and said he voted for AKP in all three national elections since 2007.
"I don't want him to resign and don't think we can find anyone better than him right now. But the prime minister needs to change his tone. I find his strong language wrong, it's causing a lot of anger. What's causing all of the people to pour out to the street is plainly this despotic stance."
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http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/04/obama_erdogan_turkey_protests_friends
From the article:
World leaders don't always have the liberty of choosing their allies, but they do get to pick their friends. And while Barack Obama has been criticized for his Vulcan-style diplomacy, the U.S. president has made a few buddies in office. Now, as anti-government protests grip Turkey, one of them is embarrassing him.
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It can be good to consider outside the box possbilities; here is a possibly fringe type comment on the situation in Turkey
Comment posted (in three segments) on SFGate 6/9/13 in response to:
http://www.sfgate.com/news/world/articleComments/Turkey-s-leader-climbs-on-bus-lambasts-protesters-4589617.php?plckItemsPerPage=20&plckFindCommentKey=CommentKey:5f2a2878-534b-47be-bd68-f615ba3f4684
On May 29, 2013, Iran invaded Turkey with millions of Shiite-inspired violent Turkish demonstrators under the guise of protests over building a mall. By imagining Turkey was protected by NATO, Prime Minister Erdogan thought he was immune to such an Iranian invasion. Erdogan was wrong. After the Iranian Shiite invasion, US President Obama fully betrayed Erdogan by unleashing against him massive, virtually unlimited criticism of Turkey.
As background, a Turkish analyst named Abdullah Bozkurt in a recent April 2013 article entitled "Iran's clandestine operations in Turkey,"
wrote the following:
"Iran's clandestine presence in Turkey is largely hidden from public view in part because Iran prefers to keep a low profile on its activities in Turkey and hides behind ostensibly charitable causes, cultural and educational programs. In fact, this sinister campaign of Iran poses greater danger for Turkey's national security than potentially a nuclear-armed Iran because of the disruptive nature of activities that are aimed to shake the very fabric of social make-up in Turkish society, creating tremors along fault-lines across the board."
For example, intelligence indicates that Iran has cultivated strong ties with some Alevi communities in Sivas and neighboring provinces in the heartland of the country where Iranian influence has long gravitated, even during Ottoman times centuries ago. Iran knows that the fragile balance among diverse groups, especially between the Sunni majority and Alevi minority groups, is the soft underbelly of Turkey and wants to use that as a trump card against Turkey. The worry is that Iran banks on this asset it has developed for some time, very much like a volcano flow slowly burning the composition of society. The marking of Alevi houses in different cities and towns in the past couple of years has been a test-run for Iranian intelligence for the reckoning day with Turkey, even though officials publicly downplayed them as the work of children.
Hence, in reality, the violent Turkish demonstrations are nothing less than an Iranian volcanic invasion of Turkey's "underbelly" through Iran's massive Alevi/Caferi network.
How did Iran come to invade Turkey?
First, the Syria Civil War has exposed a tectonic structural fault-line in Turkey in large part based on Shiite-Sunni lines, with a mixture of politics. Erdogan has come out strongly for the Syrian rebels and his chief opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has come out equally as strongly for Assad's murderous rule. This fissure was heaved open with the recent Reyhanli terrorist blast which murdered close to 51 Turks.
Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu have traded incendiary, if not outright war-like, charges at each other over the blast, and over Turkey's Syria policy.
Second, Turkey succeeded in the unthinkable: making a medium-term peace with the Kurds. This took the possible Iranian use of the Kurdish card off the table. In fact, Erdogan turned the Kurds into a medium-term ally to defend against the Iranians and the Iranian stooge Iraqi PM al Maliki. This made the Iranians desperate to have to pull the trigger on their Alevi/Caferi Turkish attack.
Third, at the recent May 2013 Erdogan visit to DC, even after 100,000 Syrians have been murdered, and despite the loving Erdogan/Obama smiles, on Syria, Obama left Erdogan with zippo-nada-nothing. So, Turkey has no US backing to do anything except watch Assad murder another 100,000 Sunnis. That leaves Erdogan up a Sunni-creek without a paddle. What's worse, Erdogan saw that Obama fully intended to enable and help Assad and his Iranian-masters win in Syria. Thus, Erdogan reasons, "If Obama wants Assad and Iran to win in Syria, Turkey will shortly face an existential Iranian nuclear threat."
Fourth, there are millions of Shiites or Shiite-affiliated Alevi peoples in Turkey. Many come from the lower-classes to begin with. There are anywhere from 4.5M to 25M Shiite Alevies in Turkey (11%-33% out of the total Turkish population of 75,000,000). Because they are Shiite, many keep their true religious affiliation absolutely secret, for fear of discrimination. Some Shiite Turkish Caferi Muslims are even out-right legally second-class citizens based on the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, and don't get any funding for their non-Sunni mosques or imams, while Sunni Muslim institutions get total state funding. Suffice it to say, these Turkish under-class citizens are 100% for Assad, and 1,000,000% against Erdogan's Anti-Assad policy.
But the shocker in not Erdogan's "foreign" allegations to the Turkish riots, it's Obama's incendiary pro-rioter, anti-Erdogan reaction to the violence. In almost an eerie replay of Obama's toppling of Mubarak, Obama appears to be toppling Erdogan.
For on May 31, the US Ambassador to Turkey Ricciardone twice gave a totally pro-riot "statement" that: "Of course, nobody could be happy to see those saddening images. I am not happy either. I wish a speedy recovery to all those injured. But if you are asking me about U.S.
foreign policy, as you know, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and the right to have peaceful protests are fundamentals of a democracy.
I am not going to say anything further." Then, on June 3, in his daily briefing, White House spokesman Jay Carney says the White House believes "the vast majority of the protesters have been peaceful." He also says "all democracies have issues that they need to work through." Not to be out-done, US Sec. of State Kerry lobbed an explosive, pro-riot bombshell at Erdogan: "We are concerned by the reports of excessive use of force by the police. We obviously hope that there will be a full investigation of those incidents and full restraint from the police force."
Obama's mouthpieces have more criticism for a mostly democratic Muslim NATO ally then they do for the mass-murderer Assad. It seems like Obama is more intent to stoke the pro-Iranian flames of the riots in Turkey, than he is to stop the mass-murder of Sunnis in Syria.
In sum, it has become clear that Obama wasn't the "Manchurian Candidate;" he was the 'Iranian Candidate.' From November 2008 to now, Obama's Middle East policy has been a sub rosa American installation of an Iranian absolute hegemony over the entire Middle East. The catastrophic consequence of Obama's rabidly pro-Iranian Shiite Caliphatic coronation is an existential threat to the Middle East, and the world.
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and this from the not always reliable WND: http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/obama-online-gurus-trained-turkey-protest-leaders/
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ISTANBUL — Late one night last summer, at the height of antigovernment demonstrations sweeping Turkey, a group of protest leaders rushed to the home of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, the capital, to negotiate a solution to the growing crisis.
They came away with a tentative agreement, but it was never accepted by the rank-and-file protesters, and so the movement was later crushed by the water cannons and tear gas of Mr. Erdogan’s police force.
Then last month, one of those leaders, Eyup Muhcu, was summoned by a local prosecutor and interrogated as part of a spreading investigation of those who led the protests. “There is no concrete charge, yet we were called in to give official statements,” said Mr. Muhcu, an architect and a member of the Taksim Solidarity Platform, a group of activists that played a central role in the demonstrations.
“For what?”
For the government, the answer seems clear, Mr. Muhcu said: to silence the opposition.
“It has come to a point where members can’t even tweet without fear of being investigated for their thoughts,” said Mr. Muhcu, one of the few activists still willing to offer a public critique of the government.
As the memory begins to fade of those sweeping protests, which began to save Gezi Park in central Istanbul from being razed and became the most serious challenge to Mr. Erdogan’s decade in power, the government has moved aggressively against its perceived adversaries. More than a thousand students, teachers, doctors and activists — even mosque imams — have been hauled in for questioning for their role in the civic unrest.
Dozens of journalists have lost their jobs for reporting on the demonstrations, and one of Turkey’s wealthiest families now has an army of tax inspectors digging through its accounts, apparently for giving refuge in a fancy hotel it owns to demonstrators escaping clouds of tear gas last summer.
But in a country with a long history of military coups, police brutality, torture and disappearances, many Turks and outside experts said they were actually expecting a more brutal crackdown after the protests. They note that while many people have been questioned for their participation, comparatively few have been charged with crimes, although a prosecutor in Ankara has threatened to charge nearly 500 people in a single court case.
“It is not a witch hunt, but definitely the government has tightened the screws,” said Saban Kardas, a professor at the University of Economics and Technology in Ankara. “It’s a preventive move, so these protests don’t happen again.”
The government, it seems, has mounted a delicate balancing act, analysts say: crack down just hard enough to keep critics of the government off the streets, especially as Turkey prepares for three elections over the next 18 months, but not so hard that Turkey’s international image is further damaged, especially in financial circles crucial to sustaining the economy.
Turkey has also been chastened by the failure of its Middle East policy, once seen as a reorientation away from the West toward the Arab world, and has recently restarted long-stalled negotiations to join the European Union.
“This is Turkey, a candidate for the E.U. and a NATO member,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the head of the Ankara office for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research organization. “Some things that may be normal in Belarus won’t be acceptable here.” Still, he added, “What is happening in Turkey is not suitable for a civilized, democratic country.”
Turkey’s secular opposition, the Republican People’s Party, recently circulated a document titled, “Turkish government’s retaliation to Gezi,” in which it equated Mr. Erdogan to Machiavelli, and wrote, “the one-man government has initiated a ruthless campaign for retaliation against the persons involved in the Gezi movement.” Inside is a list of 77 journalists who were either fired or forced to resign, including Yavuz Baydar, who had been the ombudsman for the pro-government newspaper Sabah.
After being fired for criticizing his newspaper’s coverage of the protests, Mr. Baydar wrote in The Guardian, “the country’s journalists are enslaved in newsrooms run by greedy and ruthless media proprietors, whose economic interests make them submissive to Erdogan.”
While the greatest political consequence of the protests may be that Mr. Erdogan has, for now, been forced to abandon plans to establish a more powerful presidency — which he would run for in an election next year — then analysts say the greatest impact on the culture has been an even greater intolerance by the authorities for dissent, and a coarsening of the political discourse.
Some critics and analysts say they have seen something more sinister: a rise in anti-Semitism, in a country with strained relations with Israel. In his fiery speeches during the protests, Mr. Erdogan blamed an assortment of foreign actors for the unrest, including the “interest rate lobby” — what many regarded as code for Jews — and “Zionists.” Some of Turkey’s Jews, a community of roughly 15,000, are emigrating because, according to a recent report in an English-language Turkish newspaper, Hurriyet Daily News, of “anti-Semitism, triggered by harsh statements from the Turkish government.”
Steven A. Cook, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a longtime commentator on Turkish affairs, recently wrote, “Turkish political discourse is darker and the attacks on foreign observers of Turkish politics have become relentless.”
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Summary
A large, conscripted military may no longer be the most appropriate way for Turkey to protect its interests and defend against external threats. Ankara appears to have acknowledged as much Oct. 21, when it voted to reduce the length of time conscripted soldiers are required to serve. The measure, which will take effect Jan. 1, 2014, will effectively shrink the military by 70,000 members. This is no small diminution, considering that Turkey, with its 750,000 soldiers, has the second-largest military among NATO members. Political and economic considerations may have informed Ankara's decision, but ultimately the move was made to reflect the changing geopolitical conditions under which Turkey now finds itself.
Analysis
Historically, Turkey's location and geography has necessitated a robust military. Located at the crossroads between Asia and Europe, the country was critical terrain during the Cold War. In 1952, Turkey became a member of NATO, serving as the southwestern bulwark against the Warsaw Pact. It mustered a large standing military by establishing compulsory service for all Turkish men. Though the Cold War ended two decades ago, Turkey has maintained this practice.
Turkish Armed Forces
Conscription is mandated by the Turkish Constitution, but the legislature determines how it will be enacted. Currently, a healthy Turkish man with no college education serves for 15 months. Prior to 2003, the minimum requirement was 18 months. The upcoming change will reduce this term to 12 months. Of course, there are some exceptions to the mandate. Men with college education have a shorter commitment of six to 12 months, and men over the age of 30 can buy their way out of service for a fee.
Exemptions notwithstanding, conscripts constitute the majority of Turkish service members, comprising some 500,000 soldiers. With such a short service time, many conscripts fail to gain experience after their basic training. As a result, the Turkish military has a small professional core that is augmented by lightly trained forces.
Old Structures, New Threats
This structure made sense during the Cold War, when Turkey was facing similarly structured Soviet and Soviet-backed militaries. Mobilizing an entire population of even lightly trained service members, should the need arise, certainly has its advantages. But times have changed, as have Turkey's primary strategic threats. Whereas once the country was confronted with the prospect of a Soviet ground invasion, it now contends with domestic terrorism, Kurdish insurgents and, more recently, border issues with neighboring Syria, still in the throes of civil war. Smaller, more agile professional forces, along with Turkey's paramilitary forces, are better suited to address these security concerns.
However, force structures are not determined by threats alone. For decades, the Turkish military acted as the guardian of the Kemalist principles upon which the country was founded. Maintaining a large standing army helped the military extend its influence into the political affairs of the state. But the rise and political consolidation of the ruling Justice and Development Party over the past decade has severely undermined the Turkish military's political influence. The mere sight of once-invulnerable Turkish generals in jail confirms that Turkey's civilian political leadership has supplanted the military establishment.
Clearly, there is a political element to the conscription reform, as evidenced by the Justice and Development Party's political consolidation and its imperative to curb the military's influence. Equally important, a presidential election will take place in 2014 and general elections in 2015. A circumscribed military service requirement will likely buy the ruling party considerable political capital among voters, many of whom would rather study, work and earn a living than perform an increasingly archaic social service.
Aside from political considerations, military modernization and increasingly capable military technology demand that force structures maintain highly trained, professional personnel. New technologies and the requisite personnel operating them require more time and more money. The current conscription model does not address these requirements sufficiently. Therefore, the military is being reconfigured as a smaller, better-trained and more expensive per capita professional force supported by higher-end technological platforms.
This transformation likely will continue for the foreseeable future. Conscription will be modified to the point that it faces elimination, which would probably require a constitutional amendment. Other countries that have undergone similar reconfigurations, including former Warsaw Pact members that later joined NATO, have learned that this process can take decades to complete and that a smaller military is not necessarily a cheaper military.
Read more: Turkey: How Conscription Reform Will Change the Military | Stratfor
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Guest Column: Turkey's Democratic Reforms Aren't All That Democratic
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
December 4, 2013
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4232/guest-column-turkey-democratic-reforms-arent-all
Over dinner at the newest hot restaurant in Istanbul, my friend exhales his fury. "This is democracy?" he snaps. "What kind of democracy?"
It has been barely a month since Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan reversed a precedent established 90 years ago by the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and lifted a ban on headscarves in government buildings, including the parliament. On Oct. 31, the day the new law went into effect; four female parliamentarians arrived wearing the hijab. This was not so much for religious reasons – they'd never worn them there before¬ – but in a gesture, as it were, of conquest: the Islamists had won.
Not that they expressed it this way: rather, they and the ruling Islamist AKP (Freedom and Justice) Party heralded the event as a welcome, democratizing act. What is astonishing is that many in the West did, too. In America, the New York Times chirped, "The lifting of the head scarf ban was part of a package of democratic changes Mr. Erdogan unveiled in September."
It is this news that I have just informed my friend, which elicited his retort. Only an hour earlier, his wife and I had walked past a university student's home recently raided by police. The reason: boys and girls were suspected of living there, two sexes under one roof – and this behavior, Erdogan had declared only weeks after his "democratizing" reversal of the headscarf ban, would not be tolerated.
He wasn't kidding. According to a report in the Turkish Radikal newspaper, six police officers also raided an apartment in Manisa, where three female students lived. Male guests had been seen there, the authorities said, and the women were subsequently fined 100 lira (about $45) each.
But that's not all, my friend tells me. Just days after passing the law to permit hijabs in parliament, AKP Vice President Hüseyin Çelik publicly condemned a popular TV presenter, Gözde Kansu, for appearing on air in a revealing dress, her cleavage clearly visible through a keyhole neckline. Kansu was fired the next morning, an indication of just how intimidated the media is by their government these days. This is the country the Committee to Protect Journalists has named "the world's worst jailer of the press," a nation where, while police bombarded peaceful anti-AKP protesters with water cannons and tear gas last summer, CNN's local bureau ran a documentary on penguins.
"This," says my friend, "is why it's not democracy. It would be, if women could wear hijabs or a miniskirt. But they can't."
Yet few in the West have made this simple connection to appreciate just how dangerously close the AKP is to instituting an Islamist state.
Rather, as Turkey's secular democracy gradually declines before their eyes, Westerners continue to speak of its strength, of Turkey's success as a model Muslim country operating as a secular, democratic republic – and one with an independent, strong economy to boot. Worse, some even criticize the concerns of the secular intellectual class – those who, like my dinner companions, perceive the new headscarf laws not as a gesture towards freedom but as one of impending Islamist oppression – as "paranoia."
It isn't. Because the concern isn't just about the headscarf, as the raids on student housing showed. Nor is it about the recent prohibition on alcohol sales after 10 p.m., or the call for women to have at least three children, or for the European-born children of Turkish emigrés to refuse assimilation into European culture – the very culture that is their birthright. The worry isn't even the imprisonment of peaceful demonstrators opposing the regime during last summer's Gezi riots, or of generals accused and imprisoned – largely without evidence – of plotting military coups.
Common misperceptions among Westerners are somewhat understandable: Erdogan and his minions have mastered the political art of packaging. The hijab perhaps presents the perfect metaphor for the veiled actions of a leadership working to de-secularize almost every aspect of Turkish life, covering its Islamist intentions with pretty little homilies elegantly woven with oppression and deceit.
Hence the anti-government protestors are "terrorists" and "radicals" seeking to destroy the economy and peace. Journalists who criticize the prime minister are "terrorists" and "radicals" seeking to overthrow the government, or to promulgate a society of hate. Alcohol sales after 10 p.m. promote alcoholism. Even ending the long tradition of public school uniforms last year was presented as " a victory for freedom." But look more closely, and the real purpose appears in sharper definition: to permit hijabs in public schools – schools that Ataturk decreed were to be kept secular. And this change leads – as do the hijabs in parliament – to the very antithesis of what democracy and freedom stand for: the separation, at all levels, of church and state.
What this really is about is what happens when you put all of these societal and legislative stones together and see the road they build. It is about women's rights and the incursion of a society that incorporates Islamist visions and sharia. As Kemal Kilicdaoglu of the opposition Republican People's Party recently observed, "Women in Saudi Arabia are struggling to be granted the right to drive. If you come across such a ban [in Turkey] tomorrow, don't be surprised."
That position is quite a distance from Ataturk's spirit. "He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap," Ataturk wisely observed. It was precisely by opposing this theocratic ideal that he built the modern Turkey, founded on the vow that "it is just such people that we have fought and will continue to fight."
Nonetheless, my friend's anger gives me hope because I know that he is not alone: the force of Turkey's intellectual elite remains strong. "Occupy Gezi" bore witness last summer to its members' dedication and endurance, but it did something more: it was a retrieval of the power of democracy, a small but significant battle won in that continuing fight, begun nearly a century ago, for a democratic Turkey, secular, independent, and free.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands.
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Turkey Struggles to Halt 'Jihadist Highway'
By Ayla Albayrak and Joe Parkinson
Sept. 3, 2014 4:58 p.m. ET
Workers in April lay concrete slabs to build a wall in the Turkish town of Reyhanli to help stop jihadists and smugglers between Turkey and Syria. Cihan News Agency/Reuters
ANTAKYA, Turkey—Turkey is struggling to close a "jihadist highway" that lets foreign militants slip across its border into Syria, amid pressure from Western governments and mounting security fears at home.
Turkish forces have stepped up arrests, patrols and interrogations in recent months, but the rapid advance of Islamic State extremists in Iraq has made Ankara's initiative even more urgent, say Turkish officials, Western diplomats and residents.
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama signaled an expansion of American aims in the effort to halt Islamic State, saying the U.S. would "degrade and destroy" the extremist group and turn it into "a manageable problem" with the help of international partners.
Turkey became the primary route for foreign jihadists to join Syria's civil war because of the country's easy visa policies for travel, its porous 565-mile border with Syria and its modern transportation infrastructure.
Ankara, which grew hostile to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad after his deadly crackdown on protesters in 2011, also allowed foreign militants who sought to oust him to freely operate, diplomats say. Ankara has denied turning a blind eye to their presence.
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With Turkey's latest policy shift, long-bearded militants once seen openly traveling to battle or receiving medical treatment here in the leafy border villages of Turkey's Hatay province have begun keeping a lower profile, residents and officials say.
They are shaving their beards, trading their baggy trousers and tunics for Western clothing and flying into tourism hubs on Turkey's Mediterranean coast rather than directly to Syria's border. Other fighters sneak into Syria through Lebanon and Jordan.
"Now we are asked questions and our bags are checked," said Mohammed Al-Ahmad, a 20-year-old former Syrian fighter with the Free Syrian Army who was returning to Turkey from a family visit in Syria. "This wouldn't have happened last year."
Limiting Turkey's ability to overtly crack down on jihadists is the Islamic State's June kidnapping of 49 Turkish diplomats and their families in Mosul, Iraq, U.S. officials and people close to the Turkish government say. Turkish officials declined to comment on the hostages' status after the government in June banned domestic media from reporting on the issue.
American and European officials have for two years repeatedly urged Turkey's government to tighten its border policy and to be more discriminating over which rebel factions they were helping, diplomats say.
In response, Turkish officials have complained that their Western partners have failed to provide adequate intelligence on suspects, hindering Turkey's effort.
Still, in recent months, Ankara has moved more forcefully to shut down what many observers call the "jihadist highway" after reassessing the threat from Islamic State, the diplomats say.
In the eight months through August, Turkey detained or deported more than 450 foreign fighters, according to the Foreign Ministry—sometimes entire busloads of would-be fighters—more than double the 2013 total.
Turkish security forces have also launched operations to choke off smuggling routes that have helped fighters reach the battlefield and provided a market for Islamic State to sell oil from the territories it controls across the frontier.
"There has been a clear shift in policy after Turkey turned a blind eye to those crossing to Syria since 2011," said Sinan Ulgen, a former Turkish diplomat who chairs the Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies in Istanbul.
Turkey's effort follows the rapid and brutal advance of Islamic State in its effort to establish a self-styled Islamist nation in the Arab world's heart and on Turkey's southern frontier. Islamic State's growth has prompted Ankara and its Western allies to step up intelligence sharing and security cooperation.
Their tactics were brutally spotlighted last month by the beheading of American journalist James Foley, his killer's London accent apparently identifying him as one of an estimated 500 Britons believed to have joined the jihadists. The group on Tuesday released a video showing the beheading of a second American journalist, Steven Sotloff.
But Ankara concedes that its intensified efforts aren't airtight, with these Turkish borderlands remaining a way station for aspiring militant fighters and exposing Turkey to potential Islamic State attacks. Some fighters are using the daily Syrian refugee flows across the border as camouflage.
"The border security has been increased, but the border cannot be taken under control only by military and police measures," Lutfu Savas, Antakya's mayor said on Wednesday. "It's not just the ISIS, there are many illegal groups here in Hatay and other provinces. These groups have within the past couple of years learned the border geography better than we now do."
Thousands of foreign fighters from countries including Turkey, Britain, Europe and the U.S. have joined Islamic State's ranks in its self-proclaimed caliphate, say Western diplomats and Turkish officials.
The vast majority hail from Saudi Arabia and North Africa, according to Turkish and Saudi officials. The countries are concerned the jihadists will return to their home countries to wreak havoc.
Turkish officials say that makes it even more important for Western nations to provide names and data on suspects so Ankara can stop them at airports of entry rather than the far more difficult task of trying to locate people along the border with Syria.
"The threat is very serious," a Turkey foreign-ministry official said. "Countries are worried about a couple of hundred people returning but we have all of them accumulating here. This is why we are ringing alarm bells."
Turkey's allies and foes have criticized it for a policy of aiding and sheltering some Syrian rebel groups aiming to topple Mr. Assad.
Turkish officials say that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed a "zero tolerance" policy against al Qaeda-linked groups in November and that the government designated the Islamic State's precursor a terrorist group as long ago as 2005.
Evidence of Ankara's recently stepped-up efforts can be seen at strategic points along Turkey's meandering border with Syria. Turkish police now confront and question men at Hatay Airport, especially targeting those arriving by direct flights from Saudi Arabia, witnesses say.
Turkey requires no visas for travelers coming for short holidays from Middle Eastern countries and the European Union.
Scrutiny has increased at Turkey's busiest border gates, Cilvegozu in Hatay province and Oncupinar in neighboring Gaziantep province, the most-used crossing to reach Aleppo, Syria's largest city and the site of several rebel bands including Islamic State. Only three of 13 border gates between Syria and Turkey are now fully open, a Turkish official said, with foreign nationals allowed to pass through only two of them.
"I recognize them just by their looks," one Turkish military policeman said of the foreign fighters as he guarded a border village that officials raided last month to halt smuggling. "We stopped and captured a Russian man in his 20s, as he was returning from Syria. He was detained and deported after he failed to show us his documents."
—Adam Entous in Washington contributed to this article.
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http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/10/08/everybody_will_be_responsible_if_a_massacre_happens_kurds_turkey_kobani?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=*Editors%20Picks&utm_campaign=2014_EditorsPicks10%2F08RS
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http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/turkey_the_kurds_and_iraq_the_prize_and_peril_of_kirkuk
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Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, once aspired to lead the Muslim world. At this time of regional crisis, he has been anything but a leader. Turkish troops and tanks have been standing passively behind a chicken-wire border fence while a mile away in Syria, Islamic extremists are besieging the town of Kobani and its Kurdish population.
This is an indictment of Mr. Erdogan and his cynical political calculations. By keeping his forces on the sidelines and refusing to help in other ways — like allowing Kurdish fighters to pass through Turkey — he seeks not only to weaken the Kurds, but also, in a test of will with President Obama, to force the United States to help him oust President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom he detests.
It is also evidence of the confusion and internal tensions that affect Mr. Obama’s work-in-progress strategy to degrade and defeat the Islamic State, the Sunni Muslim extremist group also called ISIS or ISIL. Kurdish fighters in Kobani have been struggling for weeks to repel the Islamic State. To help, the Americans stepped up airstrikes that began to push the ISIS fighters back, although gun battles and explosions continued on Wednesday.
But all sides — the Americans, Mr. Erdogan and the Kurds — agree that ground forces are necessary to capitalize on the air power. No dice, says Mr. Erdogan, unless the United States provides more support to rebels trying to overthrow Mr. Assad and creates a no-fly zone to deter the Syrian Air Force as well as a buffer zone along the Turkish border to shelter thousands of Syrian refugees who have fled the fighting.
No one can deny Mr. Assad’s brutality in the civil war, but Mr. Obama has rightly resisted involvement in that war and has insisted that the focus should be on degrading ISIS, not going after the Syrian leader. The biggest risk in his decision to attack ISIS in Syria from the air is that it could put America on a slippery slope to a war that he has otherwise sought to avoid.
Mr. Erdogan’s behavior is hardly worthy of a NATO ally. He was so eager to oust Mr. Assad that he enabled ISIS and other militants by allowing fighters, weapons and revenues to flow through Turkey. If Mr. Erdogan refuses to defend Kobani and seriously join the fight against the Islamic State, he will further enable a savage terrorist group and ensure a poisonous long-term instability on his border.
He has also complicated his standing at home. His hesitation in helping the Syrian Kurds has enraged Turkey’s Kurdish minority, which staged protests against the Turkish government on Wednesday that reportedly led to the deaths of 21 people. Mr. Erdogan fears that defending Kobani would strengthen the Syrian Kurds, who have won de facto control of many border areas as they seek autonomy much like their Kurdish brethren in Iraq. But if Kobani falls, Kurdish fury will undoubtedly grow.
The Americans have been trying hard to resolve differences with Mr. Erdogan in recent days, but these large gaps are deeply threatening to the 50-plus-nation coalition that the United States has assembled. One has to wonder why such a profound dispute was not worked out before Mr. Obama took action in Syria.
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Worth taking a look at the piece that starts this thread back in 2007.
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Turkey's consitution requires the military to remove any govt that becomes religious. A coup is what Turkey needed and still needs. Who ever wrote this piece needs to do some reading on Turkey's history. Ataturk worked to remove people whose goal was to live under a caliphate.
http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/20110802215355.aspx
Turkey's Military Resigns
by Austin Bay
August 2, 2011
In a democracy, when senior military officers can no longer support the policies of the elected civilian government they serve, they are supposed to resign their posts and retire -- not launch a coup.
This is one way to initially frame the complex circumstances surrounding last week's mass resignation by the most senior armed forces commanders in Turkey, the culturally Islamic nation bridging Europe and Asia and possessing NATO's second-largest military establishment.
It is a frame, however, with both encouragingly optimistic and oppressively pessimistic interpretations.
Let's start with the optimism. The Turkish military sees itself as the defender of Turkey's secular democracy. Ironically, in the process of defending democracy, on four occasions since 1960 the Turkish military has toppled an elected government, or threatened the government and precipitated its collapse. Coup leaders claimed they were protecting Turkey's political secularism and thereby ultimately defending democracy from the threat posed by Muslim recidivists and political extremists of the far left and right.
In the historical lens, the military insists it is forwarding the political and social modernization process begun by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey. Ataturk was a visionary, a dedicated secularist modernizer who pursued a socially transformational agenda. For example, between 1922 and his death in 1938, he emancipated Turkish women and liberalized and expanded public education.
As a war-winning general, Ataturk used the military as the primary (though not sole) instrument in his modernization process. The army had prestige, organization and educated officers -- all valuable assets in a land devastated by its loss World War I and the subsequent carnage of its victory in the ugly little conflict known as the Greco-Turkish War. When Ataturk died, however, he left Turkey with a democratic structure, not a democracy.
The optimists now argue that the modernization process Ataturk initiated has succeeded. Twenty-first century Turkey now possesses a robust and resilient democracy supported by a free press, eclectic civil society and a middle class interested in expanding economic opportunities. It no longer needs military intervention in domestic politics.
Moreover, the 1980 coup tarnished Turkey's armed forces when it imposed a constitution that circumscribed democratic rights and enshrined military privileges -- a praetorian constitution is a phrase used by its many critics. Protection of democracy decayed to coups by a praetorian guard cadre intent on determining political outcomes. Democratic Turks don't want that.
The pessimists, however, see recidivist Islamists launching a systematic, stealthy coup to end democracy and create a religious tyranny. In the pessimists' interpretation, the late July military resignations signal that current Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) have succeeded in sidelining, arresting or retiring military secularists. Once Erdogan and his cronies have removed the military secularists, they will rapidly replace other secular institutions with Islamic organizations and "re-Islamize" Turkey.
Erdogan's opponents argue that the very curious Ergenekon investigation is one of several noxious examples of Erdogan's plan to slowly strangle secular institutions. Erdogan's government alleges Ergenekon is a plot by secularists to destabilize Turkey and set the stage for another military coup. The government has accused hundreds of people of being involved in the murky conspiracy, including senior military officers.
The pessimists say Ergenekon and the so-called Sledgehammer coup conspiracy are poppycock and paranoia that serve Erdogan's dark motives. In pursuing the investigations, they argue that Erdogan has used state powers to intimidate, smear and imprison his secular opponents. His electoral triumph this June, which gave the AKP a large parliamentary majority, have convinced him he cannot be stopped. The mass resignations are all that a weakened general staff can manage -- they no longer have the power to act to stop the Islamist threat Erdogan represents.
Erdogan's harshest critics, however, recognize his commitment to economic development. Arguably, he has tied his own political future to sustaining economic growth. The economic disaster in neighboring Islamic Iran serves as a reminder of the wages of dogma: ossification, corruption, poverty and violent repression.
Economic growth requires adaptation, creativity and agility -- traits the Ataturk-inspired Turkish democracy possesses. Mr. Erdogan, take note.
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Welcome back Jeff!
Your point about the Turkish Constitution is a very interesting one.
All: Jeff has some distinctive knowledge of the realities of the mid-east.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/11160773/Turkey-bombs-Kurdish-rebels-as-tensions-rise-over-Isil-advance.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=*Mideast%20Brief&utm_campaign=2014_The%20Middle%20East%20Daily_10.14.14
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Turkey Struggles to Define Its Regional Role
Geopolitical Diary
Monday, October 13, 2014 - 17:54 Text Size Print
What role will Turkey play in the international military campaign against the Islamic State? This is perhaps the biggest question regarding the U.S.-led coalition's effort against militants in Iraq and Syria. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's claim that modern "Lawrences of Arabia" are actively trying to destabilize the Middle East offers some insight into the Turkish leadership's thoughts on this question. Nearly a century after the renowned British military intelligence officer played a key role in nurturing the 1916-18 Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, Turkey's leaders find themselves at odds with both Western and Arab states -- the latter far more than the former -- regarding the future of the region.
In an Oct. 13 speech at Istanbul's Marmara University, Erdogan said, "Lawrence was an English spy in an Arab land. But currently, the spies are springing out from our own countries in the shape of a journalist, writer or even a terrorist. You can witness the new 'Lawrences' trying to set the region on fire." Erdogan decried the "artificially made" borders drawn by European powers in the Middle East as "the real cause of long-term pain and crises" in the region. "Turkey is the only country that can provide peace in the region. Turkey is the hope of the Middle Eastern people. Turkey can remove the barriers between Middle Eastern people not by changing physical borders, but by instilling hope and trust," he added.
Embedded within these words is the strategic situation Turkey faces today, amid the ongoing turmoil in the Arab world stemming from the rise of the Islamic State. Ironically, a hundred years after Britain worked with the Arabs to undermine Turkey's power, Washington now needs Ankara to assume regional leadership and manage the security situation on its southern flank. Though Turkey is indeed seeking this elevated role, it is also well aware of the massive challenges that come with such an undertaking. This awareness is why Ankara is still struggling to come up with a coherent strategy to deal with the Islamic State.
Though the West's stance toward Turkey has undergone a 180-degree shift, the United States and Europe remain involved in efforts to manage the region south of the Turkish border. The gap between Western and Turkish interests further complicates matters for Ankara, which will have to manage jihadists, Kurdish separatists and Syria's Iranian-backed leadership for a while before it can reap any benefits from its involvement. While much has changed in the West's attitude toward Turkey's role in the Arab world, the Arabs themselves remain a major problem for Ankara.
Different Visions for the Future
Today's Arabs pose an even bigger problem for Turkey than they did when they revolted against the Ottoman Empire. Led by Saudi Arabia, the Arab states (with the exception of Qatar) no longer act as Western proxies against the Turks. On the contrary, given their financial prowess and Western concerns regarding Iran, Riyadh and its Arab allies are trying to steer the West's efforts against the Islamic State toward toppling Syrian President Bashar al Assad.
Turkey, too, is seeking al Assad's ouster, with the goal of replacing him with a new order (in Syria and the wider region) that is under Turkey's influence. For now, the Arab states simply want to undermine the Iranian and Shiite position in Iraq and Syria, and thus theirs is a sectarian struggle.
But this is not the issue with which Turkey must contend. Arabs already struggling against the Iranians also oppose the idea of their region falling, once again, under Turkey's influence, even though they share its Sunni sect. Already reeling from the chaos of the Arab Spring, the Saudis and their Arab partners do not have a blueprint for the region. However, Turkey's master plan entails working with Republican Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, to stabilize the region. This is something the Arab monarchies and republican autocracies see as the biggest threat to their stability. Turkey will therefore find itself in conflict with the Arab powers long after it has managed to sort out its issues with the West. The one power Washington is counting on to play a dominant role in managing an increasingly fragmented Middle East will have a hard time leading the region's ethnic majority for many decades to come.
Read more: Turkey Struggles to Define Its Regional Role | Stratfor
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Guest Column: Erdogan Grooms a New Jihad Generation
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
January 6, 2015
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4717/guest-column-erdogan-grooms-a-new-jihad-generation
First, he promised to build a new, "religious generation." Now, Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to be going one step further: creating, too, a new generation for jihad. If that sounds a bit like the Islamic State, there is one significant distinction: IS leaders shape their youth by teaching them to use Kalashnikovs and knives. Erdogan is shaping children's minds. And that can be far more dangerous.
This is not to say that Erdogan is himself a terrorist leader, despite his cozy relationships with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. And perhaps has has never realized the full gravity of his programs. But is there, leaving many in Turkey's Western, secular, intellectual elite to worry about their children's future. Throughout his leadership, beginning with his election to prime minister in 2003, Erdogan has restructured the formerly-secular education system overseeing the growth of imam hatip, or religious training schools, throughout the country. According to the Financial Times, such schools boasted 63,000 students in 2002-2003; by 2014, the number of imam hatip students had exploded to 983,000.
What makes this particularly disturbing is the fact that tens, if not hundreds of thousands of these students never signed up for imam hatips to begin with. Rather, Erdogan systematically reshaped existing secular public schools and redesigned the student examination system so that thousands of children are assigned to imam hatips even against their will. But he hasn't stopped there. As of a year ago, all public schools also provide mandatory "religious culture and ethics" courses beginning at age nine. Yet despite a 2007 European Court of Human Rights ruling requiring education in all religions, human rights lawyer and columnist Orhan Kemal Cengiz writes in Al-Monitor, "Sunni Islam continues to be imposed, with students required to memorize Islamic prayers and Quranic verses."
Now Turkey's first democratically-elected president has, through his education minister, expanded such "morality" classes to begin in nursery school, where six-year-olds will receive such lessons as "patience protects young people's chastity in environments full of illegitimate desires." Children throughout the Republic, according to newspaper Milliyet, will also learn that "death is a blessing according to our faith. It means salvations from the heavy burden of living."
Can calls for martyrdom be far behind?
Moreover, the "morality" and "values" lessons being taught to many of Turkey's youth are being given by teachers whose religious and political leanings heavily tint their "moral" views. At Istanbul's 500-year-old Galatasaray academy, a student's mother told me, one teacher taught her class that green is the color both of inner peace and of Islam. But be careful, the teacher said. Starbucks' logo is also green, yet she would never buy her coffee from them: "the owners of Starbucks are Jews, and the Jews are killing our Muslim brothers." A Jewish girl in the class remained silent; but when her mother complained to the school's director, he did nothing.
And so goes "morality" for the future of the Turkish people.
These latest moves follow another, significant effort: requiring schools to teach the Ottoman language and alphabet, both of which were banned by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1928, five years after the founding of the Republic.
This, as Al Jazeera recently pointed out, is no small matter. Ataturk banned Ottoman as a language, including its written form – which melded Arabic and Farsi script –as a critical part of his program to turn the country Westward: modern Turkish uses a Western, Latin alphabet and incorporates words from English and German. Few contemporary Turks can read Ottoman, and even fewer understand Arabic or Farsi.
But a culture rests profoundly on its language. Stanford University psychology professor Lera Boroditsky has found that "if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of looking at the world ... All this new research shows us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts, but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality."
By reintroducing Ottoman as a language, especially alongside religious educational systems, Erdogan is returning his country to its Ottoman, Islamic past both in knowledge and in thought – and away from the modern secular state that has long been a partner and ally of the West. And in his oft-underestimated shrewdness, he is using the minds of Turkey's youngest to lead the way: those six-year-olds now learning to honor death and memorize the Quran and identify with the glory of the Ottomans will, in 12 years, enter the nation's military.
Which seems to be just what Erdogan has had in mind all along. Writing in World Affairs Journal in 2013, Hillel Fradkin and Lewis Libby pointed to a little-noticed remark then-Prime Minister Erdogan made to his congress, in which he called on the country's youth to look beyond the 100th anniversary of the Republic in 2023 and to prepare for the year 2071. "This is a date that is unlikely to be meaningful for Westerners," Fradkin and Libby observe, "but is evocative for many Turks. 2071 will mark one thousand years since the Battle of Manzikert. There, the Seljuk Turks—a tribe originally from Central Asia—decisively defeated the leading Christian power of that era, the Byzantine Empire, and thereby stunned the medieval world. At the battle's end, the Seljuk leader stepped on the Christian emperor's throat to mark Christendom's humiliation. The Seljuk victory began a string of events that allowed the Seljuk Turks to capture the lands of modern Turkey and create an empire that would stretch across much of Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
In evoking Manzikert, Erdogan recalled for today's Turks the glories of their aggressive warrior ancestors who had set out to conquer non-Muslim lands and, along the way, fought off the hated Shias of their day to dominate much of the Middle East."
Less than two years later, with ISIS building its caliphate-by-blood just across the border, the shaping of the new Erdogan generation looks more threatening than ever.
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New York and the Netherlands.
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Why Hitler Wished He Was Muslim
The Führer admired Atatürk’s subordination of religion to the state—and his ruthless treatment of minorities.
Holy Warriors
Muslim recruits of the SS Handzar Division pray in 1943. ENLARGE
Muslim recruits of the SS Handzar Division pray in 1943. Harvard University Press; German Archives
By
Dominic Green
Jan. 16, 2015 3:55 p.m. ET
56 COMMENTS
‘It’s been our misfortune to have the wrong religion,” Hitler complained to his pet architect Albert Speer. “Why did it have to be Christianity, with its meekness and flabbiness?” Islam was a Männerreligion—a “religion of men”—and hygienic too. The “soldiers of Islam” received a warrior’s heaven, “a real earthly paradise” with “houris” and “wine flowing.” This, Hitler argued, was much more suited to the “Germanic temperament” than the “Jewish filth and priestly twaddle” of Christianity.
Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination
By Stefan Ihrig
Harvard, 311 pages, $29.95
For decades, historians have seen Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as emulating Mussolini ’s 1922 March on Rome. Not so, says Stefan Ihrig in “Atatürk in the Nazi Imagination.” Hitler also had Turkey in mind—and not just the 1908 march of the Young Turks on Constantinople, which brought down a government. After 1917, the bankrupt, defeated and cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire contracted into a vigorous “Turanic” nation-state. In the early 1920s, the new Turkey was the first “revisionist” power to opt out of the postwar system, retaking lost lands on the Syrian coast and control over the Strait of the Dardanelles. Hitler, Mr. Ihrig writes, saw Turkey as the model of a “prosperous and völkisch modern state.”
Through the 1920s and 1930s, Nazi publications lauded Turkey as a friend and forerunner. In 1922, for example, the Völkischer Beobachter, the Nazi Party’s weekly paper, praised Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the “Father of the Turks,” as a “real man,” embodying the “heroic spirit” and the Führerprinzip, or führer principle, that demanded absolute obedience. Atatürk’s subordination of Islam to the state anticipated Hitler’s strategy toward Christianity. The Nazis presented Turkey as stronger for having massacred its Armenians and expelling its Greeks. “Who,” Hitler asked in August 1939, “speaks today of the extermination of the Armenians?”
Islam and Nazi Germany’s War
By David Motadel
Harvard, 500 pages, $35
This was not Germany’s first case of Türkenfieber, or Turk fever. Turkey had slid into World War I not by accident but because Germany had greased the tracks: training officers, supplying weapons, and drawing the country away from Britain and France. Hitler wanted to repeat the Kaiser ’s experiment in search of a better result. By 1936, Germany supplied half of Turkey’s imports and bought half of Turkey’s exports, notably chromite, vital for steel production. But Atatürk, Mr. Ihrig writes, hedged his bets and dodged a “decisive friendship.” After Atatürk’s death in 1938, his successor, Ismet Inönü, tacked between the powers. In 1939, Turkey signed a treaty of mutual defense with Britain, but in 1941 Turkey agreed to a Treaty of Friendship with Germany, securing Hitler’s southern flank before he invaded Russia. Inönü hinted that Turkey would join the fight if Germany could conquer the Caucasus.
As David Motadel writes in “Islam and Nazi Germany’s War,” Muslims fought on both sides in World War II. But only Nazis and Islamists had a political-spiritual romance. Both groups hated Jews, Bolsheviks and liberal democracy. Both sought what Michel Foucault, praising the Iranian Revolution in 1979, would later call the spiritual-political “transfiguration of the world” by “combat.” The caliph, the Islamist Zaki Ali explained, was the “führer of the believers.” “Made by Jews, led by Jews—therewith Bolshevism is the natural enemy of Islam,” wrote Mahomed Sabry, a Berlin-based propagandist for the Muslim Brotherhood in “Islam, Judaism, Bolshevism,” a book that the Reich’s propaganda ministry recommended to journalists.
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By late 1941, Germany controlled large Muslim populations in southeastern Europe and North Africa. Nazi policy extended the grand schemes of imperial Germany toward madly modern ends. To aid the “liberation struggle of Islam,” the propaganda ministry told journalists to praise “the Islamic world as a cultural factor,” avoid criticism of Islam, and substitute “anti-Jewish” for “anti-Semitic.” In April 1942, Hitler became the first European leader to declare that Islam was “incapable of terrorism.” As usual, it is hard to tell if the Führer set the tone or merely amplified his people’s obsessions.
Like Atatürk, Hitler saw the Turkish renaissance as racial, not religious. Germans of Turkish and Iranian descent were exempt from the Nuremberg Laws, but the racial status of German Arabs remained creatively indefinite, even after September 1943, when Muslims became eligible for membership in the Nazi Party. As the war went on, Balkan Muslims were added to the “racially valuable peoples of Europe.” The Palestinian Arab leader Haj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, recruited thousands of these “Musligermanics” as the first non-Germanic volunteers for the SS. Soviet prisoners of Turkic origin volunteered too. In November 1944, Himmler and the Mufti created an SS-run school for military imams at Dresden.
Haj Amin al-Husseini, the founder of Palestinian nationalism, is notorious for his efforts to persuade the Nazis to extend their genocide of the Jews to the Palestine Mandate. The Mufti met Hitler and Himmler in Berlin in 1941 and asked the Nazis to guarantee that when the Wehrmacht drove the British from Palestine, Germany would establish an Arab regime and assist in the “removal” of its Jews. Hitler replied that the Reich would not intervene in the Mufti’s kingdom, other than to pursue their shared goal: “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space.” The Mufti settled in Berlin, befriended Adolf Eichmann, and lobbied the governments of Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria to cancel a plan to transfer Jews to Palestine. Subsequently, some 400,000 Jews from these countries were sent to death camps.
Mr. Motadel describes the Mufti’s Nazi dealings vividly, but he also excels in unearthing other odious and fascinating characters. Among them: Zeki Kiram, the Ottoman officer turned disciple of Rashid Rida, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood; and Johann von Leers, a Nazi professor who converted to Islam and became Omar Amin, an anti-Semitic publicist for Nasser ’s Egypt.
Some of the Muslim Nazis ended badly. Others stayed at their desks, then consulted for Saudi Arabia in retirement. The major Muslim collaborators escaped. Fearing Muslim uprisings, the Allies did not try the Mufti as a war criminal; he died in Beirut in 1974, politically eclipsed by his young cousin, Mohammed Abdul Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, better known as Yasser Arafat. Meanwhile, at Munich, the surviving SS volunteers, joined by refugees from the Soviet Union, formed postwar Germany’s first Islamic community, its leaders an ex-Wehrmacht imam and the erstwhile chief imam of the Eastern Muslim SS Division. In the 1950s, some of Munich’s Muslim ex-Nazis worked for the intelligence services of the U.S., tightening the “green belt against Communism.”
A revolutionary idea must be seeded before, in Heidegger ’s words, “suddenly the unbound powers of being come forth and are accomplished as history.” Seven decades passed between Europe’s revolutionary spring of 1848 and the Russian Revolution of 1917. The effects of Germany’s ideological seeding of Muslim societies in the 1930s and ’40s are only now becoming apparent.
Impeccably researched and clearly written, Messrs. Motadel and Ihrig’s books will transform our understanding of the Nazi policies that were, Mr. Motadel writes, some “of the most vigorous attempts to politicize and instrumentalize Islam in modern history.”
—Mr. Green is the author of “The Double Life of Dr. Lopez” and “Three Empires on the Nile.”
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Summary
On Feb. 21, Turkish military forces entered Syria to withdraw guards who had been posted at the tomb of Suleyman Shah, which Turkey considers to be its sovereign territory. The operation is Turkey’s first incursion into Syria since the civil war began, but it is not the beginning of an overt military intervention. In fact, it is the opposite. The mission was limited in scope, was temporary and did not involve combat. Instead, the operation was explicitly designed to eliminate a liability and keep Turkey from getting drawn into the broader Syrian conflict.
Analysis
Turkey has long considered the tomb of Suleyman Shah to be its sovereign territory, even though it is located within the borders of Syria, a little under 30 kilometers (around 20 miles) south of the Turkish border in the Euphrates River Valley. An honor guard of around 40 Turkish troops monitored and protected the site, but as battle lines moved closer to the site, protecting the tomb became riskier. This security threat became even more acute when the Islamic State kicked off an offensive in the region that took territory from the Syrian Kurds and led to the siege of Kobani.
This offensive put Islamic State fighters in proximity to the tomb and threatened to draw Turkey into direct combat in Syria if the tomb and the soldiers stationed there came under attack. But Turkey and the Islamic State have maintained a quiet balance in the ongoing conflict. The militant group refrained from attacking the site, just as it has largely avoided any concerted effort to attack positions within Turkey. For its part, Turkey has stayed on its side of the border, most notably near Kobani, where it faced domestic and international pressure to become more involved. In essence, both sides have maintained an uneasy standoff.
Turkey did not lend direct military aid to Kobani, but it did allow various Kurdish forces from the region to pass through its territory. Coupled with the air power of the U.S.-led coalition (which Turkey has so far resisted supporting in any direct way such as by providing air basing with closer proximity), the Kurdish forces have not only broken the siege on the city itself, they have retaken much of the territory they originally lost in the area.
The recent Kurdish operational advances allowed for Turkey to open a relatively safe corridor to the tomb of Suleyman Shah while precluding serious combat through large swaths of Islamic State-held territory. This explains the timing of this weekend's mission to extract the Turkish guards, who had been stuck there beyond their planned rotation, and to relocate the remains of Suleyman Shah to a position near the Turkish border that is much easier to defend. The tomb, along with its honor guard, was a potential liability and essentially a hostage of its geography. Had the tomb been raided or the honor guard been captured or massacred, Turkish policymakers would have faced serious domestic blowback.
Turkey could have reinforced the site or pre-emptively attacked Islamic State positions long ago in an effort to further secure the tomb. Instead, it chose the least confrontational path, mitigating the ongoing risk that threatened to pull it into the Syrian conflict in a more overt way. While withdrawing from a weak position that the Islamic State could have overrun gives Turkey a freer hand to take military action to its south, the nature of this move indicates Turkey will continue its policy of staying out of the Syrian conflict.
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The website of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs acknowledges that NATO has played a “central role” in the country’s security and insists that Turkey, which became a member in 1952, “attaches utmost importance” to it. Yet Turkey’s commitment to the alliance has never seemed more ambivalent than it does now.
On crucial issues — from fighting the Islamic State to fielding integrated defense systems, which share information and operate together, to standing firm against Russian aggression in Ukraine — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government either are not cooperating fully or are acting in outright defiance of NATO’s priorities and interests. Add the fact that Turkey under Mr. Erdogan has become increasingly authoritarian, and it becomes apparent that the country is drifting away from an alliance whose treaty says it is “founded on the principles of democracy” as much as defense.
For months, the Western allies have pressured Turkey to close its porous border, which has allowed thousands of jihadists to cross into Syria to join the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and has enabled ISIS to smuggle in weapons and smuggle out oil on which it relies for revenue.
Although the Turkish government has taken some steps to make transit harder, it has been unwilling, or unable, to stem the flow, according to Tim Arango and Eric Schmitt’s reporting in The Times. One smuggler said that while his job has become more difficult, sometimes the Turkish border guards look the other way.
Completely shutting down the long border may be impossible, but given the country’s large military and well-regarded intelligence service, it is inexcusable that Turkey is not doing a better job. Turkey should also be making military bases and troops available to the American-led coalition, but James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, told Congress recently that he was not optimistic that Turkey would do more against ISIS because it had “other priorities and other interests.”
Public opinion polls show that the Turks don’t consider ISIS a primary threat, and Mr. Erdogan is more concerned with opposing Kurdish autonomy within Syria and with bringing down the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad.
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Turkey has more immediate and strategic interests than playing make-believe with NATO. The West is playing he loves me-he loves me not with...
TPierre Changstien
15 minutes ago
This editorial is incredibly weak when it comes to identifying the main problem in Turkey, which is undoubtedly the shady Islamist character...
Sonny Pitchumani
15 minutes ago
MARC: The editorial also misses that Turkey regards opposition to Assad as more important than ISIS because Assad is a front for Iran-- the very same Iran Obama is allowing to go nuke.
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There are other troubling aspects of Turkey’s behavior. The government says it is still considering buying from China a $3.4 billion air defense system that involves radars and long-range ground-to-air missiles that can shoot down enemy missiles. The purchase is opposed by the American and European allies because they view this military purchase from China as a risk. They are also disturbed that Turkey is not purchasing a system from them, because they have borne the cost of defending Turkey against a Syrian attack by stationing Patriot missile batteries on Turkish territory. Moreover, the Turkish defense minister last month said the government did not plan to integrate whatever air defense system it bought with NATO’s air defenses and radars so that the various parts would work together, though the presidential spokesman later said the system would be integrated with NATO’s.
NATO would not integrate its system with a Chinese system because the two are not compatible, a Chinese system might contain risky software, and members of Congress oppose it. If Turkey refuses to link its defense system with NATO’s, “they are weakening the defense of their territory and weakening NATO at the same time,” said Ivo Daalder, a former American ambassador to NATO.
Meanwhile, Turkey is supposed to sign an agreement this year that will allow Russia to build a natural gas pipeline to Turkey, thus bypassing Ukraine. The Erdogan government, ignoring Western sanctions, has been exploiting a rift between Russia and the West over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to gain energy supplies at bargain prices. Russia also plans to build Turkey’s first nuclear power plant.
American officials say they don’t think Turkey will ever withdraw from NATO. Of course, such a move would be a catastrophic mistake. But the fact that the possibility is even raised by officials and defense experts shows how concerned the allies are about relying on Turkey in any crisis.
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https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/04/erdogan-turkey-elections-kurds-akp-hdp-executive-power/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=Flashpoints&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, revered and reviled in almost equal measure in Turkey, is at risk of becoming a victim of his own success. His political opponents, fearful of losing yet another election to him, have united around the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the upcoming parliamentary vote. And ironically, it is precisely Erdogan’s peace process with the Kurds that has made this coalition against him possible.
It is no secret that Erdogan is trying to amend the constitution to establish a presidential system. This will only be possible if the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) wins 330 seats or more, which will allow it to call for a referendum on the issue. The HDP — often affiliated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), due to its politicians’ close ties with the organization — will be a game-changing actor in determining the distributions of seats in the Turkish parliament. If the HDP manages to pass the 10 percent threshold for representation in parliament, it will be almost impossible for the AKP to win enough seats to call for a referendum to amend the constitution.
The HDP has moved aggressively to appeal to voters beyond its traditional Kurdish base during the current campaign.
The HDP has moved aggressively to appeal to voters beyond its traditional Kurdish base during the current campaign. The party’s supporters did not carry pictures of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan during a rally held in Istanbul on May 31, but rather held pictures of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk has always been a controversial figure among Kurds: As his biographer Andrew Mango wrote, the former president aligned government policy to the “assimilation of all the country’s citizens to Turkish culture.” Since the foundation of Turkey, there have been numerous Kurdish rebellions that aimed to protest or overthrow the Turkish Republic’s exclusionary ethnic politics and inhumane treatment of its own Kurdish citizens. The last Kurdish rebellion cost more than 30,000 lives after a 30-year armed conflict between the PKK and Turkish military.
But times are changing. After successive futile attempts to solve the Kurdish issue, the Erdogan-led government announced a comprehensive peace settlement. It involves direct talks with Ocalan, who some Turkish politicians have long called a “baby-killer,” and offers the country’s Kurdish population many of their long-denied political, cultural, and economic rights.
This peace initiative sparked harsh reactions among opposition. Turkish nationalism is the founding tenet of both the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) — both of which have been reluctant to meet Kurdish demands and label the PKK as an illegitimate, terrorist organization. “Isn’t treason the lightest word?” Minister of Parliament Devlet Bahceli asked rhetorically about the peace talks — which he defined in 2014 as “plotting against the state and nation … and dynamiting our national unity and solidarity.”
In an ironic twist, however, these very same opponents of the peace process now see the HDP as the last hope to avert Erdogan’s goal of implementing a presidential system. The daily newspaper Hurriyet, for instance, runs the slogan “Turkey belongs to the Turks,” and has long been an adamant defender of the Turkish army’s oppressive and bloody campaign against the Kurds. Now, however, many of its columnists openly praise the HDP. Ahmet Hakan, probably the daily’s most popular columnist, described HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas’s stance against Erdogan as “creative, provocative, and impressive.”
This attempt to use the HDP to restrain Erdogan not only extends to domestic Turkish groups but to international outlets as well. The Economist asked Turks to vote for the Kurdish party in a recent editorial, saying “It is the best way of stopping their country’s drift towards autocracy.” It marks a strange break for a magazine that once backed conservatives like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush to throw its weight behind a socialist party in Turkey.
It’s a strange split, but pollsters suggest that the AKP will lose votes to both the HDP and the party most openly hostile to the Kurds. Nationalist AKP voters, frustrated with Erdogan’s opening to the Kurds, are inclined to switch their vote to the right-wing MHP, which is expected to increase its vote share to 16 percent from 14 percent in the 2011 parliamentary election. The HDP looks to gain as well with votes from two crucial blocs: Kurds who used to vote for the AKP in past elections and secular, middle-class Turks who are adamant about weakening the AKP.
The HDP and PKK have been quite successful in their campaign to convince Kurds that the Turkish government has supported the Islamic State and al Qaeda affiliates in their fight against Kurdish rebels in northern Syria. This campaign reached its zenith during the Islamic State’s siege of Kobani, when the HDP called on its supporters to stage street protests that turned into violent clashes between pro- and anti-PKK groups, which resulted in the deaths of about 50 people. This dynamic has pushed formerly pro-AKP Kurds into the HDP camp.
For urban, middle-class Turks, the peace process has finally made the HDP a viable option for expressing political opposition.
For urban, middle-class Turks, the peace process has finally made the HDP a viable option for expressing political opposition. The ceasefire that has accompanied the talks has allowed the HDP — which used to be banned due to its affiliation with the PKK — to distance itself from armed revolt and refashion the movement as a left-leaning, pro-democracy party. Demirtas, for instance, has taken a very sympathetic line toward the 2013 Gezi Park protests, which were celebrated by middle-class Turks as a “resistance” against AKP policies. While the HDP at the time took a more equivocal stance, Demirtas now emphasizes that the protests were a noble cause, in which deputies from the HDP actively took part. The party also released a statement on May 31, the second anniversary of the protests, accusing the government of suppressing those “who wanted to use their democratic rights” and saluting the Gezi movement as “the resistance that will shed light on the way to establish a democratic future.”
While this anti-Erdogan posture benefits the HDP, no one seems to be certain whether the party will pass the 10 percent electoral threshold necessary to win seats in Parliament or not. The polls estimate that the party will receive between 9 percent and 11 percent of the vote, with a margin of error around 2 percent. Demirtas told me earlier this year that his party credited its gains in past elections to Kurds who previously used to vote for the AKP — implying that urban, middle-class Turks remained loyal to their traditional party, the CHP. The HDP’s success in the upcoming election depends on its ability to make further gains within this voting bloc.
However, the HDP could also become the victim of its own success. If the AKP wins fewer than 275 seats, it will have to form a coalition government — and its most likely partner is the right-wing MHP. This does not necessarily mean an end to the peace process, but it will be more difficult for the new government to implement Kurdish demands due to the staunch nationalist agenda of the MHP.
The AKP has been running a smart campaign, which includes officials raising the alarm bell that the party’s votes have declined significantly and insinuating that there is therefore a possibility of a coalition government. Turkish people have a very traumatic memory regarding the coalition governments that dominated the 1990s and associate them with economic crises, political instability, and stagnation.
How this will play out on election day remains unclear. But William Shakespeare’s observation in his play, The Tempest, would no doubt sound familiar to Turkish politicians: “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.”
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Turkey’s Ruling Party Loses Parliamentary Majority
Turkish voters delivered a rebuke on Sunday to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as his party lost its majority in Parliament in a historic election that ended, for now, his ambition to rewrite the Constitution and expand his powers as president.
It was also a significant victory to the cadre of Kurds, liberals and secular Turks who found their voice of opposition to Mr. Erdogan during sweeping antigovernment protests two years ago.
READ MORE »
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/world/europe/turkey-election-recep-tayyip-erdogan-kurds-hdp.html?emc=edit_na_20150607
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The Turkish Enigma
Geopolitical Weekly
July 21, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
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By George Friedman
In my "Net Assessment of the World," I argued that four major segments of the European and Asian landmass were in crisis: Europe, Russia, the Middle East (from the Levant to Iran) and China. Each crisis was different; each was at a different stage of development. Collectively the crises threatened to destabilize the Eurasian landmass, the Eastern Hemisphere, and potentially generate a global crisis. They do not have to merge into a single crisis to be dangerous. Four simultaneous crises in the center of humanity's geopolitical gravity would be destabilizing by itself. However, if they began to merge and interact, the risks would multiply. Containing each crisis by itself would be a daunting task. Managing crises that were interlocked would press the limits of manageability and even push beyond.
These four crises are already interacting to some extent. The crisis of the European Union intersects with the parallel issue of Ukraine and Europe's relation to Russia. The crisis in the Middle East intersects with the European concern over managing immigration as well as balancing relations with Europe's Muslim community. The Russians have been involved in Syria, and appear to have played a significant role in the recent negotiations with Iran. In addition there is a potential intersection in Chechnya and Dagestan. The Russians and Chinese have been advancing discussions about military and economic cooperation. None of these interactions threaten to break down regional boundaries. Indeed, none are particularly serious. Nor is some sort of inter-regional crisis unimaginable.
Sitting at the center of these crisis zones is a country that until a few years ago maintained a policy of having no problems with its neighbors. Today, however, Turkey's entire periphery is on fire. There is fighting in Syria and Iraq to the south, fighting to the north in Ukraine and an increasingly tense situation in the Black Sea. To the west, Greece is in deep crisis (along with the EU) and is a historic antagonist of Turkey. The Mediterranean has quieted down, but the Cyprus situation has not been fully resolved and tension with Israel has subsided but not disappeared. Anywhere Turkey looks there are problems. As important, there are three regions of Eurasia that Turkey touches: Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union.
I have argued two things in the past. The first was that Turkey was an emerging regional power that would ultimately be the major power in its locale. The second was that this is a region that, ever since the decline and fall of the Ottomans in the first quarter of the 20th century, has been kept stable by outside powers. The decision of the United States to take a secondary role after the destabilization that began with the 2003 invasion of Iraq has left a vacuum Turkey will eventually be forced to fill. But Turkey is not ready to fill that vacuum. That has created a situation in which there is a balancing of power underway, particularly among Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A Proximate Danger
The most violent and the most immediate crisis for Ankara is the area stretching from the Mediterranean to Iran, and from Turkey to Yemen. The main problem for Turkey is that Syria and Iraq have become contiguous battlegrounds featuring a range of forces, including Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish elements. These battles take place in a cauldron formed by four regional powers: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey. This quadrangle emerged logically from the mayhem caught between them.
Each major power has differing strategic interests. Iran's primary interest is the survival of the establishment and in assuring that an aggressive Sunni polity does not arise in Iraq to replicate the situation Tehran faced with Saddam Hussein. Iran's strategy is to support anti-Sunni forces in the region. This support ranges from bolstering Hezbollah in Lebanon, propping up the minority Alawite establishment in Syria led — for the moment — by Bashar al Assad, and assisting the Iraqi army, itself controlled by Shiites and Iraq's Shiite militias. The United States sees Iran as aligned with American interests for the moment, since both countries oppose the Islamic State and Tehran is important when it comes to containing the militant group. The reality on the ground has made this the most important issue between Iran and the United States, which frames the recent accord on nuclear weapons.
Saudi Arabia sees Iran as its primary enemy. Riyadh also views the Islamic State as a threat but at the same time fears that an Iraq and Syria dominated by Iran could present an existential threat to the House of Saud. The Saudis consider events in Yemen from a similar perspective. Also in this context, Riyadh perceives a common interest with Israel in containing Iranian militant proxies as well as the Islamic State. Who exactly the Saudis are supporting in Syria and Iraq is somewhat murky, but the kingdom has no choice but to play a tactical and opportunistic game.
The Israelis are in a similar position to the Saudis. They oppose the Iranians, but their main concern must be to make certain that the Hashemites in Jordan don't lose control of the country, opening the door to an Islamic State move on the Jordan River. Jordan appears stable for the moment and Israel and the Saudis see this as a main point of their collaboration. In the meantime, Israel is playing a wait-and-see game with Syria. Al Assad is no friend to the Israelis, but a weak al Assad is better than a strong Islamic State rule. The current situation in Syria suits Israel because a civil war limits immediate threats. But the conflict is itself out of control and the risk is that someone will win. Israel must favor al Assad and that aligns them on some level with Iran, even as Israel works with Sunni players like Saudi Arabia to contain Iranian militant proxies. Ironies abound.
It is in this context that the Turks have refused to make a clear commitment, either to traditional allies in the West or to the new potential allies that are yet emerging. Partly this is because no one's commitments — except the Iranians' — are clear and irrevocable, and partly because the Turks don't have to commit unless they want to. They are deeply opposed to the al Assad regime in Syria, and logic would have it that they are supporting the Islamic State, which also opposes the Syrian regime. As I have said before, there are endless rumors in the region that the Turks are favoring and aiding the Islamic State. These are rumors that Turkey has responded to by visibly and seriously cracking down on the Islamic State in recent weeks with significant border activity and widespread raids. The Turks know that the militants, no matter what the currently confrontational relationship might be, could transition from being a primarily Arab platform to being a threat to Turkey. There are some who say that the Turks see the Islamic State as creating the justification for a Turkish intervention in Syria. The weakness of this argument is that there has been ample justification that Ankara has declined, even as its posture toward the Islamic State becomes more aggressive.
This shows in Turkey's complex relations with the United States, still formally its major ally. In 2003 the Turks refused to allow U.S. forces to invade Iraq from Turkey. Since then the relationship with the United States has been complex and troubled. The Turks have made U.S. assistance in defeating al Assad a condition for extensive cooperation in Syria. Washington, concerned about an Islamic State government in Syria, and with little confidence in the non-Islamic State militancy as a long-term alternative, has refused to accept this. Therefore, while the Turks are now allowing some use of the NATO air base at Incirlik for operations against the Islamic State, they have not made a general commitment. Nor have they cooperated comprehensively with Sunni Saudi Arabia.
The Turkish problem is this: There are no low-risk moves. While Ankara has a large army on paper, it is untried in battle outside of Turkey's 30-year insurgency in its southeast. Turkey has also observed the outcome of U.S. conventional forces intervening in the region and doesn't want to run the same risk. There are domestic considerations as well. Turkey is divided between secular and Islamist factions. The secularists suspect the Islamists of being secretly aligned with radical Islam — and are the source of many of the rumors floating about. The ruling Sunni-dominated Justice and Development Party, better known by its Turkish acronym, AKP, was seriously weakened in the last election. Its ability to launch the only attack it wants — an attack to topple al Assad — would appear to be a religious war to the secularists and would not be welcomed by the party's base, setting in motion rifts that could bring down the AKP. An attack on the Sunnis, however radical, complicates relations with the rebel factions in northern Syria that Turkey is already sponsoring. It also would risk the backlash of reviving anti-Turkish feelings in an adjacent Arab country that remembers Turkish rule only a century ago.
Therefore Turkey, while incrementally changing — as evidenced by the recent accord to allow U.S. Predator drones to fly from Incirlik — is constrained if not paralyzed. From a strategic point of view, there appears to be more risk than reward. Its position resembles Israel's: watch, wait and hopefully avoid needing to do anything. From the political point of view, there is no firm base of support for either intervening directly or providing support for American airstrikes.
The problem is that the worst-case scenario for Turkey is the creation of an independent Kurdish republic in Syria or Iraq. That would risk lighting a touchpaper among Kurds in southeastern Turkey, and regardless of current agreements, could destabilize everything. This is the one thing that would force Turkey's hand. However, the United States has historically had some measure of influence among the Kurds in Iraq and also in Syria. While this influence can be overstated, and while Washington is dependent on the Kurdish peshmerga militias for ground support as it battles the Islamic State from the air, it is an important factor. If the situation grew out of control, Ankara would expect the United States to control the situation. If Washington could and would, the price would be Turkish support for U.S. operations in the region. The Turks would have to pay that price or risk intervention. That is the lever that would get Ankara involved.
Added Complications
The Turks are far less entangled in the Russian crisis than in the Middle East, but they are still involved, and potentially in a way that can pyramid. There are three dimensions to this. The first is the Black Sea and Turkey's role in it. The second is the Bosporus and the third is allowing the United States to operate from its air base in Incirlik in the event of increased Russian military involvement in Ukraine.
The crisis in Ukraine necessarily involves the Black Sea. Crimea's Sevastopol is a Russian Base on the Black Sea. In this potential conflict, the Black Sea becomes a vital theater of operations. First, in any movement westward by the Russians, the Black Sea is their right flank. Second, the Black Sea is a vital corridor for trade by the Russians, and an attempt by its enemies to shut down that corridor would have to be addressed by Russian naval forces. Finally, the U.S./NATO strategy in addressing the Ukrainian crisis has been to increase cooperation with Romania. Romania is on the Black Sea and the United States has indicated that it intends to work with Bucharest in strengthening its Black Sea capabilities. Therefore, events in the Black Sea can rapidly escalate under certain circumstances, posing threats to Turkish interests that Ankara cannot ignore.
The Black Sea issue is compounded by the question of the Bosporus, which is a narrow strait that, along with the Dardanelles, connects the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. The Bosporus is the only passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. For the Russians, this is a critical trade route and the only means for Russian ships passing into the Mediterranean. In the event of a conflict, the United States and NATO would likely want to send naval forces into the Black Sea to support operations around its perimeter.
Under the Montreux Convention, an agreement signed in 1936, the Bosporus is under Turkish control. However the convention also places certain restrictions on traffic in the Bosporus. Access is guaranteed to all commercial traffic, however, Ankara is authorized to refuse transit to countries at war with Turkey. All countries with coasts on the Black Sea are free to operate militarily in the Black Sea. Non-Black Sea nations, however, suffer restrictions. Only warships under 15,000 tones may be sent, and no more than nine at any one time, with a total tonnage of 30,000 tons. And then they are only permitted to stay for 21 days or less.
This limits the ability of the United States to project forces into the Black Sea — American carrier battle groups, key components of U.S. naval power, are unable to pass through. Turkey is, under international law, the guarantor of the convention and it has over time expressed a desire to be freed from it so Ankara can exercise complete sovereignty over the Bosporus Straits. But it has also been comforted by knowing that refusal to allow warships to pass can be referred to international law, instead of being Turkish responsibility.
However, in the event of a conflict with Russia, that can no longer be discounted: Turkey is a member of NATO. If NATO were to formally participate in such a conflict, Ankara would have to choose whether the Montreaux Convention or its alliance obligations take precedence. The same can be said of air operations out of Incirlik. Does Turkey's relationship with NATO and the United States take precedence or will Ankara use the convention to control conflict in the Black Sea? Even prior to its own involvement in any conflict with Russia, there would be a potentially dangerous diplomatic crisis.
To complicate matters, Turkey receives a great deal of oil and natural gas from Russia through the Black Sea. Energy relations shift. There are economic circumstances on which the seller is primarily dependent on the sale, and circumstances on which the buyer is dependent. It depends on the room for maneuver. While oil prices were over $100, Russia had the financial option to stop shipping energy. Under current pricing, Russia's ability to do this has decreased dramatically. During the Ukrainian crisis, using energy cut-offs in Europe would have been a rational response to sanctions. The Russians did not do it because they could not afford the cost. The prior obsession with the fragility of the flow of energy from Russia is no longer there, and Turkey, a major consumer, has reduced its vulnerability, at least during the diplomatic phase.
The United States is constructing an alliance system that includes the Baltics, Poland and Romania that is designed to contain any potential Russian advance westward. Turkey is the logical southern anchor for this alliance structure. The Turks have been more involved than is already visible — conducting exercises with the Romanians and Americans in the Black Sea. But as in the Middle East, Ankara has carefully avoided any commitment to the alliance and has remained unclear on its Black Sea Strategy. While the Middle East is more enigmatic, the Russian situation is potentially more dangerous, though Turkish ambiguity remains identical.
Similarly, Turkey has long demanded membership in the European Union. Yet Ankara's economic performance over the last 10 years indicates that Turkey has benefitted from not being a member. Nevertheless, the secularists in particular have been adamant about membership because they felt that joining the union would guarantee the secular nature of Turkish society. The AKP has been more ambiguous. The party continues to ask for membership, but it has been quite content to remain outside. It did not want the EU strictures secularists wanted, nor did it want to share in the European economic crisis.
Turkey is nevertheless drawn in two directions. First, Ankara has inevitable economic ties in Europe that are effected by crises, ironically focused on its erstwhile enemy Greece. More important at the moment is the immigration and Islamic terrorism crisis in Europe. Many of the Muslims living in Germany, for example, are Turks and the treatment of overseas Turks is a significant political issue in Turkey. While Ankara has wanted to be part of Europe, neither economic reality nor the treatment of Turks and other Muslims in Europe argue for that relationship.
There is a growing breach with Europe in an attempt to avoid absorption of economic problems. However in southeastern Europe discussions of Turkish investments and trade are commonplace. Put into perspective, as Europe fragments, Turkey — a long-term economic power, understanding of what the short-term problems are — draws southeastern Europe into its economic center of gravity. In a way it becomes another force of fragmentation, simply by being an alternate economic benefactor for the poorer countries in the southeast.
The potential interaction of Turkey in the Middle East is an immediate question. The mid-term involvement with Russia is a longer question. Its relation to Europe is the longest question. And its relationship with the United States is the single question that intersects all of these. For all these concerns, Turkey has no clear answer. It is following a strategy designed to avoid involvement and maintain maximum options. Ankara relies on a multi-level strategy in which it is formally allied with some powers and quietly open to relations with powers hostile to its allies. This multi-hued doctrine is designed to avoid premature involvement; premature meaning before having achieved a level of strategic maturity and capability that allows it to define itself, with attendant risks.
In one sense, Turkish policy parallels American policy. U.S. policies in all three regions are designed to allow the regional balance of power to maintain itself, with Washington involving itself selectively and with limited force. The Turks are paralleling the United States in principle, and with even less exposure. The problem the Turks have is that geography binds them to the role of pivot for three regions. For the United States this role is optional. The Turks cannot make coherent decisions, but they must. So Ankara's strategy is to be consistently ambiguous, an enigma. This will work until outside powers make it impossible to work.
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Quantum Geopolitics
Geopolitical Weekly
July 28, 2015 | 08:00 GMT
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By Reva Bhalla
Forecasting the shape the world will take in several years or decades is an audacious undertaking. There are no images to observe or precise data points to anchor us. We can only create a picture, and a fuzzy one at best. This is, after all, our basic human empirical instinct: to draw effortlessly from the vivid imagery of our present world and past experiences while we squint and hesitate before faint, blobby images of the future.
In the world of intelligence and military planning, it is far less taxing to base speculations on the familiar — to simulate a war game that pivots on an Iranian nuclear threat, a seemingly unstoppable jihadist force like the Islamic State and the military adventurism of Russia in Eastern Europe — than it is to imagine a world in which Russia is weak and internally fragmented, the jihadist menace is contained by its own fractiousness and Iran is allied with the United States against a rising Sunni threat. In the business world, it is much simpler to base trades and strategies on a familiar environment of low oil prices and high interest rates. Strategists in many domains are guilty of taking excessive comfort in the present and extrapolating present-day assumptions to describe the future, only to find themselves unequipped when the next big crisis hits. As a U.S. four-star general once told me in frustration, "We always have the wrong maps and the wrong languages when we go to war."
So how do we break out of this mental trap and develop the confidence to sketch out plausible sets and sequences of unknowns? The four-dimensional world of quantum mechanics may offer some guidance or, at the very least, a philosophical approach to strategic forecasting. Brilliant physicists such as Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie and Erwin Schrodinger have obsessed over the complex relationship between space and time. The debate persists among scientists over how atomic and subatomic particles behave in different dimensions, but there are certain underlying principles in the collection of quantum theories that should resonate with anyone endowed with the responsibility of forecasting world events.
Quantum Principles and Political Entities
Einstein described space-time as a smooth fabric distorted by objects in the universe. For him, the separation between past, present and future was merely a "stubbornly persistent illusion." Building on Einstein's ideas, celebrated U.S. physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, some of whose best ideas came from drawings he scribbled on cocktail napkins in bars and strip clubs, focused on how a particle can travel in waves from point A to point B along a number of potential paths, each with a certain probability amplitude. In other words, a particle will not travel in linear fashion; it will go up, down and around in space, skirting other particle paths and colliding into others, sometimes reinforcing or canceling out another completely. According to Feynman's theory, the sum of all the amplitudes of the different paths would give you the "sum over histories" — the path that the particle actually follows in the end.
The behavior of communities, proto-states and nation-states (at least on our humble and familiar planet Earth) arguably follows a similar path. We have seen statelets, countries and empires rise and fall in waves along varied frequencies. The crest of one amplitude could intersect with the trough of another, resulting in the latter's destruction. One particle path can reinforce another, creating vast trading empires. Latin America, where geopolitical shifts can develop at a tortoise's pace in the modern era, tends to emit long radio-like waves compared to the gamma-like waves of what we know today as a highly volatile Middle East.
Applied Quantum Theories: Turkey
If we apply the nation-state as an organizing principle for the modern era (recognizing the prevalence of artificial boundaries and the existence of both nations without states and states without nations), the possibilities of a state's path are seemingly endless. However, a probability of a state's path can be constructed to sketch out a picture of the future.
The first step is to identify certain constants that have shaped a country's behavior over time, regardless of personality or ideology (an imperative to gain sea access, a mountainous landscape that requires a large amount of capital to transport goods from point A to point B, a fertile landscape that attracts as much competition as it provides wealth). The country's history serves as a laboratory for testing how the state has pursued those imperatives and what circumstances have charted its path. What conditions were in place for the state to fail, to prosper, to avoid getting entangled in the collisions of bigger states, to live in relative peace? We take the known and perceived facts of the past, we enrich them with anecdotes from literature, poetry and song, and we paint a colorful image of the present textured by its past. Then comes the hard part: having the guts to stare into the future with enough discipline to see the constraints and enough imagination to see the possibilities. In this practice, extrapolation is deadly, and an unhealthy obsession with current intelligence can be blinding.
Take Turkey, for example. For years, we have heard political elites in the United States, Eastern Europe and the Middle East lament a Turkey obsessed with Islamism and unwilling or incapable of matching words with action in dealing with regional competitors like Iran and Russia. Turkey was in many ways overlooked as a regional player, too consumed by its domestic troubles and too ideologically predisposed toward Islamist groups to be considered useful to the West. But Turkey's resurgence would not follow a linear path. There have been ripples and turns along the way, distorting the perception of a country whose regional role is, in the end, profoundly shaped by its position as a land bridge between Europe and Asia and the gatekeeper between the Black and Mediterranean seas.
How, then, can we explain a week's worth of events in which Turkey launched airstrikes at Islamic State forces and Kurdish rebels while preparing to extend a buffer zone into northern Syria — actions that mark a sharp departure from the timid Turkey to which the world had grown accustomed? We must look at the distant past, when Alexander the Great passed through the Cilician Gates to claim a natural harbor on the eastern Mediterranean (the eponymous city of Alexandretta, contemporarily known as Iskenderun) and the ancient city of Antioch (Antakya) as an opening into the fertile Orontes River Valley and onward to Mesopotamia. We move from the point when Seljuk Turks conquered Aleppo in the 11th century all the way up to the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War I, when a fledgling Turkish republic used all the diplomatic might it could muster to retake the strategic territories of Antioch and Alexandretta, which today constitute Hatay province outlining the Syrian-Turkish border.
We must simultaneously look at the present. A contemporary map of the Syria-Turkey border looks quite odd, with the nub of Hatay province anchored to the Gulf of Iskenderun but looking as though it should extend eastward toward Aleppo, the historical trading hub of the northern Levant, and onward through Kurdish lands to northern Iraq, where the oil riches of Kirkuk lie in what was formerly the Ottoman province of Mosul.
We then take a long look out into the future. Turkey's interest in northern Syria and northern Iraq is not an abstraction triggered by a group of religious fanatics calling themselves the Islamic State; it is the bypass, intersection and reinforcement of multiple geopolitical wavelengths creating an invisible force behind Ankara to re-extend Turkey's formal and informal boundaries beyond Anatolia. To understand just how far Turkey extends and at what point it inevitably contracts again, we must examine the intersecting wavelengths emanating from Baghdad, Damascus, Moscow, Washington, Arbil and Riyadh. As long as Syria is engulfed in civil war, its wavelength will be too weak to interfere with Turkey's ambitions for northern Syria, but a rehabilitated Iran could interfere through Kurdistan and block Turkey farther to the east. The United States, intent on reducing its burdens in the Middle East and balancing against Russia, will reinforce the Turkish wavelength up to a point, while higher frequencies from other Sunni players such as Saudi Arabia will run interference against Turkey in Mesopotamia and the Levant. While Russia still has the capacity to project military power outward, Turkey's moves in Europe and the Caucasus will skirt around Russia for some time, but that dynamic will shift once Russia becomes consumed with its own domestic fissures and Turkey has more room to extend through the Black Sea region.
Thinking Beyond Limitations
This sketch of Turkey is by no means static or deterministic. It is, simply but critically, the product of putting a filter on a lens to bring the state's trajectory into clearer view. The assumptions we form must be tested every day by incoming intelligence that can lead to refinements of the forecast at hand. A quantum interpretation of the world will tell you that nothing is deterministic, and we cannot know for sure that a certain outcome will or will not happen based on the limited information we possess. We can only assign a probability of something happening, and that probability will evolve over time. As Stephen Hawking said, "It seems Einstein was ... wrong when he said, 'God does not play dice.' Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."
We can apply the same process to the ebb and flow of the Far East, with a resurgent Japan responding to the reverberations of a powerful China and an artificially divided Korea sandwiched in between. Or, the push and pull between France and Germany on the European mainland as centripetal forces subsume the EU project.
Too often, we see the future as we see the past — through the distorted lens of the present. That is the flaw in our human instinct that we must try to overcome. Constraints will apply, and probabilities will be assigned. But whatever the time, direction or dimension we are operating in when forecasting geopolitical events, we must simultaneously exist in the past, present and the future to prepare for a world that we have yet to know.
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Brace and break The Defense Department is finally being allowed to scrub a mission that some military officials never much liked in the first place: stationing two U.S. Army Patriot anti-missile batteries in southern Turkey.
A joint statement by the United States Embassy in Ankara and the Turkish government on Sunday said that the two Patriot batteries and 250 U.S. soldiers will come back to the States in October so that the missile systems can undergo “critical modernization upgrades.” The Patriots -- along with Patriot units from Germany and The Netherlands -- were deployed to Turkey in 2013 to calm Ankara at a time when NATO feared that Turkey was in danger of being hit by ballistic missiles fired by Syrian forces.
But with that threat all but eliminated now that Syrian forces have abandoned the Turkish border region, Pentagon leaders have been eager to bring the batteries home. Patriots are in high demand by commanders across the Middle East and Asia, and the soldiers manning the systems in Turkey had yet to conduct a single mission during the deployment. The timing of the move was a delicate diplomatic issue, however, as the U.S. and Turkey had been working on a deal to get Turkey into the anti-Islamic State fight while allowing U.S. warplanes and drones to begin flying out of Turkish air bases. Once that deal was reached, U.S. officials told their Turkish counterparts about the Patriot redeployment.
As part of the deal, six U.S. F-16 fighter jets and 300 American military personnel have now arrived at Incirlik and have started flying combat missions against the Islamic State in Syria. Germany also announced on Saturday that it was pulling its Patriot battery from Turkey, leaving only a Spanish unit behind. The Spanish system replaced the Dutch battery this year.
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http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/09/09/world-view-turkey-slips-into-chaos-as-violence-spreads-across-country/
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Powerful Again, Turkish President Erdogan Faces Choice Between War and Peace With Kurdish Militants
So far, leader is sticking to hard-line rhetoric
By Yaroslav Trofimov
Nov. 12, 2015 5:30 a.m. ET
ISTANBUL—As a consummate politician, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has benefited from renewed war with Kurdish militants to rally voters and regain control over Turkey in a rerun of elections this month.
As a once-again powerful president, Mr. Erdogan now is facing a momentous choice. Should he press on with the war in hopes of finally crushing the PKK Kurdistan Workers’ Party? Or should he row back and eventually restart the peace process with the PKK that he pursued in the earlier years of his rule?
“If Turkey doesn’t resolve its Kurdish issue, it will turn into another Syria,” warned Bayram Balci, a Turkish affairs specialist at Sciences Po university in Paris. “Kurdish populations are gathering strength across the Middle East, and no Turkish leader can afford to ignore that.”
So far, Mr. Erdogan is sticking to the hard-line rhetoric that, during the Nov. 1 election, helped him lure Turkish nationalist voters opposed to any compromises with the Kurdish minority’s aspirations for self-rule.
“The period ahead of us is not one of talks and discussions; it’s a period to achieve results,” Mr. Erdogan said in a speech last week, adding that Turkey will keep hitting the PKK “until all its members surrender or are eliminated.”
Following the vote, the PKK has also pledged to intensify the war.
“A free and democratic living can only be attained by means of a committed resistance against those who trust they can break the will of the peoples,” said the group, which is classified as terrorist by Turkey and the U.S.
Middle East Crossroads
In recent months, hundreds of people have died in fighting between the PKK and Turkish security forces, many of them civilians. Scores of urban areas in Kurdish-populated southeast Turkey have effectively become no-go areas for authorities.
“Both sides are sharpening their knives,” said Tahir Elci, a prominent attorney and head of the bar association in Diyarbakir, the biggest city in Kurdish-dominated parts of Turkey. “Both sides are chasing utopian goals. Both sides are getting farther from what is reasonable.”
And yet, many leaders on both sides also know that they cannot defeat each other on the battlefield.
The PKK and the Turkish state, after all, have been at war since the 1980s, in a conflict that cost at least 40,000 lives and depopulated large parts of the southeast—without destroying the PKK.
“The military solution has not been successful for more than 25 years,” said Umit Pamir, the former Turkish ambassador to NATO and the United Nations.
Mr. Erdogan was once seen as a peacemaker and enjoyed the support of many Kurds, thanks to lifting some long-standing restrictions on Kurdish language and culture. His apparent readiness to settle the Kurdish problem prompted the PKK to declare a cease-fire in 2013.
But the military successes of a PKK affiliate, which now runs a ministate in Syrian areas along Turkey’s border, have spurred a backlash. In recent months, Mr. Erdogan repeatedly expressed displeasure with the PKK affiliate’s victories against Islamic State in Syria, saying he sees no difference between the two organizations.
The cease-fire collapsed in July, shortly after Mr. Erdogan’s AKP Justice and Development Party lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in 13 years—in part because of an unexpectedly strong showing by a Kurdish party backed by the PKK.
On Nov. 1, as Turkish voters sought stability amid renewed violence, AKP regained a comfortable majority in a rerun election.
That majority should enable Mr. Erdogan to tackle the Kurdish conflict, some of his allies say.
“It was Erdogan who had initiated the Kurdish opening, and now that he has emerged from the second election in a position of strength, I hope he will resume the Kurdish opening where it was left off,” said Yasar Yakis, one of the founders of AKP who served as Mr. Erdogan’s foreign minister. “If it’s not done by Erdogan, it can never be done by another leader.”
Galip Dalay, research director at the al-Sharq Forum think tank, forecast that Mr. Erdogan would in coming months try to woo Kurdish citizens with concessions on issues such as language rights—while still refusing to negotiate with the PKK.
“It’s taken for granted that there is no military solution, but you cannot go back to the talks as if nothing happened,” Mr. Dalay said. “The peace process in its previous form and structure will not go on for quite some time.”
Such an approach, however, is unlikely to quell the spreading unrest.
“You now have a very nationalistic Kurdish new generation that is not willing to settle for cosmetic changes,” said Gönül Töl, director of the Turkish studies center at the Middle East Institute.
A choice to press on with the military campaign may also underestimate the potential costs to Turkey, which must increasingly grapple with a separate threat from Islamic State.
“The risks of failing to grasp the refreshed opportunity for a political solution are quite serious,” said Francis Ricciardone, head of the Middle East Center at Atlantic Council who served until last year as U.S. ambassador in Ankara. “No matter how bad things may appear in this region, history shows that they can always become far worse.”
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Russian President Vladimir Putin said the downing of a Russian Su-24 by Turkish F-16s on Tuesday was "a stab in the back delivered by accomplices of the terrorists." In another oblique reference to Turkey, Putin said the Islamic State is "protected by the military of an entire nation." He expressed concern and disbelief that Turkey did not try to contact Russia following the incident and instead rushed to convene a NATO meeting when Russia has "always treated Turkey as not only a close neighbor, but also a friendly nation."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin have been well aware that competition between their countries has been growing on multiple fronts. And until Tuesday, both took great care to avoid having that competition devolve into outright confrontation. A number of factors will drive Moscow and Ankara to try to temper the latest bout of hostilities, but neither leader will be able to avoid the uncomfortable reality that geopolitical forces are once again pulling these old rivals further apart.
Turkey and Russia cannot help but step on each other's toes. Turkey is the gatekeeper to the Mediterranean from the Black Sea through its control of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. That means if Russia wants to send container ships, oil cargoes and warships westward, they pass through Turkey. If NATO wants to threaten the Russian underbelly from the Black Sea, Turkey has to give the green light. This is a point not lost on Putin's Russia.
As two Eurasian powers with long imperial pasts, Russia and Turkey have overlapping spheres of influence in parts of the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia and the Middle East. This dynamic brought both empires to war multiple times over nearly five centuries. Not surprisingly, Turkey was profoundly uncomfortable when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and Crimea in 2014 to reinforce its position in the former Soviet space. Though Turkey saw an imperative to keep Russian ambitions in check, it preferred letting the United States, Poland, Romania and others take the lead. After all, Russia supplies 55 percent of Turkey's natural gas needs, and Ankara was not interested in risking disruptions to that supply or to the broader Turkish-Russian trade relationship that could further strain the Turkish economy.
But Russia has been getting too close for Turkey's comfort more recently. In the Caucasus, several factors are challenging the status quo in Nagorno-Karabakh, a conflict zone that could eventually draw Russian and Turkish intervention. In the Middle East, Russia's military intervention in Syria on the side of the Alawite government squarely challenges Turkey's ambitions to bring Sunni power back to Syria through the toppling of President Bashar al Assad. Turkey's downing of the Russian fighter jet shows that Ankara is now willing to act on its frustration with Russia and bear the consequences.
The most immediate consequence will be felt in Syria. The preliminary steps toward a power-sharing deal are effectively stalled for now. The videos of Turkmen rebels shooting Russian pilots and attacking search and rescue missions will only reinforce Russia's claims that the rebels Turkey, the United States and others have been sponsoring cannot be trusted and therefore do not deserve a place at the negotiating table. There were already major doubts about whether the rebel sponsors could be talked into negotiating with the Syrian government at this stage of the fight anyway.
The battlefield, however, will remain just as intense. Turkey is serious about moving ahead with a plan to create a safe zone in northern Syria along the Turkish border to root out the Islamic State, keep a check on the Kurds and reinforce its rebel proxies against the al Assad government. The United States also remains committed to the fight against the Islamic State and is willing to facilitate Turkish operations in northern Syria toward that end. Russia is unlikely to back down from its operations in Syria targeting both Islamic State and rebel forces. In fact, Russia will be reinforcing its bombers with accompanying fighter jets to deter another shoot-down. The potential for further skirmishes on the Syrian battlefield cannot be ruled out.
The less visible, but no less significant, consequence concerns Turkey's relationship with NATO. Turkey's careful balance with Russia and differences with the West over working with Islamist forces have long been a source of frustration for other members of NATO, especially given the significant role Turkey could play in counterbalancing Russia and in responding to threats such as the Islamic State. As the Islamic State threat escalated and as Russia became more involved in Syria, Turkey started drifting closer toward its NATO allies. Turkey's recent decision to officially cancel a controversial deal to purchase a multibillion-dollar air defense system from China gave hope to NATO members that Turkey was prepared to remove some of the ambiguity from its role in the security alliance. And with Turkey's competition with Russia now on full display following the downing of the Russian Su-24, the United States and a number of Central and Eastern European powers will see an opportunity to draw Turkey deeper into NATO.
Russian officials and media have proposed retaliatory measures against Turkey, such as energy cutoffs, trade restrictions and undefined military responses. Russia certainly has the means to squeeze Turkey economically, though cutting off natural gas would also undermine Gazprom's commercial reputation at a time when Russia is fighting to retain market share in the West. Russian military interference against Turkish operations on the Syrian battlefield is also possible, though such actions are very risky for Russia itself. So long as Russia remains in a standoff with the United States and the West at large — a situation that will not abate anytime soon — Russia will need to play it carefully with Turkey. Only now, it is dealing with a Turkey that is sitting a lot more comfortably with its NATO partners than it was just a couple of months ago.
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Why Turkey Can't Sell a Syrian Safe Zone
Geopolitical Diary
October 7, 2015 | 01:24 GMT Text Size
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(Stratfor)
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Brussels on Tuesday with an ambitious agenda: to promote the establishment of a "safe zone" in northern Syria. Erdogan can see that the Europeans have no good solutions to their immigration crisis other than to manipulate the route and flow of migrants. The latest idea gaining traction in a host of European capitals is to keep the hundreds of thousands of people trying to cross the Mediterranean off of Europe's shores by bottling them up closer to home instead. Brussels would, of course, pay Ankara to take care of its problem by housing more refugees traveling overland. But Turkey, which already hosts more than 2.5 million Syrians and has spent $7.6 billion on the refugee crisis so far, isn't buying into Europe's offer. Erdogan wants more. Much more.
Now that Turkey has Europe's attention and Russia has blindsided the United States in Syria, Erdogan is attempting to use the chaotic climate to dust off his plans for a Syrian safe zone. The Turkish version of a safe zone entails reinforcing rebel forces that are friendly with Turkey to flush out the Islamic State from a zone measuring 80 kilometers (50 miles) by 40 kilometers in Syria's northern Aleppo province. A no-fly zone, according to the Turkish proposal, would accompany the safe zone. Once the zone is declared safe and free of terrorist activity, refugee camps would be set up and Syrian migrants could live within their country's borders again.
What is a Geopolitical Diary?
The motives behind Turkey's plan are many and thickly layered. Most important, Turkey needs to avoid augmenting the burden migrants are placing on it at home while its economy is deteriorating. Second, Turkey is legitimately threatened by the Islamic State and wants to create as much distance as possible between its borders and those of the self-proclaimed caliphate. But the reasons don't stop there. Turkey can see that its southern neighbor will be fragmented for the foreseeable future. Ankara does not want to eradicate the Islamic State only to see Kurdish forces take its place. Rather, it wants to establish a physical foothold in northern Syria to ensure that the Kurds cannot create a viable autonomous state that could exacerbate Turkey's own Kurdish problem at home.
There is also a broader objective framing Turkey's strategy. A divided Syria undoubtedly creates risk, but it also presents an opportunity for Turkey to expand its sphere of influence in the Levant. This is the main driver behind Turkey's campaign to topple Syrian President Bashar al Assad's government and replace it with a Sunni Islamist-led administration that takes its cues from Ankara. After all, someone would have to provide security to make the zone in northern Syria "safe"; Turkish forces and civilian personnel presumably would take the lead in reinforcing such a corridor, potentially placing Turkish boots back on Arab soil.
Meanwhile, there is a murkier motive to consider. Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party will enter the Nov. 2 elections with a low chance of winning enough votes to regain its majority in parliament. The likelihood of the elections resulting in another hung parliament, coupled with Erdogan's reluctance to share power, raises the potential (albeit in an extreme scenario) for Turkey to use the premise of a military operation in Syria to stave off a third round of elections.
But Russia is botching Turkey's plans. Russia, Turkey and NATO are still arguing over whether two alleged Russian violations of Turkish airspace near the Syrian border were intentional (as Turkey and NATO claim) or accidental (as Russia insists they were). Russian Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov said Tuesday that Russia was ready to form a working group and that it would be pleased to host Turkish Defense Ministry officials in Moscow to avoid further misunderstandings in Syria. Ankara has no choice but to interpret Russia's actions as a signal that Moscow is willing to interfere in a Turkish-led safe zone if Ankara tries to push ahead with its plans.
Moscow's strategy has already begun to bear fruit. The European officials who met with Erdogan in Brussels listened politely to his ideas for a safe zone and promised to discuss the idea further. But no European power wants to risk getting mixed up with a brazen Russia on the Syrian battlefield. The Europeans would rather bargain with Erdogan on issues such as visa liberalization for Turkish citizens and Turkey's acceptance of more migrants on the Continent's behalf instead.
The United States has kept Turkey's safe zone plan at arm's length for similar reasons. However, Russia's military adventurism in Syria is accelerating U.S. plans for a rebel offensive that could still at least partially fit with Turkey's interests.
In the coming months, the United States will be focused on the areas east and west of the Euphrates River. To the east, the United States will ramp up its support for Kurdish forces and their allies in preparation for a move toward Raqqa against the Islamic State. Greater U.S. support for Kurdish forces will not please Turkish leaders, but the United States' simultaneous boost in aid for the rebels Turkey has been preparing to the west will. Here, the United States and Turkey will work together to try to carve out a border zone free of the Islamic State's presence. The Americans are avoiding the label of a safe zone to keep the operation from conflating with Turkey's more ambitious agenda. Nonetheless, the United States will be indirectly taking the first crucial steps toward Turkey's ultimate goals for northern Syria.
Of course, Turkey will still have to contend with Russia. Moscow will do whatever it can to play off the fears of the NATO alliance. If a buffer zone were established in Syria and if Turkey, a NATO member, tried to protect the airspace over the zone, who would shoot down the Russian air force in the event that it crossed into the zone? In Brussels, Erdogan reiterated that "an attack on Turkey means an attack on NATO." But if NATO proves too afraid of the consequences of responding to Russian interference, then NATO's credibility will have been dealt a major blow. And that is exactly the outcome the Russians are hoping for.
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Turkey is the Wrong Partner to Fight Terror
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
November 28, 2015
http://www.meforum.org/5659/turkey-is-the-wrong-partner-to-fight-terror
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right), seen here with Hamas leaders Khaled Mashaal (center) and Ismail Haniyeh in June 2013, famously declared that "there is no Islamic terror."
Sadly, the free world feels compelled to partner with the wrong country in its fight against Islamic terror.
The host of this year's G-20 summit, which came right after the Nov. 13 Paris attacks, was Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In his usual Sunni supremacist language, he accused the victims of jihad rather than the jihadists. "New tragedies will be inevitable," he said, "if the rising racism in Europe and other countries is not stopped. Racism, coupled with enmity against Islam, is the greatest disaster, the greatest threat."
Yet Erdogan willingly ignores the rising racism, xenophobia, and anti-western, jihadist sentiments that increasingly command the hearts and minds of his fellow Turks. A quick look at a few sports games and fan behavior in recent weeks would reveal much about the Turkish mind and heart.
Erdogan ignores the jihadist sentiments that increasingly command the hearts and minds of his fellow Turks.
On October 13, three days after a twin suicide bomb attack in Turkey's capital, Ankara, killed more than 100 Kurds and pro-Kurdish, leftist and secular Turks, the central Anatolian province of Konya, a hotbed of political Islam in Turkey, hosted a Euro 2016 football qualifier between Turkey and Iceland. Before the kick-off, both teams stood for a moment of silence to protest the bomb attack -- a typical gesture to respect the victims. Sadly, the moment of silence was marred by whistles and jeers: apparently the football fans of Konya were protesting the victims, not their jihadist killers.
Anyone under the impression that the whole world stands in solidarity with Paris should think again. Hundreds of Turkish fans booed and chanted "Allahu Akbar" ("Allah is greater" in Arabic) during a moment of silence for the Paris attack victims before a Turkey-Greece soccer friendly. Once again, the Turks were exhibiting solidarity with the terrorists, not their "infidel" victims.
More recently, on Nov. 21, Turkish police had to deploy 1,500 policemen so that Turkish fans could not harm the visiting Israeli women's national basketball team. One thousand five hundred police officers at a women's basketball game! Despite that, Turkish fans threw objects at Israeli players as they were singing Israel's national anthem. Fans also booed the Israeli players while others applauded the fans who threw the objects.
Turkish fans threw trash at the visiting Israeli women's national basketball team last week.
Unsurprisingly, Turkish fans waved Palestinian flags. Israeli women basketball players were barred from leaving their hotel other than for training and the game.
None of that is surprising although, at least in theory, Turkey is a candidate state for membership in the European Union. A new study by Pew Research Center revealed that 8% of Turks have a favorable opinion of the Islamic State (IS), higher than in the Palestinian territories, where support for IS stands at 6%, and only one point lower than in Pakistan. Nineteen percent of Turks "do not know" if they have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of IS -- which means 27% of Turks do not have an unfavorable opinion of the jihadist killing machine. That makes more than 21 million people! Of the countries polled, Lebanon boasted a 100% unfavorable opinion of IS and Jordan, 94%. In Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, 4% reported a favorable opinion of IS, half of Turkey's.
This is Erdogan's "neo-Ottoman" and increasingly Islamist Turkey. After the Paris attacks, this author saw tweets that called the victims "animal carcass;" that said "now the infidels will lose their sleep out of fear;" and others that congratulated the terrorists "who shouted Allahu Akbar."
Meanwhile, and so funny, the free world cannot see that its ally to fight the jihadists is another jihadist. How should Erdogan fight Islamic terror – something he does not believe exists? One of Erdogan's famous remarks is, "there is no Islamic terror." But he thinks that "just like fascism," Zionism is a crime against humanity.
There is a Turkish saying that could perhaps describe the free world's alliance with Erdogan's Turkey against jihadist terror: "Kuzuyu kurda emanet etmek" ("to trust the wolf with the sheep").
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist for the Turkish daily Hürriyet and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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Turkey's Human Wave Assault on the West
by Gregg Roman and Gary C. Gambill
The Hill
December 7, 2015
http://www.meforum.org/5683/turkey-human-wave-assault-on-europe
Turkey is trying to overwhelm Europe by sheer force of numbers.
For months, Western policymakers have agonized over what to do with the masses of Sunni Muslim migrants flooding Europe by the boatload, particularly Syrians. Largely missing from this discussion is the question of why this flood is happening.
For starters, it doesn't have much to do directly with the civil war in Syria or the rise of ISIS. The vast majority of the 886,662 migrants who illegally entered Europe this year embarked from Turkey, a little over half of them Syrians who took shelter in the country over the past four years. "EU officials have said ... Ankara was very effective in previous years in preventing the outflow of refugees from the country," according to the Wall Street Journal.
What caused the spike in migration is that Ankara stopped containing it. Over the past year or so, the Turkish government has allowed human traffickers to vastly expand their operations, bringing prices down tenfold (from $10,000-$12,000 per person last year to around $1,250 today, according to one report). This spawned what the New York Times calls a "multimillion-dollar shadow economy" profiting from the traffic, ranging from the smugglers to manufacturers of cheap rafts, life vests, and other equipment.
Turkey opened the spigot of migrants to extract financial, political, and strategic concessions in exchange for closing it.
By the spring of this year it had become easier and cheaper than ever before to illegally enter Europe through Turkey, and more people have taken advantage of the opportunity Ankara has created.
So why did Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan open the spigot? Put simply, to extract financial, political, and strategic concessions from European governments in exchange for closing it.
Ankara certainly hasn't been shy about asking for money over the course of its negotiations with EU officials in recent weeks. On November 29 the EU agreed to provide Turkey with an "initial" $3.19 billion and take steps to expedite its bid to join the EU in exchange for Turkish promises to better patrol its coastlines.
Erdogan also used the crisis to generate foreign political support ahead of snap elections on November 1, essentially a re-do of the June 2015 elections that saw the ruling AKP lose its parliamentary majority for the first time. Though Western diplomatic protocol frowns on state visits during election time, German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Istanbul for high-profile meetings with Erdogan and Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu just two weeks before the vote. The European Commission postponed the release of a report detailing the erosion of the rule of law, freedom of expression and judicial independence in Turkey until after the election in order, according to Reuters, "to avoid antagonizing" its president.
Most worrisome, perhaps, is Turkey's pursuit of strategic payoffs for its human wave assault on Europe. In a letter sent to European leaders at the September 23 EU migration summit, Davutoglu proposed the creation of a "safe zone" and U.S.-enforced no-fly zone stretching from the Turkish border 80 km into northern Syria, where his government has backed a variety of Sunni Islamist insurgents against both pro-regime Syrian forces and local Kurds.
Although the start of Russian military intervention in Syria on September 30 put an end to this fantasy for the time being (which perhaps explains why the Turks were so trigger-happy in shooting down an SU-24 that only slightly violated their airspace on November 24), you can bet Erdogan will use the migrant crisis to pressure the West into supporting his ambitions in Syria.
The most vexing question is what to do with a government that uses human beings as a diplomatic pressure tactic.
If all of this sounds familiar, it's because the late Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi used to play the same game, turning the pipeline of illegal trans-African migration into Europe on and off as a way of extracting concessions. The most vexing question, then as now, is not what to do with the migrants, but what to do with a government that so callously manipulates masses of downtrodden human beings as a diplomatic pressure tactic.
On this there's room for debate. But the first step in doing anything about it is to call Erdogan out for what he is – dangerous and manipulative – no partner for Western leaders. Still, after meeting with the Erdogan in Paris on Tuesday, President Obama praised Turkey for being "extraordinarily generous when it comes to its support of refugees."
The next step, instead of bribing Turkey with ransom payments to end the hemorrhaging of Syrian and other Middle East refugees into the West, should turn the tables on Ankara. The potential loss of Western support to Turkey as it deals with both Russia and ISIS should be the sword of Damocles, convincing Erdogan to contain the refugee crisis.
Western material support to Turkey should be cut off entirely unless Ankara puts an end to the refugee crisis it is manufacturing and begins to play a constructive role in bringing stability to the region. How appropriate that an ancient Greek tragedy disrupt the current calamitous Turkish-born reality.
Gregg Roman is director of the Middle East Forum. Gary C. Gambill is a research fellow at the Middle East Forum
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second post
By Reva Bhalla
With the Turkish downing of a Russian fighter jet still fresh on his mind, Russian President Vladimir Putin had some choice words for his erstwhile ally Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he delivered his state of the nation speech to the Russian Federal Assembly on Dec. 3. Putin angrily lamented "we were prepared to cooperate with Turkey on most sensitive issues and go further than their allies. Allah knows why they did it. Apparently Allah decided to punish the ruling elite in Turkey by taking their sanity."
While Putin may sound a bit dramatic, there is a hard geopolitical truth behind his shock and dismay toward Turkey. Russia knows the importance of keeping Turkey as a friend when it is facing off with bigger powers to the West. That is because Turkey holds the keys to the Dardanelles and Bosporus — the only way Russian merchant vessels and warships can reach the Mediterranean from Russia's warm water ports in the Black Sea. All of Putin's calculations in dealing with the United States are now turning on an uncomfortable reality that Moscow can no longer fully rely on Turkish neutrality in one of the most strategic spots on the map.
Stressing Over the Straits
The year 1946, when World War II had just wrapped up, offers a useful snapshot into Moscow's extraordinary obsession with the Turkish straits. Since losing its empire after World War I, an economically devastated Turkey had struggled to piece together a nation, wisely choosing to sit out the second round of global conflict. A decade earlier, when Hitler's troops had invaded the demilitarized Rhineland and Mussolini was openly declaring his desire to take over Anatolia, an anxious Turkey demanded a revision to the doctrine governing the straits, arguing that the straits needed to be remilitarized and placed under Turkey's exclusive control. The result was the Montreux Convention of 1936, which formalizes Turkey's role as custodian of the straits, ensures freedom of passage for merchant vessels in times of peace and imposes size, type and tonnage restrictions on non-Black Sea war vessels. Under the convention, war vessels from non-Black Sea states Turkey permits to enter the straits cannot stay in the Black Sea for longer than 21 days. In times of war, Turkey is expected to ban belligerents from the straits altogether to keep the Black Sea conflict free.
But the Soviets were never completely satisfied with Turkey's neutrality, knowing that Ankara was likely to tilt West when things got rough. The Soviets told the Turks in 1946 that if they were sincere about being allies, then they should give the Soviets basing rights in the Dardanelles. The Soviets bandied a number of threats to convey its seriousness to Turkey, such as Soviet territorial claims to portions of eastern Turkey, stirring up Kurdish separatists and backing Syrian claims to Hatay province.
A frazzled Turkey looked across the Atlantic for U.S. help. U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Edwin Wilson explained to U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes that, "the real [Soviet] objective towards Turkey is not a revision of the regime of the Straits, but actual domination of Turkey. In the vast security belt of the Soviet Union, which extends from the Baltic to the Black Sea, Turkey constitutes a sole gap … the Soviet objective, therefore, is to break down this present independent Turkish government and to establish in its place a vassal or "friendly" regime in Turkey, which will complete the security belt of subservient countries on Russia's western and southern frontiers and put an end completely to Western influence in Turkey."
The time had thus come for the United States to bring Turkey under its security umbrella.
On April 6, 1946, the USS Missouri arrived in Istanbul on the pretext of delivering the ashes of a Turkish ambassador to the United States who had died on U.S. soil. A jubilant Turkey celebrated the arrival of the U.S. battleship with special postage stamps and gifts for U.S. naval officers. As Ambassador Wilson put it, "the USS Missouri visit is thus apt to take on the character of one of those imponderable events, the influence of which extends far beyond the immediate theater in which it occurs." The ostentatious display of a U.S. security guarantee was the prelude to U.S. President Harry S. Truman's February 1947 request to Congress to provide foreign aid to Turkey and Greece "to assist free people to deal with their destinies in their own way." This was the Truman Doctrine that locked in the Cold War, with Turkey sitting squarely on the U.S. side.
An Old Rivalry Revived
The Turkish-Russian confrontation is now back, not because either side willed it, but because geopolitics compelled it. Putin and Erdogan are the inheritors of two historical empires that fought several wars from the 17th century to the 19th century. With both countries resurgent, they were bound to butt heads again. The first sign came in August 2008, when Russia's invasion of Georgia woke Turkey up to a Moscow ready and willing to apply military force to re-create buffers in the former Soviet sphere to counter Western encroachment. At that time, Russia was not happy at the sight of Turkey allowing U.S. warships into the Black Sea to deliver aid to Georgian ports; Moscow conveyed its displeasure by holding up thousands of Turkish trucks at the Russian border. But both sides went out of their way to avoid a bigger breach.
The 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea was the next big Russian punch to the Turkish gut. Roughly 300,000 Turkic-speaking Tatars remain on the Crimean Peninsula as a remnant of Ottoman history. Turkey's quick defense of the Tatars in the wake of the Russian invasion stemmed from more than a concern for its ethnic kin: Turkey understood that the balance of power in the Black Sea was shifting. Russia's seizure of Crimea meant Moscow no longer has to deal with pesky lease arrangements with a mercurial government in Kiev. Russia now enjoys the freedom to beef up its Sevastopol-based Black Sea Fleet, a fleet largely designed to counter Turkey's naval strength.
Russia's push into Syria in 2015 was the red line for Turkey. In this chapter of Turkish expansion, the Islamist Justice and Development Party is logically prioritizing its volatile Middle Eastern backyard. The Turkish focus is on northern Syria and northern Iraq, a belt of former Ottoman provinces that naturally extend eastward from Turkey's Hatay province. Russia's involvement in Syria in defense of the Alawite government runs directly against Turkey's objective of expanding its own military footprint in Aleppo, keeping a check on Kurdish separatist activity and eventually replacing Syrian President Bashar al Assad with a Sunni government friendly to Turkish interests.
Syria is of peripheral interest to the Russians, just as Ukraine is of peripheral interest to the Turks. But there are a number of factors drawing the Russian military dangerously close to Turkey's core interests along the Syrian-Turkish border. The Islamic State is a real threat to Russia, and Moscow has a legitimate interest in targeting the threat at its source. At the same time, Russia's relationships in Syria are concentrated in Alawite circles. Russia sees its leverage with the Alawite government as its main way to negotiate with the United States, keep Iran dependent on Moscow and deal with threats like Islamic State. The more crowded the battlefield, of course, the greater the chances of a Turkish and Russian collision.
To supply its forces in Syria, the Russian navy has been relying on the so-called Syrian Express, a naval supply route from Sevastopol on the Black Sea to its Eastern Mediterranean naval facility at the Syrian port of Tartus. As gatekeeper of the straits, Turkey could theoretically complicate this supply route. In peacetime, Turkey could still claim it is abiding by the Montreux Convention and allowing Russia free access while increasing inspections on passing Russian ships. While it would prove an annoyance to Russia, Moscow's main worry is Article 20 of the Montreux Convention, which says that in wartime Turkey as a belligerent has full discretion when allowing or preventing the passage of warships through the strait, potentially cutting Russia off from the Mediterranean.
Turkey's Double-Edged Sword
The straits are powerful tools Turkey can use against Moscow, but Ankara cannot easily quit Russia. Turkey is the second-largest buyer of Russian natural gas, a significant importer of Russian oil and metals, and the largest buyer of Russian wheat and sunflower oil. A contentious relationship with Russia will bring enormous economic pain to the Turks. Nowhere is this truer than in their energy relationship. Unlike oil, coal or wheat, which can be sourced from alternative suppliers, Turkey has no quick and reliable alternative for natural gas, an important energy source for industry and households. Russia supplies around 55 percent (or about 27 billion cubic meters of its 50 bcm annual needs) of Turkish natural gas consumption. That supply is split between two pipelines that each can hold 16 bcm of natural gas; Blue Stream, which runs directly from Russia to Turkey across the Black Sea; and the Gas-West pipeline, which transits Ukraine, Romania and Bulgaria before reaching Turkey. Turkey is not close to closing the straits to Russia nor is Russia close to cutting off natural gas to Turkey. But even so, Turkey must start taking its energy security much more seriously now that it is in an open confrontation with Russia.
The problem for Turkey is that there are no quick-fix solutions to its energy dilemma. Turkey has only two liquefied natural gas import terminals, at Marmara Ereglisi (8.2 bcm annual capacity) and Aliaga (5 bcm annual capacity). With limited LNG import and storage capacity (3 bcm), Turkey has much work to do — and investment to raise — to build out this infrastructure over the course of several years.
Ankara's alternative pipeline suppliers carry their own set of complications. Turkey imports roughly 20 percent of its natural gas from Iran; such imports could grow as Iran begins to repair its energy sector after years of sanctions. It will take considerable time, however, and expanding the Iran-Turkey energy relationship would still carry big risks for Turkey. Iran is just as much a geopolitical challenger to Turkey as Russia is, and the more assertive Turkey becomes in the Middle East, the more its competition with Iran will grow in Syria and Iraq.
Iranian-Turkish competition only further complicates Turkey's ambitions for Iraqi Kurdistan, where Erdogan has developed close business ties to Kurdistan Democratic Party leader Massoud Barzani. Turkey has already helped Barzani develop an independent oil export route at the expense of Iran's allies in Baghdad and is now gearing up to do the same for natural gas to feed the Turkish market. But the collapse of Turkey's peace process with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (whose fighters rely on Iraqi Kurdistan for refuge) and a power vacuum in northern Syria exploited by Kurdish separatists will drive Turkey's military to become more aggressive beyond its borders in both Syria and Iraq. Turkey's control over the revenues from those oil export sales gives Ankara substantial clout over the Iraqi Kurdish government, but Barzani and his allies are also in the untenable position of doing business with the Turkish enemy at the same time Turkey is incrementally enlarging its military footprint in Kurdish territory. This creates an easy opportunity for Iran and Russia to exploit Kurdish divisions and militancy to push back against Turkey.
While pursuing an extraordinarily complicated energy plan in Iraqi Kurdistan, Turkey is also trying to edge its way into the Eastern Mediterranean energy scene. Both Israel and Cyprus have seen their offshore natural gas export plans stall because of export and regulatory obstacles while Egypt has emerged as the new potential natural gas hub of the region. As the debate continues over the many proposals for pipelines and LNG export terminals, Turkey will have added urgency to prod along reunification talks in Cyprus to remove one of the key blocks to Turkey's energy integration with its estranged eastern Mediterranean neighbors.
The most geopolitically compatible energy source for Turkey is Azerbaijan, which is preparing to send 6 billion cubic meters of natural gas to Turkey starting from 2019 through the Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (and another 10 bcm that will be sent onward to Europe through the Trans-Adriatic Pipeline). This will help Turkey shave down its energy dependence on Russia by about 12 percent, but Turkey will still need to look elsewhere to truly loosen Russia's grip. The Caucasus, like the Middle East, will redevelop into another big arena for Turkish-Russian competition. Russia is already hard at work trying to pull Baku closer to the Kremlin through diplomatic maneuvering over Nagorno-Karabakh and will do what it can to obstruct plans by Turkey and Azerbaijan to create an energy link across the Caspian with Turkmenistan.
The Turkish Awakening
Four years ago, Stratfor co-hosted a simulation in Istanbul with the Turkish Industry and Business Association to paint a picture of the energy world in 2040 and Turkey's place in that world. We saw a world in which a reluctant Turkey was inevitably going to be drawn into conflicts in the Middle East and with Russia, making it all the more imperative for Turkey to strategize a future that would deny Russia the ability to cripple Turkey economically. Then-Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (now prime minister) concluded the simulation with a message that Turkey is "not about to follow a new expansionist policy" and that Turkey's way of coping with energy challenges is to take advantage of its geographic position and maintain a stable relationship with its neighbors.
This was a time when Davutoglu's "zero problems with neighbors" policy was still clouding the vision of the Turkish political elite. The policy proved to be shortsighted, but was also expected from a country that was awakening from a decadeslong geopolitical slumber and was in no mood to create trouble in the region. But all the signs were there: Russia was already making aggressive moves in its near abroad, the European Union was showing early signs of unraveling and the Syrian civil war was just getting started.
Four short years later, Turkey has shot down a fighter jet belonging to its main energy supplier and is preparing for a military push into its Mideast rim. And Putin now has to figure out how to manage a Turkey that is much more willing to work with the United States and its Central and Eastern European peers to balance Moscow's aggressions. Ankara has been suppressed for some time, but there is no denying it now: Turkey's time has come.
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The muslim world hearts Hitler.
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Russian Imperialism Meets Delusions of Ottoman Grandeur
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
December 31, 2015
http://www.meforum.org/5753/russia-ottoman-grandeur
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Slightly edited version of an article originally published under the title "Russian Imperialism Meets Illusions of Ottoman Grandeur."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right) says he doesn't understand why Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) intervened in Syria, since Russia "does not even border Syria."
In a 2012 speech, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, then foreign minister, predicted that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's days in power were numbered and that he would depart "within months or weeks." Almost three and a half years have passed, with Assad still in power, and Davutoglu keeps on making one passionate speech after another about the fate of Syria.
Turkey's failure to devise a credible policy on Syria has made the country's leaders nervous. Both Davutoglu and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have lately resorted to more aggressive, but less convincing, rhetoric on Syria. The new rhetoric features many aspects of a Sunni Islamist thinking blended with delusions of Ottoman grandeur.
On December 22, Davutoglu said, "Syrian soil is not, and will not be, part of Russia's imperialistic goals." That was a relief to know! All the same, Davutoglu could have been more direct and honest if he said that: "Syrian soil will not be part of Russia's imperialistic goals because we want it to be part of Turkey's pro-Sunni, neo-Ottoman imperialistic goals."
Erdogan's rhetoric on Syria blends Sunni Islamist thinking with delusions of Ottoman grandeur.
It is obvious that Davutoglu's concern is not about a neighboring territory becoming a theater of war before it serves any foreign nation's imperialistic goals. His concern, rather, is that neighboring soil will become a theater of war and serve a pro-Shiite's imperialist goals. Hardly surprising.
"What," Davutoglu asked Russia, "is the basis of your presence in Syria?" The Russians could unconvincingly reply to this unconvincing question: "Fighting terror, in general, and ISIL in particular." But then Davutoglu claims that the Russian military hits more "moderates" (read: merely jihadist killers, not to be mixed with jihadist barbarians who behead people and cheerfully release their videos). Translation: more Islamist targets and fewer ISIL targets.
A legitimate question to ask the Turkish prime minister might be: What is the basis of "moderate" Islamists' presence in Syria?
Could the basis be the religious bond? Could Prime Minister Davutoglu have politely reminded the Russians that the "moderate" fighters are Muslim whereas Russia is not? But then, one should ask, using Davutoglu's logic, "What is the basis of the U.S.-led Western coalition's airstrikes in Syria?" Since when are the Americans, British, Germans and French Muslims?
In Turkish thinking, there is just one difference between non-Muslim Russia's presence in Syria and non-Muslim allies' presence: The non-Muslim Russians seriously threaten the advancement of our pro-Sunni sectarian war in the Levant, whereas the non-Muslim allies can be instrumental in favor of it. Hence Turkey's selective objection to some of the non-Muslim players in Syria.
For Davutoglu, only countries with regional ambitions convergent with Turkey's have the right to tamper in former Ottoman lands.
Earlier in 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that he found it difficult to understand what Russia was doing in Syria, since "it does not even border Syria." By that logic, Turkey should not be "doing anything" in the Palestinian territories, Somalia, Egypt, Pakistan, Afghanistan or any of the non-bordering lands into which its neo-Ottoman impulses have pushed it over the past several years. By the same logic, also, Turkey should be objecting to any allied (non-Muslim) intervention in Syria, or to any Qatari or Saudi (non-bordering) intervention in the Syrian theater.
In the unrealistic imperial Turkish psyche, only Turkey and the countries that pursue regional ambitions convergent with Turkey's can have any legitimate right to design or re-design the former Ottoman lands.
Such self-righteous and assertive thinking can hardly comply with international law. The Turks and their imperial ambitions have already been declared unwelcome in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. Nor would such ambitions be welcomed in any former Ottoman land to Turkey's west. But if, as Turkey's Islamists are programmed to believe, "historical and geographical bonds" give a foreign nation the right to design a polity in another nation, what better justification could the Russians have had for their post-imperial designs in Crimea?
When they have a moment of distraction from their wars against Western values, the West, Israel, Jews or infidels, the Sunni and Shiite Islamists in the Middle East fight subtle-looking (but less subtle than they think) and cunning (but less cunning than they think) wars and proxy wars, and accuse each other of pursuing sectarian policies. Turkey's rulers are no exception.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist for the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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Turkey's Free Speech Assault is Beyond 'Worrying'
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
January 27, 2016
http://www.meforum.org/5817/turkey-free-speech
A criminal indictment was filed against Sedat Ergin (left), editor-in-chief of the country's most influential newspaper, Hurriyet, for allegedly insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right).
Defending his quest for an executive presidential system Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cited Hitler's Germany as an effective form of government. Yes, he said, you can have the presidential system in a unitary state as in Hitler's Germany. His office later claimed that the president's "Hitler's Germany" metaphor had been "distorted" by the media. Erdogan's words on Hitler's Germany may or may not have been distorted, but the way he rules Turkey reminds one powerfully of how Hitler ruled the Third Reich.
With or without a distortion of Erdogan's words, a criminal indictment was filed against Sedat Ergin, editor-in-chief of the country's most influential newspaper, Hurriyet. Prosecutors demanded up to five years in prison for Ergin, for allegedly insulting Erdogan. The indictment claims that Hurriyet insulted the president by paraphrasing his Sept. 6, 2015 remarks about an attack by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) on the Iraqi border, which killed 16 Turkish soldiers.
Such insane charges are no longer news in Erdogan's Turkey. On Jan. 11, prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the host and the producer of a popular talk show on charges of "terrorist propaganda." The move came after a caller, identifying herself as a schoolteacher, protested the civilian casualties during recent security operations against the PKK. The caller was urging the public to raise its voice against the deaths of "unborn children, babies and mothers." She did not even mention the PKK.
500 journalists were reportedly fired in Turkey last year, while 70 others were subjected to physical violence.
According to a report by the Turkish Journalists Association, 500 journalists were fired in Turkey in 2015, while 70 others were subjected to physical violence. Thirty journalists remain in prison, mostly on terrorism charges. Needless to say, the unfortunate journalists invariably are known to be critical of Erdogan.
Journalists are not the only ones threatened by a judiciary and law enforcement apparatus staunchly loyal to Erdogan. On Jan. 15, police detained scores of academics whom Erdogan had labeled "dark people" for signing a declaration that denounced military operations against the PKK.
Over 1,100 Turkish and 300 foreign academics signed the declaration that Turkish prosecutors think "insulted the state and engaged in terrorist propaganda on behalf of the PKK." Just before the arrests, Erdogan decried the signatories and called on the judiciary to act against the "treachery."
"Just because they have titles such as professor, doctor in front of their names does not make them enlightened. These are dark people," Erdogan said. "They are villains and vile because those who side with the villains are villains themselves."
In their declaration, these "traitors" said they refused to be "a party to the crime" and called on the government to halt what they called a "massacre."
One convicted mafia leader, a notoriously nationalistic man, publicly threatened the signatories that "we will take a shower in their blood." Unlike the "terrorist" academics, he has not so far been indicted for that threat.
"For Turkish democracy (whatever that is) this is yet another low. It confirms that this is a 'democracy' with rapidly diminishing freedom of speech. It is 'democracy' where the 'voice of the nation,' which practically is the voice of the political majority and its glorified leader, intimidates and silences dissenting voices," wrote Hurriyet columnist Mustafa Akyol.
The Turkish Justice Ministry's statistics perhaps best explain the huge democracy deficit in the Turkey of Erdogan. Turkey's prisons have a total capacity to house 180,176 inmates. As of January 13, Turkey had a total of 179,611 inmates, meaning that there will not be any space if Turkish prosecutors detain just 565 more.
Europe, cherishing its "transactional" relations with Turkey, prefers to look the other way. All of this is happening not in Germany of the late 1930s but in Turkey of the 21st century. Meanwhile, Europe, cherishing its "transactional" relations with Turkey, prefers to look the other way and whistle. All the European Union could say about the prosecution of the academics who signed the declaration was that it is "extremely worrying." Brussels cannot see that Turkish affairs passed the threshold of "extremely worrying" a long time ago.
Prominent journalist Can Dundar, who has been in jail on terrorism charges since Nov. 26, was right when he wrote in an open letter to Italy's prime minister, Matteo Renzi, that "the rapprochement between Turkey and the European Union over refugees should not overshadow violations of fundamental rights and freedoms in Turkey during the country's EU accession process."
In reality, Turkey's irregularities are too big to be hidden behind the usual diplomatic words such as "concern" and "worrying." Ahead of Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's meeting in London with Britain's David Cameron, more than two dozen prominent writers, including David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Hari Kunzru, William Boyd, Ali Smith, Sarah Waters and Monica Ali, called on the British prime minister to urge the Turkish government to halt its crackdown on freedom of speech.
The English, Welsh and Scottish branches of PEN put it in plain language: "Over the past five months, intimidation, threats and even physical assaults against journalists, writers and publishers have become the norm [in Turkey]."
Turkey is now more than "worrying."
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist for the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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The European Union Caves to Turkey's Blackmail
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
March 15, 2016
http://www.meforum.org/5910/turkey-eu-blackmail
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu (2nd from left) says his latest round of talks with Europe's leaders was bargaining "a la Kayseri," a Turkish city famous for its cunning merchants.
Turkey has been sliding into an ugly Islamist despotism. Yet its relations with the European Union (EU) it aspires to join have rarely been better. Some call it a mutually "transactional" improvement: "pragmatism."
Others, in less diplomatic language, call it Turkish blackmailing on the back of the refugee crisis. Even Turkey's Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu admitted that his latest round of negotiations with Europe's leaders was bargaining a la Kayseri, a Turkish city famous for its tough-bargaining merchants.
In reality, modern Turkey has never been this galactically distant from the core values enshrined by the European civilization and its institutions, including even the EU. Turkey has never been so galactically distant from core European values.
When Turkey's Constitutional Court ruled that the detention for 92 days of two journalists, Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, constituted a breach of their basic rights, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not hide his anger. He said he would not respect or obey the Supreme Court's ruling. The journalists had been charged with espionage and terrorism after their secular newspaper, Cumhuriyet, ran photos and a story about Turkish intelligence sending trucks full of arms to jihadists fighting in Syria. Prosecutors demand life sentences for the prominent journalists.
Erdogan does not mind playing the supreme leader beyond the check on power of law. In a March 11 speech, Erdogan said:
The Constitutional Court has to be one of the institutions that should be the most sensitive about the interests and rights of the state and the people. But this institution and its president have not hesitated to rule against the country and its people on one of the most concrete examples of a massive attack towards Turkey in recent times. Turkey is now a country where the elected president publicly says that he will not obey a ruling from the Supreme Court.
In one of its boldest moves against free speech, Turkish courts, controlled by Erdogan's government, put the newspaper Zaman, one of the last remaining media critics of Erdogan, under state control. A court actually appointed administrators to run the newspaper. Editor-in-chief Sevgi Akarcesme said that this was effectively the end of media freedom in Turkey. said in a letter to Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu that press freedom in Turkey is "under siege."
Turkey ranks 149th out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders World Press Freedom Index.
Unsurprisingly, Turkey ranks 149th amongst the 180 countries in the Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index 2015.
It's not just the press. Prosecutors also detained four prominent businessmen who run a multibillion-dollar conglomerate for alleged ties with Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who was formerly a staunch political ally of Erdogan. Gulen's followers broke with Erdogan after the two groups entangled in a power-sharing struggle in late 2013.
The newspaper Zaman too, was a Gulenist outlet critical of Erdogan's undemocratic practices. After its seizure by the judiciary, the newspaper now features a distinctly pro-government slant. One of its front pages after take-over featured a picture of a smiling Erdogan.
Against such a gloomy background, the EU's ties with Turkey, instead of going into the deep freeze, are flourishing. Two ministers from German Chancellor Angela Merkel's government have voiced support for Turkey's EU membership bid in an apparent praise for Turkey's potential "usefulness" in Europe's efforts to deal with a pressing refugee crisis. "I am for the opening of the chapter on justice and human rights, finally," German Justice Minister Heiko Maas of Social Democrats (SPD) told German magazine, Spiegel, in an article published on March 11. Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen said: "It is right to accommodate further the negotiations on Turkey's EU membership now."
Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), accuses Turkey of "blackmailing" the EU.
Such praise came when Turkey and the EU are in negotiations over a re-admission agreement in which Turkey will take back some of the illegal Syrian migrants who reach Greek shores –-and then travel to central Europe—in return for a visa-free travel regime for 79 million Turks and speeding up Turkey's several decades-long membership process. After the latest round of talks with the EU, Davutoglu proudly told reporters of a "Kayseri-style bargaining," not hiding his pleasure at tricking the Europeans by the notorious business cunning and acumen of the people of Kayseri.
Quite realistically, Nigel Farage, a British opposition figure, accused Turkey of "blackmailing" the EU over the Syrian refugee crisis and its proposed EU membership. The UKIP party leader told the European Parliament it was "outrageous" that Turkey had been offered concessions on joining the bloc in exchange for doing a deal to accept more refugees and migrants.
None of what has been going on in Turkey is surprising. By a popular vote, the country has been dragged into an Islamist tyranny. Yet it is only by a grotesque irony that the European leaders might surrender.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist for the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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Turkey's Erdoğan Gambles and Loses
by Daniel Pipes
The Australian
March 19, 2016
http://www.meforum.org/5915/erdogan-gambles-and-loses
A rhetorical question by the time the Economist ran this cover in June 2013.
The Republic of Turkey, long a democratizing Muslim country solidly in the Western camp, now finds itself internally racked and at the center of two external crises, the civil war in next-door Syria and the illegal immigration that is changing European politics. The prospects for Turkey and its neighbors are worrisome, if not ominous.
The key development was the coming to power of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2002, when a fluke election outcome gave him total control of the government, which he then brilliantly parlayed into a personal dominion. After years of restraint and modesty, his real personality – grandiloquent, Islamist, and aggressive – came out. Now, he seeks to rule as a despot, an ambition that causes his country incessant, avoidable problems.
Initially, Erdoğan's disciplined approach to finance permitted the Turkish economy to achieve China-like economic growth and won him increasing electoral support while making Ankara a new player in regional affairs.
After years of restraint, the real Erdoğan – grandiloquent, Islamist, and aggressive – came out.
But then conspiracy theories, corruption, short-sightedness, and incompetence cut into the growth, making Turkey economically vulnerable.
Initially, Erdoğan took unprecedented steps to resolve his country's Kurdish problem, acknowledging that this ethnic minority making up roughly 20 percent of the country's population has its own culture and allowing it to express itself in its own language.
But then, for electoral reasons, he abruptly reversed himself last year, resulting in a more-than-ever determined and violent Kurdish insurgency, to the point that civil war has become a real prospect.
Initially, Erdoğan accepted the traditional autonomy of the major institutions in Turkish life – law courts, the military, the press, banks, schools.
(Cumhuriyet editor-in-chief Can Dündar (right) and journalist Erdem Gül (left) were jailed on charges of terrorism and espionage when they exposed Erdoğan's covert support for ISIS.)
No longer; now he seeks to control everything.
Take the case of two prominent journalists, Can Dündar and Erdem Gül: because their newspaper, Cumhuriyet, exposed the Turkish government's clandestine support for the Islamic State (ISIS), Erdoğan had them imprisoned on the surreal charges of espionage and terrorism. Worse, when the Constitutional Court (Turkey's highest) reversed this sentence, Erdoğan accused the court of ruling "against the country and its people" and indicated he would ignore its decision.
Initially, Erdoğan maintained cautious and correct relations with Moscow, benefiting economically and using Russia as a balance against the United States. But since the reckless Turkish shoot-down of a Russian warplane last November, followed by a defiant lack of apology, the little bully (Erdoğan) has more than met his match with the big bully (Russia's Vladimir Putin) and Turkey is paying the price. French President François Hollande has publicly warned of "a risk of war" between Turkey and Russia.
Initially, Erdoğan's accommodating policies translated into a calming of domestic politics; now, his bellicosity has led to a string of minor and major acts of violence. To make matters worse, many of them are murky in origin and purpose, building paranoia. For example, before the Kurdish group TAK claimed responsibility for the bombing on Mar. 13 that killed 37 near the prime minister's office in Ankara, the attack was variously blamed on Kurds, ISIS, and the Turkish government; . It was interpreted as intending to justify a more forceful campaign against domestic Kurds or to punish the government for attacking the Kurds; to encourage a Turkish military invasion of Syria or to frame Erdoğan's political archenemy, the Gülen movement.
The scene in Ankara on March 13.
Initially, Turkey became a plausible candidate for membership in the European Union thanks to Erdoğan's muted behavior. Now, his slide toward despotism and Islamism means the Europeans go merely through the motions of pretending to negotiate with Ankara, while counting on the Republic of Cyprus to blackball its application; as Turkish journalist Burak Bekdil notes, "modern Turkey has never been this galactically distant from the core values enshrined by the European civilization and its institutions."
In the early months of the Syrian uprising, Erdoğan offered sage advice to the dictator in Damascus, Bashar al-Assad, about relaxing his grip and allowing political participation. Things have gone so awry that – as Dündar and Gül reported – Erdoğan now supports ISIS, the most fanatical and Islamist organization of today, and perhaps ever. That support has taken many forms: permitting foreigners to cross Turkey to reach Syria, allowing recruitment in Turkey, providing medical care, and provisioning money and arms. Despite this, ISIS, fearful of betrayal by Ankara, threatens and attacks Turks.
Erdoğan's error of backing ISIS and other Sunni Islamist organizations in Syria has hurt him in another way, leading to a massive influx of Syrian refugees to Turkey, where, increasingly unwelcomed by the indigenous population, they cause new social and economic strains.
Which brings us to Erdoğan's latest gambit. The many Syrian refugees wanting to go on to northwestern Europe provide him with a handy mechanism to blackmail the European Union: pay me huge amounts of money (€6 billion at latest count) and permit 80 million Turks to travel visa-free to your countries, or I will dump more unwelcome Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, et al. on you.
Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu speaks at a conference on immigration.
So far, the ploy has worked. Led by Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Europeans are succumbing to Erdoğan's demands. But this may well be a Pyrrhic victory, hurting Erdoğan's long-term interests. In the first place, forcing Europeans to pretend they are not being blackmailed and to welcome Turkey with clenched teeth, creates a foul mood, further reducing, if not killing off, Turkish chances for membership.
Second, Erdoğan's game has prompted a profound and probably lasting shift in mood in Europe against accepting more immigrants from the Middle East – including Turks – as demonstrated by the poor showing of Merkel's party in elections earlier this month.
This is just the start. In combination, these errors by Erdoğan point to more crises ahead. Gökhan Bacik, a professor at Ipek University in Ankara, notes that "Turkey is facing a multifaceted catastrophe," the scale of which "is beyond Turkey's capacity for digestion." If Iran is today the Middle East's greatest danger, Turkey is tomorrow's.
Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum.
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Erdoğan's One-Man Islamist Show
Dateline
by Burak Bekdil
Middle East Quarterly
Spring 2016 (view PDF)
http://www.meforum.org/5879/erdogan-one-man-islamist-show
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Explosions rip through a group of protesters staging an anti-government peace rally in Ankara, October 2015, resulting in the worst ever single terror attack in Turkey's modern history. The upsurge in violence helped propel President Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) to a stronger showing in the November elections, but he did not receive enough votes to change the constitution.
Secular and liberal Turks sighed with premature relief when on June 7, 2015, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) lost its parliamentary majority in general elections for the first time since it came to power in November 2002. With 41 percent of the national vote (compared with 49.8 percent in the 2011 general elections), the AKP won eighteen fewer seats than necessary to form a single-party government in Turkey's 550-member parliament. More importantly, its parliamentary seats fell widely short of the minimum number needed to rewrite the constitution in the way Erdoğan wanted it so as to introduce an executive presidential system that would give him uncontrolled powers with few checks and balances, if any.[1]
Undaunted by what looked like an election defeat, Erdoğan chose to toss the dice again. At his instructions, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu pretended to hold coalition negotiations with opposition parties while secretly laying the groundwork for snap elections.[2] In Erdoğan's thinking, the loss of a few more seats would make no difference to AKP power, but re-winning a parliamentary majority would make the situation totally different. Then a terrible wave of violence gripped Turkey.
First, the separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK), which had been fighting a guerrilla war from mountain hideouts in northern Iraq, declared an end to its unilateral ceasefire begun in 2013.[3] Then on July 20, a Turkish suicide bomber killed more than thirty people at a pro-Kurdish gathering in the small town of Suruc.[4] Claiming that the Turkish state had a secret role in the bombing, the PKK killed two policemen in the town of Ceylanpinar.[5] The three-decades-old violence between the Turkish and Kurdish communities had suddenly roared back with a vengeance. In one of Turkey's bloodiest summers ever, more than a thousand PKK fighters and Turkish security officials were killed.
Then in October, ISIS attacked in the Turkish capital. Two suicide bombers, one Turkish the other Syrian, killed some one hundred people at a pro-peace rally in the heart of Ankara, the worst single terror attack in the country's modern history.[6] By then, Erdoğan had already dissolved parliament and called for early elections on November 1, calculating that the wave of instability would push frightened voters toward single-party rule.
Erdoğan's gamble paid off. The elections gave the AKP a comfortable victory and a mandate to rule until 2019: 49.5 percent of the national vote, or 317 parliamentary seats, sufficient to form a single-party government but still short of the magical number of 330 necessary to bring a constitutional amendment up for referendum. Once again, political Islam had won in Turkey. But how, in a span of just five months, did a government mired in rising unemployment, economic slowdown, terror attacks, and soldiers' funerals succeed in increasing its national vote by about nine percentage points? A combination of factors offers some clues.
A Splintered Opposition
The AKP's renewed victory illustrates the hopelessly divided and polarized state of the Turkish political scene. To begin with, not all Kurds are PKK supporters. The summer-long violence between the PKK and the Turkish military seems to have won over those Kurds with relatively more loyalist sentiments toward Turkey as well as those who sympathize with the Islamist AKP for reasons of piety. This caused a shift of votes, measured at 1.4 percentage points, from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) to the AKP.
The AKP's renewed victory illustrates the hopelessly divided and polarized state of the Turkish political scene.
More importantly, the violence improved the AKP's position vis-à-vis the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which shares more or less the same voter base. In the June elections, some of the AKP's votes seem to have shifted to the MHP (which won 16.3 percent of the balloting overall), apparently due to nationalist disapproval of the AKP's peace overtures to the Kurds. Once they scrapped the peace process and launched an all-out war against the restive Kurdish minority, Erdoğan and Davutoğlu could boast of their newfound nationalist spirit. In the November elections, the MHP lost 4.1 percent—all of which apparently went to the AKP.
Add to this the disappearance from the political scene of two splinter parties, one with an Islamist and the other with nationalist manifestos, which had won 2 percent of the vote on June 7, allowing the AKP to pick up another 1.5 percent of the overall vote.
The opposition Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) shares more or less the same voter base with the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and gained strength in the June 2015 general elections. MHP leader Devlet Bahceli (left) sat down for inconclusive talks with prime minister Ahmet Davutoğlu (right) in August 2015, but as Turkey spiraled into violence, and Davutoglu's AKP party scrapped its peace process with the Kurds, the MHP lost ground in the November balloting.
Finally, in the June elections, some AKP voters apparently refrained from voting in the face of Erdoğan's lavish public lifestyle, his assertive unconstitutional intervention in party politics, and growing allegations of corruption and nepotism. Ipsos, the global market research company, found that nearly half of those who had abstained were AKP voters.[7] Yet they returned to the ballot box in November to help their ailing party, earning the AKP another 2 percentage points. Was this "non-buyer's remorse" or something more troubling? Are Turks displaying a form of Stockholm syndrome in which hostages, psychologically beaten into submission, develop sympathy and positive feelings toward their oppressors?
Interestingly, a study released shortly before the November elections found that only a quarter of Turks were not afraid of Erdoğan; as many as 68.5 percent said they were. The research also found that even some of Erdoğan's own supporters were afraid of him.[8] In any event, the turnout rate was nearly 4 percent higher in November than in June—half of which apparently went to the AKP.
Erdoğan's Road to an Elected Sultanate
Erdoğan has never hidden his ambitions to legitimize his de facto executive presidency. As he said in a 2015 speech,
There is a president with de facto power in the country, not a symbolic one. The president should conduct his duties for the nation directly but within his authority. Whether one accepts it or not, Turkey's administrative system has changed. Now, what should be done is to update this de facto situation in the legal framework of the constitution.[9]
To legitimize his rule by changing the constitution, his AKP party needs at least 330 seats but has only 317. Since the November elections, all three of the major opposition parties have said that they would not support any AKP-sponsored amendment in favor of an executive presidential system. But in Turkish politics nothing is impossible.
The secular, main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) is unlikely to be in favor of Erdoğan's sultanate-like presidential system under any scenario.[10] The Nationalist Movement Party has firmly denied any potential support although it has cooperated with the AKP in some controversial legislative work in the past, such as a bill that legalized the Islamic headscarf on university campuses.[11] That leaves the pro-Kurdish HDP as Erdoğan's only possible partner.
The Kurdish party's rhetoric on the presidential system has been tricky. It refused to support any presidential amendment "in a unitary Turkey" but does that mean it would withhold support from an AKP-sponsored presidential bill in a "federal Turkey?"[12] A federal Turkey, meaning one with an autonomous Kurdish region, is the HDP's main objective. Thus it could find itself in a transactional relationship with the AKP for some degree of Kurdish autonomy in return for supporting Erdoğan's modern-day, elected sultanate.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is tirelessly seeking to rewrite the Turkish constitution to increase his control of the country in its entirety. While a study released shortly before the November elections found that more than 68 percent of Turks were afraid of him, his party still won a comfortable election victory and gained enough seats in parliament to form a single-party government although still short of the number needed to bring a constitutional amendment up for referendum.
For that to happen, the current wave of violence between Kurds and the Turkish military would have to come to a halt. At the beginning of 2016, there were no such signs, and what looked like a localized civil war, contained mainly to Kurdish-majority southeast Turkey, continued to claim lives daily.[13] Worse, Erdoğan and the Davutoğlu government look less prone to any reconciliation. Even a call for peace could be deemed "terrorist propaganda."
In January, for example, prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into the host and the producer of a popular talk show on such charges. The move came after a caller, identifying herself as a schoolteacher, protested the civilian casualties during the security operations against the PKK. The caller was urging the public to raise its voice against the deaths of "unborn children, babies, and mothers." She did not
even mention the PKK.[14] Shortly after that, Turkish police detained scores of academics for signing a declaration denouncing military operations against the PKK. In their declaration, the so-called traitors wrote that they refused to be "a party to the crime" and called on the government to halt what they said was a "massacre."[15]
More than 1,100 Turkish and three hundred foreign academics signed the declaration, which Turkish prosecutors claimed "insulted the state" and engaged in "terrorist propaganda" on behalf of the Kurdish group. Erdoğan decried the signatories and called on the judiciary to act against this "treachery." Erdoğan said,
Just because they have titles such as professor [or] doctor in front of their names does not make them enlightened. These are dark people. They are villains and vile because those who side with the villains are villains themselves.[16]
Alongside any fresh ceasefire—not likely but not altogether impossible—HDP will want renewed talks for a political solution to Turkey's Kurdish dilemma. Beginning in 2011, Erdoğan did enter into negotiations with the Kurds and convinced them to call for a ceasefire in 2013. He might try that again.
Davutoğlu often publicly presents a milder Islamist posture than Erdoğan.
But both Erdoğan and the Kurds would have less appetite this time for such a new political adventure. Kurds trust him less than they did between 2011 and 2013. At the same time, Erdoğan has discovered that he wins more votes if he plays to the nationalist Turkish constituencies rather than Kurdish ones. He will be more reluctant to shake hands with the Kurds than he was in 2013 and is able to read the election results of June and November 2015.
Erdoğan's ambitions also leave in limbo his right-hand man, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. In Turkey, the prime minister is the head of the executive while the president's constitutionally-defined role is largely symbolic. When Davutoğlu was campaigning to win more votes for the AKP in 2015, he was in a real sense campaigning to end his own political career as the chief executive of the country. There is some speculation that Davutoğlu, who often publicly presents a milder Islamist posture than the president, may eventually break with his patron and his authoritarian style, especially in light of the charges of corruption, favoritism and extravagance that beset the president. However, that expectation is too optimistic given Davutoğlu's character and devotion to ideology.
Since Davutoğlu was chosen by Erdoğan to succeed him as prime minister in the summer of 2014, he has alternated between conducting himself ethically and in a Machiavellian fashion. While he may even view himself as a paladin for advancing the interests of Turkey and Islam (or Islamism), he knows that in order to further these goals he must continue to serve the man whom he sees as the champion of Turkish Islamism, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He must, therefore, remain prime minister and, as such, must ignore the issues that challenge his ethical and religious side.
This helps explain why Davutoğlu repeatedly uses one particular word in public speeches: "dawa" (dava in Turkish) or the "political cause."[17] His loyalty is not to the seat he occupies or to worldly ambitions but to the struggle for the advancement of Islamism under the Turkish banner, to the dawa. It is unlikely then to expect Davutoğlu to betray his boss or the dawa.
Turkey by the Numbers
In Turkish politics, Erdoğan remains unrivalled. There is no credible indication that any of the three opposition parties could increase their votes so as to threaten the AKP in the near future, and there is no internal rival for leadership. The main opposition Republican People's Party's returns seem to be stuck in neutral, at a mere 25.4 percent in the November 2015 balloting, down marginally from 25.9 in 2011.[18] The nationalist MHP is in the midst of a chaotic leadership race while its national figures edge toward a number below the 10 percent threshold necessary for parliamentary representation (11.7 percent in the November 2015 election). Although it won parliamentary representation for the first time in history in 2015, the pro-Kurdish HDP conducts itself under the violent shadow of the militant PKK.
The separatist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) recently declared an end to its unilateral ceasefire begun in 2013. Although the Turks have a clear military advantage, the Kurdish minority also possesses a secret weapon: The fertility rate in Kurdish-speaking parts of Turkey is higher than in the Turkish-majority regions. The Kurds may emerge as the Turkish Islamists' main rivals in the not-too-distant future simply by having more babies.
There are, moreover, sociopolitical and demographic reasons to anticipate that both Islamists and Kurds will perform better in any future Turkish election. From a political perspective, Turkey is becoming increasingly right-wing and religiously conservative. F. Michael Wuthrich of the University of Kansas' Center for Global and International Studies has demonstrated that Turkish voting bloc patterns have progressively shifted to the right from 59.8 percent in 1950 to 66.7 percent in 2011.[19] This pattern, presumably still in progress, will work in favor of the AKP or any other political party championing Islamist-nationalist ideas. In 2015, Erdoğan boasted that the number of students studying to be imams rose from a mere 60,000 when his party first came to power in 2002 to 1.2 million in 2015.[20] When those students reach the voting age of eighteen, marry, and have children, their pious families will likely form a new army of five to six million AKP voters.
But the Kurds also have their own demographic advantages. Presently, the total fertility rate in eastern and southeastern, Kurdish-speaking Turkey is 3.41, compared to an average of 2.09 in the non-eastern, Turkish-speaking areas. For his part, Erdoğan has urged every Turkish family to have "at least three, if possible more" children.[21] But things are not moving as he wishes. The total fertility rate in Turkey dropped from 4.33 in 1978 to 2.26 in 2013. Unsurprisingly, it currently stands at 3.76 for women with no education and at 1.66 for women with high school or higher degrees.[22]
Just like less-educated (and more devout) Turks grew in number and percentages over the past decades and brought Erdoğan to power simply by combining demographics and the ballot box, the Kurds may, therefore, emerge as the Turkish Islamists' main rivals in the not-too-distant future simply by using the same political weapon.
Conclusions
Turkey seems to be stuck between two unpleasant options: Erdoğan's increasingly authoritarian, de facto one-man rule or the same rule legitimized by a rewritten constitution. The sultan will not give up his ambition to raise "pious generations."[23] But do Turks care how their country is trending?
Nearly half of AKP voters do not think they live in a democratic country but are happy to vote for the party anyway.
A recent survey by Kadir Has University in Istanbul suggests that a substantial number of Turks are fully aware of the current trajectory. The survey found that 56.5 percent of Turks do not think Turkey is a democratic country while 36.1 percent think it is. Similarly, 59 percent think that there is no freedom of thought while 33.1 percent said there is. A mere 9 percent of Turks think there "definitely" is a free press in the country although another 31.3 percent agree to some extent. These numbers leave almost 60 percent who are sure they no longer have these civil liberties.[24]
More alarmingly, when narrowed down to AKP voters—49.5 percent according to the November 2015 elections—the study finds that these Turks do not care all that much about democratic values. Only 58.3 percent of those who vote for the AKP think Turkey is a democratic country; 56.7 percent think there is freedom of thought in the country, and 54.8 percent think there is a free press. In other words, nearly half of AKP voters do not think they live in a democratic country but are happy to vote for the party anyway, without blaming it for the democratic deficit. This is truly worrying for Turkey and, looking beyond Anatolia, for NATO (of which Turkey is a member), and the EU (to which Turkey aspires).
The country is being dragged into increasing levels of authoritarianism with few if any checks and balances. The opposition parties fail to impress the voters and show no sign of credibly challenging Islamist rule. An unresolved rift between a growing Kurdish population and a shrinking Turkish one has the potential to explode, especially as Kurds outside Turkey gain de facto independence. Meanwhile, a frightening number of Turks just do not seem to care that the representative, democratic republic bequeathed to them by Kemal Atatürk is becoming just one more relic in the junkyard of history.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist for Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow of the Middle East Forum. He has also written for the U.S. weekly Defense News since 1997.
________________________________________
[1] Hürriyet (Istanbul), Jan. 27, 2016.
[2] Reuters, Aug. 3, 2015.
[3] Al-Jazeera America (New York), Nov. 5, 2015.
[4] BBC News, July 20, 2015.
[5] Al-Jazeera (Doha), July 22, 2015.
[6] BBC News, Oct. 10, 2015.
[7] Emre Çetin, blog, Jan. 11, 2015.
[8] Ertuğrul Özkök, "The Turkish Public Is Afraid of the President," Hürriyet, Oct. 22, 2015.
[9] Hürriyet, Aug. 14, 2015.
[10] Today's Zaman (Istanbul), Dec. 30, 2015.
[11] Bianet (Istanbul), Feb. 10, 2008.
[12] Akif Beki, "Başkanlık 'federasyon'da tıkanıyor," Hürriyet, Jan. 7, 2016.
[13] Hürriyet, Jan. 20, 2016.
[14] Ibid., Jan. 11, 2016.
[15] The Washington Post, Jan. 15, 2016.
[16] U.S. News and World Report, Jan. 15, 2016.
[17] Birgün Gazetesi (Istanbul), Aug. 6, 2015.
[18] Taha Akyol, "Where to, CHP?" Hürriyet, Jan. 19, 2016.
[19] F. Michael Wuthrich, National Elections in Turkey: People, Politics, and the Party System (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015), p. 30.
[20] Cumhüriyet (Istanbul), Sept. 28, 2015.
[21] Hürriyet, Jan. 3, 2013.
[22] A. Banu Ergöçmen, presentation, Hacettepe University's Institute of Population Studies, Ankara, May 11, 2015.
[23] Fox News, Feb. 13, 2015.
[24] Hürriyet, Jan. 27, 2016; "Eğilimler Araştırması 2015 Sonuçları Açıklandı," Kadir Has University, Istanbul.
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I just got back from Germany yesterday and had a chance to converse at dinner the night before about the prosecution (with Merkel signing off on it) of the German comic for insulting Erdogan.
Though I have been rather limited to news access while gone, I gather that Merkel's logic is that this is necessary to keep the deal with Turkey blocking further invasion of Europe/Germany going (at the cost of billions of Euros btw).
Here's a thought-- maybe we should be making Turkey worry about the continuation of its status in NATO. Russian is making moves in the Caucusus region as well as Turkey and Turkey may come to be glad to its NATO protection.
Now that we are thinking of it, is it a good idea for NATO (i.e. the US and the Euro dwarves) to be in mutual defense relationship with Turkey?
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Erdogan Expands His Assault on Journalists Beyond Turkish Borders
IPT News
May 3, 2016
http://www.investigativeproject.org/5337/erdogan-expands-his-assault-on-journalists-beyond
A caricature depicts Ebru Umar working away despite a Turkish ball and chain tied to her ankle.
Ebru Umar was angry. A Dutch journalist of Turkish heritage, she has been known to take that anger to the page. On the night of April 24, from her summer home in Kusadasi, Turkey, she took it instead to Twitter, raging against a letter the Turkish Embassy in the Netherlands sent to Turkish organizations throughout the country. The message: Please report anyone who has insulted Turkey or its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If possible, include the perpetrator's name, e-mail address, and other identifying information.
In tweets laced with profanity, including "#f***ererdogan," Umar decried the edict (which the embassy had later unconvincingly explained was "misinterpreted" as a result of "unfortunate wording"). Even more, she condemned the many Dutch-Turks who supported it. Tweeting late into the night, she cursed Erdogan, cursed his supporters, and battled verbally with Dutch Turks who responded by threatening to turn her in to the police. Then she went to bed.
Soon after, a knock at her door signaled that someone had followed through with the threat: Turkish police officers stood outside. Umar spent the night in prison. Though she was released the next day, she may not leave the country. This land arrest could easily end in days, or it could last years. Meantime, as Dutch officials negotiate with the Turkish government to bring her home, she continues writing and condemning the oppression facing her and other journalists.
That's not just in Turkey, which now stands 151st in a list of 181 countries ranked for press freedom.
"The biggest problem [in Turkey] is freedom of thought, and especially freedom for journalists to engage in political commentary," Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk declared last year.
Increasingly, Turkish officials are making demands of, and threats against, journalists abroad.
The notice from Turkey's embassy to the Netherlands, for instance, followed Germany's decision a month ago to charge comedian Jan Boehmermann for reading an anti-Erdogan poem on his talk show. The poem referred to yet another incident in Germany: the satirical broadcast of a song titled "Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan," which included such statements as: "Equal rights for women: beaten up equally."
Shortly after the "Erdowie" satire aired, Erdogan demanded it be deleted from the station's web site and wiped from the internet. The TV station refused.
But if German broadcasters had defied Turkey's demands, Chancellor Angela Merkel has proved more malleable. There are political reasons for this. As Dutch journalist Jeroen Wollars said on Dutch TV program "De Wereld Draait Door" the day after Umar's arrest, Germany has become completely dependent on Erdogan in the face of the recent agreement over Syrian refugees, which essentially gives the Turkish president the power to stop the wave of refugees to Europe or permit it to continue. Hence, when the Turkish government demanded Boehmermann be prosecuted for insulting its president, Merkel caved. The 35-year-old satirist now faces jail time on the grounds of section 103 of the German penal code, which criminalizes insulting a foreign head of state.
"Erdogan has become extremely aggressive since the deal," noted Turkey-based Dutch journalist Lucas Waagmeester on "De Wereld Draaait Door." "And it's not just Erdogan – it's the Turkish soul." In pursuing that aggression, Holland must have seemed like a strategic target. Dutch Turks voted heavily for Erdogan in Turkey's snap election last November, suggesting that they would be sympathetic to his call.
But no one had counted on Ebru Umar.
Legally, Umar faces the same dilemma confronting Boehmermann: Dutch law also prohibits insulting foreign world leaders. (Though in the shadow of the Boehmermann case, several parliament members have called for repealing the law.) Meantime, pundits on Dutch news and talk shows debate the issue, speaking of the "long arm of Erdogan" and condemning her arrest.
But not everyone agrees. The day Umar was released from jail, her Amsterdam apartment was burgled, her old laptop stolen, and the word "whore" scrawled in the hallway. "NederTurks," as Umar calls them – second and third-generation Dutch Turks – continue to threaten her on Twitter, and say in media interviews that she "deserved" to be arrested.
She insulted our president, they say. In other words, they view Erdogan as their president, and take conservative Turkish values – not Dutch – as their own. What's more, identifying with Erdogan indicates that they support restricted speech, a more Islamist culture, and have turned against the free secular society in which they were born.
For this, Umar views them as traitors to their country, and to their parents and grandparents who left everything behind, she writes, to give them freedom:
"I think your parents, who left house and home to give you a homeland of freedom and security, are proud of you. Your parents who for years have missed their families, have lived and worked in often appalling conditions so that you, their children, could have a better life than they did. Congratulations for your totally failed Dutch-ness. Congratulations for your total loyalty to a pair of mountain goats from Turkey – goatf*ckers, if you will, whom you follow as soon as they call on you to behave like the NSB [a Dutch fascist party active from the 1930s to 1945]. Any idea what the NSB was? Oh, wait, no – the lessons in school about WWII have been scrapped, right? Yes, thanks."
Dutch officials have begun voicing concern about Ebru's safety if she does return to The Netherlands. Even so, she has refused police protection. A similar reaction by another outspoken writer, Theo van Gogh (whose column she took over after his 2004 murder by a Muslim radical), proved fatal.
Meantime, what the Dutch are calling the "long arm of Erdogan" continues to extend its grasp. On April 25, as Umar was leaving her prison cell, American freelancer David Lepeska, who has lived in Istanbul for years, returned from a brief holiday in Italy only to be denied re-entry at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport. Instead, the freelancer, who has written for Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy and others, was held for 20 hours before being ushered onto a flight to Chicago without explanation. Contacted by e-mail the following day, he said only, "A bit heartbroken, but determined to return."
But even if he is able to go back to Istanbul, what kind of country will he be returning to? In March, authorities seized control of the country's most popular newspaper, Zaman. In August, 2015, two American journalists working for Vice were arrested and charged with terrorism, along with their Turkish associate. Last Thursday, two editors from Turkish daily Cumhurriyet were sentenced to two years in prison on blasphemy charges for reprinting the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons.
For all its exotic charms and celebrated cultural riches, Turkey is fast becoming a land where no journalist, no matter where he or she may come from, can be safe.
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One of the world's architectural masterpieces built by Holy Roman Emperor Justinian ordered be used by Ergodan to be used for Muslim prayer during Ramadan:
https://www.hotgas.net/2016/06/neo-ottoman-empire-turns-byzantine-cathedral-mosque/
That would be like me going to Mecca and holding a Friday night Jewish service there.
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Sounds like coup is good for us and probably Israel:
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/437951/turkey-military-coup-reported
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Relations between Turkey and Israel will remain status quo but Israeli leaders would not have shed tears if the sectarian Ergodan was ousted.
http://www.jpost.com/International/Analysis-Why-the-Turkey-coup-failed-and-whats-likely-to-come-next-460561
"This is also the reason that Erdogan purged institutions in the state and instituted changes within them to strengthen his hold on power. He put his loyalists in key positions in Turkey's intelligence agency, police, justice system, education system and the army. He harassed the media, trying to take it over and marginalized business leaders who he saw as hostile to the throne."
Sounds like Obama here. Enforce some laws and not others (such as immigration law to increase his power by shipping in people who will vote for his party by the millions). Executive orders all over the place to strengthen his (Democrat) hold on power. Place flaming liberal loyalists all over government and intimidate those who disagree in the media and use propaganda with jurnolisters .
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Warning : a lot of adds:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/07/16/turkeys-last-hope-dies.html
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Turkey's Manipulation of Europe, Then and Now
by Efraim Karsh
The Times Literary Supplement
July 17, 2016
http://www.meforum.org/6117/turkey-europe-then-and-now
Originally published on June 24 under the title "Holding the Balance of Power: Turkey's Complicating Relationship with Europe during the First World War and Since."
A Turkish regime exploiting an international crisis to manipulate Europeans. Sound familiar?
It is a historical irony that, for the second time in a century, Turkey is exploiting a major international crisis to manipulate the most powerful European nation into a hugely misconceived and self-defeating policy.
Having exacerbated the Syrian civil war by allowing jihadists of all hues to cross Turkish territory to fight his friend-turned-nemesis Bashar al-Assad, then spurred a massive humanitarian crisis by allowing hundreds of thousands of Syrian refuges (and assorted Middle Eastern migrants camped in Turkey) to infiltrate Europe illegally, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan capitalized on Chancellor Merkel's recoil from her "open door" migration policy to extract substantial financial and political concessions from the European Union that, if fully implemented, will irreversibly change the EU's demographic and cultural identity.
Ottoman culpability for the outbreak of the First World War was of course infinitely smaller, yet the ailing Muslim empire was equally adroit in harnessing German vulnerabilities and anxieties to its advantage. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin lays bare the full extent of Istanbul's manipulation and deceit, beginning with its success in goading Berlin into a secret defence alliance unpalatable to most German decision-makers, including the Chancellor, the Foreign Minister, the Ambassador to Istanbul, and numerous senior officers who considered the Ottoman army a "problem child."
Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame. 550 pp. Allen Lane. £30, 9-781846-147050.
He shows, for example, how the Ottoman Minister of War, Enver Pasha, clinched the alliance treaty by promising to turn over to Germany the soon-to-be-delivered UK-built Ottoman flagship, knowing full well that the vessel had been requisitioned by London; and how, immediately after signing the agreement, the Ottomans extracted a string of far-reaching concessions, left out of the preceding negotiations lest they prevent the treaty's conclusion, by allowing two German warships into the Dardanelles (in contravention of the 1841 London Convention stipulating the closure of the straits to military vessels), only to have them incorporated into the Ottoman navy so as to comply with Istanbul's declaration of neutrality - made in flagrant violation of the nascent alliance treaty.
Indeed, in order to get their ally to comply with its contractual obligation to join the war, the Germans had to pour vast quantities of weapons and money into the bottomless Ottoman pit and had to endure months of insinuated threats of defection before the Sultan declared war on the Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente on November 10, 1914.
Nor was the objective balance of power between the two allies reflected in the actual relationship between them throughout the war. Quite the reverse; in line with their long-established practice of using their perennial weakness as a lever for winning concessions from powerful allies, the Ottomans exploited their First World War setbacks to attract ever-growing military, economic, and political support from Berlin for paltry returns.
The Ottomans exploited their wartime setbacks to attract greater military and economic support from Berlin.
Thus, for example, in the late-war negotiations on the renewal of the bilateral alliance, Istanbul secured the reiteration and expansion of the original German pledges as well as a commitment both to avoid a separate peace treaty and to accord the Ottoman Empire vast territorial gains in Thrace, Macedonia, and Transcaucasia. Similarly, in the summer of 1917, when Enver set out to establish a special 120,000-strong new army, code-named Yilderim ("Thunderbolt"), the Germans agreed to assign to it thousands of troops despite their great reluctance to divert any forces from the main theatre of war in Europe.
Last but not least, the Germans so resented the Ottoman foray into Transcaucasia following Russia's departure from the war in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution that they threatened to withdraw all their officers from the Ottoman Empire were it to march on the Azeri capital of Baku, and planned to resist such a move "with all available means," including sabotaging the railways used to supply the Turkish army. These attempts at influence, however, came to naught as Istanbul considered Transcaucasia the natural preserve for its imperial ambitions, going so far as to order its forces to engage in battle any German units that stood in their way.
McMeekin's meticulous documentation of this pushing and shoving goes a considerable way to discrediting the conventional paradigm of Ottoman victimhood. Yet he seems reluctant to follow his factual findings to their logical conclusion. "The decision by Turkish statesmen to enter the war in 1914 is best understood as a last gasp effort to stave off decline and partition by harnessing German might against the more dangerous powers with designs on Ottoman territory - Russia, Britain, and France (in roughly that order)", he writes. "Given the security problems facing the empire in 1914, there was no realistic scenario in which it could have endured indefinitely on some kind of status quo ante, only bad and worse options."
Istanbul's plunge into World War I was a straightforward attempt to revive imperial glory and regain lost territories.
This conclusion is hardly supported by the historical facts (or, indeed, by The Ottoman Endgame's narrative). Far from a desperate bid to stave off partition by the European powers (merely a year before the outbreak of the First World War, Britain and Russia prevented the destruction of the Ottoman Empire by its former Balkan subjects), Istanbul's plunge into the whirlpool was a straightforward attempt to revive imperial glory and regain lost territories. Had the Ottomans stayed out of the conflict, as begged by the Triple Entente, they would have readily weathered the storm and the region's future development might well have taken a different course.
No empire can of course endure indefinitely and the Ottoman Empire was no exception to this rule. Yet, having lost its European colonies well before the First World War, it faced no intrinsic threat to its continued existence for the simple reason that its mostly Muslim Arabic-speaking Afro-Asian subject population was almost totally impervious to the national idea - the ultimate foe of empires in modern times and the force that had driven the Ottomans out of Europe.
Even more far-fetched is the author's speculation that in the event of a German victory "a semi-victorious Britain (whatever this creative euphemism means) may still have picked off Ottoman Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Syria in exchange for accepting the German position in Russia and Ukraine." For one thing, there is no reason to assume that a victorious Germany would have shown greater magnanimity to a defeated Britain (or France) than that accorded to it by the two powers. For another, having shown no interest in colonizing the Ottoman Empire before the world conflict, Britain remained wedded to its continued existence for months after Istanbul's entry into the war, leaving it to a local Meccan potentate - Sharif Hussein ibn Ali of the Hashemite family - to push the idea of its destruction.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk extricated Turkey from its imperial past reestablished it as a modern, largely secularist nation-state.
In his concluding comments, McMeekin rightly deems Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's extrication of Turkey from its imperial past and its reestablishment as a modern, largely secularist nation-state to have been a resounding success. What he fails to note, however, is that for quite some time this legacy has been under sustained assault. In the thirteen eventful years since it first came to power in November 2002, Erdoğan's Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) has largely undone Atatürk's secularist reforms; transformed Turkey's legal system; suppressed the independent media; sterilized the political and military systems; and embarked on an aggressive foreign policy blending anti-Western rhetoric with Neo-Ottoman ambition to "reintegrate the Balkan region, Middle East and Caucasus... together with Turkey as the centre of world politics in the future" (in the words of Foreign-Minister-turned-Prime-Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu).
This in turn means that while for Atatürk and his erstwhile successors Turkish-European relations, notably Ankara's bid for EU membership, were a matter of political and cultural affinity on top of anything else, for the AKP these relations are strictly instrumental: a springboard both for harnessing European economic and financial resources to the AKP's grand ambitions without real reciprocation, not unlike Istanbul's First World War alliance with Berlin, and for establishing an Islamist bridgehead in Europe with a view to its gradual expansion. As Davutoğlu told a large gathering of Swiss Turks in January 2015:
Islam is Europe's indigenous religion, and it will continue to be so... I kiss the foreheads of my brothers who carried the tekbir [i.e., the call Allahu Akbar] to Zurich... How holy those people were, who came and sowed the seeds here, which will, with Allah's help, continue to grow into a huge tree of justice in the centre of Europe. No one will be able to stop this... We will enter the EU with our language, our traditions, and our religion... Would we ever sacrifice one iota of that culture? With Allah's grace, we will never bow our heads.
Efraim Karsh is emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at Kings College London, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, and principal research fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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Analysis
Editor's note: As a coup in Turkey unfolds, this analysis, first published in December 2013, explores the competing circles of power that are now challenging the conservative rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. He has long sought to move the country away from control of its older secular elites, which include the military. We republish this analysis for its contextual insight.
Turkey's Bosporus, the 31-kilometer (19-mile) waterway transecting historic Byzantium — the present-day sprawling metropolis of Istanbul — provides an instructive metaphor for the roiling Turkish scandals currently grabbing headlines. Surface currents on this busiest of world straits flow from north to south, from the Black Sea through the Bosporus and on to the Mediterranean. Unseen, however, a deeper current below runs south to north, against seeming logic actually pulling water from the Mediterranean up and into the Black Sea from which it came. The Black Sea is what geologists call a "meromictic" lake, with some 90 percent of its volume devoid of oxygen, all of it low in salinity. The Mediterranean, by contrast, is highly saline. The result is a complex hydrology discovered only in 1935. The currents and crosscurrents mystify scientists to this day.
Much the same can be said of Turkey's politics: What one sees from above obscures the complexity and interplay of currents below. On the surface, Turkey appears to be a modern state with a political system and parties easily analogized to their counterparts in Europe or North America. In this view, the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a reformist group credited with defanging a prickly military that mounted three coups between 1960 and 1980, delivering to the country a vibrant democracy. The AKP came to power in 2002 on a trilogy of promises to promote freedom, end poverty and end corruption. Until recently, Turkey under the AKP was touted by many in the West as a model for the Middle East and Islamic world.
More recently by this account, the AKP that came to power as a coalition of Islamists and liberals, is newly at odds with a group known as the Gulen movement, a powerful religious fraternity whose global network of media outlets, schools and commercial enterprises make it a serious player in Turkish politics. It is led in turn by a lay preacher named Fethullah Gulen, self-exiled and living in Pennsylvania.
Some 80 people have been swept up in a recent wave of arrests and charges, with at least four AKP ministers threatened with corruption indictments. A raid on the president of the largest state-owned bank found $4.5 million in his home. Scenes of the arrest of the son of the minister of interior, the nation's top cop, rivet Turkish TV watchers. Prosecutors tied to the Gulen movement meanwhile lead the drama. That the movement and its allies in the police and judiciary are seen as the animators of the now infamous "Ergenekon" and "Sledgehammer" court cases that silenced many an AKP critic and put hundreds of officers — including the former chief of the army's general staff — behind bars, serves to cement this view of the obvious current of Turkish politics. That the government's reaction was to remove the lead prosecutor, an erstwhile AKP hero, puts the capstone on this conventional narrative.
But within Turkey's complex political hydrology, something deeper ensues. For Turkey is not a modern state. Rather, it is the collapsed star of empire. It is the heir to the dynasties and sub-dynasties that wove the Ottoman Empire into a tapestry of shifting alliances among fiefdoms known as "millets." In turn, the Ottoman Empire itself, which conquered the Byzantine Empire in 1453, did not so much replace its predecessor as subsume and mimic it. No wonder that Turkey's politics remain, in a word, Byzantine.
It is not excessively simplistic to argue that the fundamental dynamic of the Ottoman Empire was an endless struggle between the center, in Istanbul, and the periphery that reached at the empire's height from Budapest in the west to the Arabian Sea in the east, sweeping up to encircle the Black Sea in what is today Russia and the Caucasus. Those centrifugal forces eventually tore the empire apart, leading to the establishment of today's Republic of Turkey in 1923.
Secular republicanism nominally replaced theocratic monarchism, but old habits and reflexes endured.
One enduring tradition was a rent-seeking system of wealth creation at odds with any notion of Weberian capitalism. Innovation and entrepreneurialism was — and is — an almost alien concept. In its place was an intimacy between business and government that made the two often hard to distinguish. State-run enterprises dominated throughout the 20th century as vast private fortunes depended both on government largesse, connections and high tariff walls. The center of power, moved to the new inland capital of Ankara, was supreme, and tight central control under the tutelage of the military was the rule.
Political parties other than the founding Republican People's Party were not allowed until the late 1940s. When they arrived their hues were — and still are — more akin to fiefdoms or even the millets of old. They function as patronage systems, arbitrating factional disputes and managing the alliances of powerful families and the state. The first multiparty elections were held in 1950. Those elections, which yielded rule by a party of the periphery and hinterland, the Democrat Party, also signaled a return to the fundamental tension. Its leader, Adnan Menderes — whom Erdogan sees as a mentor — challenged the rule of the center and the patronage networks that both supported and were nurtured by that center. The result was the coup of 1960. Menderes was hanged. His gallows, constructed next to a makeshift military courthouse during his trial, speaks volumes about presumption of innocence in Turkey and hints at the independence of the judiciary even today.
Great family fortunes were allowed to accumulate, with the Eczacibasis, the Kocs, the Sabancis and the Dogans all synonyms today for Turkey's largest conglomerates. These replaced, and in some cases outright seized, the assets of the former commercial and subservient Ottoman classes, the non-Muslim minorities now largely departed.
Ideological violence, the Cold War and Turkey's Kurdish separatist impulses were all part and parcel of Turkey's grand political dramas of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. But whenever a government strayed too far from the centralist line, the military stepped in. Coups occurred in 1971 and again in 1980, with the political classes allowed to return only after a punitive breather each time.
Surges between these two poles created other and lesser commercial dynasties as each party upon obtaining power sought to buttress its gains with a new wealthy class of supporters created through access to state bank credits, public tenders and other patronage.
As globalized trade surged and tariffs fell during the 1980s, another new party and government led by the late Turgut Ozal took power. The Motherland Party spawned another round of assertiveness and economic rise in the hinterland. This empowered the so-called Anatolian Tigers, a breed of conservative bourgeoisie whose wealth stemmed from Turkey's embrace of the trends of globalization in textiles, cement, furniture manufacture and construction. Lesser clashes between the center and periphery ensued, including a "post-modern coup" in 1996, whereby the military quietly forced Turkey's first Islamist government from power. Once again, the old guard reasserted itself.
Ultimately, however, this newest class cleared the way for Erdogan's success in 2002. It also was fueling the rise of the Gulenist movement, which drew and draws its power from a similar if narrower base.
The first AKP government was a coalition of sorts of Islamists, secular conservatives weary of the state's fickle economic management, liberals with an eye on the model of the then-surging European Union, and, of course, the Gulenists.
The economy was improving, and in 2004, Turkey under the AKP began its negotiations to join the European Union. This embrace of the European Union masked many of the center-periphery distinctions, and a flood of portfolio and foreign direct investment greased the traditional cogs of patronage. But this also opened new fissures between the old and new ruling elites, with foreign direct investment in some years exceeding the entire volume of foreign investment into Turkey from the time of the republic's founding until 2000.
The sheer momentum of the EU embrace and economic growth aided greatly in the assault on military power, and with help from many quarters, the AKP curtailed the ability of the generals and jailed those who resisted. Real crimes were certainly addressed in a series of trials, though the motivations had to do with, once again, the currents below.
But the AKP's assault on the old guard was not limited to the military. Bastions of old-line commercial power, beginning with the media and telecommunications empire of the Uzan family, were effectively seized and redistributed to AKP allies. The media and energy empire of the Dogan family was hit next with billions of dollars in tax fines when the group stepped out of line in its reporting. More recently, the powerful Koc industrial and retail dynasty was cut down to size with a series of inquiries that followed support for protesters who rallied in the last spring and early fall in Istanbul's Gezi Park in opposition to Erdogan and the AKP's rule.
For its part, the Gulen movement is at odds with the AKP over many things. On the economic front in particular these include a set of proposed education reforms that would close private university prep classes, a moneymaker for the movement in a sector that vastly outstrips the size of the formal budget for national education. And indeed the movement appears the broker in the new anti-AKP coalition forming among the factions. But this is only the obvious political current.
The Gulenists, however, are clearly not alone. Erdogan's premiership has aroused great enmities among once-loyal liberals, conservatives and critically, the old elite who once thought they could do business with the AKP. With assets in the police, media and judiciary, the Gulen movement is a minor rival, but a useful and public one for the disparate groups now coalescing to cut Erdogan down to size.
The intent will likely be to tame the AKP, not kill it. The emerging electoral punch of the anti-AKP coalition in a presidential election next summer is unlikely to derail the AKP's formidable machine. Nor is it likely to deny Erdogan's move from premiership to presidency. But local elections in March are another matter. The prize of the Istanbul mayoralty, the post from which Erdogan launched his career two decades ago, is one the emerging anti-Erdogan coalition could snag with the help of the Gulenists. That will not devastate the AKP, but it will be a huge psychological blow and slow the party's swagger.
It will also signal the return of normalcy in Byzantium. After a decade in the shadows and on the defensive, the power brokers of the Ottoman-derived center are back to challenge the upstarts from the periphery of Turkish politics. Turkish politics flow in odd ways and multiple directions, just like the waters of the country's Bosporus.
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https://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/did-erdogan-stage-coup
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I can't find where I posted my question, which side were we on, the military coup or the Erdogan disaster?
Don't Weep For Turkey's Erdogan -- He's Killing His Nation's Democracy
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/dont-weep-for-turkeys-erdogan-hes-killing-his-nations-democracy/
rkey: Foreign support for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the coup was based largely on the idea of defending a democracy. But it's Erdogan who seems intent on destroying Turkey's democracy.
Everyone around the world seemed to agree that Turkish democracy was worth defending from a coup. "The president and secretary agreed that all parties in Turkey should support the democratically elected government of Turkey, show restraint and avoid any violence or bloodshed," a statement from the U.S. State Department read.
"Germany stands on the side of all of those in Turkey who defend democracy and the rule of law," said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country is home to millions of Turkish gastarbeiter.
Indeed, across the world the response was remarkably the same: Whether we like Erdogan or not, coups are bad and, after all, Erdogan was democratically elected. To support Erdogan is to support democracy. End of story.
Well, to a point.
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People forget Erdogan's own conflicted feelings about democracy. In the past, he has likened democracy to a train: You get on and then get off once you get to where you're going. In short, democracy for him isn't a bred-in-the-bone conviction but rather a political convenience, useful only for grabbing power then discarding it like yesterday's trash.
Case in point: Following the coup, Erdogan arrested 8,777 officers from the Interior Ministry, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency, including 103 generals and admirals and thousands of police officers. He also detained judges, lawyers, senior aides and others, said Anadolu.
This looks a lot more like a purge than a legitimate security action, particularly since Turkey's government has described the plotters -- none of whom has had a trial yet -- as a "cancer" that must be "cleansed" from Turkey's public institutions.
In an interview with CNN, it became quite clear that Erdogan won't be governing in the future as a small-d democrat. Apparently, he's getting off the train.
This is problematic for a number of reasons.
For one, Turkey has an outstanding application to join the European Union, based on the notion that it is a legitimate democracy.
But as Erdogan threatens to reinstate the death penalty to take care of those who allegedly plotted against him, the EU warns it will end any hope he has of future membership in the EU.
"Let me be very clear on one thing ... no country can become an EU member state if it introduces (the) death penalty," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said.
For another, Turkey is a NATO member. But it has been shaky in its support of NATO since Erdogan, a committed Islamist, took over, even denying NATO the use of airbases during the Iraq war. Secretary of State John Kerry warned that the Turkish government could fall foul of NATO's "requirement with respect to democracy" and "diversity" if it fails to uphold the rule of law after the coup attempt.
No doubt Vladimir Putin, looking to expand his baneful influence in the Mideast, is licking his lips.
But the fact is, as head of the Turkish state since 2003 -- first as prime minister and since 2014 as president -- Erdogan has methodically exerted control over Turkish institutions and cashiered thousands of officers in Turkey's military, the traditional pro-Western bulwark against those who would end Turkey's secular democracy, first established by Ataturk in 1923.
And he's become more bold of late.
"Developments in the aftermath of the June and November 2015 parliamentary elections convinced many Turks that it was no longer possible to change the government through democratic and peaceful means," wrote Yüksel Sezgin, director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, in the Washington Post. "Erdogan would not recognize the results of June 2015 parliamentary elections in which his ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party) lost its parliamentary majority and called for repeat elections in November 2015."
"In the meantime, he destroyed the peace process with the Kurdish rebels that he started a few years earlier and launched a major military campaign in the Kurdish cities, which left thousands of people homeless, injured and dead," Sezgin added.
In short, Erdogan has silenced media that criticize his regime, bullied the judiciary, harassed political foes and arrested those who pose a threat to him, all in his bid to restore an Islamic form of government based on Shariah law.
No, that doesn't mean the coup plotters would have been better. But certainly Erdogan is no democrat -- at least not in the Western sense. We should stop defending him as such. Sadly, what remains of Turkey's democracy of 75 million may be gasping its last breaths, as Erdogan uses the coup as a pretense to seize greater and greater power. What a pity.
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My understanding is that ever since Attaturk, the military had a role in defending secularism in governing-- a role which they have fulfilled several times.
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http://www.economist.com/node/11829711
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http://www.clarionproject.org/analysis/trump%E2%80%99s-unsettling-response-turkey%E2%80%99s-islamist-tyranny
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http://www.news.com.au/world/reports-turkish-troops-have-sealed-off-incirlik-usnato-nuclear-air-base/news-story/4d7bb16e4e86842218b5b0d7d70f582b
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Personally I would not give Obama any credit for this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/world/europe/turkey-coup-erdogan-fethullah-gulen-united-states.html?_r=0
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Perhaps he simply prepares domestic opinion for his next move, , ,
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http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-andreasen-nuclear-weapons-turkey-20160811-snap-story.html
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• Zhirinovsky vs. the Turks
Turkey's Exhausting Zigzagging between East and West
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
August 23, 2016
http://www.meforum.org/6217/turkey-zigzagging-between-east-and-west
Turkey has been a republic since 1923, a multi-party democracy since 1946, and a member of NATO since 1952. In 1987, it added another powerful anchor into the Western bay where it wanted it to remain docked: It applied for full membership in the European Union (EU). This imperfect journey toward the West was dramatically replaced by a directionless cruise, with sharp zigzags between the East and West, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Islamist AKP party came to power in 2002. Zigzagging remains the main Turkish policy feature to this day.
Until the summer of 2015 Turkey was widely known as the "jihad highway," because of its systematic tolerance for jihadists crossing through Turkey into neighboring Syria to fight Erdogan's regional nemesis, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey supported various jihadist groups in the hope that they would help Ankara unseat Assad. Then, under pressure from its NATO allies, it decided to join the U.S.-led, international campaign to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in Syria. Feeling betrayed, ISIS started to blow up Turkish cities.
At the end of 2015, Turkey risked tensions with Russia in order to advance its pro-Sunni Islamist agenda in Syria. Russia, together with Iran, provided the lifeline Assad needed to stay in power while Turkey stepped up its anti-Assad campaign. In November, Turkey once again zigzagged toward the West when it shot down a Russian military aircraft, citing the violation of its airspace along its border with Syria. Turkey also threatened to shoot down any Russian aircraft that might violate its airspace again. It was the first time in modern history that a NATO ally had shot down a Soviet or Russian military airplane.
Russian President Vladimir Putin (left) with Erdogan in Istanbul in December 2012.
An angry Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, imposed punishing economic sanctions, which cost the Turkish economy billions of dollars. Turkey started zigzagging again. In July 2016, Erdogan apologized for downing the Russian plane, and in August he went to Russia to shake hands for normalization. Once again, Russia is trendy for the Turks, and the West looks passé.
Turkey's newfound love affair with Russia will inevitably have repercussions in Syria, and that pleases Iran. "Not only will Turkey have to 'digest' that [Russian-Iranian-Syrian] line, it will have to join it, entering into a pact with Putin and the ayatollahs. Clearly, this is where Erdogan has decided is the best place to pledge his allegiance," wrote Meira Svirsky at The Clarion Project. There are already signs.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said that Turkey and Russia have similar views on the need for a ceasefire in Syria, the provision of humanitarian aid, and a political solution to end the crisis. That must have caused shy smiles in Moscow: the Turkish John Wayne on his knees begging to work on Syria only months after he threatened to shoot down any Russian aircraft and kick the Russians out of Syria. Now Turkey is calling on Russia to team up and carry out joint military operations in a bid to crush ISIS in Syria.
After the last Turkish zigzag, Turkey and Russia found where they converge: Putin accuses the West of violating agreements by expanding NATO to Russia's borders and fomenting unrest in nearby Georgia and Ukraine, while in Turkey, the pro-Erdogan media accuses the U.S. of orchestrating the coup. There are more alarming signals from Ankara. Cavusoglu, the foreign minister, said that Turkey may look outside NATO for defense cooperation.
Fuad Kavur, a prominent London-based film director and producer, described the Turkish zigzag in a private letter (quoted with permission):
Erdogan's recent maneuverings remind me of how Hitler hoodwinked the West. Until four days before he invaded Poland, the West, ever sleepwalking, were utterly convinced Hitler was going to attack USSR, because he had come to power on an anti-Communist ticket. The West had a rude awakening only when, on 23 August 1939, Von Ribbentrop signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Molotov; and on Sept. 1, Hitler took half of Poland. Few days later, Stalin took the other half.
What is the moral of the story? Until a few weeks ago, the West was comfortably day-dreaming that, despite his foibles, Erdogan was a staunch U.S. ally and an eager EU candidate. After all, had he not, only recently, downed a Russian jet? Then, suddenly, what do we see? Putin and Erdogan kissing and making up ... It is a matter of 'my enemy's enemy...'.
From the beginning, Russia was too big for Turkey to bite. A few billion dollars of trade losses and friendly reminders from Western allies that Turkey should keep up to better democratic standards were sufficient to get Ankara kneel down -- and perform another act of zigzagging. This, in all probability, will not be the last such act.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist for the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fed-eu-erdogan-says-turkey-could-join-shanghai-092151501.html
Deep implications here.
Does Turkey really belong in the EU, or NATO for that matter? What implications if not?
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http://www.meforum.org/6423/erdogan-gritted-teeth-peace-with-israel
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http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443398/donald-trump-turkey-erdogan-tougher-stance
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http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/turkey-terror-attack-live-updates-9544682
First a truck problem in Germany, now a gun problem in Turkey. Must be some sort of safety issue with the consumer products over there.
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U.S. President Donald Trump and his Turkish counterpart, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, held an overnight phone conversion Feb. 8 focused on Syria and fighting terrorism, Reuters reported. According to Turkish presidential sources, the two leaders reportedly agreed to work together against the Islamic State in two key Syrian towns: the northern town of al-Bab and the group's de facto capital in Syria, Raqqa. The call comes just days after the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces launched a new phase in the offensive to retake Raqqa.
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http://www.meforum.org/6539/turkey-record-breaking-academic-purge
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Analysis
In an apparent cliffhanger victory, with challenges from the opposition still outstanding, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President (and now party leader) Recep Tayyip Erdogan are claiming a hairline victory in a decisive referendum that will greatly empower the presidency. Some 48 million of 55 million eligible voters cast ballots on a raft of 18 constitutional amendments that will fundamentally alter the Turkish government, taking effect in the next scheduled election in 2019. With nearly all votes counted, the "Yes" vote garnered 51.34 percent of the vote with the "No" vote coming in close behind with 48.66 percent of the vote, according to state-run Anadolu Agency. Though the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) is not conceding the vote and is contesting at least 37 percent of the votes counted, the AKP is claiming victory. Still, the poll has shown just how deeply polarized the Turkish electorate has become: Erdogan has eked out a victory despite losing the three largest cities in the vote — Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. The AKP's razor-thin lead is a big reason why Erdogan feels compelled to resort to extraordinary measures to consolidate power.
Constitutional referendums are common in recent Turkish history, with six notable polls having taken place since 1961. The tug of war between granting powers to the parliament, the judiciary, the executive and the military is a decadeslong struggle in Turkey. But the April 16 referendum enables the most sweeping changes yet to the division of power between the executive and legislative branches, heaping additional powers on the president in an unprecedented way in Turkey. The vote is a culmination of a yearslong effort by Erdogan to formalize some of the powers he had already encroached upon as president. He will absorb the powers of the now-eliminated prime minister — historically the more powerful of the two positions — and will be able eschew nonpartisan rules and lead his own political party, dismiss parliament, choose judges that were once selected by their peers, announce a state of emergency, and enact some laws by decree. Overall, the legislative and judicial branches of the Turkish government will have diminished oversight on the presidency. The changes also allow Erdogan to run for two more terms, setting him up for possible rule until 2029.
It is highly unusual for an electoral victory in Turkey to be claimed without winning the largest metropolises. Istanbul and Ankara have been reliably in the AKP camp for years and Izmir, once an opposition CHP stronghold, has been trending toward the AKP in recent elections. According to results from state-run Anadolu Agency, in Istanbul, the "No" vote led with 51.34 percent against 48.66 percent "Yes;" in Ankara, 51.14 percent "No" to 48.86 percent "Yes;" and in Izmir, 68.78 percent "No" to 31.22 percent "Yes." The "No" vote was unsurprisingly ahead in predominantly Kurdish districts in Turkey's southeast, but the margin was smaller than expected. In the Mediterranean city of Antalya the results were: 59.06 percent "No" to 40.94 percent "Yes" and in Mersin, 64.01 percent "No" to 35.99 percent "Yes." Meanwhile, in overseas voting, 59.06 percent voted "Yes" while 40.94 percent voted "No," according to Anadolu Agency.
While "No" campaigners are casting suspicion on Turkish Electoral Board's decision to count unsealed ballots, this has been a common occurrence in recent Turkish polls. Opposition parties supporting the "No" vote, CHP chief among them, publicly doubt the legitimacy of the polls. Considering the state of emergency in place since last July's coup attempt in Turkey, there was concern among "No" voters that the government would use its institutional influence to secure victory in the April 16 poll. Should the ruling party feel the need to take a stronger hand in quelling opposition to the results, it could also leverage the ongoing state of emergency. Turkey's National Security Council is expected to decide on whether to extend or end the state of emergency shortly after the poll. It has been renewed in three-month increments since last July.
Turkey's shift toward a more authoritarian system under Erdogan will no doubt elicit further condemnation from the European Union, but European powers also understand that they still need Turkey's cooperation in containing migrant traffic and in keeping a check on Russia. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said last week that the government will revisit the stalled issue of EU visa liberalization for Turks and further threatened that Turkey's government could reassess the migrant deal with the bloc after the referendum. A more emboldened AKP following the vote will mean more friction in Turkey's already fragile negotiation with the European Union. As weather conditions improve and migrant traffic picks up, this will be a pressing concern for the European Union to manage with Turkey.
While the vote points to dramatic change for Turkey domestically in the long term, Turkey's foreign policy will remain largely unchanged. Regardless of a victory or defeat in the referendum, Turkey will still deepen its focus and presence in northern Iraq and Syria in an effort to contain Kurdish expansionism and face off with Iran in a broader proxy battle.
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51-49 in favor of dictatorial, Islamist rule is a close vote when much of the opposition is already killed or in jail.
More analysis here:
https://clarionproject.org/as-turks-vote/
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http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/16/rip-turkey-1921-2017/
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http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/04/16/rip-turkey-1921-2017/
Make Turkey more islamic !
That should turn out well.
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Hey Tayyip, its me Don:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-congratulates-erdogan-referendum_us_58f52397e4b0da2ff862741e?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009
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https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2017/04/pres-trumps-deafening-silence-on-turkey-dictatorship-are-business-interests-muzzling-potus
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https://www.steynonline.com/7758/who-lost-turkey-revisited
When democracy becomes tribal, the size of the tribe determines the outcome. The Asian Muslims of Turkey have a far higher birth rate than the European heritage Turks.
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Not mentioned is that the dictator likely stole the election, like Chavez in his recall.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.nytimes.com/2017/04/18/world/europe/turkey-referendum-is-haunted-by-allegations-of-voter-fraud.amp.html
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" the dictator likely stole the election "
Well I guess the election maven James Earl Carter is too sick (brain tumor) to go and investigate.
Then again he never did any good anyway.
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"Villagers who voted 'No' in referendum forced to leave home"
https://anfenglish.com/kurdistan/villagers-who-voted-no-in-referendum-forced-to-leave-home-20397
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http://www.meforum.org/6791/daniel-pipes-erdogan-is-capable-and-willing-to?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=592ca5d50f-pipes_daniel_2017_06_30&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-592ca5d50f-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-592ca5d50f-33691909
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Diplomatic rancor is on full display as Germany and Turkey are no closer to bridging the widening rift between them. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel announced a significant overhaul of policy toward Turkey July 20, in response to the detention of six human rights activists suspected of terrorist activities, including a German national, Peter Steudtner. Gabriel issued a firm warning against German citizens traveling to Turkey, saying the German government could no longer guarantee their safety. Steudtner remains in custody without any formal charges made against him and has been denied access to the German Consulate. Gabriel also announced he could no longer envision talks on expanding the European customs union to include Turkey and issued a review of state guarantees on German corporate exports to Turkey along with pre-accession funds.
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble contributed to the escalating row July 21 by starting a review of all future arms exports to Turkey, despite both countries being members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Turkish media has already reported the statement as a firm decision. The German government could also hit Turkey with financial sanctions. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hit back by branding Germany's actions as intimation and lies. If Germany decides to limit arms exports to Turkey, it would mean a significant shift for the Turkish military.
This is a new escalation in tensions between Germany and Turkey (and the European Union), which has been ongoing since the attempted coup in Turkey on July 16, 2016. In the subsequent crackdown on political opponents by Turkish authorities, Germany refused to deport Turkish citizens linked to the Gulen movement (Labeled a terrorist organization by Turkey and accused of orchestrating the failed coup). Turkey also banned members of the German Parliament from visiting German soldiers at the Incirlik military base. Germany consequently decided to move its troops to Jordan. Turkey is now also refusing to allow members of Parliament to visit their soldiers at the NATO airbase in Konya.
Turkey is an EU candidate member state, and the union is threatening to take measures against it during the pre-accession procedure. On the other hand, the union and Germany worry that too much pressure on Turkey would endanger the refugee deal during the summer months. The risk remains high for Turkey, however, as Germany is a key trade and investment partner, and deeper tensions between the two countries could bring severe damage to the Turkish economy.
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Turkey: In the Eye of the Storm
Aug 25, 2017
By Jacob L. Shapiro
This time last year, Turkey was in the throes of a crisis. A faction of the military had tried to – and nearly did – overthrow the government. The putsch failed, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the opportunity to purge the system of current and potential opponents to his rule. The purges haven’t stopped, and Turkey is still in a formal state of emergency, but the worst of the crisis has passed and Turkey is beginning to stabilize.
Now, the chaos isn’t in Turkey but around it. And one of the surest signs that Turkey is nearly back on its feet is the way it is confronting the chaos.
Ankara’s Perspective
Consider for a moment the world from Ankara’s perspective. To the south, the Islamic State is slowly being crushed. In Iraq, it’s barely hanging on to its last strongholds; in Syria, it is under assault from the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and the Russian-backed Assad regime. Turkey wants to see IS defeated, but it isn’t a fan of who is doing it: The SDF is made up of Syrian Kurds, who, to Turkey, are just as much a terrorist group as IS, and Turkey was an enemy of the Assad regime long before the Syrian civil war began. To the southeast, the Kurdistan Regional Government – an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq – appears determined to go forward with an independence referendum on Sept. 25. Turkey has already told the KRG to cancel the referendum because it fears what a vote for independence would mean for the millions of Kurds who live in or on the border with Turkey.
Farther south, Iran and Saudi Arabia are flirting one minute and threatening each other the next. Turkey is getting in on the action, broaching the possibility of limited cooperation with Iran in some areas of mutual interest. Meanwhile, to the north, Turkish relations with Russia remain complicated and inextricably linked to the U.S.-Russia relationship. Russia and the U.S. are quietly cooperating in Syria in the fight against IS, but they are at loggerheads everywhere else. Across the Black Sea from Turkey in Ukraine, the U.S. is backing Russia into a corner, and two places we expect Russia to respond are the Balkans and the Caucasus. Turkey hopes to expand its influence into the former and is already a major player in the latter. Russian activity in either of these regions would affect Turkey, and the Turks must be ready for that.
Turkey’s response to these challenges is one that has become typical of Turkish foreign policy: It is trying to balance between all the various parties without solidly committing itself to any. The number of high-profile visits Turkey has hosted in recent weeks is telling. Last week, Iran’s chairman of the armed forces General Staff was in Ankara for talks. Earlier this week, Russia’s armed forces chief of staff also visited Turkey to discuss coordinating efforts in Syria. Then on Aug. 23, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis arrived in Turkey for a marathon day of meetings with Turkish officials.
People chant slogans and wave flags in Istanbul on July 15, 2017, as they wait for official ceremonies to begin on the July 15 Martyrs Bridge on the anniversary of the failed coup attempt. CHRIS MCGRATH/Getty Images
With Iran, Turkey promised to boost military cooperation – something of a surprise considering that Turkey and Iran both aspire to regional leadership in the long term. Their interests are, ultimately, mutually exclusive. With Russia, Turkey agreed to tactical coordination in Syria and saluted Moscow’s understanding of Turkey’s concerns about the dangers posed by Syrian Kurds. As with Iran, however, Turkey has fundamental strategic differences with Russia in the short term (the future of Syria and Assad’s place in it) and the long term (competition in the Caucasus and southeastern Europe). There are tactical ways in which these powers can help each other – Iran and Turkey against the Kurds, Russia and Turkey against U.S. influence in the region – but these are not long-term alliances.
Then there is the U.S., with which Turkish relations have been deteriorating for years. The U.S. decision to begin arming Syrian Kurds in May was another blow to relations, and Mattis’ visit appears to have been in large measure to patch up the issue. The official statements out of the Pentagon are typical of political statements: sweet sounding with no substance. But unnamed Turkish officials have been telling any reporter who will listen about how Mattis pledged to help Turkey fight the Kurdish PKK militant group and how American support for Syrian Kurds is limited to the duration of the fight against the Islamic State. That Mattis came out publicly against the KRG’s independence referendum probably didn’t hurt either. For the moment, Turkey seems more publicly comfortable than it has been with the U.S. in months, so whatever Mattis promised in Ankara had the desired effect.
Between Superpowers
It’s the balance between Russia and the U.S. that is particularly difficult for Turkey to strike right now. In the coming years, Turkey’s imperatives will compel it to encroach on areas that Russia considers within its sphere of influence. Turkey isn’t ready for that conflict, and in the interim, Russia is a crucial player in the Caucasus and a powerful one in the Middle East.
Turkey’s imperatives jibe better with the U.S. vision for the region, but it isn’t a perfect marriage. The U.S. seeks a balance of power in the region and wants Turkey as a junior ally; Turkey sees itself as a rising power that doesn’t have to do anyone’s bidding, even if the one asking is the mighty United States. Turkey isn’t strong enough to push back against both, and kowtowing to one does nothing to advance Turkish interests either, hence its complicated relationship with both.
As if to underline the complexity of the game Turkey is playing, Mattis’ next stop after leaving Ankara was Kiev. Both Ukrainian and Russian media sources quoted Mattis as saying the U.S. had approved the delivery of $175 million worth of “special equipment that will strengthen the defense capability of Ukraine.” U.S. media’s reporting on the issue omitted this particular detail, but even so, there can be no doubt about the tone of Mattis’ meeting with Ukraine’s president and his comments afterward. The defense secretary decried Russian aggression and vowed that the U.S. would not tolerate Russian violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Mattis stopped short of throwing down the gauntlet: The U.S. is still debating whether to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons such as anti-tank missiles. Doing so would cross a serious line from Russia’s perspective. And there have been hints that the U.S. is at least open to dialogue: An upcoming meeting between the U.S. special envoy to Ukraine and one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidential aides could be a step toward defusing the situation. But between Mattis’ strong language and recent U.S. sanctions against Russia, U.S.-Russia relations outside of Syria are trending toward distrust and hostility. Russia can absorb only so many challenges from the U.S. before the Kremlin will need to demonstrate that it is strong enough to prevent the U.S. from pushing it around.
Articulating a Vision
All these issues matter to Turkey, and now the Turks are trying to formulate a coherent plan to pursue their interests that doesn’t outstrip their capabilities. For all of Turkey’s threats to intervene in Syria or to attack various Kurdish groups, it has stayed out of the fray. Turkey’s foreign minister even ruled out closing the border with the KRG if it goes through with its independence referendum. Turkey’s primary goal is to demonize the Syrian Kurds, who have more in common with Turkey’s Kurds than they do with most of Iraq’s Kurds, and to leverage the support it can offer to Russia and the U.S. to align the policies of both with Turkey’s immediate concerns.
The coup attempt weakened Turkey briefly, especially its ability to project hard power. But it also gave Erdogan a chance to clear the deck and pursue grander ambitions. Now, after a year of recuperation, Turkey is hosting the top defense leaders of the U.S., Russia and Iran, all in the course of a week and a half. Not only that, but those representatives are all coming to Turkey, and Turkey is setting the price for its help without committing itself to any agenda except its own immediate ones: to keep its national integrity intact, to rebuild its military and economy, and to let everyone else weaken themselves by fighting each other.
Turkey wants to stay in the eye of the storm as long as it can, but ultimately, Turkey can’t control everything that happens around it. All it can do is make itself strong enough and shape its regional environment enough so that when it does have to step out into the storm, it can protect its interests. The most important thing after this week is not just that Turkey is articulating that vision, but that it is forgoing opportunistic relationships to see that its vision comes to pass.
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http://www.meforum.org/6938/nato-needs-to-admit-turkey-is-shredding?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=ed671691b5-roman_gregg_2017_09_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-ed671691b5-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-ed671691b5-33691909
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http://www.meforum.org/6955/let-all-agree-not-to-visit-turkey
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Turkey Is Behaving like an Enemy Now
by Michael J. Totten
World Affairs Journal
October 12, 2017
http://www.meforum.org/6970/turkey-is-behaving-like-an-enemy-now
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Turkey and the U.S.: A Poisoned Alliance
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
October 30, 2017
http://www.meforum.org/6983/turkey-and-the-us-a-poisoned-alliance
In theory, Turkey and the United States have been staunch allies since the predominately Muslim nation became a NATO member state in 1952. Also, in theory, the leaders of the two allies are on friendly terms. President Donald Trump gave "very high marks" to Turkey's increasingly autocratic, Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan during the Turkish leader's recent visit to Washington when his security detail attacked peaceful protesters.
It is puzzling why Trump gave a passionately (and ideologically) pro-Hamas, pro-Muslim Brotherhood, Islamist leader "very high marks." But in reality, the Ankara-Washington axis could not be farther from diplomatic niceties such as "allies" or "very high marks."
This is a select (and brief) recent anatomy of what some analysts call "hostage diplomacy" between the two "staunch NATO allies."
• In June this year, Pew Research Center's Global Attitudes Survey, covering a total of 37 countries, revealed that 79% of Turks had an unfavorable opinion of the U.S. That was the second-highest among the countries surveyed, after 82% in Jordan. Anti-American sentiment in Turkey is 27% higher than in Russia, and more than twice as high as the global median of 39%.
• There are reports that six Turkish government banks face billions of dollars in fines from the U.S. over alleged violations of Iran sanctions.
• Turkey is keeping in jail, among a dozen or so others, a NASA scientist who was vacationing with relatives in Turkey, and a Christian missionary who has lived in Turkey for 23 years. Others include a visiting chemistry professor from Pennsylvania and his brother, a real-estate agent. All of them face long prison sentences for allegedly playing a part in last year's failed coup against Erdogan's government.
There is little doubt that the U.S. citizens are being held in Turkey as a bargaining chip to pressure Washington to extradite Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, a former Erdogan ally and allegedly the mastermind behind the attempted putsch. Erdogan himself does not hide his intentions. If Gülen were handed over, Erdogan said, he would sort out the American pastor's judicial case. "Give him to us and we will put yours through the judiciary; we will give him to you," he said recently.
• Early in October, as "hostage diplomacy" intensified, the "staunch allies" U.S. and Turkey stopped issuing non-immigrant visas to each other's citizens -- a restriction that has already affected thousands of travelers. The first ban came from the U.S., then Turkey retaliated. The U.S. move came after Turkey's arrest of a U.S. consulate employee, a Turkish citizen, on charges that he had links to Gülen. The visa ban put Turkey in the same category of countries such as Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Venezuela and Yemen. Erdogan also claims that the U.S. is hiding a suspect in its Istanbul consulate who is also linked to Gülen.
• Erdogan apparently wants to raise the stakes. A Turkish court earlier in October convicted -- in absentia -- a Wall Street Journal reporter of producing "terrorist propaganda" in Turkey and sentenced her to more than two years in prison. Ayla Albayrak was sentenced for writing an August 2015 article which, the judges ruled, violated Turkey's anti-terror laws. Had Albayrak not been in New York at the time of the verdict, she would have joined nearly 200 journalists already jailed in Turkey.
• Adding insult to injury over the "very high marks," Erdogan claims that the U.S., not Turkey, is uncivilized and undemocratic. In an Oct. 21 speech, he said that the U.S. indictment against his bodyguards was "undemocratic." He said, "They say the United States is the cradle of democracy. This can't be true. This can't be democracy ... I'm sorry, but I cannot say that country [the U.S.] is civilized."
A kind of "transactional relationship" is, of course, understandable, given U.S. interests in a volatile region of the world where Turkey happens to be one of the state actors. All the same, the U.S. administration does not have the luxury of maintaining a game in which it views Turkey as a "staunch ally" and Erdogan as a leader with "very high marks." This make-believe policy toward Turkey will only further poison whatever is left of what once was a genuinely staunch alliance.
Washington does not have the luxury of maintaining the pretense that Turkey is 'staunch ally.'
Turkey is clearly no longer a "staunch ally." Take the most significant geostrategic regional calculation in northern Syria: What Ankara views as the biggest security threat are U.S. allies fighting the Islamic State: the Syrian Kurds.
Ever since the Iraqi Kurds held a referendum (and voted "yes") on independence, on September 25, Turkey has aligned itself with Iran and the Iran-controlled government in Iraq, who view the Kurdish political movement as a major threat.
In addition, the anti-American sentiment in Turkey (part of which has been fueled by the Islamist government that has been in power since 2002) may push Turkey further into a Russian-led axis of regional powers, including Iran. Erdogan will not wish to look pro-American ahead of critical presidential elections in 2019 when 79% of Turks have an unfavorable opinion of the U.S.
Moreover, the idea of unifying Sunnis against the Shiite bloc is more difficult than it may look. Sunni Turks view Sunni Kurds, as an existential threat who are -- allied with Shiite Iran and Iran-controlled Iraq, which contains Kurds.
Saudi Arabia and Turkey also found themselves at the opposite ends of the crisis surrounding Qatar -- all Sunni.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based political analyst and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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https://nypost.com/2017/11/19/turkey-bans-all-lgbtq-events-in-capital/
Two of my favorite Democrat constituencies, Islamists and gays, are not getting along with each other. Nothing says tolerance like accepting people who stone people they don't agree with.
They are looking out for their safety by Banning their events.
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Stratfor Worldview
Forums
Nov 22, 2017 | 00:02 GMT
3 mins read
Turkey: Currency Value Tumbles Toward Record Low
(Stratfor)
Connections
News of Turkey's deteriorating currency aligns with Stratfor's 2017 Annual Forecast, in which we mentioned how the lira's continued instability will spook investors, who are already alarmed by the country's political crackdowns.
See 2017 Third-Quarter Forecast
The value of Turkey's currency, the lira, rapidly depreciated to record lows today, falling to 3.97 against the U.S. dollar. In an effort to not breach the unprecedented rate of 4 lira to 1 dollar, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan instructed his ministers to prepare urgent measures to bolster the currency over the next few days. On Nov. 21, Turkey's Central Bank cut its borrowing limits to sustain the lira's value, reduce liquidity and avoid a financial meltdown.
Leading up to the next Central Bank meeting on Dec.14, Erdogan, along with other policymakers, will likely engage in a heated debate over what measures to take next. Historically, the president has been reticent to raise interest rates, preferring to meddle with his country's monetary policy in ways that restrict the Central Bank's ability to take preventative measures in step with global market dynamics. However, the currency slide has Erdogan concerned about the damage it could inflict on the economy. Turkey depends on high levels of domestic consumption, and without purchasing power and consumer confidence, Turkish citizens' trust in the government could falter.
Without purchasing power and consumer confidence, Turkish citizens' trust in the government could falter.
The origins of the currency slide come from within the country but some of the latest drivers of the trend are external. Turkey has one of the world's most fragile economies, largely because the country is heavily reliant on short-term hot money flows. Dependence on short-term profit makes Ankara highly sensitive to global capital flows. This was the case in 2013 when the United States announced a tapering of its Quantitative Easing program, and international capital flooded into the United States — and out of emerging markets such as Turkey. At that time, Turkey was one of the so-called Fragile Five countries that had difficulties adjusting to changes in U.S. economic policy.
Ankara faced the same problem in 2016 when money again flowed into the United States, driving up the dollar as part of the "Trump Trade." Following a year of dollar depreciation, it's no surprise that the lira's own depreciation coincides with a mini-resurgence in the greenback. In early November, the ratings agency Standard and Poor's released a list of the new Fragile Five countries. Of the five, Turkey was the only country from the 2013 list that remained. The other four countries — Brazil, India, Indonesia and South Africa — mended their economies and were replaced by Argentina, Pakistan, Egypt and Qatar. If Turkey is to escape its economic funk, Ankara may want to consider changing its approach.
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Turkey: Turkey, Qatar and Iran signed a transportation agreement intended to facilitate trade among the three countries. It effectively makes Iran the transit country for Turkey-Qatar trade. Additionally, the Iranian Chamber of Commerce said Iran is having difficulty exporting goods to Syria because the market is saturated with goods from Turkey. Why has Turkey signed on to a deal that links it so closely to Iran? How does Turkey view Iran’s growing power in the region? Is Ankara radically shifting its position?
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Nothing surprising here, it's not like Islamist-run Turkey is a member of NATO or (former) ally of the US...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/reza-zarrab-taking-stand-trial-straining-u-s-turkish-ties-n824751
http://www.shariahfinancewatch.org/blog/2017/11/30/turkish-despot-erdogan-implicated-in-plot-to-launder-money-for-ayatollahs-in-iran/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/30/world/europe/erdogan-turkey-iran-sanctions.html?mtrref=www.google.com&gwh=70BBA54BC1D475CCA3BB81FA5ECD6A26&gwt=pay
The crux of United States v. Zarrab, as the case was formerly known, is ultimately about U.S. sanctions, and how a group of high-ranking and well-connected Turkish actors, including Zarrab, may have conspired to assist Iran in skirting them through fraud and elaborate money-laundering schemes.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/11/could-the-reza-zarrab-case-lead-to-mike-flynns-downfall.html
NY Magazine ponders Michael Flynn's involvement in this.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/03/flynn-admits-to-lobbying-for-firm-linked-to-turkey.html
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In North Africa, Signs of a Turkish Revival
Dec 28, 2017
By Allison Fedirka
For a number of years, the Turkish government has tried to strengthen relations with countries that were formerly part of the Ottoman Empire. It’s part of what GPF sees as Turkey’s re-emergence as a regional power. One of the regions in which it has tried to establish a growing presence is North Africa, where the Turkish president has spent much of this week on state visits. It’s important to remember, however, that Ankara still faces a number of barriers to restoring its past glory.
Reviving Turkish Influence
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this week visited Sudan, Tunisia and Chad in what, on the surface, appeared to be routine diplomatic trips aimed at maintaining bilateral ties. Both the Turkish and the international press particularly emphasized the Sudan visit, highlighting Turkey’s plan to restore the Suakin Port along the Red Sea. The port has been defunct for more than a century, but it was a major port during part of the time that Sudan was ruled by the Ottomans. It will now be used mostly for tourism and a ferry service to Mecca.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (C-L) is welcomed by his Sudanese counterpart Omar al-Bashir (C-R) upon his arrival in Khartoum on Dec. 24, 2017, for a two-day official visit. ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images
The restoration of this port is part of a broader neo-Ottomanist strategy to revive Turkish influence in regions once controlled by the Ottomans. Domestically, the government has been arousing pan-Turkic sentiment for years through a number of measures, including restoring historic sites. But now we’re seeing moves to expand Turkish power on the international front, with the Turkish press even referencing the country’s Ottoman past during Erdogan’s visits abroad.
But Turkey won’t be able to revive its old empire if it can’t ensure its own survival. Key to its survival is maintaining its control over the Bosporus, a critical waterway that separates the European and Asian parts of Turkey. The Ottomans too depended on this passageway. Before Mehmed the Conqueror took Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453, the Byzantine Empire was able to threaten the Ottomans and prevent them from defending their holdings on either side of the strait. Securing the Bosporus requires building buffer zones around it where Turkey can maintain some degree of influence and prevent other powers from getting close enough to threaten Turkish control. Building this strategic depth requires establishing power over parts of the Caucasus that can act as chokepoints in its ability to project power further east toward Iran; securing territory south of the Caucasus in Arab lands that border the western side of the Zagros Mountains; protecting or controlling its border with Europe in the southern Balkans; and defending itself in the eastern Mediterranean.
(click to enlarge)
Turkey faces challenges to establishing buffers in each of these directions. In the Caucasus, it faces competition from both Iran and Russia. In the Balkans, it has to contend with the Russians and key European powers, although Europe currently lacks a major power like the Hapsburg Empire so it’s less threatening. To the south, the Syrian civil war rages on and a lot of political, and potentially military, maneuvering will be needed to establish a Turkish foothold here.
Less Competition
The one place where Turkey could more easily expand its presence is in North Africa. Turkish engagement with countries like Sudan and Tunisia will be met with relatively less competition or pushback from other regional powers. North Africa’s main geopolitical value is its access to the Mediterranean Sea and, to the east, the Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. Given that Europe borders the Mediterranean to the north, it naturally has an interest in North African affairs. But this interest is currently limited to stemming migration to Europe, which has exacerbated internal political divisions on the Continent.
The United States needs to ensure its navy has access to the Mediterranean, but it already has this through its NATO partnerships. Washington’s resources are stretched thin, and the resouces it has devoted to Africa are mostly focused on security operations in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa.
Russia has recently established a minor naval presence in the Mediterranean to support its operations in Syria, but the fleet’s home base is far away in Murmansk, and maintaining long, large deployments in the region is logistically difficult. Its efforts to expand its global influence are better focused elsewhere in the Middle East or in other strategic regions where it can better compete. Additionally, should it want to contest Turkey directly over the Bosporus, it can use its Black Sea Fleet.
Both Sudan and Tunisia fell under Ottoman rule during the empire’s heydays and could allow Turkey to once again project power into North Africa. The Ottoman Empire seized control over North Africa and maintained this control by relying heavily on local actors and a very powerful navy. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Ottoman navy had a strong presence in the Mediterranean and maintained trading routes to North Africa for much of this time. While some Italian city states tried to challenge it for control of these routes, they failed to cut maritime supply routes. This time around, however, considering the significant U.S. and NATO presence in the Mediterranean, Ankara will likely establish its influence through political ties and economic investments.
Turkey may be trying to re-establish its once mighty power, but a number of factors still stand in its way. Iran is chief among them. Tehran, which has strong ties with the governments in Damascus and Baghdad, is blocking Turkey’s path in Syria and Iraq. Even at the height of Ottoman power, the empire couldn’t push its borders too far east due to geographic factors, including the long distance between Istanbul and eastern Turkey that made supplying its army difficult.
Although deeply concerned about the rising power of Iran, the Arabs are also worried about Turkish expansion and are therefore resisiting alignment with Turkey. But the Arabs need a counter to Iran. Egypt, considering the state of its economy, is in no position to be an Arab leader. Saudi Arabia is still dealing with the fallout of its economic reforms and the drop in oil prices. Neither of these two countries is capable of countering Iranian power, and thus the only viable option is Turkey.
But by supporting the Turks, they run the risk of helping Turkey re-establish itself as the regional hegemony. The Ottoman Empire is a blueprint for what this regional hegemony might look like in the future, and Ankara’s interest in North Africa is motivated by its desire to grasp that power once again.
The post In North Africa, Signs of a Turkish Revival appeared first on Geopolitical Futures.
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• Syria: The Turkish government summoned the Russian and Iranian ambassadors to express “discomfort” over violence in Idlib, Syria. Are we seeing a serious breakdown in cooperation among the three countries?
• Turkey: The Turkish government said it will mediate between Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq. The standoff that followed the KRG’s secession referendum in September 2017 seems to have ended – Iran reopened its border crossings with the region, and KRG President Massoud Barzani resigned. So what is there to talk about?
• Turkey: Turkish newspaper Haberturk reported that dams near the capital, Ankara, are only 15-20 percent full, and said there is a serious drought throughout Anatolia. Let’s define the drought geographically and gauge its impact. Turkey isn’t Syria, but remember that Syria’s civil war broke out in part because water issues forced Sunni Arabs into cities because they couldn’t make a living as farmers anymore.
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Turkey Breaks With Iran and Russia
Jan 11, 2018
By Jacob L. Shapiro
The “Astana troika” is in danger of breaking up. After meeting in Astana, Kazakhstan, in mid-September, Turkey, Iran and Russia agreed to serve as guarantors of a cease-fire agreement in Syria. Four “de-escalation zones” were established with the goal of a six-month pause (subject to further extension) in fighting between the forces of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime and anti-government rebels in these zones. The problem with this arrangement is that these countries don’t see eye to eye. Turkey supports the anti-government rebels. Russia and Iran support Assad’s regime. Now the two sides are accusing each other of supporting their favorites rather than keeping the peace.
(click to enlarge)
On Jan. 9, the Turkish Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian and Iranian ambassadors to express its concerns over the Assad regime’s advances in the Idlib de-escalation zone, the largest, most strategic and most contested of the four zones. The next day, Turkey’s foreign minister pointed the finger at Russia and Iran, insisting that Turkey’s two purported partners needed to do more to stop the Syrian regime and fulfill their duties as guarantors of the cease-fire. The same day, Yeni Safak, a Turkish newspaper known for its strong support of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, claimed that the Assad regime’s advance was coordinated with the Islamic State, with the tacit support of Russia and Iran. Turkey likes to accuse all its enemies of being in cahoots with IS, but Russia and Iran aren’t supposed to be enemies. That makes the report notable, regardless of its admittedly dubious veracity.
This isn’t the first time Turkey has had cause for concern about the actions of Russia and Iran. On Dec. 20, Reuters reported that the Syrian army, backed by Russian air support, had seized 50 villages in southern Idlib province the previous week. On Dec. 25, Anadolu Agency reported Syrian and Russian airstrikes in both Idlib and Hama provinces. On Jan. 7, TRT reported additional airstrikes in Idlib, and the next day, Anadolu reported that a Turkish military convoy in Idlib had come under fire from unknown assailants. And on Jan. 10, Syria’s state-run news agency SANA reported that Syrian government forces and allies had captured 23 new villages in the Idlib countryside.
Different Points of View
From Turkey’s perspective, the Assad regime, with Russian air support and Iran’s blessing, is attempting to assert its control over territories currently held by anti-Assad regime rebels. The victims of this offensive are civilians and moderate opposition groups that Turkey has pledged to defend.
Russia, for its part, does not accept that the terms of the cease-fire apply to all elements of the opposition. The dominant militia in Idlib is Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist group whose core element is al-Qaida’s Syrian branch. Russia views HTS as a fair target and is encouraging the Assad regime to attack HTS fighters wherever they hold territory. HTS strongholds happen to be in Idlib, so that is where Russia is concentrating its resources. Eliminating jihadists, from Russia’s point of view, is a necessary part of maintaining the de-escalation zones. Furthermore, Russia expected Turkey to put pressure on HTS to give up its arms and disband when its forces entered Idlib province. Turkey has declined to do so, at times even collaborating with HTS on the ground, giving Russia the pretense it needs to support further Assad regime consolidation efforts.
It’s important to keep in mind that none of this was Russia’s preferred outcome. Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the defeat of IS and the imminent withdrawal of Russian troops from Syria on Dec. 6, in part because he calculated that conditions were ripe for a political solution to the Syrian civil war. Putin’s political solution and the triumphant recall of Russian troops now seem a distant memory. On Dec. 31, at least two Russian soldiers were killed when Hmeimim air base was shelled, reportedly by jihadist militants. Russia disputed reports that a significant number of its planes were damaged in the attack. Then, on Jan. 6, 13 unmanned aerial vehicles attacked the base at Hmeimim and a logistics center at Tartus. According to Russia’s Ministry of Defense, the attacking UAVs were neutralized. The two attacks have underscored just how far Russia is from being able to pull out its forces, and how vulnerable its forces are to attack.
Russia has since made a point of providing two more details about the Jan. 6 attack. On Jan. 8, the Russian Ministry of Defense said the UAVs were of such sophistication that they “could have been received only from a country with high technological potential on providing satellite navigation and distant control of firing.” In other words: the United States. (The Pentagon has rejected these claims as ludicrous and noted that IS regularly uses primitive UAVs to attack U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces fighters in eastern Syria.) Then, on Jan. 10, the Defense Ministry’s newspaper published a report that said the UAVs had been launched from Muazzara in southwestern Idlib. The report said that this territory was under the control of “moderate opposition” forces backed by the Turkish government and that Russia had sent a formal complaint of its own to high-level Turkish officials exhorting them to ensure Turkey enforced the cease-fire.
Iran Leans Toward Russia
Iran has not made its views known on this particular incident. The presence of Iran’s foreign minister in Moscow on Jan. 10, however, as well as its own military support of Assad’s advances in Idlib, indicate that Iran’s views are more closely aligned with Russia than with Turkey on this matter, which only makes sense. Though Turkey and Iran have some interests in common, they diverge in Syria, despite prior short-term tactical cooperation against Kurdish groups. Iran looks at the Assad regime as integral to its strategy to increase its power. Turkey views Iran as a long-term rival that has amassed an impressive strategic advantage in recent months and needs to be cut back down to size. Turkey also sees that Iran, at least for now, has tied its ambitions to Russia, another long-term Turkish rival.
Nevertheless, the “alliance” among these three countries was built on a mismatch of interests. It’s a perfect example of the old adage that two’s company, three’s a crowd. The more countries you try to cram into an alliance, the more tenuous the alliance becomes. It was one thing to coordinate moves when all sides could agree that defeating the Islamic State was the main priority. But the defeat of IS eliminated the only common ground these countries had in Syria. Turkey’s ideal political solution sees Assad removed and the country stitched back together under Sunni aegis. Iran’s ideal political solution sees Assad restored but dependent on Iran and its proxies for survival. Russia’s ideal political solution is any that makes it appear strong and keeps Assad as a somewhat independent actor, neither dependent on Tehran nor fearful of Ankara’s next move. Something’s got to give.
Now these fissures are coming out into the open, just a week before representatives of Iran, Turkey and Russia are to meet to plan the Sochi Congress on Syria’s Future, scheduled for Jan. 29-30. Even the preparations for this meeting have been tense, with some Syrian opposition groups refusing to attend and Turkey insisting that it will not attend any meeting that includes the YPG, the militia representing Syrian Kurds. Russia reportedly had invited YPG representatives in October but backed off when Turkey objected. Syrian Kurdish officials insisted as recently as two weeks ago that Moscow has promised them an invitation, while Turkey maintains that Russia has agreed not to do so. Russia, for its part, has a history of supporting anti-Turkish Kurdish groups when it’s strategically useful to keep Turkey distracted.
Regardless of who attends the Sochi meeting, Syria’s future will not be decided there, or in Astana or Geneva or Timbuktu. It’s being decided on the ground in Syria right now, and it’s bringing Turkey into conflict, however unwillingly, with its historical rivals. The Astana troika may very well figure out a way to paper over these inconsistencies during the meeting in Sochi, but it’s all a charade. On the ground, the Assad regime has the upper hand and Russia is calling the shots, still very much at war. Iran is biding its time, hoping to capitalize on Russia’s eventual fatigue. Turkey finds itself backed into a corner but without the requisite strength to preserve its interests. It needs to stall, but angry comments to ambassadors won’t stop Assad or Russia, though they will produce nice headlines. Turkey is searching for a way to stop Assad, and if it can’t find one, it will be on the losing end of this breakup.
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Turkey, the Arab World Is Just Not That into You
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
January 14, 2018
http://www.meforum.org/7162/arabs-are-just-not-that-into-turkey
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He runs around in a fake fire extinguisher's outfit, holding a silly hose in his hands and knocking on neighbors' doors to put out the fire in their homes. "Go away," his neighbors keep telling him. "There is no fire here!" I am the person to put out that fire, he insists, as doors keep shutting on his face. That was more or less how Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's neo-Ottoman, pro-ummah (Islamic community), "Big Brother" game has looked in the Middle East.
After years of trial and failure Erdogan does not understand that his services are not wanted in the Muslim neighborhood: The Iranians are too Shiite to trust his Sunni Islamism; the (mostly Sunni) Kurds' decades-long dispute with the Turks is more ethnic than religious; and Sunni Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past. Still, Erdogan insists.
Turkish textbooks have taught children how treacherous Arab tribes stabbed their Ottoman ancestors in the back during the First World War, and even how Arabs collaborated with non-Muslim Western powers against Muslim Ottoman Turks. A pro-Western, secular rule in the modern Turkish state in the 20thcentury coupled with various flavors of Islamism in the Arab world added to an already ingrained anti-Arabism in the Turkish psyche.
Erdogan does not understand that Arabs do not wish to revisit their Ottoman colonial past.
Erdogan's indoctrination, on the other hand, had to break that anti-Arabism if he wanted to revive the Ottoman Turkish rule over a future united ummah. The Turks had to rediscover their "Arab brothers" if Erdogan's pan-Islamism had to advance into the former Ottoman realms in the Middle East.
It was not a coincidence that the number of imam [religious] school students, under Erdogan's rule, has risen sharply to 1.3 million from a mere 60,000 when he first came to power in 2002, an increase of more than twenty-fold. Erdogan is happy. "We are grateful to God for that," he said late in 2017.
Meanwhile, the Turkish Education Ministry added Arabic courses to its curriculum and the state broadcaster, TRT, launched an Arabic television channel.
Not enough. In addition, Erdogan would pursue a systematic policy to bash Israel at every opportunity and play the champion Muslim leader of the "Palestinian cause." He has done that, too, and in an exaggerated way, by countless times declaring himself the champion of the Palestinian cause -- and he still does it.
Turkey hosted a high-profile summit of Arab-Islamic leaders in December 2017 to condemn U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital. The front row, from left to right: Emir Sabah of Kuwait, King Abdullah of Jordan, Erdogan, and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority.
Erdogan's Turkey championed an international campaign to recognize eastern Jerusalem as the capital city of the Palestinian state, with several Arab pats on the shoulder.
His spokesman, Ibrahim Kalin, happily said that the dispute over Jerusalem after President Donald Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to the Israeli capital "had in fact united the Muslim world."
A united Muslim front around the "Palestinian capital Jerusalem" is a myth. Iran, for instance, renounced Turkey's Jerusalem efforts because, according to the regime, the entire city of Jerusalem, not just eastern Jerusalem, should have been recognized as the Palestinian capital. Before that, Turkey accused some Arab countries of showing a weak reaction to Trump's decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
The Turkish-Arab fraternity along Muslims lines is an even bigger myth. For instance, the Saudi-led Gulf blockade of Qatar imposed in June came as a complete shock. One of his Sunni brothers had taken out the sword against another?! Turkey's Sunni brothers had once been sympathetic to his ideas but no longer are.
Only two years ago, Turkey and Saudi Arabia were mulling the idea of a joint military strike in Syria.
For the Sunni Saudis, the Turks were allies only if they could be of use in any fight against Shiite Iran or its proxies, such as the Baghdad government or the Syrian regime. For the Saudis, Turkey was only useful if it could serve a sectarian purpose. Meanwhile, as Turkey, together with Qatar, kept on championing Hamas, Saudi Arabia and Egypt distanced themselves from the Palestinian cause and consequently from Turkey. Both the Saudi kingdom and Egypt's al-Sisi regime have viewed Hamas, an Iranian satellite, with hostility, whereas Turkey gave it logistical and ideological support. Another reason for the change in Saudi Arabia's position toward Turkey -- from "friendly" to "semi-medium-hostile" -- is Saudi Arabia's newfound alliance with Egypt's President el-Sisi. El-Sisi replaced the Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, in Egypt, while Turkey and Qatar, have effectively been the embodiments of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region.
Erdogan offered to build a Turkish military base in the Kingdom, for example, but in June, Saudi officials turned him down.
Erdogan was a rock star in the Arab world when he visited Jerusalem in 2005. No longer.
Erdogan might benefit by being reminded of a few facts and shaken out of his make-believe world. For instance, he might recall, that his worst regional nemesis is an Arab leader, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, not an "infidel king." He must realize that he is no longer the "rock star" he was in the streets of Amman or Beirut that he once was – when the only currency he could sell on the Arab Street was his anti-Semitic rants. Turkey does not even have full diplomatic relations with the most populous Sunni Arab nation, Egypt.
More recently, a tiny sheikdom had to remind Erdogan that his expansionist, "ummah-ist" design for the Middle East was no more than a fairy tale he persistently wanted to believe. In December, United Arab Emirates (UAE) Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahayan shared a tweet that accused Turkish troops of looting the holy city of Medina a century ago. In response, Erdogan himself lashed out:
Some impertinent man sinks low and goes as far as accusing our ancestors of thievery ... What spoiled this man? He was spoiled by oil, by the money he has. But that was not the end of what looks like a minor historical debate. The row symbolized the impossibility of what Erdogan has been trying to build: An eternal Arab-Turkish fraternity.
UAE Foreign Minister Anwar Gargash: The Arab world will "not be led by Turkey."
Anwar Gargash, UAE's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, said there was a need for Arab countries to rally around the "Arab axis" of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Did Erdogan hear that? If not, he should have heard this one: Gargash also said that "the Arab world would not be led by Turkey." In what better plain diplomatic language could the idea have been expressed?
Meanwhile Erdogan keeps living in his make-believe world. Last summer, as part of his futile "euphemizing Arab-Ottoman history" campaign, he claimed that "Arabs stabbed us in the back was a lie." Not even the Arabs claim they did not revolt against the Ottomans in alliance with Western powers.
If none of that is enough to convince Erdogan he should read some credible polling results. Taha Akyol, a prominent Turkish columnist, recently noted some research conducted by the pollster Zogby in 2016. The poll found that 67% of Egyptians, 65% of Saudis, 59% of UAE citizens, and 70% of Iraqis had an unfavorable opinion of Turkey.
Do not tell Erdogan, but if "polling" had existed a century ago, the numbers might have been even worse.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based political analyst and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
Related Topics: Turkey and Turks | Burak Bekdil
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Reread the thread that began this thread eleven years ago-- George Friedman runs deep:
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Proposed Anti-Tank Missile Sale to Turkey, Qatar Raises Concern
by John Rossomando • Mar 1, 2018 at 9:37 am
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7360/proposed-anti-tank-missile-sale-to-turkey-qatar
Advanced anti-tank missiles that Raytheon and Lockheed Martin plan to sell to Turkey and Qatar could end up in the hands of jihadists, a member of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC) told the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT). Defense Department officials announced last week that the two companies won a $95 million contract to sell sophisticated Javelin anti-tank missiles to Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, France, Taiwan, Jordan and Lithuania.
"This is very dangerous. Give these people weapons today. Never know if they end up using it in the West and Europe. These guys want back [the] Ottoman Empire," said Bassam Ishak, a member of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC)'s political bureau. That is the political wing of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces that form the backbone of the Trump administration's strategy against ISIS in Syria.
Recently, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to attack SDF forces – and possibly U.S. troops who are stationed in Manbij, Syria in support of the SDF. Turkey also has recently threatened to invade NATO ally Greece.
Erdogan's government has a track record of arming jihadists in Syria. Turkey and Qatar provided arms to Libyan rebels, much of which ended up in the hands of the "more antidemocratic, more hard-line" groups.
Turkey served as the main source of arms in Libya, a March 2016 United Nations Security Council panel of experts found. Exiled Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt reported that U.N. experts tracked the weapons to companies linked to the Turkish government.
Turkish intelligence, known by its Turkish acronym MIT, also armed hardline jihadists in Syria.
"At this point, any arms provided to Turkey under Erdogan['s] leadership is potentially dangerous," Bozkurt said. "It is the most anti-Western political leader that is on par with Iran's Mullahs."
U.S. officials seem oblivious to Turkey's role arming and supporting jihadists who attacking Sunni Syrian Arabs and Kurds who share America's secular, democratic values in the Afrin region, Ishak said.
He contrasts SDF supporters with the forces Turkey supports, saying the SDF wants a peaceful pluralistic Syria that is open to all regardless of religion or ethnicity, while Turkey wants a Syria ruled under shariah.
"They are acting like a bully in the neighborhood. They have regained the Ottoman bully spirit. If the world allows them to do this, you have a powerful Muslim Sunni state that is supporting religious extremists," Ishak said.
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There goes the democracy. Like thomas Friedman, Erdogan's mentor is Communist China.
Restricting social media is what triggered the Arab Spring.
This country is our ally??
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/world/europe/turkey-erdogan-internet-law-restrictions.html
"...creeping control of the media has been a persistent feature of Mr. Erdogan’s 15 years in power. He has used every legal means, as well as extraordinary emergency powers since a failed coup in 2016, to steadily turn Turkey into an authoritarian system under his thumb." ...
"After the 2016 coup, 150 media outlets were closed down, and journalists were imprisoned at a pace that left Turkey second only to China..."
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This country will soon be unrecognizable to people who visited a half-modern Turkey a short time ago, like a school teacher / author friend who wrote this book of her stay a decade ago:
https://www.amazon.com/You-must-only-love-them-ebook/dp/B01DFUGIEI
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Turkey Refusing to Release Detained Greek Soldiers
by John Rossomando • Mar 6, 2018 at 8:55 am
https://www.investigativeproject.org/7363/turkey-refusing-to-release-detained-greek-soldiers
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Crafting a US Response to Turkish Intransigence
by Gregg Roman
The Hill
March 7, 2018
http://www.meforum.org/7239/crafting-a-us-response-to-turkish-intransigence
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Originally published under the title, "Navigating the U.S. Collision Course with Turkey."
Erdoğan has been repositioning Turkey as an adversary of the United States for years.
In a rare public policy speech in mid-December, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster singled out Turkey as one of the two leading state sponsors (alongside Qatar) of "radical Islamist ideology." The Turkish government protested the statement as "astonishing, baseless and unacceptable," which means it was a pretty good start. McMaster's speech highlighted an emerging recognition among Trump administration officials that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey poses a pernicious threat to US interests in the Near East. Since McMaster's speech, Erdoğan has invaded Afrin, Syria (a city then controlled by America's Kurdish allies), massacring women, children and the elderly; promoted the use of child soldiers in his fight against the Kurds; and undermined U.S. sanctions against Iran. A Manhattan Federal District Court's guilty verdict against a Turkish banker accused of helping Iran evade sanctions speaks volumes about the growing threat posed by Erdoğan's Turkey. Although Erdoğan was not charged in the case, "testimony suggested he had approved the [defendant's] sanctions-busting scheme" to launder billions of dollars for Iran beginning in 2012, according to the New York Times.
No more silence. No more favors. No more trust. No more second chances.
That Erdoğan was secretly weakening U.S. sanctions right when Iran was feeling the pinch should come as no surprise. He has been repositioning Turkey as an adversary of the United States for years — covertly aiding ISIS in Syria (before switching sides on a dime to align with Russian forces), overtly embracing Hamas terrorists, flooding Europe with migrants, and hosting an international summit condemning U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, to name just a few of the lowlights. While wishful thinkers still hold out hope that U.S.-Turkish relations are strained by short-term concerns and eventually will rebound, a growing chorus of voices led by Daniel Pipes contends that "Erdoğan's hostile dictatorship" has passed the point of no return and cannot be reconciled with American interests and values. Erdoğan's increasingly brutal methods of governance, particularly since a July 2016 failed coup against his regime, is wholly unbecoming of a NATO ally. In late December, he issued an emergency decree that effectively legalizes politically-motivated lynching.
Why does the United States continue to allow Erdoğan's malign behavior in the region? And, more importantly, what should policymakers do about it?
For Washington, it is time both to up the ante in seeking a course correction from Erdoğan and to prepare for the worst. This path forward should be guided by the following basic principles.
No more silence
Since Erdoğan goes out of his way to lambast the United States at every turn, Washington should make a practice of not holding back when it censures his behavior.
The United States should speak out against Erdoğan's continuing oppression of minority Kurds, in Turkey and in neighboring Syria and Iraq. In particular, it should call for the release of Kurdish political leaders jailed by Erdoğan, such as Selahattin Demirtaş, co-chair of the Kurdish-dominated Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP). The US should invite Kurdish representatives to visit Washington for high-profile meetings at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon.
No more favors
Last June, the United States International Trade Commission issued a report finding that Turkey has been subsidizing the sale of steel reinforcing bars (rebars) in the United States, a judgment that ordinarily leads to the imposition of anti-dumping tariffs. As of yet, this hasn't happened. But it must.
More serious penalties should await Turkey for purchasing the S-400 missile system from Russia last year, which clearly ran afoul of new U.S. sanctions on Russia (the manufacturer of the S-400 has been explicitly blacklisted by the State Department). The White House should immediately put to rest speculation that it intends to waive these penalties.
No more trust
Whichever direction Erdoğan's ambitions take Turkey, one thing is certain — his regime cannot be trusted with sensitive military technology and intelligence. The United States should expel Turkey from the nine-nation consortium producing the next-generation F-35 fighter jet. The risk that the plane's technological secrets will find their way from Turkey to Russia or Iran is too great.
The United States should remove dozens of nuclear weapons presently stored at Incirlik air base in southern Turkey. Although adequate safeguards are in place, these weapons serve no practical purpose (aircraft stationed at the base cannot load them) and their continued presence might be misconstrued as a U.S. endorsement of Erdoğan's reliability as an ally.
No more second chances
Erdoğan's government arrested more than a dozen American citizens of Turkish descent — including a NASA scientist who happened to be visiting family—in the wake of the July 2016 coup attempt. These arrests, as well as those of tens of thousands of Turkey's own subjects, are based on unspecified allegations concerning these individuals' involvement in the coup. Most incarcerated Americans were denied consular access until recently. At least seven are still being held in Turkish prisons— more or less as hostages. Erdoğan has offered to trade them for the extradition of a political rival living in the United States. While on a May 2017 visit to Washington, Erdoğan ordered his security detail to viciously attack peaceful protesters outside the Turkish ambassador's residence. A similar, equally appalling episode happened when he visited in 2016.
Washington must make it crystal clear to Erdoğan that any further egregious violations of the laws of the United States, the sanctity of its soil, or the rights of its citizens will result in immediate sanctions banning him and his lieutenants from stepping foot in this country (or inside one of its embassies) ever again.
In conclusion, while Turkey's relative political stability, economic strength and military power make it a desirable ally, they also make it a formidable enemy. Now is the time to make it clear to Erdoğan and his subjects that America no longer plays nice with its enemies.
Gregg Roman is director of the Middle East Forum.
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Erdoğan's Turkey has no Place in NATO
by Burak Bekdil
Begin-Sadat Center
March 7, 2018
http://www.meforum.org/7240/erdogan-turkey-has-no-place-in-nato
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Originally published under the title, "Turkey and NATO: From Loveless to Hateful Marriage."
Erdoğan and Putin in Istanbul, 2012
The West's self-imposed Pollyanna game over Turkey a decade or so ago seemed delusional to most Turks who knew the true nature of the Islamist politician lauded as a pro-reform, pro-West democrat. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, western leaders argued, would consolidate Turkey's democratic system, bring the country closer to its western allies and even win a historic membership in the European Union. Erdogan's Turkey would be a perfect bridge between western and Islamic civilizations, thus being a role model for less democratic Muslim nations.
The founding values of NATO, such as the safeguarding of freedom and the principles of liberal democracy, individual liberties and rule of law, are rare commodities in today's Turkey.
A decade later, obliviousness has turned into bitter feelings, but Pollyanna is still out there, all smiles. In the words of Fabrizio F. Luciolli, president of the Atlantic Treaty Organization: "Since sixty-five years [sic], a mutual commitment binds Turkey and NATO, which can hardly be scratched by contingent interests or frictions, or replaced by new strategic directions. In its dialogue with Turkey, NATO once again reveals its unique role as transatlantic forum for political consultation on security issues."
Turkey-optimism is not a new phenomenon in the West. But it is fascinating that it still finds buyers in the marketplace of ideas.
A Phony Ally
Turkey has not arrived where it stands today overnight.
In April 2009, Turkey and Syria held a joint military exercise – the first of its kind between a NATO member and a Russian-armed and trained client state. In September 2010, Turkish and Chinese aircraft conducted joint exercises in Turkish airspace. This, too, was a first for a NATO air force. In 2011, before finally providing NATO forces with logistical support for their anti-Qaddafi campaign, then-Prime Minister Erdoğan angrily asked, "What business can NATO have in Libya?"
In 2012, Turkey became associated with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as a dialogue partner. (Other dialogue partners were Belarus and Sri Lanka; Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Mongolia acted as observers.) Since then, Erdoğan has repeatedly stated that Ankara will abandon its quest to join the EU if offered full membership in the SCO... In 2013, Turkey announced the selection of a Chinese company for the construction of its first long-range air and anti-missile defense system, reassuring its western allies that local engineering would make the Chinese system interoperable with the US and NATO assets deployed on Turkish soil. (The contract was eventually scrapped.)
Beginning in 2015, Turkey came under international suspicion for systematically and clandestinely abetting various jihadist groups in Syria, including, allegedly, ISIS. Speculated to have included logistics and arms, this support reflected Ankara's distinct approach to the Syrian theater: while the West's primary goal has been to fight ISIS, Erdoğan has sought to topple Syria's Alawite President Bashar Assad and install a Sunni, pro-Turkey, and Islamist regime in his place.
In December 2017, Ankara officially announced that it would acquire two Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile systems, making it the first NATO member state to operate such systems. To be sure, Turkey is also discussing with Eurosam, a European consortium, the development and co-production of a similar system for its future air defense architecture. But that hardly gives any relief to western capitals
where policymakers are now wondering, among other concerns, how a NATO ally will simultaneously operate a Russian-made air defense system and the planned, US-led, multinational F-35 strike fighters.
Turkey, a partner in the Joint Strike Fighter group that builds the F-35, has ordered a batch of 116 future stealth fighter jets. But its growing relations with Moscow and its recent military campaign in Syria have added to calls for an F-35 boycott. It is not a secret that Washington is quietly weighing that option as Erdoğan threatens to extend his military campaign in Syria to areas (Manbij and the east of the Euphrates) where US troops are aligned with Kurdish militias. Ankara has deemed these militias terrorist organizations and thus legitimate targets. This is not the typical war scenario NATO's first and second largest armies would normally envision.
A Grim Future
Then there is the problem of like-mindedness. The founding values of NATO, such as the safeguarding of freedom and the principles of liberal democracy, individual liberties and rule of law, are rare commodities in today's Turkey.
In January 2018, the annual Freedom in the World report, produced by the US NGO Freedom House, classified Turkey as "not free" for the first time since the report series began in 1999. The country had lost its status as "partly free" due to a slide in political and civil rights, Freedom House noted.
Also in January, the World Justice Report, an independent organization seeking to advance the rule of law around the world, said that Turkey fell to the 101st position out of 113 countries in its 2017-18 Rule of Law Index.
The future may be gloomier. At a time of rising xenophobia and anti-western sentiments across Turkey, Erdoğan's campaign for the November 2019 presidential elections will undoubtedly target the "evil powers of the West," adding to the isolationist (that is: anti-NATO) Turkish psyche.
Erdoğan's militancy will likely strike a chord among his constituents. According to a December 2017 survey by the Turkish pollster Optimar, 71.9 percent of Turks are "against the US" while 22.7 percent are "partly against the US." This in sharp contrast to the 62.1 percent approval rating among Turks for closer relations with Russia.
A survey of 393 Turkish businessmen has likewise found 66 percent of them to have an unfavorable opinion of the US; while a survey by Kadir Has University in Istanbul (in December 2017) found that 64.3 percent of respondents viewed the US as the top security threat to Turkey.
Russian President Vladimir Putin could not have possibly found a better partner than Erdoğan for his attempts to divide and weaken NATO.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based columnist and a fellow at the Middle East Forum.
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Turkey: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized NATO for “not supporting” Turkey in its operations in Afrin, Syria. Meanwhile, Asharq Al-Awsat, a London-based Saudi daily that is becoming increasingly unreliable, reported that Turkey and Russia had come to a deal over Afrin’s fate. Is Erdogan trying to set things up for Turkey to leave NATO? What about this deal with Russia – is it real or just Saudi paranoia? Is it a data point showing that Turkey is moving away from NATO?
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Not sure that I agree with his conclusions but WRM is an intelligent man and states difficult questions clearly
Getting to Yes With Turkey
There’s a common interest in countering the Russian-Iranian axis in Syria.
By Walter Russell Mead
March 12, 2018 7:32 p.m. ET
38 COMMENTS
The post-Obama Middle East is a grim and ugly place: the brutal wars in Syria, the deepened chaos in Iraq, the shambolic Libya mess, the vaulting ambition of Iran, the intrusion of Russia, the smoldering failure of the Arab Spring, and the collapse of the U.S.-Turkish relationship.
President Obama cannot be blamed for everything that went wrong in the Middle East on his watch. But it’s clear the Trump administration inherited an incoherent strategy, a discredited democracy agenda, alienated allies, and an American public so traumatized by successive American policy misfires that it has become skeptical about any American engagement in the region.
It is not a surprise under these circumstances that the Trump administration wants to change course, or that its efforts to do so have enjoyed significant support in the region. If the rise of Iran has created a crisis in the Middle East, it has also created a great opportunity. Israel and most of the Arab world are so horrified by the Iranian threat, and so unnerved by the vagaries of recent American policy, that the new administration has been able to repair relations with many old allies relatively quickly.
But if relations with Israel and Arab states have rapidly warmed, relations with Turkey have deteriorated dangerously—so much that the U.S. is looking for alternatives to its important air base in Incirlik. Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has even called for the removal of American nuclear weapons from the country.
The Turkish alliance has been a pillar of America’s Middle East strategy since the Truman administration; indeed, it was Britain’s decision to end aid to Turkey and Greece in February 1947 that prompted the U.S. strategic review culminating in the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. With Iran hostile and the Arab world in disarray, Turkey is more important than ever to American policy.
Yet rebuilding relations with Turkey will force the U.S. to make some hard choices. One is about human rights. As with President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi in Egypt, a close relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would raise difficult questions for America’s human-rights policy. Past policy failures in the Middle East make it hard for Americans to push a democracy and human-rights agenda in the region credibly, but Wilsonians—a significant part of any American political coalition interested in strong leadership abroad—are appalled by the evident repression in Turkey since the failed coup. If the Trump administration wants a close strategic relationship with Mr. Erdogan, it will have to accept some bitter and wounding criticism from human-rights advocates at home and in Europe.
The second choice is even harder. Syrian Kurds have been America’s most useful partners in the war against ISIS. But their politics and ambitions directly conflict with the policy of Mr. Erdogan, who considers Syrian Kurds to be allies of terrorist forces in Turkey. Turkey bears a significant portion of the blame for the continuing conflict with the PKK, the Kurdish organization that has been fighting the Turkish government since 1984. Nevertheless, if the U.S. wants Turkey’s help, it will have to address Turkish concerns about America’s alliance with Syrian Kurds more effectively.
It would be a mistake to be too pessimistic about the U.S.-Turkish alliance. While relations are frosty, the core interests of the two countries, which diverged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are again closely aligned. The Russian-Iranian partnership now dominating Syria and upending the regional balance of power is Turkey’s worst nightmare come true. Turkish leaders know their country can’t counter this transformation without American support.
The Middle East coalition the Trump administration needs to rebuild must inevitably contain countries that don’t like or trust one another. Egypt and Saudi Arabia see Turkey’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood as a strategic threat. Mr. Erdogan and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold each other in contempt. The recent warming of relations between Israel and the Gulf states is both temporary and fragile.
The U.S., and only the U.S., can hold this coalition together. Without it, there is no viable path for containing Iran. Turkey is a key member of any realistic coalition to rebalance the Middle East; getting to yes with Mr. Erdogan is one of the administration’s most crucial challenges in the region.
Appeared in the March 13, 2018, print edition
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Russia, Turkey, US: Three Russian warships have entered the Mediterranean in as many days. Meanwhile, Turkey and Russia are having high-level discussions aimed at improving their relationship. Turkey and the U.S. are also having high-level discussions, with recent news about the two countries moving toward some kind of understanding, though the departure of Rex Tillerson as U.S. secretary of state may affect the timeline. What is the trajectory for U.S.-Turkish relations? Does Russia’s deployment track with previous exercises they have conducted, or is this something new? And is it linked in any way to shifting relations in the region?
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http://www.speroforum.com/a/AESQYRPAZI1/83092-Turkey-defies-Trump-as-war-with-Israel-looms?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DVVZTTYEXN53&utm_content=AESQYRPAZI1&utm_source=news&utm_term=Turkey+defies+Trump+as+war+with+Israel+looms#.WrshJHrcCqA
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The Sultan’s Pleasure: Turkey Expands its Operations in Syria and Iraq
by Jonathan Spyer
The Jerusalem Post
March 31, 2018
https://www.meforum.org/articles/2018/the-sultan’s-pleasure-turkey-expands-its-operatio
Turkish forces this month entered Afrin City, bringing Operation “Olive Branch,” launched on January 20, to a successful conclusion. Latest reports suggest that the Turks are now set to seek to enter the neighboring Kurdish-controlled town of Tal Rifaat, after reaching an agreement with the Russians allowing them to contest its control.
According to the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 78 Turkish soldiers were killed in the Afrin fighting, along with 437 Turkey-aligned Syrian Sunni rebels. SOHR puts Kurdish casualties as 1,500 killed in the operation.
All indications suggest that for Turkey, the recent battles were only a phase in a larger process. So where might Turkey turn next? And what is the goal of the Turkish campaign?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, following the fall of Afrin, that “we marked a comma. God willing, a full stop will come next…. Now we will continue this process, until we entirely eliminate this corridor, including in Manbij, Ayn al-Arab [Kobani], Tel-Abyad, Ras al-Ayn (Sere Kaniyeh) and Qamishli.”
These are the main towns of the Kurdish-controlled area further east. A Turkish push toward them would mean a comprehensive attempt to destroy the Kurdish autonomous zone that has been in existence east of the Euphrates since the withdrawal of Assad’s forces from the area in July 2012.
It would also mean the near certain prospect of a collision between Turkish and US forces. Officially, there are 2,000 US military personnel in the area. The real number is probably considerably larger, perhaps twice this figure. The US maintains a number of facilities east of the Euphrates. These are held in cooperation with the Syrian Democratic Forces, which is the US partner in the war against Islamic State, but which would also form the main element resisting a Turkish push eastward.
The town of Manbij is currently the main issue of contention. West of the Euphrates and with a mixed Arab and Kurdish population, it is nevertheless currently controlled jointly by the SDF and the Americans. Turkey has made clear that it intends to remove its Kurdish opponents from the town.
Given the extreme risks inherent in any such drive eastward, however, it appears more likely that Turkey will satisfy its immediate appetites for further strikes at its enemies elsewhere.
Despite Erdogan’s grammatical metaphors, the taking of Afrin did represent a kind of “full stop” for the Turks. It completed the acquisition by Ankara of a sizable, contiguous enclave in northwest Syria. The Afrin canton was a “missing piece” separating two areas of de facto Turkish control.
In Operation “Euphrates Shield” in late 2016, the Turks carved out an area of control between the towns of Azaz and Jarabulus along the Syrian-Turkish border.
Meanwhile, Turkish forces also entered northern Idlib province, which remains under the control of Sunni Islamist rebels.
The destruction of Afrin joins these two areas, giving Turkey a contiguous area of control, from Jarabulus to northern Idlib. The Turks have made clear they have no intention of handing these areas over to the Assad regime. So Ankara now has its own little bit of fragmented Syria, alongside the various enclaves of other powers.
This is of importance to Erdogan. He will be able to present himself as the champion of the Sunni Arab population of Syria, and the guarantor of the remnants of its rebellion against the Assad regime.
As the earliest and most consistent supporter of the Syrian Sunni rebellion, the Turkish leader stood to appear humiliated by the final eclipse of their cause. The Russians, by permitting the Turks and their rebel foot soldiers to enter Afrin, have allowed Erdogan to salvage some dignity from his situation. In affording him this concession (against the will of the Assad regime), Moscow has served its broader goal of drawing the Turks further away from their already severely eroded alliance with the West.
With their northwest Syrian enclave largely secured, and the area further east dangerous to approach, because of the American presence, there are indications that the Turks are looking further afield for further victories against the Kurds.
Turkish aircraft have in recent days been in action over the skies of northern Iraq, bombing what Ankara claims to be a presence of PKK guerrillas in the Qasr-e area of Erbil province. The Turkish military is presently engaged 15 km. across the border into the Kurdish Regional Government area, in the Sidakan area in northern Iraq.
Erdogan has threatened in recent days to carry out a military operation against PKK guerrillas located in the Sinjar Mountain area of northern Iraq. The fighters of this Kurdish organization have been in this area since the summer of 2014, when they opened a corridor to rescue Yazidi civilians trapped on the mountain by the advance of ISIS.
The PKK has announced its willingness to leave Sinjar and has begun to hand security facilities over to the local Yazidi YBS forces. Given the links between these forces and the PKK, however, it is not yet clear if this will be sufficient to prevent a Turkish incursion into the area.
There are those among the Iraqi Kurds who fear that these activities may presage a more general Turkish attempt to comprehensively root out and destroy Ankara’s PKK enemies in northern Iraq.
A larger-scale Turkish assault into Dohuk and Nineveh provinces to carve out an enclave between the Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria is not an impossibility. But it would be carried out against the wishes of the US, Iran, and the government of Iraq, and may be too large a morsel for Turkey to attempt at the present time.
Nevertheless, the lower-level attacks on Kurdish targets in Iraq look set to continue and intensify.
Meanwhile, inside the area of Kurdish control in eastern Syria, a mysterious organization called Harakat al-Qiyam has carried out a number of attacks on individuals linked to the Kurdish-led authorities in recent months. Many observers calculate that this group may be backed by the Turks, constituting an irregular accompaniment to overt military action further east and west.
IN ALL three areas – the Afrin operation, the (alleged) links to Harakat al-Qiyam and the air activity and threatened incursion into Sinjar and northern Iraq – the contours and direction of Turkish activity are clear.
Ankara has set as a strategic goal to destroy the Kurdish gains that resulted from the fragmentation of Syria and Iraq over the last half decade. Turkey also wishes to present itself as the natural leader and patron of Sunni Arab communities in both countries.
In asserting these goals, Ankara will partner with or oppose other local powers (Iran, the government of Iraq, the Assad regime), according to immediate tactical needs. Similarly, Turkey is likely to tread carefully around the larger powers, whose will it cannot oppose (the US, Russia), seeking to draw neither too close nor too far away from either.
After the capture of Mosul from ISIS, speaking of Turkey’s activities in Iraq, Erdogan said, “We cannot draw boundaries to our heart, nor do we allow that.” The surrounding territories and populations in the nominal states of Syria and Iraq appear set to receive the full and heartfelt attention of Turkey, to the sound of revived Ottoman marching tunes – whether they like it or not.
Related Topics: | Jonathan Spyer
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Turkey again extends state of emergency
Turkish Parliament extends ongoing state of emergency for the seventh time.
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/244657
What is the 'emergency' in Turkey, that an elected leader wants greater power.
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One day later:
Erdogan announced that parliamentary and presidential elections, originally scheduled for November 2019 will now be held June 24, meaning that a new political system that will increase the powers of the president will take effect a year early.
http://time.com/5246214/erdogan-turkey-snap-election-june/
It vaguely reminds me of someone who went from Chancellor to Führer.
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we are seeing the rise of the strongman dictators again
Xi in China
this guy in Turkey
continuation of these guys in Venezuela and Kooba
More evidence of the failure of Obama
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I forget where but I saw an article this morning saying that Turkey was second only to Venezuela in % of millionaires leaving.
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Long, serious article on Turkey. Important and timely read. Contested election coming up shortly. Unknown who will win or if it will be honestly conducted and counted. Erdogan has been consolidating power and also ending the separation of 'church' (Islam) and state.
http://strategypage.com/qnd/pothot/articles/20180613.aspx
Conclusion from the article: "No one is sure how all this will end or when. Meanwhile, Turkey is going backward rather than forward and most Turks do not want, as Erdogan says he does, Turkey to become the leader of an Islamic coalition to destroy Israel and, presumably, create another Turkish empire."
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http://strategypage.com/qnd/pothot/articles/20180613.aspx
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Amongst the good news around the world, some bad news with Putin, Maduro and Erdogan 'winning' elections along with an election coming up in Mexico. Not all is well around the world.
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2018/06/turkey-erdogan-still-faces-uphill-battle-despite-victory.html
"MHP has become the key party in parliament, which will provide the checks and balances to Erdogan’s rule."
I doubt that.
Is Turkey still our ally? Is NATO still relevant?
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Is Turkey still our ally? Is NATO still relevant?
Good question
he does work at times with Israel
The Kurds are screwed - again.
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Turkey's Economy Takes a Tumble. What's Next?
The Big Picture
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After recent elections, the biggest challenge for the Turkish government was stabilizing the worrisome economy. But poor U.S.-Turkey relations and investor uncertainty about Turkey's ability to stabilize its volatile economy have pushed its currency, the lira, to an all-time low. Its crash is pressing on the country's dollar-denominated debt and raising questions about whether President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will temper his political moves to allow room for economic stabilization.
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Turkey's Resurgence
What Happened?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke before the nation twice on Aug. 10, but the country's currency continued its descent, reaching about 6.4 lire per dollar, a decline of about 14.6 percent. At one point during the day, it had fallen more than 20 percent. Meanwhile, new Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak, also the president's son-in-law, previewed a new economic program for the country. The president — instead of reassuring the markets, whose collapsing confidence is one of the main drivers behind the lira's unprecedented depreciation — slammed Western countries and accused them of waging economic warfare on Turkey. He returned to his familiar refrain of urging Turks to use their reserves of dollars, euros and gold to buy up lire. The markets reacted swiftly, and the lira dropped even further.
What Are the Government's Options?
Erdogan won re-election in June and has secured an empowered presidency, leaving him freer to confront the country's economic challenges. Municipal elections are not until April 2019. But the question is whether Erdogan has the political will, and the ideological inclination, to change course.
The government has political and economic options at its disposal to try to calm the currency's volatility, to keep inflation — now about 15 percent but climbing — under control and to reassure investors. The economic options include a central bank intervention by raising interest rates, although this would have a temporary effect, and Erdogan is famously hesitant to raise rates. (The last substantial hike was in January 2018; before then, it was in late 2013, when Turkey was dealing with the end of the U.S. Federal Reserve's quantitative easing program.) The country could also place controls on capital, but those can hamper private sector activity and won't be easy considering the government's relative inability to totally control private capital.
Politically, Turkey's finance minister continues to try to say the right things, including that the country will embrace a tightened fiscal policy in the coming months to achieve the strategic goal of "economic balance." He has also promised to narrow Turkey's current account deficit. But Erdogan has consistently sandwiched every moderate statement by his son-in-law with nationalist and populist rhetoric that only undermines investor confidence. The president, after all, chose a family member to head this influential position for a reason. The prospects for Albayrak being able to pursue an independent economic policy to safeguard the autonomy of the Central bank do not appear good.
Will Diplomatic Tensions Heighten the Currency Challenge?
The United States and Turkey are already at loggerheads over trade, defense deals, the future of the U.S. mission in Syria and Ankara's warming ties with Russia. On the morning of Aug. 10, U.S. President Donald Trump intensified these divisions by tweeting that he had authorized a doubling of tariffs on Turkey's steel and aluminum, rising to 20 percent on aluminum and 50 percent on steel.
Erdogan's nationalist campaign and Trump's "America First" policy clash perfectly. Trump's public announcement of tariffs will only fan Erdogan's economic warfare narrative, which puts the source of Turkey's economic woes outside its borders. Furthermore, consternation in the U.S. Congress has led to a nascent bill that could limit Turkey's ability to obtain loans from any U.S.-based financial institutions.
And some Turkish banks are already under U.S. scrutiny for transactions with Iran. With new Iran sanctions coming up, more Turkish banks could face U.S. probing if they are doing business with the Islamic republic.
Is a Bailout Coming?
While the International Monetary Fund has a history of lending a hand to Turkey, Erdogan is wary of the organization, creating barriers to a bailout. An IMF offer will come with strings attached — strings that Erdogan may find a violation of sovereignty — including demands to rein in the country's runaway inflation with higher interest rates. That move would collide with Erdogan's beliefs that see him consistently slamming interest rate hikes.
Another option is aid from other countries — possibly Qatar or China, an ally in the BRICS group. For China, stabilizing a fellow emerging economy's currency has value, but Beijing could also benefit from becoming an economic friend to a NATO state whose relationship with the West is increasingly strained. Erdogan could also entertain help from Qatar, but the benefits of such aid from Doha would be limited.
Is There a Contagion in the Air?
Turkey is a major emerging market economy with $466 billion in foreign debt (about 78 percent in U.S. dollars and about 18 percent in euros), or 52.9 percent of gross domestic product. And more than one-third of that debt is coming due within the year. These looming payments are one of the main reasons for the government's fragility, because a weaker lira makes that debt more expensive to pay off. This situation has led the European Central Bank to sound alarm bells warning that Turkey's currency problems could infect Europe's banks. The central bank noted that Spain's BBVA, Italy's UniCredit and France's BNP Paribas all have significant exposure to Turkish debt and that a crashing lira could affect repayment of foreign currency loans. Spanish banks, in particular, are the most exposed, with over $80 billion in Turkish loans.
The lira's plummeting value, the potential for debt defaults, the possibility of a balance-of-payments crisis and rising inflation all represent clouds gathering ahead of an economic storm that could batter the country. In addition, there is little confidence that the government will pursue a policy that will ease the downturn.
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Since the attempted coup against his government in July 2016, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used the arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of U.S. citizens in Turkey as a tool for negotiating with Washington.
In response, the United States will consider passing more damaging sanctions, in addition to the first wave it imposed in late July.
The escalating dispute is just one of many issues — including Ankara's plans to deploy the Russian S-400 missile defense system — threatening the United States' alliance with Turkey.
In the wake of Turkey's latest elections, the country's relationships abroad are only getting rockier. The June 24 vote formally instated an executive presidential system, institutionalizing re-elected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's one-man rule. At the same time, it has continued the deterioration of Turkey's relations with its partners and allies, foremost the United States. The ever-escalating diplomatic rupture, largely at Erdogan's hand, represents an abrupt departure from Turkey's national interests in favor of a personalized and impulsive foreign policy. Even if Washington and Ankara can resolve their immediate problems — such as the recent arrest of U.S. citizens in Turkey — the numerous, and multiplying, issues on which Turkey and the United States now disagree could be their relationship's undoing.
A Hostage Situation
In the last two years, the Turkish government has increasingly used the detainment of people with U.S. or dual citizenship to try to force the United States to give into its demands. The tactic is typically the preserve of adversarial states, such as Iran and North Korea, and not of strategic partners like Turkey, a NATO member. But since the attempted coup in July 2016, Erdogan has turned to it repeatedly. Ankara followed up the arrests of Andrew Brunson, an American evangelical pastor who has lived it Turkey for more than 20 years, and Serkan Golge, a Turkish-American scientist working for NASA, by imprisoning Turkish staff from various U.S. diplomatic missions. In each case, the government cited the detainee's alleged (and unsubstantiated) involvement in the failed coup or affiliation with the Gulen movement, the uprising's suspected instigator. Their trials and sentencing — Golge received a sentence of 7.5 years in prison in February, while Brunson is now under house arrest after officials released him from prison July 25 — exposed not only the president's influence over Turkey's judiciary but also the cases' political motivation.
The dubious charges of terrorism or subversion aside, the Turkish government's reason for holding these individuals is to bend Washington to its will. In return for Brunson's release, for example, Erdogan has explicitly demanded that the United States extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim cleric allegedly responsible for the 2016 coup (though Turkey has failed to convince U.S. justice officials of Gulen's role in the revolt). Ankara probably intends to use the other prisoners as bargaining chips for other policy objectives: to encourage the United States to back off from supporting the Kurdish Democratic Union Party and People's Protection Units in Syria; to reduce the fine against state-owned Halkbank for violating U.S. sanctions against Iran; and to arrange early release for the bank's vice president, who was recently convicted in U.S. federal court for facilitating the sanctions violations.
Another interpretation of the detentions is that the Erdogan administration is using them to try to realize domestic policy goals. The Turkish president has been keen to arrest Gulen for the past five years because the exiled cleric has challenged his prerogative to rule. By reducing Halkbank's fine and securing the repatriation of its vice president, meanwhile, Erdogan could protect the bank and save face in light of his own involvement in and benefit from the sanctions evasion. Negotiations failed to achieve the desired results, prompting the Turkish government to try more aggressive tactics, regardless of their costs to the country's economy and international standing.
The Price of Strong-Arm Tactics
And the costs are starting to add up. Erdogan has managed to unify an otherwise fractured Washington against his administration's actions. At the end of July, the White House announced a first wave of sanctions against Turkey under the Magnitsky Act, a law that targets human rights abusers, originally Russian operatives close to the Kremlin. The measures banned Turkey's justice and interior ministers, identified as the parties mainly responsible for arbitrarily arresting U.S. citizens in the country, from entering the United States and seized their U.S. assets. But more than in their direct consequences, the effect of the sanctions lies in the stigma they carry. The measures have put Turkey in a league with the other countries the United States has deemed human rights violators, such as Nicaragua, Gambia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Russia. The economic repercussions have also been profound. Turkey's beleaguered currency, the lira, lost more than 6 percent of its value in less than a week, while treasury bond yields rose to 22 percent. What's more, these sanctions are only the first among a variety of punishments that the United States can and is willing to use in turn against its ally Turkey.
Erdogan's attempts to goad the U.S. government into compliance with his wishes has left Turkey with few allies in Washington willing to publicly defend it.
If Erdogan digs in, the U.S. Congress is prepared to respond with legislation to direct international credit agencies such as the World Bank and the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development from extending loans to Turkey. Given the country's economic turmoil, Turkey will probably need that kind of assistance sooner than later. The United States could then remove Turkey from the SWIFT international money transfer system, a move that would have devastating consequences for Turkish banks, and perhaps even for Erdogan's continuity as president. It's important to remember, however, that the backlash is of Erdogan's own making. He could have avoided it entirely were it not for his attempts to goad the U.S. government into compliance with his wishes. This strategy has left Turkey with few allies in Washington willing to publicly defend it.
The Crises Yet to Come
Along with the immediate crises in their relationship, the United States and Turkey will soon have other problems to deal with. To the extent that Turkey pushes ahead with the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system, it will likely interfere with its purchase of U.S. F-35 fighter jets, for which it has already paid $1 billion. A delegation of U.S. senators told Erdogan in no uncertain terms during a visit to Ankara in July that the U.S. Congress would block the transfer of the F-35s if his country deployed the S-400.
Then there's the matter of the renewed sanctions against Iran. U.S. President Donald Trump's administration has declared that it will block any country that defies the measures from doing business in the United States. For Turkey, which depends entirely on imports to meet its fossil fuel needs, the return of sanctions on Iranian energy exports in November will require a decision: Fall in line with the United States or face the consequences. Washington is unlikely to grant Ankara a waiver to continue importing oil and natural gas from Iran, simply because it has no reason to. But since Turkey has bad relationships with alternative fuel suppliers such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, it may well opt to keep buying from Iran.
Together, the various disagreements between the United States and Turkey are driving the two allies apart at a rapid pace. Turkey and the United States have weathered many diplomatic and military rifts over the years, thanks in large part to mutual trust and a desire to overcome their differences, as well as to effective communication between the countries' leaders. Today, by contrast, Washington and Ankara have lost much of the goodwill that once kept them from falling out. Resolving their more pressing problems, such as the Brunson issue, may not be enough to salvage their partnership.
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https://www.ftportfolios.com/Commentary/EconomicResearch/2018/8/15/turkey,-tariffs,-tax-rates-and-trump
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https://soundcloud.com/clarion-project/trumps-economic-war-with-turkey
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http://carolineglick.com/andrew-brunson-case-proves-us-turkey-alliance-has-been-over-for-years/
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second post
https://israelunwired.com/terror-attack-on-the-us-embassy-in-turkey/
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What Happened
The man at the center of a political tug of war between the United States and Turkey is finally going free. A Turkish court sentenced Andrew Brunson, an American evangelical pastor who has been in prison on terrorism charges since 2016, to three years in prison on Oct. 12 — only to order his release on time served. The court further lifted an overseas travel ban for Brunson, paving the way for his return to the United States and prompting a celebratory tweet from U.S. President Donald Trump.
Why It Matters
The significance of Brunson's release is manifold: The pastor's fate was one of the few issues in which Ankara possessed leverage over Washington, but Turkey's decision to release him indicates that the country wishes for some U.S. overtures on other issues. And ahead of next month's midterm elections in the United States, Brunson's release is likely to buoy Republican lawmakers with large evangelical bases of support, as they can portray his release as an example of the White House's deep involvement in evangelical interests.
Though Turkish leaders have portrayed the release as a mere judicial matter, Ankara ultimately permitted Brunson to go free because it wishes to calm its fragile economy after the Turkish lira fell in part because the United States imposed sanctions on Turkey in August over the pastor's continued detention. Not only will Brunson's release end the pretext for further U.S. sanctions on Turkey over the pastor’s case (though Turkey could face scrutiny in the future over other files like Iran-related sanctions) but it will also facilitate continued U.S.-Turkish economic trade and investment.
Turkey is also seeking continued cooperation in Syria with the United States, as well as assurances that Washington is doing what it can to assist Ankara with concerns related to national security, such as the Gulen movement and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). The United States already has demonstrated its hesitation at extraditing Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based Turkish theologian whom Ankara has accused of masterminding a July 2016 coup attempt, but it could provide hints of flexibility on the Islamic scholar. At the same time, the United States has already expressed increased concern about PKK-linked attacks in Turkey. The United States will also seek Turkey's commitment to enforcing U.S. sanctions on Iran-related trade.
Background
Before the Oct. 12 court hearing, a number of signs suggested that Brunson's release was imminent, including that U.S. officials told reporters that they anticipated the pastor's release based on negotiations between U.S. and Turkish officials. Some of the witnesses against the pastor subsequently shifted their testimony, while pro-government newspapers dispensed with the "terrorist" moniker for Brunson in favor of the more neutral "pastor." Taken together, Brunson's releases points to the success of the behind-the-scenes negotiations, as well as the value Ankara ultimately places in its ties with Washington.
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Why Turkey Isn't Burning Bridges With Saudi Arabia Over Khashoggi
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks about the slaying of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi during a weekly parliamentary address on Oct. 23 in Ankara.
(Getty Images)
The fallout from the Khashoggi affair underlines a larger battle between Turkey and Saudi Arabia for influence throughout the Sunni world that will continue in the religious, political and economic spheres.
Turkey may be trying to use its muted response to coax Saudi Arabia into stopping its cooperation with Iraqi and Syrian Kurds, or possibly into to reducing Saudi economic pressure on Qatar, Turkey's major regional ally.
Their slowly growing defense and economic ties will mitigate the chances of a complete rupture between Ankara and Riyadh.
For weeks, allegations of criminality and a cover-up have consumed the Turkish media after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed at Riyadh's consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2. Three weeks later, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told parliament that Saudi authorities had planned the dissident's slaying. Erdogan has a penchant for bombast, but the speech was understated, and the president even issued a cordial appeal to Saudi King Salman to cooperate in exposing the truth in the Khashoggi affair. Conspicuously, Erdogan elected not to mention the elephant in the room: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely believed to have played a role in the killing.
The Big Picture
Among the major states of the Middle East, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are rivals competing for dominance in the Sunni Muslim world. The fallout over the violent death of a Saudi journalist in Turkey has given Ankara some leverage against Riyadh, which it will use carefully.
See Rebalancing Power in the Middle East
See The Saudi Survival StrategySee Turkey's Resurgence
The speech and the steady leak of information from Turkish authorities strengthen the view that Erdogan is trying to carefully pressure Saudi Arabia, whose worldview and regional policies are at odds with Turkey's. Erdogan isn't going so far as to risk destroying relations with Saudi Arabia — especially given the prospect that the crown prince could emerge from the scandal — but if international pressure against the crown prince rises, Erdogan is well-positioned to join in the campaign. For the moment, Turkey is seeking to alter the balances within the Saudi royal family by emphasizing that the king is a credible partner while explicitly questioning who instigated the killing, all without mentioning the crown prince by name.
The antagonism between the crown prince and the president is mutual. In comments earlier this year to the Egyptian press, the crown prince called Turkey, Iran and political Islam an "axis of evil." Basically, the two leaders are revisiting a familiar history of Saudi-Turkish rivalry, which goes back decades. Economic priorities might prevent each side from damaging an otherwise productive relationship, but that doesn't mean each won't try to capitalize on the other's moments of weakness and public relations stumbles — particularly in the way Turkey appears to building leverage against Saudi Arabia in the Khashoggi killing.
Who Leads the Sunni World?
At its core, the conflict is driven by their differing political visions for the Sunni world, as well as the struggle between the visions to get the upper hand. For Saudi Arabia, which is the custodian of Islam's two holiest cities, Turkey's challenge is seen as an attack on the legitimacy of the Saud family as rulers. For Turkey, whose sultans once held the same cities as the caliphs of the Sunni world, it is an opportunity to secure soft power in the Muslim world for decades to come.
At its core, the conflict between Saudi Arabia and Turkey is driven by their differing political visions for the Sunni world.
The question of leadership in the Sunni world has been in flux since the nascent Turkish Republic abolished the caliphate in 1924. In the republican Turkish view, it is authentic expressions of Islamic thought, as espoused by morally upright Muslim citizens, that ought to guide and rule the Sunni world. The Saudis, in contrast, believe that traditional and clear hierarchies, with authority vested in Riyadh-appointed members of the ulama (Muslim clerics), should guide the Sunni world. In essence, Turkey posits that the legitimacy for leadership comes from the grassroots authenticity of everyday Muslims, while Saudi Arabia claims that it is based on the hierarchy of tradition.
This worldview explains Riyadh's abhorrence of movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, which holds views similar to Turkey and which has received political protection from Ankara. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, for example, has operated out of Turkey since Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi seized power from Mohammed Morsi, a member of the group, in 2013. Turkey's worldview appeals to Muslims anywhere who believe that it is not tradition or social deference that must determine leadership, but commitment to the Islamic faith.
This is a direct political threat to the Saudi royal family's legitimacy; the more Saudis are exposed to such thinking, the more they may question the tribal-cum-wasta ("influence") social contract that underpins much of the monarchy's authority. While the Saudis also claim to be pursuing true and authentic representations of Islam, their insistence on royal privilege and prerogative opens them to criticism that their religious scruples are not as consistent as they say. This creates a soft power contest between the two, and Riyadh hopes to keep this Turkish-derived influence as far away from Saudi subjects as possible.
Rival Camps
Because Turkey and Saudi Arabia view themselves as the Muslim world's pre-eminent Sunni powers, they are broadly aligned on many foreign policy issues. For instance, both countries want to contain the spread of Iranian hegemony in the region, perceiving Persian power as a threat to their own ability to lead the Middle East and the Muslim world. This makes the two powers natural allies to the United States' growing efforts to contain Iran's influence. Washington's increasing reliance on the two to help contain Iran rests on existing U.S. dependence on the pair to bolster regional counterterrorism efforts. Both Saudi Arabia and Turkey have, after all, committed to fighting the Islamic State alongside the United States.
But despite their broad alignment on Iran, Ankara and Riyadh have very different relationships with Tehran. While Saudi Arabia avoids as much contact with Iran as possible, Turkey shares a border and an economic and strategic relationship with the country. This might expose Turkey to certain risks (for instance, the risk of suffering harsher U.S. sanctions on Iran in the coming months and years if Turkish companies continue to trade with Iranian entities), but it also provides Ankara a certain freedom to maneuver that Riyadh does not enjoy, such as in the Syria conflict. Moreover, Turkey and Iran's shared border and large Kurdish populations also give the pair common cause to contain Kurdish separatism.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia further have an interest in supporting the same political causes across the Sunni world, albeit from different angles. The two countries support Palestinian statehood but have pursued contrasting approaches to economic and political aid for the community. Turkey is closer to Hamas, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that rules Gaza, while Saudi Arabia primarily backs Fatah, the Palestinian faction that controls the West Bank and which is hostile toward Hamas. Turkey is also publicly healing its rift with Israel, which will broaden its ability to extend support to the Palestinians, at a time when Saudi Arabia has kept its ties with Israel as quiet as possible while expressing public support for the Palestinian cause.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia have also staunchly opposed Syrian President Bashar al Assad throughout most of the Syrian civil war, but they have supported different rebel groups in the conflict. In this, Saudi Arabia's recent support for the Syrian Kurds has particularly irked Turkey, which view such rebel groups as terrorists.
Competition and Conflict
The Iranian-Saudi rivalry has attracted much attention, but the Turkish-Saudi rivalry — nuanced though it is — is also producing real policy effects, drawing regional Sunni countries into either the Ankara or Riyadh camp. Because Turkey's political model threatens governments such as Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, the two states have aligned themselves with Saudi Arabia's regional endeavors. But other Sunni governments, such as Qatar, have grown closer to Turkey because Doha supports Islamist politics as a means of forming deeper connections to global Muslim communities. A few, such as Jordan and Lebanon, try to benefit from both.
Further afield in Africa, the two powers have sought to build the political, religious, economic and security influence that could bolster political legitimacy on the continent. In the Horn of Africa and across North Africa, both countries are opportunistic, taking advantage of political openings, as in Somalia, where Turkey supports political forces opposed to rivals backed by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. In Tunisia, Turkey has tried to support the Islamist Ennahda party to help it counter more secularist parties, prompting Saudi Arabia's (somewhat unsuccessful) efforts to back the latter. Saudi Arabia has also sought to weaken Turkey's ability to make Africa an export market by undercutting Turkish efforts with donations or investments. By strengthening African economies, Saudi Arabia can help give them the strength to push for a harder bargain with Turkey or to seek imports from elsewhere.
As rivals, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have found ways to needle each other at points of weakness. Because preventing the development of an autonomous Kurdish polity is Turkey's primary security objective, Ankara is increasingly nervous about Saudi and Gulf efforts to connect with Kurds in Iraq and Syria. Saudi Arabia also deeply opposes Turkey's support for Qatar, which helped provide a political and security lifeline at the beginning of the June 2017 blockade. Riyadh especially wants to prevent Ankara from bolstering its military presence in Qatar. What's more, the two have also supported different communities within the crowded and complex political spectrum in Lebanon, in some ways inflaming Beirut's political problems.
Neither Turkey nor Saudi Arabia has a significant interest in stirring political waters that could upend valuable economic ties.
Economic Ties
Despite the rivalry, Saudi Arabia and Turkey's burgeoning economic ties might mitigate the possibility of a serious rift — particularly in the realm of defense. Turkish-Saudi defense collaboration began in September 2013, when the two countries ratified a cooperation agreement. Late in 2017, Aselsan Corp., one of Turkey's most important defense companies, formed a joint venture with Saudi Arabia's Taqnia called Saudi Defense Electronics Co. (SADEC), which focuses primarily on electronics, including jammers, radars, electronic warfare suites and infrared receivers. As part of the joint venture, Aselsan and Taqnia have commenced construction on a factory in Saudi Arabia.
Turkey has not yet made any major arms sales to Saudi Arabia, although Ankara has been negotiating the sale of unmanned aerial vehicles to Saudi Arabia and has entertained hopes of selling its Altay tank, as well as other weapons and equipment. Because bilateral defense ties remain in their infancy, a serious rift between Turkey and Saudi Arabia would not upend any current arms deals, but it would certainly hinder Ankara's ambitions of expanding into the lucrative Saudi market, meaning neither side would benefit from a profound rupture in relations.
In terms of trade, the relationship is not massive (the two conducted just $4.7 billion in largely balanced trade last year), yet both governments have pledged to increase trade and investment in sectors that matter to both. Accordingly, neither country has a significant interest in stirring political waters that could upend valuable economic ties. Turkish construction firms, which represent a strategic sector for Ankara, have won contracts to build Saudi Arabian housing projects — the number of which is set to grow substantially under Riyadh's Vision 2030. Saudi tourists, whose numbers have also been increasing yearly, have also buoyed the Turkish economy by spending big when visiting Turkey. Saudi citizens have also been at the forefront of a campaign to gobble up Turkish real estate, highlighting just how important the kingdom's customers are to the economic sector for Ankara. (Naturally, some of Riyadh's influence over Ankara through the real estate market is mitigated by the $1 billion in investments that Qatar, an even bigger foe of Saudi Arabia, has made in Turkey's housing market in the past three years.)
Keeping Calm, for Now
For now, Riyadh is playing it safe with Ankara as it tries to defuse the Khashoggi crisis. So what, ultimately, does Turkey want as it dangles the journalist's case over Saudi Arabia? Economically, Turkey could be quietly soliciting Saudi financial support in exchange for an end to the media pressure on the crown prince or it might even be soliciting some diplomatic relief for Doha, which remains under the Gulf Cooperation Council's blockade. Politically and security-wise, Turkey is also seeking a channel to contain Saudi support for the Kurds.
Ultimately, however, much of the Saudi-Turkish rivalry fits into the political and soft power spheres, in which personalities like Mohammed bin Salman and Erdogan compete for prestige and Ankara and Riyadh attempt to win the hearts and minds of the Sunni world. For now, Turkey appears to see the benefit in not rocking the boat with Saudi Arabia— but that's no guarantee that it won't change its mind.
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I confess I think this idea weak and the second time Trump has looked weak in this regard-- with the first being when Erdogan had his people beat up peaceful protestors
(many of whom were Kurds) in front of the Turkish embassy in Washington DC and Trump did nothing.
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By Jacob L. Shapiro
Gulen Revisited
The U.S. reportedly wants to trade an exiled cleric for better relations with Turkey.
Hoping to ease Turkish pressure on Saudi Arabia following the death of Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, the United States is exploring legal options to extradite Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen to Turkey, according to NBC News, which cited four sources, including two unnamed senior U.S. officials. The Trump administration reportedly directed federal law enforcement agencies to look into extraditing Gulen last month, but to no avail.
The report has set off a media firestorm in Turkey, which has accused Gulen of masterminding the 2016 attempted coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and of leading a global terrorist organization. A U.S. State Department spokesperson denied the report but stipulated that the U.S. continues to evaluate Turkey’s requests regarding the exiled cleric. Lost in the melodrama is that if the United States followed through on this extradition – which the executive branch cannot do unilaterally – problems in U.S.-Turkey relations will endure.
Power Tussles in the Middle East
U.S. and Turkish strategic objectives in the Middle East are imperfectly aligned. The United States wants to contain Iran and destroy Islamism (as embodied by the Islamic State), while Turkey aspires to become the dominant regional power and quash Kurdish separatism. In its fight against the Islamic State, the United States is partnered with a Syrian Kurdish militia that Turkey claims is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party terrorist group. Ankara is more interested in moderating and harnessing Islamism as currency to project Turkish soft power in the region. Turkey is also quietly looking to fill the influence vacuum left as the U.S. and its allies work to hobble Iran. These incongruent regional interests have led to tensions in relations between the U.S. and Turkey.
The notion that extraditing Gulen would assuage Turkish anger at Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi affair is nonsensical: It misunderstands Turkey’s intentions and goals. Turkey has made such a big deal out of the Saudi journalist’s murder not to champion freedom of the press, but because it is a low-cost way to weaken a key rival. By feeding the media an endless stream of leaks on the newest, grisliest details of Khashoggi’s killing, Turkey is putting pressure on both the Saudi regime and the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
Why Gulen, Why Now?
Washington would like a better, stronger relationship with Turkey and sees extraditing Gulen as a goodwill gesture. In a vacuum, the exchange of a Muslim cleric living in Pennsylvania, even one with a Green Card, for a more cooperative Turkey would be beneficial for Washington’s Middle East strategy. But while the Trump administration might be more willing than the previous administration to offer Gulen up to Turkey, the process of extraditing him isn’t that simple – to say nothing of the political ill-will the U.S. would attract for doing so. Turkey’s extradition treaty with the United States clearly states that extradition cannot be granted “for an offense of a political character or on account of [the accused’s] political opinions.” There is a reason the Trump administration is reportedly seeking legal ways to remove Gulen – an executive order on its own will not do the trick.
Even if the Trump administration manages to navigate the legal hurdles, it would be trading Gulen only for a media cycle’s worth of plaudits. The problems in the U.S.-Turkey relationship are structural and rooted in divergent interests. Individuals like Fethullah Gulen are minor figures in a much larger story: the slow decoupling of U.S. and Turkish interests in the Middle East.
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The S-400 purchase and possible sanctions of Turkish bank bear watching:
Turkey and US: Conflict Contained, Not Resolved
by Burak Bekdil
Gatestone Institute
November 20, 2018
https://www.meforum.org/articles/2018/contact-turkey-and-us-conflict-contained,-not-res
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Witnessing the War of Symbols in Eastern Turkey
People hold pictures depicting victims of the Dersim operation in the 1930s, behind a placard marking the 79th anniversary of the genocide during a demonstration on May 4, 2016 in Istanbul.
(OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty Images)
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Highlights
Turkish authorities have clamped down hard on municipalities run by the country's largest pro-Kurdish party, assuming direct control and arresting dozens of mayors.
Some residents hope municipal elections in March 2019 will offer a return to democracy, although President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he will not tolerate victories by the main Kurdish party.
Because the Kurdish issue has spread beyond Turkey's borders, events throughout the Middle East will ultimately have a bearing on the relationship between the Turks and the Kurds in Anatolia.
I'm not the world's best driver, but I've always managed to pay due care to avoid running red lights. I lost that distinction, however, during a recent trip to Turkey's east: The thing was, driving down the main thoroughfare in the province of Tunceli was no longer a straightforward exercise. Where standard lampposts had once lit the way come night, hundreds of red-light tulips, adorned with the Turkish flag, now lined the avenue. With the street awash in red, differentiating between the red lights of the traffic system and the red lights of the Turkish state was a tall order — one that I failed, albeit without any further ramifications.
A Different Walk in the Park
In politics, symbolism matters. The tulips — that most Ottoman and Turkish of symbols — are just a small aspect of the changes occurring in Turkey's east and southeast since a peace process between Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) collapsed in summer 2015. The return to arms has killed thousands, resulted in the detention of thousands more and erased whole neighborhoods off the map as the Turkish state has sought to clamp down on Kurdish ambitions, whether within its own borders or beyond in Syria and Iraq as part of what it terms an anti-terrorist fight.
The crackdown has engendered a climate of fear and suspicion in places like Tunceli, a small town nestled in the mountains of eastern Turkey. (The town was officially known by the Kurdish name of Dersim until Ankara gave it the Turkish name of Tunceli in 1935, three years before beginning an operation to subdue a rebellion in the area, resulting in the deaths of at least 10,000 people. Mindful of this history, many residents continue to call the town Dersim.) Foreigners rarely venture to the town, and on all my previous visits, I was greeted with warmth and curiosity. Not so this time, as most locals mistook my foreign appearance as a sign that I was an undercover police officer from elsewhere in Turkey.
Photograph of the Munzur River in the village of Ziyaret, in Tunceli's Ovacik district.
The village of Ziyaret in Tunceli's Ovacik district. The Munzur River (pictured) starts in the village and runs around 70 kilometers (44 miles) to Tunceli.
(Stratfor)
In places like Tunceli, the Turkish government has removed — and frequently arrested — mayors from the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), replacing them with hand-picked trustees who answer solely to Ankara. Indeed, after the peace process collapsed between Ankara and the PKK, Turkish authorities also moved to restrict the space for legal Kurdish politics as part of its anti-terrorism fight. According to a Dec. 11 report from the HDP, authorities have incarcerated 15 of the party's current or former lawmakers, removed HDP mayors from 94 municipalities, jailed 50 mayors and arrested or detained a further 2,000 party members or supporters — the last all in 2018 alone. Tunceli's trustee, Tuncay Sonel — who also doubles as the province's unelected governor — has embarked on a number of projects to transform the city since his appointment in January 2017. But while some initiatives pleased everyone, the symbolism behind the changes has left many locals uneasy.
The Munzur River runs past the town of Ovacik in Turkey's eastern province of Tunceli.
The Munzur River runs past the town of Ovacik in Turkey's eastern province of Tunceli.
(Stratfor)
Venturing back into the city for the first time in eight months, my Tunceli-born wife and I were certainly not prepared for the symbolic changes. In addition to the tulip lights, the trustee had opened a new park in the neighborhood: the July 15 Martyrs' Park. As we passed an armored personnel carrier (APC) standing guard at the entrance, we first encountered a small mosque (an anomaly in this town of 30,000 in which the majority of residents are Alevis, a religious community that does not attend the mosque) before entering a green space featuring a newly planted rose for each person killed in the July 15, 2016, coup attempt.
While the memorial might be fitting elsewhere in Turkey, the park's name and its roses are provocative in a place like Tunceli, most of whose residents see little difference between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) and members of the Gulenist movement, the alleged perpetrators of the coup attempt. As the AKP has subsequently used the failed putsch as a symbol to buttress its power, the opening of a park glorifying the victims of the coup attempt feels like an imposition of Erdogan's vision for Turkey, Tunceli residents told me.
We left the July 15 Martyrs' Park behind and proceed further up the main road — renamed the July 15 Martyrs' Avenue — toward the town center. There, along the river bank, other changes were afoot. Gone were the treed areas that provided shade during the long hot summers; in their place were two bridges festooned with Turkish flags, alongside a construction site for an Ottoman-themed restaurant, a mosque and other public facilities geared toward the thousands of police officers and soldiers that have been deployed to the area in recent years.
The burnt-out remains of vehicles that were torched at a Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) checkpoint between Tunceli and Ovacik in 2015.
The burnt-out remains of vehicles that were torched at a Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) checkpoint between Tunceli and Ovacik in 2015. As the peace process collapsed, the PKK would frequently destroy the vehicles of those it viewed as collaborators with the Turkish state.
(Stratfor)
"It's as if this is another country and they won a war," one woman told me, referring to the bridges lined with flags. Weaving our way past APCs on patrol along the river bank, my wife and I stopped for a beer at a local cafe. Motioning toward the bridges, our waiter said, "No one here likes what's happening, but no one can do anything about it." It was a sentiment shared by many in the town: With the space to protest in Turkey severely limited, locals feel helpless in the face of what has been happening in the city. Some hope for changes when Turkish citizens elect new mayors on March 31, 2019, but the prospect of new elections might prove to be a mirage for people in Kurdish areas like Tunceli. After all, Erdogan has already promised to appoint trustees once more if "people who have engaged in terrorism win at the ballot box" — suggesting that authorities will not allow the HDP to assume the municipality if it wins the area in three months' time.
A banner in Ovacik belonging to the now-closed Democratic Rights Federation reads "Fighting against the massacre of nature and policies of assimilation is not a crime."
(Stratfor)
For some, the only hope of salvation is a complete economic meltdown in Turkey, as it would presumably deprive Erdogan of funds to wage his campaign in the east. I spoke with one civil servant, a local urban planner, who felt Ankara would only halt its policies of assimilation and its military operations in the mountains around Tunceli if the lira's value fell so sharply that Ankara simply couldn't afford to foot the bill anymore.
A Journey to the "Capital"
In Tunceli, military helicopters may buzz constantly overhead as they head to battle militants in the mountains, but fighting has not occurred in the city since the peace process ended. It's a different story 224 kilometers south in Diyarbakir, a city of around 2 million people that is only half-jokingly called "the capital," as it's the largest Kurdish-majority metropolis in Turkey. I met a friend there, a teacher, and after the obligatory tea we went to the city's UNESCO-recognized walls — some of the longest such fortifications in the world.
A street scene from Diyarbakir's Sur neighborhood in 2007.
A street scene from Diyarbakir's Sur neighborhood in 2007.
(Stratfor)
"Do you want to see what it looks like now?" he asked, referring to the neighborhood of Sur, which lies — or better yet, lay — behind Diyarbakir's impressive basalt walls. I did, even though I was worried about what I would see from the top of the walls. We duly scrambled over a fence police had erected to prevent the curious from climbing the walls to survey Sur.
The pictures I'd viewed before hadn't prepared for me for the sight below. Where once there had been a lively warren of narrow streets, there was now a barren wasteland. In the distance, construction workers were building new housing developments that would bear little resemblance to the houses that once stood there.
Sur, a multicultural area that features the largest Armenian church in the Middle East, was destroyed in intense fighting between the Turkish state and local youth affiliated with the PKK starting in 2015. In the end, the Turkish state's superior firepower won the day, allowing Ankara to conquer the area. Aside from the military aspect, Ankara also appointed trustees to the local municipalities who quickly got down to work, removing the city's Kurdish name, Amed, from the city hall, taking down Kurdish street signs and bulldozing public artwork infused with Kurdish symbolism.
Authorities are now constructing new developments on the barren territory of Sur.
Fighting between Turkish forces and locals linked to the PKK has resulted in the near-total destruction of Sur. Authorities are now constructing new developments on the barren territory.
(Stratfor)
So where do the Kurds go from here? Through military strength, the Turkish state has captured areas of the east that rose up in revolt in 2015. At least on its own soil, Turkish forces have beaten back the PKK (around Tunceli, many people attributed the militants' lack of activity to government drones rather than full-scale military assaults) and imposed heavy-handed rule. For Kurds — and indeed any opponent to the current Turkish government — protest is difficult. Even so, it hardly seems like now is the end of the story. Far more draconian Turkish policies suppressed, but did not eliminate, the Kurdish movement in the 1990s.
More than that, however, the Kurdish struggle is no longer a phenomenon confined to Turkey; Kurdish ambitions are now an indelible aspect of the Syrian civil war, while the Kurdistan Regional Government has gained a measure of international recognition as an autonomous actor in Iraq — its ill-fated bid for independence notwithstanding. Given that, it's not just Ankara that will determine what happens in places like Tunceli or Diyarbakir, but the larger forces reshaping the Middle East.
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https://www.defenseone.com/business/2019/03/dont-sell-f-35-turkey-if-it-buys-russian-sams-top-nato-general/155318/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
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Turkey: We're buying S-400. The purchase of advanced Russian anti-aircraft missiles is a "done deal," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a TV news station Wednesday. That follows a warning by NATO's supreme commander, U.S. Army Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, who told lawmakers on Tuesday that Ankara should not be allowed to also buy the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Scaparrotti is worried that the S-400 might send Russia information about NATO's latest jet.
Eject Ankara from the F-35?: "This is no small thing. Turkey is the largest Tier 3 partner in the F-35 program and has contributed close to $200 million to the fifth-generation fighter jet's development," wrote Selim Sazak and Caglar Kurc last year in Defense One. "If the crisis escalates further, it is likely to have severe reverberations."
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Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean. On a visit to North Cyprus on Saturday, Turkey’s foreign minister said his country would conduct drilling operations inside Cyprus’ exclusive economic zone. The European Union and the United States joined Cyprus in issuing statements of concern and calling on Turkey to halt all drilling operations, but Turkey’s defense minister doubled down on Sunday, saying that Turkey would “always protect the rights of the people of Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.” This is a long-running dispute, but as we noted in our 2019 forecast, Turkey has better reasons than ever to be more assertive in the Eastern Mediterranean. Even as U.S. national security adviser John Bolton attempts to make a routine U.S. naval deployment in the Middle East look like a threatening gesture toward Iran, the U.S. faces a more assertive and powerful challenge in NATO ally Turkey, who is not going to back down because of a few strongly worded statements.
The Turkish lira under pressure. We’ve been writing about Turkey’s external debt problem since December 2017. After the Turkish lira took a nosedive in October 2018, Turkey was able to stabilize the currency with a number of confidence-boosting monetary measures, but the underlying external debt problem has not gone anywhere. The currency is now at its lowest point on the dollar in seven months and today fell below six liras on the dollar. In the past, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tried to use the currency’s weakness as a rallying cry against “economic terrorism” from foreigners, but the lira’s slide continues. Now the question is how much more time Turkey can buy before this enters crisis territory again.
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Turkey and the EU: A Doomed Engagement
by Burak Bekdil
BESA Center Perspectives
April 28, 2019
https://www.meforum.org/58367/turkey-eu-doomed-engagement
Two decades ago, the big question in Brussels and Ankara was, "Will Turkey one day become a full member of the EU?" A decade ago, it was, "How soon can Turkey become a full member?" Today, the question is simpler: "Will it be Turkey or the EU that puts an official end to this opera buffa?"
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https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/05/get-us-nuclear-weapons-out-turkey/157101/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
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President Recep Tayyip Erdogan risks pushing Turkey's economy into an economic collapse similar to those seen in Latin America under populist regimes.
Despite Ankara's assertions to the contrary, the nation is lurching toward capital controls and nationalization, head of research Jan Dehn said. "Politicians who go down the heterodox route rarely change tack and they almost always end in crisis.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-09/turkey-seen-heading-for-latin-style-economic-calamity-by-ashmore
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At the moment it appears like Erdogan is proceeding with the Russian missiles at the cost of the US F-35s.
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https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2019/07/17/no-deal-trump-cancels-sale-of-u-s-f-35-fighter-jets-to-turkey/
Odd a member of Nato is buying systems from the enemy.
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https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2019/07/17/no-deal-trump-cancels-sale-of-u-s-f-35-fighter-jets-to-turkey/
Odd a member of Nato is buying systems from the enemy.
NATO in name only, unfortunately.
Walter Russell Mead who I respect says we should be careful not to drive Turkey into Russia's camp. As they convert to an islamist dictatorship and turn away from us, I don't see how it is US driving them away. Still it might be better to have them on the fence Bambi a complete enemy. Bad and worse look to be our options.
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"Walter Russell Mead who (sic) I respect says we should be careful not to drive Turkey into Russia's camp."
Turkey has skillfully played its hand in this regard. For example, it holds control to the Bosphorus (sp?) which determines much of the value of Russia's seizure of Crimea and the Sea of Aznar for getting into the Mediterranean.
That said, there comes a point where Turkey pushes too far-- exposing F-35 technology to the Russians crosses that line for me , , , Do we really want an Article 5 NATO relationship with what Turkey has become and what it may provoke in the the Syrian maelstrom?
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It would make more sense to have Russia in NATO at this point. Although NATO is long past it’s sell by date.
"Walter Russell Mead who (sic) I respect says we should be careful not to drive Turkey into Russia's camp."
Turkey has skillfully played its hand in this regard. For example, it holds control to the Bosphorus (sp?) which determines much of the value of Russia's seizure of Crimea and the Sea of Aznar for getting into the Mediterranean.
That said, there comes a point where Turkey pushes too far-- exposing F-35 technology to the Russians crosses that line for me , , , Do we really want an Article 5 NATO relationship with what Turkey has become and what it may provoke in the the Syrian maelstrom?
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This seems weak to me!
https://www.defenseone.com/politics/2019/07/graham-trump-asked-me-call-turkey-s-400-deal/158706/?oref=defense_one_breaking_nl
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By Xander Snyder
Turkey in the Bigger Picture
Purchasing the S-400 system from Russia is a sign of its increasingly independent foreign policy.
Until Turkey received the first shipments of the S-400 air defense systems earlier this month, many believed that its deal to buy the Russian-made military hardware was merely a tactic to negotiate better terms on its potential purchase of the U.S-made Patriot system. It’s clear that that wasn’t the case. Now that Turkey has been expelled from the U.S. F-35 fighter jet program, many are asking why Turkey would compromise its access to the modern warplane in exchange for the S-400 when the U.S. had already offered to sell Ankara the Patriot system.
For Turkey, the S-400 purchase was not just about acquiring a defense system; it was about building up its own capabilities. Since the early 1980s, Turkey has been trying to develop its own military industry, an undertaking which requires technology transfer agreements that often come with weapons purchases to learn how to develop similar systems domestically. And although the U.S. was willing to sell Turkey its Patriot system, it wasn’t willing to give tech transfer rights as part of the deal.
As for the timing, Turkey signed the S-400 agreement with Russia before the U.S. passed the 2017 Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which could expose Turkey to secondary sanctions because of its purchase of Russian defense products. And the U.S. threatened to remove Turkey from the F-35 program only after Turkey had already agreed to acquire the S-400. Some have also speculated that Turkey went through with the deal to appease the Russians after it shot down a Russian jet near the Syria-Turkey border in 2015. A month before the incident, the U.S. and Germany pulled their own missile defense systems from Turkey, which Ankara likely perceived as a disregard from its NATO allies about the threats Turkey was facing at the time.
The more critical question, however, is why would Turkey risk its place in NATO – an alliance that has shielded it from its long-standing adversary, Russia – to buy a weapons system for which alternatives exist? And why would the U.S. let an important ally purchase a defense system that could compromise its expensive F-35 fighter jet program and jeopardize the NATO alliance? It seems borderline reckless for the U.S. to risk losing a close ally over tech transfer rights and a few billion dollars. The answer comes down to Turkey’s increasing willingness to pursue its own interests, even at the expense of its NATO allies.
Going It Alone
Over the past several years, relations between the U.S. and Turkey have been tense. The U.S. support of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a mainly Kurdish rebel group supported by the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, has enraged Turkey, which views the YPG as an extension of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The U.S., however, began supporting the SDF only after Turkey declined to intervene in the Syrian civil war and fight the Islamic State. In fact, Turkey even neglected its border for years to allow IS recruits to cross into Syria and place greater pressure on Bashar Assad.
U.S. tariffs on Turkish steel – which were initially double the rate of similar duties placed on other countries but later lowered to 25 percent – were another major issue. In addition, in response to Turkey’s jailing of U.S. Pastor Andrew Brunson, the U.S. imposed sanctions on two Turkish government officials last August, which contributed to the decline of the already struggling Turkish lira. (The U.S. lifted the sanctions in November after the pastor was released.)
One of the most critical disputes between Ankara and Washington has been over Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Turkey has accused of being behind a failed coup attempt in 2016. Because the U.S. has repeatedly refused Turkey’s extradition requests, Turkey has suggested that the U.S. may have also played a role in the coup. Either way, Washington has certainly impeded Turkish efforts to dismantle the Gulen network. Add to all this the U.S. criticism of Turkey’s ongoing natural gas exploration activities in the Eastern Mediterranean and a broader picture begins to emerge: Neither Turkey nor the U.S. is acting in the other’s interests, and Ankara may see more benefits in going it alone than in sticking by Washington’s side.
Toward an Independent Foreign Policy
The S-400 purchase, then, should be seen less as a breaking point and more as a marker in a trajectory leading to a critical goal for Ankara: an independent Turkish foreign policy. Arguably, this long-term goal emerged after Turkey’s 1974 invasion of Cyprus, after which the U.S. imposed an arms embargo on Turkey. At the time, however, Turkey was a key NATO ally, forming one of the southern links in the Soviet containment line. Starting in the early 1980s, Turkey began a more concerted effort to develop a domestic military inventory so that it could stop depending on foreign arms imports.
The S-400, therefore, is part of a broader strategy to diversify Turkey’s arms supply – and not an indicator of a budding strategic alliance between Ankara and Moscow. Still, it’s true that Turkey has been increasing cooperation with Russia, with which it has a long history of conflict. Trade between the two countries has been growing, and Turkey counts Russia as its largest supplier of natural gas. It has also essentially legitimized Russia’s presence in Syria by repeatedly sitting down for peace talks that include Moscow.
Ankara and Moscow, however, aren't exactly friends. It wasn’t too long ago that Turkey shot down a Russian jet that crossed into its territory. And the two countries still support opposing sides in what is essentially a proxy conflict in northwest Syria – Russia backs Assad while Turkey supports anti-Assad rebels. Some observers have even speculated that Turkey followed through on the S-400 deal only because Russia threatened to let Assad unleash a massive offensive on Idlib that would have driven at least tens of thousands of refugees into Turkey. With nearly 4 million Syrian refugees already living in the country, Ankara’s resources are stretched thin. It doesn’t want to take in any more.
Diverging Interests
The S-400 dispute could also have implications for Turkey’s relationship with NATO. Understanding those implications requires understanding why it joined NATO in the first place. It was always Turkey’s fear of Russia that drove it to the alliance. It needed support from a superpower to fend off its long-time adversary – an adversary that emerged from World War II more powerful than ever. Today, however, Russia is a shadow of its former self. It’s bogged down in Ukraine and facing severe economic challenges, and President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings continue to fall. It has bigger problems to deal with than Turkey. In fact, it has been careful to avoid confrontation with Turkish forces in Syria. Russia’s relative weakness has thus given Turkey more freedom to act independently of its anti-Russia allies. (It should be noted, however, that Russia still spends roughly $50 billion more on defense than Turkey.) Being able to pursue an independent foreign policy without risking Russian retribution has allowed Ankara to distance itself from an alliance that has protected it from Russia for decades.
The last thing to consider are the political factors at play. Both sides, but especially the U.S., have handled this deal in a way that has backed Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a corner, making it extremely difficult for him to back down without losing face at a time when his party’s grip on power is already slipping (as we saw in June’s Istanbul mayoral election). It may just be a result of the Trump administration’s business-like negotiating style. Perhaps the S-400 dispute could have been resolved through more traditional diplomatic channels if the State Department wasn’t understaffed for much of this administration’s tenure. Still, this wouldn’t have changed the long-term trajectory. Regardless of who’s in the White House, Ankara would still be trying to carve out an independent foreign policy now more than ever.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14624/turkey-threatens-migrant-crisis
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Turkey about to invade Kurds in NE Syria.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-launches-last-ditch-effort-to-stop-turkish-invasion-of-northeast-syria/2019/08/04/3b0fd5a8-b55f-11e9-8949-5f36ff92706e_story.html
Which one is our ally?
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The Real Cost of Ejecting Turkey From the F-35 Program
By Sinan Ciddi
Lockheed Martin rolls out the first F-35 fighter jet built for Turkey during a ceremony in Fort Worth, Texas, on June 21, 2018.
(ATILGAN OZDIL/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.
Highlights
The Trump administration has removed Turkey from the F-35 program after Ankara took delivery of the Russian-made S-400 air defense system.
The U.S. move presents Turkey with a fundamental question: What model of fighter plane will it procure to replace its aging fleet, currently dominated by F-16s?
It is not certain the United States will push ahead with sanctions against Turkey as there appears to be a rift between the U.S. Congress and President Donald Trump.
The growing divide between Turkey and the United States comes at a particularly bad time because of mounting tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean over drilling rights off the coast of Cyprus. It remains unclear whether Turkey will seek to work with its Western partners or track an independent course.
President Donald Trump's administration announced in mid-July that the United States was removing Turkey from its F-35 fighter program after Turkey received its first shipment of the Russian-made S-400 air defense system. The U.S. decision will prevent Turkey from taking delivery of any of the 100-plus F-35s it had planned to buy. What's more, the White House's decision also removes Turkish contractors from the F-35's production chain.
Turkey was also slated to host a maintenance base where Middle Eastern countries that had F-35 fleets could get their planes serviced. This plan was also canceled. It's estimated the Trump administration's move will cost the United States $500 million. As for Turkey, it already has paid more than $1 billion toward its planned purchase of the F-35, money it may not get back.
Playing for Time?
By taking delivery of the S-400, Turkey not only appears to have disrupted the F-35's supply and manufacturing chain, but it also lost its ability to add the next generation of fighter aircraft to its air force inventory on a revenue-neutral basis: Income derived from servicing F-35s from countries such as Israel would have canceled out the purchase cost of Turkey's own F-35s. And in a broader perspective, Turkey has chosen to purchase a tactical weapon — the S-400 — that may provide a modicum of security under a limited set of circumstances over acquiring the F-35, which would have given Turkey's air force regional dominance.
At this point, it remains unclear what Turkey's procurement options are. Its F-16 fighters are aging and its fleet of F-4 and F-5 fighter-bombers is obsolete (with several units crashing in the past few years). Immediately beginning with the delivery of S-400 components in mid-July, Russia began to broadcast its readiness to begin discussions with Turkey about the sale of Russian fighters.
Although S-400 deliveries to Turkey have begun, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters that the entire delivery of components and missiles would not be completed until April 2020. That the S-400 system likely will not be operational before then begs the question of whether Turkey is playing for time. The U.S. Congress has indicated that Turkey will face significant sanctions under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act if it deploys the S-400. What if Turkey were to delay making the systems operational, or even sell them to a third party? It may be for these reasons that Trump has asked for space to negotiate with Turkey before implementing sanctions.
From the U.S. perspective, there is a genuine desire to avoid disrupting the supply and production cycle of the F-35 that would ensue if Turkey were actually removed from the program. A further concern focuses on what Turkey might do if sanctions are immediately imposed: Erdogan has stated clearly that if the United States takes such measures, then Turkey would respond in kind, beginning with the likely expulsion of U.S. forces from Incirlik air base, which could disrupt U.S. military operations in the region.
By taking delivery of the S-400, Turkey has lost its ability to add the next generation of fighter aircraft to its aging air force inventory.
From Turkey's perspective, the damage could also be very real: Just being removed from the production cycle means that Turkish defense contractors would lose close to $10 billion in revenue, which is likely to prove catastrophic for many. Moreover, the Turkish military could find itself dealing with an arms embargo similar to the one it faced in the mid-1970s when Congress banned the sale of U.S. weapons to Turkey following its invasion of Cyprus. It would likely cripple Turkey's military readiness if it is unable to source U.S. parts and software updates for its existing inventory.
Bad Timing
These variables loom at an inopportune moment. Turkey's decision to begin searching for hydrocarbons off the coast of ethnically divided Cyprus prompted the European Union to sanction Ankara because it considers the EU member's internationally recognized government in the Greek-majority southern part of the island nation to have exclusive rights to those Eastern Mediterranean waters. Turkey recognizes the Turkish Cypriot administration in the breakaway northern part of Cyprus and argues that any hydrocarbons found in the country's exclusive economic zone belong to all Cypriots; the government's drilling activities are only benefitting Greek Cypriots, Turkey says. While Turkey may have a valid point, its drilling activities are perceived to be hostile and belligerent. In the event of a conflict between Turkey and another European power, what will be the position of the United States? This is a clear unknown. In previous years, the United States has mediated and de-escalated contentious issues, but U.S. policy under Trump has resulted in regional disengagement. With the deepening bilateral U.S.-Turkey crisis, it is also clear that Turkey would not trust the United States to mediate if an unexpected conflict arises.
What is off the table for sure is Turkey being ousted from NATO. The F-35 debacle, however, will likely result in Turkey being removed from key NATO military programs, missions and intelligence platforms as the deployment of the S-400 system is a direct threat to NATO's operational security. Even if Trump holds off in pressing ahead with sanctions in the immediate term, such delay is unlikely to continue. Independent of Turkey, countries such as China and Egypt are also interested in purchasing the S-400 system. If they are not disincentivized by making a clear example out of Turkey, it could open the floodgates and allow allies to buy weapons that are not manufactured by the United States. Congress isn't likely to tolerate or accept this.
In the final analysis, the wider picture is clear: The loss of trust between the United States and Turkey is real and will be hard to soon reestablish in any substantive form. The question of whether the S-400s will actually be operational still stands, however.
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https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-mar-02-fg-iraq2-story.html
Deployment
BY RICHARD BOUDREAUX AND AMBERIN ZAMAN
MARCH 2, 2003
12 AM
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ANKARA, Turkey — In a stunning rejection that appeared to kill U.S. plans for a “northern front” in any war against Iraq, Turkey’s parliament refused Saturday to authorize the deployment of 62,000 U.S. troops on Turkish soil.
As antiwar protesters staged a tumultuous protest outside the legislature, Turkish lawmakers weighed appeals by their government to join the U.S. war effort -- with the offer of a $15-billion U.S. aid package in return...
Even as the measure was going down in defeat, about 80 American ships carrying equipment for the 4th U.S. Infantry Division floated off the Turkish coast in an indication of U.S. officials’ expectation that its NATO ally would pass the proposal....
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With friends like this, who needs enemies.
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Turkey Has Legitimate Grievances Against the U.S.
Trump is right to pull back from supporting PKK-affiliated Kurds in northern Syria.
By Michael Doran and
Michael A. Reynolds
Oct. 8, 2019 7:08 pm ET
A Russian plane carrying parts of the S-400 missile defense system is unloaded in Ankara, Turkey, July 12. Photo: Xinhua/Zuma Press
President Trump’s critics see his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from northern Syria as the product of a dangerous impulsiveness that ignores strategic realities. They argue that it betrays the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, the Kurdish force that helped the U.S. defeat Islamic State, while rewarding a dangerous autocrat, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But it is Mr. Trump’s critics who disregard reality.
Most members of America’s foreign-policy establishment see Turkey as an ungrateful ally, perhaps even a Trojan horse inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s walls. On Capitol Hill and in many Washington think tanks, a call for concessions to Tehran will get a more sympathetic hearing than a call to compromise with Ankara, a treaty ally for 67 years. Turkey’s determination to secure its southern border against the YPG is a wanton impulse, in the prevailing view. But the YPG has substantial ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, as then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter testified before Congress in April 2016. Classified by the State Department as a terrorist organization, the PKK has been waging armed struggle against Turkey since 1984 at a cost of tens of thousands of lives, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, a respected source on armed conflict.
The GOP Revolt Against Trump on Syria and the Kurds
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Turkey’s critics point to Ankara’s recent purchase of the S-400 air-defense missile system from Russia to confirm their belief that Mr. Erdogan is rupturing the U.S.-Turkey relationship. But that’s an oversimplification that rests on a lazy assumption—that Mr. Erdogan’s personality is the root of the rancor in American-Turkish relations. It invokes his authoritarianism, Islamist worldview, hostility to Israel, sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood, and opposition to Kurdish nationalists inside and outside Turkey’s borders to argue that Turkey is unworthy of U.S. support.
Some articles of this indictment rest on a more solid evidentiary base than others. But the causes of Ankara’s recent willingness to defy Washington go beyond one man’s personality. Polls reliably indicate that 70% to 80% of Turks regard the U.S. as a hostile power. While anti-Americanism is an old story in Turkey, in recent years it has a sharper edge. Turks increasingly see America as a threat.
This is a remarkable development in a country that had been a stalwart U.S. ally and partner for decades. The levels of hostility to America cannot be laid on Mr. Erdogan’s doorstep, for he commands the support of only around 40% of Turks. Dissatisfaction with the U.S. stretches far beyond the president’s AK Party.
Why is the U.S. losing Turkey? Turks have their own list of grievances, of which three stand out.
First, America’s diffident Syria policy. Ankara followed Washington’s lead in backing the Syrian people’s attempt to overthrow the dictator Bashar Assad. But when Turkey shot down a Russian combat jet violating its airspace in 2015, President Obama treated the episode more as a bilateral spat between third parties than as a conflict between America’s key regional ally and a more powerful adversary of U.S. interests. Left on its own, Ankara realized it had little choice but to accommodate Moscow. Vladimir Putin’s steadfastness trumped Mr. Obama’s aloofness. Thus was born the relationship that begot the S-400 deal.
Second is the curious sympathy that America extends to Fethullah Gülen, a guru-like religious figure who has been residing in Pennsylvania since 1999. The Department of Homeland Security originally denied Mr. Gülen’s application for a residence permit under the Bush administration, finding that Mr. Gülen’s claims regarding his educational abilities were exaggerated. Mr. Gülen’s schools have also been investigated for immigration fraud and mismanagement, though no charges have emerged. Figures close to Mr. Gülen have been accused of playing key roles in the July 2016 coup attempt that took the lives of 251 Turks. Though Mr. Gülen condemned the coup and denied any involvement, former followers of his say that his organization is tightly centralized. U.S. experts on Turkey—such as James Jeffrey, a former ambassador to Ankara—say that Mr. Gülen’s followers have pursued power in Turkey by infiltrating government bodies. Many Turks doubt Mr. Gülen’s supporters could participate in a coup without his blessing. Before taking up his current position as the State Department’s point man on Syria, Mr. Jeffrey stated that it is “embarrassing” that Mr. Gülen “is sitting here in the United States.” How, many Turks ask, can the U.S. harbor such a despicable figure?
The third misdeed is the most consequential: the Obama administration’s decision in 2016 to arm and train YPG members and directly embed American special forces with them. Rather than work with Turkey, the U.S. chose to support the Syrian wing of the PKK, which the Turkish public holds responsible for decades of warfare and tens of thousands of deaths. The PKK represents a grave threat to the Turkish Republic, and Turks across the political spectrum loathe it. To dismiss Ankara’s objections to America’s arming of the YPG as mere anti-Kurdish bigotry is ignorant, akin to labeling the fight against al Qaeda as Islamophobia.
The purchase of the S-400s and the pressure Mr. Erdogan is placing on U.S. forces in northern Syria provide a way to demonstrate to the broader Turkish public his willingness to defy Washington for its shabby treatment of Turkey and to restore the balance of power between Turkey and the PKK, which American policy inadvertently overturned. For the U.S. to retaliate against Turkey and alienate it permanently would be folly. To do so now—when Mr. Erdogan’s support is waning and democracy in Turkey is showing its vibrant face—would hand Mr. Putin a gift he couldn’t have dreamed of.
Mr. Doran is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Mr. Reynolds is a professor of Near Eastern studies and director of the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Princeton University.
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second post
http://www.ekathimerini.com/245316/article/ekathimerini/news/concerns-as-turkish-navy-surrounds-cyprus?utm_source=GPF+-+Paid+Newsletter&utm_campaign=9678fae788-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_09_02_56&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72b76c0285-9678fae788-247660329
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Turkey's Fragile Economy Faces a Blowback
11 MINS READOct 9, 2019 | 22:34 GMT
Turkish Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak speaks during the launch of Turkey's New Economic Program for 2020-2022 in Ankara on Sept. 30, 2019.
(EVRIM AYDIN/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Turkish Treasury and Finance Minister Berat Albayrak speaks during the launch of Turkey's new economic program for 2020-2022 in Ankara on Sept. 30, 2019. Turkey believes it's ready to cope with the economic consequences of its invasion of northeastern Syria.
Editor's Note: Since 2018, Turkey's economy has been fragile, suffering from high inflation, a tanking currency and rising levels of debt. And with some congressional leaders in the United States threatening to hurt Turkey's economy in response to its invasion of northeastern Syria, we're revisiting some of our past pieces that lay bare the plight of the Turkish economy — and what might happen if Washington turns the screws on Ankara.
For Turkey's economy, the day of reckoning may be near. The White House and U.S. Congress may disagree on Turkey more than ever, yet both the president and a top Republican senator alike have been bellicose in their economic threats to Ankara in recent days, pledging, respectively, "to destroy and obliterate the economy of Turkey" and impose "sanctions from hell" on the country over its invasion of northeastern Syria. After plumbing the depths in summer 2018, Turkey's economy has stabilized somewhat, possibly convincing Ankara that it is prepared to handle whatever comes next. Nevertheless, Turkey's invasion will put its economy at risk amid the threat of U.S. sanctions — and potentially drive even the European Union to take an economic shot at Ankara itself. All told, Turkey's new venture into Syria against the Kurds means the country is facing a potentially long period of economic pain.
The Current Situation
Turkey's economy remains fragile. In mid-August 2018, the Turkish lira fell as far as 6.95 to the U.S. dollar, but it has since stabilized. In fact, after Ankara launched its offensive into northeastern Syria on the afternoon of Oct. 9, the lira had only dropped slightly to around 5.87 to the dollar. Other aspects of the economy that were especially weak in summer 2018, including inflation, have improved slightly. But even if the lira is stronger than it was 14 months ago, Turkey's economy remains fragile enough that an external shock, such as U.S. sanctions, could severely damage it, sending the country's currency spiraling downward once more.
The divide between the U.S. Congress and the White House over Turkey is deepening. Some members of Congress seem more determined than ever to punish Turkey for its actions in Syria, expressing deep anger at how the White House has ignored their concerns. This means the likelihood of punitive sanctions or penalties from Congress is high. U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Chris Van Hollen have drafted a bipartisan bill that includes sanctions ranging from limits on arms sales and military assistance to Turkey to specific targeted sanctions on individuals, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and economic sectors, including the Turkish energy sector. If the bill were to pass (which is not a given, let alone with a veto-proof majority), President Donald Trump will have to certify to Congress every 90 days that Turkey is "not operating unilaterally in Syria." This sets up a sharp divide between Trump, who is scheduled to host Erdogan in the White House on Nov. 13, and congressional leaders who want to sanction the Turkish president.
As it has done previously, Turkey is displaying its willingness to risk incurring sanctions in pursuit of national security objectives. In response to the delivery of a Russian S-400 missile defense system to Turkey, the U.S. Congress sought to use the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) to punish Ankara. However, Trump has so far refused to implement any such sanctions, and there is no legal mechanism stipulating when he must do so. Last month, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the United States was still considering CAATSA penalties, but the executive branch is clearly in no rush to financially penalize Turkey. This has likely bolstered Ankara's confidence that it can move forward with a military operation in Syria without facing economic penalties.
The European Union could pursue action independent of the United States that could financially damage Turkey. In response to the Turkish incursion into Syria, France and the United Kingdom are calling for a U.N. Security Council meeting. Although any potential U.N. sanctions or action is unlikely to be powerful enough to dissuade Turkey from pursuing its objectives in Syria, Turkey could face punitive EU measures that include a halt to cooperation agreements between Brussels and Ankara, as well as an end to accession funds. Indeed, the European Union already approved a sanctions package against Turkey in July over the country's ongoing drilling operations in Cypriot waters.
Turkey's new venture into Syria against the Kurds means the country is facing a potentially long period of economic pain.
Trump Targets Turkey With Tariffs
Last summer, Trump first took aim at the Turkish economy with a series of tariffs in response to trade spats — as well as Ankara's intentions in Syria and its increasing coziness with Russia.
Turkey's Economy Takes a Tumble. What's Next?
Aug. 10, 2018: The United States and Turkey are already at loggerheads over trade, defense deals, the future of the U.S. mission in Syria and Ankara's warming ties with Russia. On the morning of Aug. 10, U.S. President Donald Trump intensified these divisions by tweeting that he had authorized a doubling of tariffs on Turkey's steel and aluminum, rising to 20 percent on aluminum and 50 percent on steel. Erdogan's nationalist campaign and Trump's "America First" policy clash perfectly. Trump's public announcement of tariffs will only fan Erdogan's economic warfare narrative, which puts the source of Turkey's economic woes outside its borders. Furthermore, consternation in the U.S. Congress has led to a nascent bill that could limit Turkey's ability to obtain loans from any U.S.-based financial institutions.
A Missile System Comes Between Erstwhile Allies
Before the U.S. threat to sanction Turkey over its offensive in northeastern Syria, it had threatened to take aim at the country's defense industry and the wider economy for choosing Russia's S-400 missile defense system.
A Game of Turkish Brinksmanship on Missile Defense
June 27, 2019: Whether by employing the provisions of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) or ending Turkey's involvement in the high-tech F-35 stealth fighter program, the U.S. could invoke retaliatory options that would hurt Turkey's economy. … But while Turkey is well aware of the economic consequences of its choice, domestic political considerations are propelling Ankara to override economics and choose the Russian system. But the fragile state of Turkey's economy does pose the question of whether such political brinkmanship is worth it for Ankara. The country's economy dipped into a recession during the last quarter of 2018, while growth also slowed in the second half of last year. During this time, Turkey has earned more revenue from exports — but only because the lira is so weak that the country's goods are much cheaper. Over the next year, the Turkish private sector must pay back close to $140 billion in debt, while domestic consumption has slowed. But the five-year gap until the next scheduled elections in 2023 also forms part of Ankara's calculations regarding economic risk, as Erdogan believes he has time to stabilize the economy — even if the United States imposes sanctions that cause foreign investors to flee or further depress the lira's value.
This graph shows the bonds that Turkey must repay this year.
Rising Inflation and a Falling Lira
Even without the threat of U.S. sanctions, Turkey's economy is staring at difficulties that stem particularly from the massive amounts of corporate debt that its companies possess, as well as its skyrocketing inflation and poorly performing currency.
Counting the Costs of Potential U.S. Action Against Turkey
Feb. 4, 2019: The United States is in a position to hurt Turkey's economy in part because of the latter's economic fragility. Turkish corporations are saddled with a high amount of debt, totaling about $200 billion that they must pay back in 2019. What's more, most of this debt is denominated in dollars and euros, meaning companies will struggle to pay it back if the lira remains weak. But debt isn't the only specter haunting Turkey: The country is also suffering from high inflation, decreased consumption and a lack of investor confidence stemming in part from perceptions that the country lacks the rule of law.
[The arrest of U.S. evangelical pastor Andrew Brunson] demonstrated that the United States' ultimate economic weapon against Turkey is sentiment. Such a tool may be indirect, but Trump proved that caustic rhetoric and the imposition of even limited sanctions can depreciate the lira, rapidly damaging investor confidence and inciting consumer panic that the currency would tumble again, thereby compounding the existing consumption slowdown. Indeed, when the lira plunged last summer, Turks began to lose confidence in the economy, causing them to spend less and convert their liras into dollars or other currencies — in spite of official calls to the contrary — causing the lira to plummet even further.
This graph charts the fall in the Turkish lira in recent years.
An Economic Plan Without Much Support
Last year, in an effort to put the economy back on track, Erdogan tapped his son-in-law — the country's finance minister — to draft a plan. Berat Albayrak's three-year plan, however, has yet to find a ringing endorsement from international investors.
As Turkey Enters 2019, Its Economic Woes Are Never Far Away
Nov. 28, 2018: No matter how intense the economic headwinds become, Turkey's government will refuse to budge on certain issues, which will detract from its ability to deftly manage the fragile economy. With Erdogan now wielding enormous control over all aspects of governance — including issues such as the economy that are not necessarily his area of expertise — the country's economic management strategy has failed to inspire much confidence in external investors. Ankara has outlined a three-year, medium-term economic plan to trim spending, tackle inflation and shore up the lira and consumer sentiment, but its economic team has yet to delve into the onerous task of implementing the promised structural changes. What's more, pledges to cut down on spending contradict Erdogan's preferred strategy of spending to spur growth, to say nothing of the challenge the central bank faces in trying to combat inflation given his past interference. And the economic team is led by Erdogan's son-in-law, the finance and economy minister, underlining the close and opaque ties that bind the president to his financial management squad.
This graph shows Turkey's recent inflation trend.
But regardless of how fragile its economy becomes, Ankara will continue to pursue certain political aims. In pursuing its primary national security goal — namely, to prevent the development of a Kurdish state in the broader Middle East, since Turkey believes that would fuel demands for Kurdish autonomy at home and threaten the country's territorial integrity — Turkey will retain its forces in northern Iraq and northwestern Syria, even if that is likely to tax the country's coffers or irk its regional and Western allies.
Facing Economic Woes, Ankara Plays the Nationalist Card
Time and time again, Erdogan has sought to shore up his administration in the face of economic worries by appealing to a majority of citizens' shared sense of nationalism — as well as the century-old fear that enemies at home and abroad are planning to take down the republic.
The AKP's Thirst for Power Risks Leaving Turkey High and Dry
June 11, 2019: Getting the Turkish economy up and running again will likely require a period of painful structural reforms and austerity measures — not quick-fix solutions. A more secure electoral position would give the government more leeway to embark on such sweeping reforms. But facing the potential loss of the Istanbul mayoral position come June 23, the AKP [ruling Justice and Development Party] knows it has to weather the political blowback of pursuing unpopular measures such an overhaul would entail. Thus, the AKP will instead opt to zero in on its tried-and-true playbook of nationalist policies in the coming months, as it grasps to retain what power it has left to stave off electoral challenges in 2023. Yet this short-term strategy will ultimately be short-sighted by creating even worse conditions for the economy, and more problems for the government to fix.
In this photo, Haki Pacha signs the Treaty of Sevres on behalf of the Ottoman Empire on Aug. 23, 1920.
Haki Pacha signs the Treaty of Sevres on behalf of the Ottoman Empire on Aug. 23, 1920. The treaty, which would have dismembered much of what is now the Republic of Turkey if not for Turkey's War of Independence against European powers, remains a byword for Turkish nationalists' fears that outside powers are planning to carve up their country.
(BETTMANN/Getty Images)
Making Sense of Turkey's Economic Crisis
Aug. 16, 2018: When Erdogan declares war against "evil" interest rates and likens dollars, euros and gold to "bullets, cannonballs and missiles" in a war that aims to take Turkey down, he is not entertaining the Western financial community; he is channeling a deep-seated paranoia rooted in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, which dismembered the Ottoman Empire at the hands of Allied powers. The so-called Sevres syndrome can be channeled in Turkish politics to this day to raise hysteria of outside powers conspiring to kick Turkey while it's down in the dust. It can also be used to enforce politically motivated boycotts of foreign goods. Many educated Turks who despise Erdogan but are bombarded with propaganda of Turkey coming under economic attack are rationally trying to sell lira and secure more stable assets, but they are also seriously questioning whether their country is coming under siege by foreign powers. U.S. President Donald Trump's attempt to fan Turkey's economic flames through a tariff-loaded tweet last week only compounded those suspicions.
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https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1683-1914__turkey-ottoman-empire.jpg?utm_source=GPF+-+Paid+Newsletter&utm_campaign=11979360ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_11_01_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72b76c0285-11979360ff-247660329
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https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/1683-1914__turkey-ottoman-empire.jpg?utm_source=GPF+-+Paid+Newsletter&utm_campaign=11979360ff-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_10_11_01_27&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72b76c0285-11979360ff-247660329
Yes.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_(furniture)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire#Abyssinian_slaves
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https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/why-isnt-the-media-covering-turkish-president-erdogans-ties-to-isis/?fbclid=IwAR2rSQ2lJAVV_EHbroNyvNgHn7rfMdB2SgjECFPK3Qqf1bBwBEBlvioA75w
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funny how the kurds have suddenly become another victim group incorporated by the Dem party
just this past week.
We never heard such concern when bama was president
and ISIS was slaughtering Muslims Christians Kurds etc
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Two simple talking points:
1) Exactly how, when, and why did we become bound to defend the YPG and the YKK in their ongoing war with our NATO ally Turkey?
2) Choose: 3.6 million Syrian Arabs unleashed to walk into Europe or leave the YPG/YKK Kurds to their fight with Turkey?
Separately I am listening to Espy today on Chris Wallace. Did I just here correctly that we left out of fear that Turkey would go through our tripwire troops?!? WTF?!?
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https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2019/10/why-turkey-nato-anyway/160563/?oref=defenseone_today_nl
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In Syria, Turkey Will Pay the Price for an Imperfect Buffer
6 MINS READOct 14, 2019 | 10:00 GMT
This photo shows fighters with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army gathered near the Turkish border in northeastern Syria on Oct. 11, 2019.
(ANAS ALKHARBOUTLI/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Fighters with the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army gather near the Turkish border in northeastern Syria on Oct. 11, 2019. Turkey has long sought to establish a buffer zone in Syria to protect itself from the effects of that country's civil war.
Highlights
Turkey will expand its buffer zone along its border with Syria to buttress it from the effects of the Syrian civil war, but the expansion will bring repercussions from Syria, Russia, Iran, the United States and Europe.
Turkey will endure the risks of U.S. and European sanctions to gain as much as it can from a new, northeastern Syrian buffer zone, but it will not want a military clash with Syrian, Russian or Iranian forces that enter the northeast.
Turkey's expanded buffer zone will also be subject to insurgent attacks by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces or the Islamic State.
The Turkish military is moving into Syria's northeast as Ankara chases its strategy of expanding a buffer space between Turkey and Syria's civil war. But while Turkey will succeed in building up this buffer zone from Afrin in the west to Iraq in the east, it will also pay a price. Turkey's actions will increase tensions not only between it and Syria and Syria's Russian and Iranian backers, but also between it and the United States, the region's former protector, and Europe. Meanwhile, an insurgency by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) will complicate Ankara's bid to establish a truly safe zone for Syrian refugees and Turkish security interests.
The Big Picture
Turkey has an opportunity to build a larger buffer zone along its border with Syria to prevent the growth of a Kurdish statelet and militancy and to push back against Russia and Iranian influence in Syria. But Turkey's gains will come at a price, including new tensions with Syria, Russia and Iran; additional U.S. congressional outrage; and increased anger from Europe.
See Middle East and North Africa section of the 2019 Fourth-Quarter Forecast
See The Syrian Civil War
Turkey is moving ever closer to its goal of establishing a broad buffer zone in Syria. It wants to prevent the Syrian border from becoming like its border with Iraq, where an autonomous Kurdish region hosts Kurdish militants in the form of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Ankara also wants to build up space to slow refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war from entering Turkey or even to return some of the 3.6 million refugees it has been sheltering at great expense.
Finally, by establishing a zone of influence along the border, Turkey aims to maintain a degree of influence in neighboring Syria and thus the Arab world — and a means to create some counterbalance against the sometimes unfriendly Russian and Iranian influence inside Syria.
Why a Buffer Zone Is Tricky
Building this buffer zone, however, comes with costs, from rising tensions with Syria, Russia and Iran to problems with the United States and Europe, to an ongoing Kurdish insurgency. And the more Turkey expands the buffer, the more of these costs it will incur.
A bigger buffer will increase tensions between Turkey and Syria and, by extension, between Turkey and Russia and Turkey and Iran. The Turkish incursion is coming about because the United States is signaling it is no longer protecting the SDF, creating a power vacuum for Turkey to exploit. But the SDF will not just step aside as Turkey rolls in. It has already signaled it will reach out to Damascus for protection to offset the U.S. withdrawal. A partnership with Damascus will likely erode the SDF's goal of autonomy, but the SDF, without the United States, will have little choice.
By bringing in Damascus, the SDF will create a new front between Syria and Turkey — and, again by extension, with Russia and Iran, which Syria will rely on to help it take control of the northeast. A larger buffer zone in the northeast will require Turkish proxies and forces to extend their reach to maintain it, creating opportunities for mistakes and friction between Syria and its allies on one side and Turkey on the other. The recurrent de-escalation talks between Ankara, Moscow and Tehran will also increasingly have to factor in the northeast.
This map shows the location of Turkish, Kurdish and other forces along the Turkey-Syria border.
Even as the big powers seek to de-escalate the conflict, the SDF will build on the anti-Turkish insurgency already present in Afrin and extend it to whatever new buffer zones are built up in northeastern Syria. Once more, the larger the zone, the more targets there will be for the insurgency. This insurgency will also reflect the geographic reality of the region: With such a vast area to patrol, Turkey will not be able to wholly control the border, and thus will not completely cut off the SDF-PKK links it is seeking to sever. Smuggling of arms and supplies back and forth will continue on some scale. In addition to the increased risks from the SDF, the Islamic State's underground elements will also potentially strike Turkish proxies and forces as they stay in Syria. This situation will create a long-term drain on Turkish military and security resources while failing to fully address its security concerns.
A Place to Resettle Syrian Refugees
Turkey also will not be able to use the expanded buffer zone to solve all of its refugee-related problems. Many refugees are from Syria's west — which is under regime control — and will resist resettlement in the northeast; they will not want to move to an unfamiliar part of the country. The northeast also lacks housing and employment opportunities. Even in pre-civil war Syria, the Syria-Turkish border region was relatively underdeveloped, and its cities small. Housing will be hard to find, and many refugees will realize they will be placed in long-term camps, dependent on aid.
That does not mean Turkey will not force some refugees to go to the safe zones. With anti-Arab sentiment rising in cash-strapped Turkey, the Turkish government needs to show it is not prioritizing foreign refugees over its own citizens. But the harsher Turkey acts toward Syrian refugees, the more Ankara risks outrage from Europe and the United States, with disruptions in their relationships possible. In addition, to find suitable housing for refugees and to disrupt the connections between Turkish Kurdistan and Syrian Kurdistan, Turkey will be tempted to repeat its Afrin population strategy, ejecting people it considers disloyal and replacing them with other Syrian refugees. In doing so, Turkey once more would risk international outrage from its Western partners and create a new incentive for sanctions against it.
Building a buffer zone in Syria comes with costs. And the more Turkey expands the buffer, the more of these costs it will incur.
Finally, the more Turkey expands its buffer zones, the more it will risk its ties with the United States, particularly with the U.S. Congress, whose members are already outraged by Turkish military action against the SDF, a U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State. A larger or lengthier Turkish military operation will increase Congress' desire to penalize Turkey. Further humanitarian-related concerns may arise as Turkey resettles refugees and carries out military operations. Congress could introduce fresh legislation in response to such incidents, producing more tension between the United States and Turkey.
But because of its imperative to diminish Kurdish militancy that could lead to a Kurdish state, Ankara will have a high tolerance for some of these risks as it seeks to gain as much as it can from its current military operations. While it will not want to escalate the situation to a military confrontation with Syria, Russia or Iran, Turkey will brave sanctions from the United States and Europe to achieve its buffer zone — before Syria and its allies move into parts of the northeast.
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Two simple talking points:
1) Exactly how, when, and why did we become bound to defend the YPG and the YKK in their ongoing war with our NATO ally Turkey?
2) Choose: 3.6 million Syrian Arabs unleashed to walk into Europe or leave the YPG/YKK Kurds to their fight with Turkey?
Separately I am listening to Espy today on Chris Wallace. Did I just hear correctly that we left out of fear that Turkey would go through our tripwire troops?!? WTF?!?
The counterpoint in point 1) would center on these three words: Nato. ally. Turkey.
Trump threatened our withdrawal from NATO in the campaign. Then he rescued it getting Europe's contribution boosted. Now the Turkey question rears its ugly head. They are signatories to NATO and so are we. Treaties have obligations. But is Turkey an ally, is a larger question.
Trump doesn't want to be a war president. The implication in the tripwire theory is that the full force of the world's greatest military will come down upon you if you cross it. But it won't. We can't, see above, NATO ally Turkey. Trump doesn't want to have his own Obama Red Line gaffe.
Did he overspeak that we will destroy your economy, Turkey, if you go to far? Does he have Europe on board with that? How far is too far? What is really happening there and is our visual media sensationalizing it?
Turkey has taken a part of a town. Did that section of town give safe haven to people who commit terror in Turkey or were they shooting innocent civilians? I can't tell from the pictures on my screen. I see a man shooting an automatic rifle at a building. What man, what building, why? Don't know.
It looks to me like this is Turkey's moment to determine their own future. If they commit genocide, I would expect a move to boot them out of NATO, diplomacy instead of military action.
They may want to be booted from NATO, free to expand other alliances. https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/turkey-and-russia-new-alignment
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https://nypost.com/2019/09/21/why-isnt-the-media-covering-turkish-president-erdogans-ties-to-isis/?fbclid=IwAR05ri2Y6EyIz6eSFUsucpdtmNalIuotCbVTmP79So7MgI_poHY4OTqUVag
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If the Kurds have luck turning to Russia for help, doesn't that drive Turkey away from Russia? A strategic gain for the US?
The post Crafty was looking for (?) is worth a second look in hindsight. What a complicated web. We don't really know what is said in these various meetings. Erdogan met with Iran, Russia and Mattis in the same week? We can just try to figure it out by seeing what happens afterward.
Stratfor: Turkey in the Eye of the Storm
« Reply #148 on: August 26, 2017,
Turkey: In the Eye of the Storm
Aug 25, 2017
By Jacob L. Shapiro
This time last year (2016), Turkey was in the throes of a crisis. A faction of the military had tried to – and nearly did – overthrow the government. The putsch failed, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the opportunity to purge the system of current and potential opponents to his rule. The purges haven’t stopped, and Turkey is still in a formal state of emergency, but the worst of the crisis has passed and Turkey is beginning to stabilize.
Now, the chaos isn’t in Turkey but around it. And one of the surest signs that Turkey is nearly back on its feet is the way it is confronting the chaos.
Ankara’s Perspective
Consider for a moment the world from Ankara’s perspective. To the south, the Islamic State is slowly being crushed. In Iraq, it’s barely hanging on to its last strongholds; in Syria, it is under assault from the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces and the Russian-backed Assad regime. Turkey wants to see IS defeated, but it isn’t a fan of who is doing it: The SDF is made up of Syrian Kurds, who, to Turkey, are just as much a terrorist group as IS, and Turkey was an enemy of the Assad regime long before the Syrian civil war began. To the southeast, the Kurdistan Regional Government – an autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq – appears determined to go forward with an independence referendum on Sept. 25. Turkey has already told the KRG to cancel the referendum because it fears what a vote for independence would mean for the millions of Kurds who live in or on the border with Turkey.
Farther south, Iran and Saudi Arabia are flirting one minute and threatening each other the next. Turkey is getting in on the action, broaching the possibility of limited cooperation with Iran in some areas of mutual interest. Meanwhile, to the north, Turkish relations with Russia remain complicated and inextricably linked to the U.S.-Russia relationship. Russia and the U.S. are quietly cooperating in Syria in the fight against IS, but they are at loggerheads everywhere else. Across the Black Sea from Turkey in Ukraine, the U.S. is backing Russia into a corner, and two places we expect Russia to respond are the Balkans and the Caucasus. Turkey hopes to expand its influence into the former and is already a major player in the latter. Russian activity in either of these regions would affect Turkey, and the Turks must be ready for that.
Turkey’s response to these challenges is one that has become typical of Turkish foreign policy: It is trying to balance between all the various parties without solidly committing itself to any. The number of high-profile visits Turkey has hosted in recent weeks is telling. Last week, Iran’s chairman of the armed forces General Staff was in Ankara for talks. Earlier this week, Russia’s armed forces chief of staff also visited Turkey to discuss coordinating efforts in Syria. Then on Aug. 23, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis arrived in Turkey for a marathon day of meetings with Turkish officials.
With Iran, Turkey promised to boost military cooperation – something of a surprise considering that Turkey and Iran both aspire to regional leadership in the long term. Their interests are, ultimately, mutually exclusive. With Russia, Turkey agreed to tactical coordination in Syria and saluted Moscow’s understanding of Turkey’s concerns about the dangers posed by Syrian Kurds. As with Iran, however, Turkey has fundamental strategic differences with Russia in the short term (the future of Syria and Assad’s place in it) and the long term (competition in the Caucasus and southeastern Europe). There are tactical ways in which these powers can help each other – Iran and Turkey against the Kurds, Russia and Turkey against U.S. influence in the region – but these are not long-term alliances.
Then there is the U.S., with which Turkish relations have been deteriorating for years. The U.S. decision to begin arming Syrian Kurds in May (2017) was another blow to relations, and Mattis’ visit appears to have been in large measure to patch up the issue. The official statements out of the Pentagon are typical of political statements: sweet sounding with no substance. But unnamed Turkish officials have been telling any reporter who will listen about how Mattis pledged to help Turkey fight the Kurdish PKK militant group and how American support for Syrian Kurds is limited to the duration of the fight against the Islamic State. That Mattis came out publicly against the KRG’s independence referendum probably didn’t hurt either. For the moment, Turkey seems more publicly comfortable than it has been with the U.S. in months, so whatever Mattis promised in Ankara had the desired effect.
Between Superpowers
It’s the balance between Russia and the U.S. that is particularly difficult for Turkey to strike right now. In the coming years, Turkey’s imperatives will compel it to encroach on areas that Russia considers within its sphere of influence. Turkey isn’t ready for that conflict, and in the interim, Russia is a crucial player in the Caucasus and a powerful one in the Middle East.
Turkey’s imperatives jibe better with the U.S. vision for the region, but it isn’t a perfect marriage. The U.S. seeks a balance of power in the region and wants Turkey as a junior ally; Turkey sees itself as a rising power that doesn’t have to do anyone’s bidding, even if the one asking is the mighty United States. Turkey isn’t strong enough to push back against both, and kowtowing to one does nothing to advance Turkish interests either, hence its complicated relationship with both.
As if to underline the complexity of the game Turkey is playing, Mattis’ next stop after leaving Ankara was Kiev. Both Ukrainian and Russian media sources quoted Mattis as saying the U.S. had approved the delivery of $175 million worth of “special equipment that will strengthen the defense capability of Ukraine.” U.S. media’s reporting on the issue omitted this particular detail, but even so, there can be no doubt about the tone of Mattis’ meeting with Ukraine’s president and his comments afterward. The defense secretary decried Russian aggression and vowed that the U.S. would not tolerate Russian violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.
Mattis stopped short of throwing down the gauntlet: The U.S. is still debating whether to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons such as anti-tank missiles. Doing so would cross a serious line from Russia’s perspective. And there have been hints that the U.S. is at least open to dialogue: An upcoming meeting between the U.S. special envoy to Ukraine and one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s presidential aides could be a step toward defusing the situation. But between Mattis’ strong language and recent U.S. sanctions against Russia, U.S.-Russia relations outside of Syria are trending toward distrust and hostility. Russia can absorb only so many challenges from the U.S. before the Kremlin will need to demonstrate that it is strong enough to prevent the U.S. from pushing it around.
Articulating a Vision
All these issues matter to Turkey, and now (2017) the Turks are trying to formulate a coherent plan to pursue their interests that doesn’t outstrip their capabilities. For all of Turkey’s threats to intervene in Syria or to attack various Kurdish groups, it has stayed out of the fray. Turkey’s foreign minister even ruled out closing the border with the KRG if it goes through with its independence referendum. Turkey’s primary goal is to demonize the Syrian Kurds, who have more in common with Turkey’s Kurds than they do with most of Iraq’s Kurds, and to leverage the support it can offer to Russia and the U.S. to align the policies of both with Turkey’s immediate concerns.
The coup attempt weakened Turkey briefly, especially its ability to project hard power. But it also gave Erdogan a chance to clear the deck and pursue grander ambitions. Now, after a year of recuperation, Turkey is hosting the top defense leaders of the U.S., Russia and Iran, all in the course of a week and a half. Not only that, but those representatives are all coming to Turkey, and Turkey is setting the price for its help without committing itself to any agenda except its own immediate ones: to keep its national integrity intact, to rebuild its military and economy, and to let everyone else weaken themselves by fighting each other.
Turkey wants to stay in the eye of the storm as long as it can, but ultimately, Turkey can’t control everything that happens around it. All it can do is make itself strong enough and shape its regional environment enough so that when it does have to step out into the storm, it can protect its interests. The most important thing after this week is not just that Turkey is articulating that vision, but that it is forgoing opportunistic relationships to see that its vision comes to pass.
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https://www.foxnews.com/world/turkey-nuclear-bombs-hostage-syria?fbclid=IwAR108TD6gvCa5NZmPMYyOKnjAgnqwt8uGfdeYxCKgrznEmhhhfBFdDgx6Ow
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Turkey Is Stepping Up Where Others Fail to Act
Syria’s refugee flows, violence and instability have pushed us to the limit of our tolerance.
By Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Oct. 14, 2019 6:57 pm ET
Turkish civilians wave at an army convoy driving toward Syria, Oct. 9. Photo: bulent kilic/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Since the Syrian civil war began in 2011, no country has felt the pain of the ensuing humanitarian crisis more severely than Turkey. We took in 3.6 million Syrian refugees—more than any other country—and spent $40 billion to offer them education, health care and housing. Our culture of hospitality compelled us to shoulder the burden of hosting millions of war victims with very little help from the international community.
Yet at a certain point, Turkey reached its limit. My administration repeatedly warned that we would be unable to stop refugees from flooding into the West without international financial support. Those warnings fell on deaf ears as governments, eager to avoid responsibility, portrayed as a threat what was intended as a mere statement of fact.
My administration concluded that the international community wasn’t going to act, so we developed a plan for northern Syria. I shared the plan with world leaders at last month’s United Nations General Assembly. In line with that plan, Turkey last week launched Operation Peace Spring to end the humanitarian crisis and address the violence and instability that are the root causes of irregular migration in our region. Absent an alternative plan to deal with the refugee crisis, the international community should either join our efforts or begin admitting refugees.
As part of Operation Peace Spring, the Turkish military, together with the Syrian National Army, will remove all terrorist elements in northeastern Syria. These militants are preventing Syrian refugees, including some 300,000 Kurds, from returning home. Our mission is simultaneously to combat the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the terrorist organization known as the PKK, along with its Syrian affiliates and Islamic State. Turkey has no argument with any ethnic or religious group. From our perspective, all citizens of the Syrian Arab Republic—who don’t belong to terrorist groups—are equal. In particular, we object to equation of the PKK with the Syrian Kurds.
Likewise, Turkey opposes equation of ISIS, which has murdered thousands of innocent people, with Islam. We will ensure that no ISIS fighters leave northeastern Syria. We are prepared to cooperate with source countries and international organizations on the rehabilitation of foreign terrorist fighters’ spouses and children.
The same countries that lecture Turkey on the virtues of combating ISIS today, failed to stem the influx of foreign terrorist fighters in 2014 and 2015. Perhaps the government of a certain European country, which I won’t name, would like to explain to the world how one of its nationals could board a flight to Istanbul in 2014 with live ammunition in his checked luggage. Likewise, France has blocked weapons sales to Turkey, but why did it ignore our repeated early warnings about imminent terrorist attacks?
Members of the Arab League, which has described Turkey’s operation in northern Syria as an invasion, need to answer some questions. Since they are so unhappy with Turkey’s efforts to reunite Syrian refugees with their ancestral lands, how many war victims have they admitted? How much did they contribute to efforts to end the humanitarian crisis in Syria? Which political initiatives did they support to stop the civil war? The Arab League, whose statements don’t reflect the true views and sentiments of the Arab people, has no legitimacy.
The international community missed its opportunity to prevent the Syrian crisis from pulling an entire region into a maelstrom of instability. Many countries have had to deal with the conflict’s negative side effects, including irregular migration and an uptick in terrorist attacks. Operation Peace Spring represents a second chance to help Turkey end proxy wars in Syria and restore peace and stability to the region. The European Union—and the world—should support what Turkey is trying to do.
Mr. Erdoğan is president of Turkey.
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second post
Turkey Fights a Losing PR Battle Over Syria
Sinan Ciddi
Sinan Ciddi
Board of Contributors
7 MINS READOct 16, 2019 | 09:30 GMT
Turkish-backed proxies search for members of the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces in Tal Abyad, Syria, on Oct. 15, 2019.
(OMER ALVEN/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Turkish-backed proxies search for members of the mainly Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces in Tal Abyad, Syria, on Oct. 15, 2019. Turkey has struggled to satisfy the international community as to why it has attacked northern Syria.
Contributor Perspectives offer insight, analysis and commentary from Stratfor’s Board of Contributors and guest contributors who are distinguished leaders in their fields of expertise.
Highlights
Turkey has begun combat operations in northern Syria to wipe out the mainly Kurdish People's Protection Units.
Turkey's allies, however, are worried the move will destabilize Syria and reinvigorate the Islamic State.
Turkey's unilateral action could isolate Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government amid widespread global condemnation.
On Oct. 9, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan finally confirmed speculation that had been swirling for months: Turkey was beginning major combat operations in northern Syria with the goal of creating a safe zone to eradicate the presence of the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) and the Islamic State. The issue is complicated, however, by Washington's tactical partnership with the YPG (which rebranded itself as the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF) as a joint means of terminating the Islamic State. Turkey has criticized the partnership since it began in 2014, viewing it as a betrayal on the grounds that the YPG is tied to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), an organization that Ankara, Brussels and Washington recognize as a terrorist group.
The flawed, yet effective U.S. motivation to collaborate with the YPG/SDF stemmed from two related developments: From 2012 to 2014, the fight to eliminate the Islamic State was only a distant second priority for most countries in the region — in contrast to the United States. Second, Turkey had directed its energies to toppling Syrian President Bashar al Assad, making it clear that it would not commit military assets to fight the Islamic State in Syria or Iraq. Given the lay of the land, the administration of former U.S. President Barack Obama hit upon what it deemed an effective and acceptable approach, committing a limited number of U.S. special forces and airpower and relying on the YPG to conduct the bulk of combat operations against the Islamic State. But even if Turkey's contempt for the YPG was always evident, why has it chosen to act unilaterally against the Syrian Kurds now? Ultimately, the answer is simple: There isn't one — at least a palatable one from Turkey.
A Case for War?
Turkey's move is motivated more by Erdogan's domestic political concerns than any imminent threat posed by the YPG. To be fair, Turkey does have a legitimate concern with the emergence of a large Kurdish political entity along its southern border, especially if it is organized by a political entity that presents a threat to Turkey's sovereignty and security. Such concern, however, is not tantamount to an imminent and dangerous threat. Turkey, in its near-century history as a republic, has faced such imminent threats and responded accordingly. During World War II, the specter of either a Nazi or Soviet invasion was ever-present, testing the resolve of Turkey's leaders between 1939 and 1945. But even amid the danger of the Nazis at the gates, Turkey's government avoided war as an option. In 1974, when insurrectionists toppled Cyprus' government with an eye to uniting the island with Greece, Turkey's government took the immediate step of deploying the military to stall such an eventuality. (Later, it breached its mandate by carving out a de facto Turkish state that remains to this day.)
What concerns did the U.S.-Turkish joint patrols in northeastern Syria not address that required Turkey's military incursion?
No similarly dramatic incident or reason for immediacy precipitated last week's Turkish military incursion into northeastern Syria, dubbed Operation Peace Spring. In fact, there were no conditions for hot pursuit, which explains the overwhelming international concern and condemnation. Indeed, it leads to the question: What concerns did the U.S.-Turkish joint patrols not address that required a military incursion? As it is, the incursion began only after an abrupt telephone conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Erdogan, in which Trump reportedly gave a green light to the initiative and declared that Turkey, henceforth, would be in charge of keeping Syria — and possibly the region — free of the Islamic State.
In the immediate term, Erdogan looks set to reap the awards of his brazen behavior. For the past 12 months, the Erdogan government has found itself in a corner due to a severely weakened economy and a loss of voter confidence — all of which culminated in widespread losses for the president and the governing Justice and Development Party in local elections on March 31. Erdogan, however, has successively swept debate on such topics to the side, refocusing the nation's attention on the Syria operation. Indeed, a campaign to wipe out the PKK and the YPG is proving popular with the public, as it rallies behind a strong leader who is determined to pursue Turkey's security concerns and defy Western criticism and restrictions. Beyond taking the sting out of domestic criticism of Turkey's perilous economy and the skyrocketing cost of living, the move also silences dissent in general, compelling opposition parties to lend their support due to the popular appeal. Predictably, authorities have already rounded up scores of critics, especially members of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democracy Party — the only major party to oppose Turkey's cross-border operation. In such an atmosphere, Erdogan might even be tempted to call for a fresh round of elections to take advantage of the short-term euphoria over the offensive.
Turkey's Viewpoint Finds Few Takers
That said, Turkey might just be opening up Pandora's box with its incursion. First, journalists in the affected areas are reporting numerous civilian casualties and a humanitarian catastrophe in the making as tens of thousands flee the fighting. How will Turkey uphold humanitarian standards, given that it is now responsible for the plight of the new refugees? Syrian sovereignty, meanwhile, is also at stake. At the outset, Turkey announced that it was launching the operation in full recognition of Syria's independence and sovereignty. That's a nice platitude, but once the military operations are done and dusted, how long and under whose authority will Turkish troops remain?
Erdogan has also intimated that his "liberated" area of about 450 by 30 kilometers (roughly 280 by 19 miles) will become home to the Syrian refugees presently living in Turkey. Where does Turkey's government obtain the authority to resettle the refugees? Will this not infringe upon the area's existing demographics? Turkish authorities have yet to give — and are unlikely to do so in the future — satisfying answers to these questions. And as Turkish artillery pound pre-selected targets, reports are emerging that hundreds of Islamic State detainees are breaking out of camps because the Kurds guarding them are having to flee themselves. If the Islamic State launches a whole new wave of attacks, or even enjoys a political resurgence, how will Turkey address the resulting security concerns from countries the world over?
The YPG has garnered an international reputation for defeating the Islamic State; Turkey, in contrast, has garnered a reputation for striving to destroy the Islamic State's conquerors — if not aid the jihadist group itself.
So far, international condemnation has been swift. The U.S. Congress has initiated the process of promulgating direct sanctions on Turkey; support for bipartisan legislation might be so strong that Trump won't have the means to veto it. The European Union and individual member states have also condemned Ankara's actions and imposed bans on arms sales to Turkey. Others have even called for the suspension of Turkey's NATO membership.
Turkey, which seems to have been surprised by the backlash, has responded with hostility and ill-considered comments that parallel Erdogan's vitriol at global actors. For one, Erdogan has threatened to open Turkey's borders and send Syrian refugees to Europe unless the Europeans begin applauding his actions and lend their support. At this juncture, Erdogan believes the problem rests in not having the right people and mechanisms to help explain Turkey's perspective. The problem, however, is more that Turkey has decisively lost the international public relations campaign, even if it has grabbed the initiative on the military front. The YPG has garnered an international reputation for defeating the Islamic State; Turkey, in contrast, has garnered a reputation for striving to destroy the Islamic State's conquerors — if not aid the jihadist group itself. It appears that Turkish authorities have yet to understand that insisting on their position is not going to change the world's opinion.
In the end, Erdogan has acted with impunity at home for over a decade, subjecting Turkey's population to his brash and unbridled demeanor. He's now trying the same thing on the world stage and expecting the rest of the globe to fall in line. That isn't going to happen, and the longer Turkey continues its military operation, the more it will find itself relegated to the position of an international pariah.
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One POV
https://www.wsj.com/articles/turkey-may-go-the-way-of-venezuela-11571872299
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https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/untenable-alliance-is-no-turkish-delight/?fbclid=IwAR2sQmWpJXkQd1u-X00QZoOn0TCUkQ0SMpKZG3F93LVxVwUMz9cCWIJrhFA
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https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/turkey-and-west-gathering-storm-podcast-erdogan-sanctions-syria-russia?id=743c2bc617&e=b6fb3e5216&uuid=ce40d508-2f35-4f9d-8568-06c1fbc383b4&utm_source=Topics%2C+Themes+and+Regions&utm_campaign=b4ae577a81-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_11_07_11_03&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_743c2bc617-b4ae577a81-53682369&mc_cid=b4ae577a81&mc_eid=%5bUNIQID%5d
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https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/after-six-decades-turkey-is-now-a-us-ally-in-name-only
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Visiting Istanbul
By: George Friedman
I am writing this from Istanbul, trying not to count how many Thanksgivings I have spent without my children and grandchildren. But as they say, this is the life I chose. Right now I am looking out over the Bosporus from my hotel room and noticing something startling. I have been here many times but I have never seen ship traffic so light. I have seen only a handful of Russian tankers passing through. This is only the second day and it may change, but I have to wonder if the world oil market is topped off and Russia is finding it hard to find customers. This while my wife sees the beauty of the sun sparkling across the water.
Istanbul is for me a city where I make speeches, listen to speeches and have lavish dinners. But it is rare that I roam the city freely, and it was only once in the past decade that I broke loose with a car and map and wandered the eastern half of the country. I recall getting lost on the trip, entirely my wife’s fault, and slowly driving through small and poor villages. As it was obvious we were lost, a car with two men in their 30s drove up beside us, and one of them asked me in excellent English to follow him to my destination. That he was driving a late-model car for this region and speaking English well made it unlikely he was merely a helpful villager. I had insisted to a very senior official that I was going to travel on my own, without any guidance. Thankfully he didn’t listen to me, which was likely part courtesy and part caution.
Courtesy and caution sums it up. I am speaking at a meeting of MUSIAD, a Muslim business organization. It is a vast gathering, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be speaking as well, so it is significant. The dinner with the board of MUSIAD prior to the event was enlightening. The board consisted of sophisticated businessmen eager to find opportunities in the United States. At the same time, they expressed their regrets over ongoing tensions in Turkey’s relations with the West – Turkish politeness for being let down by the U.S. and Europe.
They made two points that must be understood. The first is that the Syrian civil war has caused 3 million Syrian refugees, a staggering number, to enter Turkey. It was explained that these refugees are free to work and live in Turkey, and do. They said the Europeans have failed to honor their commitment to provide aid, which means that Turkey bears the load. To be criticized on human rights by the Europeans when Turkey, not the Europeans, has borne the burden outrages the Turks.
They are also furious at what they regard as misrepresentation of the Kurdish situation. Turkey has a population of about 80 million, 18 million of whom are Kurds. The vast majority are part of Turkish society, and they hold 10 percent of the seats in parliament. According to my hosts and from what I have seen, the Kurds are not in a state of civil war with Turkey. A small fraction, belonging to the PKK, or the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, has carried out terrorist attacks. The PKK was formed in the Soviet era, a Marxist group as its name indicates. The Soviets had supported radical groups in Turkey to destabilize the country, and the PKK was one of the parties they supported. The PKK maintained its struggle after the Soviet Union fell. From my hosts’ point of view, the inability of the U.S. to distinguish between the Kurds and the PKK is outrageous. Therefore, when the Turks moved to disarm the Kurds on their border with Syria, they claimed that they were terrorists linked to the PKK and were furious at several members of the U.S. Congress for talking about the removal of Kurds from the border and hinting at a risk of genocide.
(click to enlarge)
The Turks feel that these facts are well known in the U.S. and are twisted in order to weaken Turkey. My counterpoint was, assuming that all this was true, the U.S. Congress was not well versed in the subtleties of Turkish politics, and their ignorance of the Turkish point of view has a great deal to do with Turkey not knowing how to manage the United States. The British, Irish, Israelis and Armenians, to cite a few, have mastered the art of managing the U.S. government. Turkey simply doesn’t know how and doesn’t feel it should have to be the teacher.
This shows in the case of Fethullah Gulen. There was an attempted coup in Turkey in 2016. Such coups are not unknown there, as the Turkish Constitution, left by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, gave the military the role of guaranteeing a secular Turkey. Given that, there is some case to be made that the army was carrying out its constitutional duty by trying to displace Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP. The view of Turkish Muslims was that while this may have been true, this role for the military is antiquated; Turkey is now a democracy and the army should respect the outcomes of elections.
The feud is not really with the army, but with a group called the Gulenists. The Gulenists are hard to define. They are led or guided (depending on who you ask) by Fethullah Gulen, now residing in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. The group combined an idiosyncratic version of Islam with a highly efficient system of recruiting members via schools, clubs and the like, and networking like-minded businessmen together, multiplying their power. Gulen had once been a close friend of Erdogan to complicate the story even more.
Erdogan turned against the Gulenists early in the century. The AKP and Erdogan saw them as having amassed a great deal of murky power that challenged the AKP. After the attempted coup occurred in 2016, while the military was heavily purged, the real target was the Gulenists and Gulen himself. The Turkish government demanded that the United States extradite Gulen for trial in Turkey. This didn’t happen, and now it was the Turks who did not understand the United States.
The U.S. president and Congress do not have the power to extradite a legal resident to a foreign country. In the end, it takes a judge who reviews evidence and decides. This bars all appeals and whatnot inherent in the American legal system. The president and his attorney general have some role, but not a decisive one. This is something that the Turks simply do not understand. Erdogan is president of Turkey, Putin is president of Russia and so on. If they want to extradite someone, he is gone. The idea that a leader with the title of president has little control over a legal process, the Turks dismiss.
At any rate what is clear to me is that there are few substantial issues between the U.S. and Turkey, but a breathtaking array of willful misunderstandings. The Turks want to feel the victim, and the U.S. doesn’t want to take them seriously. But that is a mistake. As I said 10 years ago in “The Next 100 Years,” Turkey is emerging as a major regional power. It deals with the Russians, Germans and Americans as equals. Its gross domestic product, by purchasing power parity, ranks 13th in the world. Its army is large and getting better. It is an important player.
The U.S. and Turkey have common interests. The Turks are vehemently opposed to the Bashar Assad regime, as is the U.S. The Russians saved Assad and are protecting him. The Iranians make the Turks extremely uneasy as they operate in Syria and Iraq. These are common interests. But when I point these out on Wednesday and step off the podium, I know that the first question from the Turks will be, what about Gulen? And the nice fellow from the U.S. Embassy assigned to listen to speeches will ask why I didn’t raise the S-400 and F-35. I can go through American law ad infinitum and it won’t help. And the Turks’ having the S-400 will give the U.S. an opportunity to look at it up close and personal, which will be dismissed by the Americans.
In the end, the Turks have fought too many wars with Russia and Iran to trust either and need the Americans. The U.S. wants to stabilize the region without using U.S. troops. But that is geopolitics and that in the short run is too simple. So we will debate far less important but still very complex issues that don’t matter nearly as much in the long run.
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second post
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November 27, 2019
If Russia invades the Baltics, Turkey warns it won't help unless NATO members formally say the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria is a terrorist group. That's according to four alliance officials who spoke to Reuters on Tuesday.
Quick review: "Ankara views the Kurdish fighters as terrorists for their links to a Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey," the Associated Press writes us in a separate development today. "The fighters had however partnered with the U.S. against the Islamic State group." But "U.S. troops pulled back from the border with Turkey to avoid clashes with a NATO ally, opening the way for the Turkey-backed invasion," in what AP calls "a major shift in the power balance in oil-rich northeastern Syria."
Why Turkey's Baltic stance is in the news now: Very likely because NATO heads of state are scheduled to converge in London next week for a 70th anniversary summit. Reuters has a preview of that summit, here.
Bigger picture: "The plan for the Baltic states and Poland, drawn up at their request after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, has no direct bearing on Turkey's strategy in Syria, but it raises issues about security on all of NATO's frontiers," Reuters writes.
We asked a few experts about this back in mid-October, just days after Turkey launched its unilateral invasion of northern Syria. At the time, it seemed slightly absurd to doubt a NATO ally's commitment to collective defense. We appear to have been wrong in that assessment.
Said one of those experts, Aurel Sari of the University of Exeter's Law School: "Assuming that an armed attack has occurred and the victim requests assistance, the North Atlantic Treaty favours and seems to foresee a collective, united response. However, nothing precludes nations that share the victim State's assessment that it has suffered an armed attack, and which therefore consider Article 5 to be engaged, to provide assistance bilaterally or plurilaterally, without all nations sharing that view and considering Article 5 as triggered." (Read Sari's analysis of the topic and related issues, "The Mutual Assistance Clauses of the North Atlantic and EU Treaties: The Challenge of Hybrid Threats." See also his Oct. 15 op-ed in Just Security: "Can Turkey be Expelled from NATO? It's Legally Possible, Whether or Not Politically Prudent.")
Said Chris Skaluba of the Atlantic Council: "In practical terms, Turkey couldn't stop alliance members from responding. That's because when it comes to NATO, there are largely four capitals that matter: London, Paris, Berlin and Washington. Even if [Turkish President Recep Erdogan] were to say, 'I'm going to put my stick in the ground and resist this,' the Turkish delegation would have a very hard time holding out over time."
Such a position "may limit how [Turkey] could use NATO command or NATO intelligence. But in most cases, politically the Turks would be under enormous pressure. Even in 2003 during the Iraq invasion, the four capitals were misaligned and NATO wound up being involved and having a role."
It's worth noting in our current era of apparent norm-breaking, said David Auerswald of the National War College, that generating "consensus" among alliance members for Article 5 action "is not so much a rule as a norm. The key is to keep alliance members from vetoing alliance action. During Kosovo, for example, we did that by essentially buying off the Greeks with a series of actions that protected their interests, such that they abstained rather than vetoing the operation."
However, some alliance officials see some room for negotiation with Turkey since, as one diplomatic source explained to Reuters, "Ankara also needs leaders to approve a separate, upgraded military plan detailing how NATO would defend Turkey in the event of an attack." A bit more from Reuters, here.
Meanwhile in northeastern Syria, a car bomb killed at least 17 people "in the village of Tal Half, near the city of Ras al-Ayn," AP reports. Turkey's defense ministry says Syrian Kurdish fighters are responsible; however officials provided no proof to back up their claim. A bit more, here.
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The fact that Turkey is still a member of NATO demonstrates exactly what a joke NATO has become.
second post
Problems viewing? View as a web page
November 27, 2019
If Russia invades the Baltics, Turkey warns it won't help unless NATO members formally say the Kurdish YPG militia in northern Syria is a terrorist group. That's according to four alliance officials who spoke to Reuters on Tuesday.
Quick review: "Ankara views the Kurdish fighters as terrorists for their links to a Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey," the Associated Press writes us in a separate development today. "The fighters had however partnered with the U.S. against the Islamic State group." But "U.S. troops pulled back from the border with Turkey to avoid clashes with a NATO ally, opening the way for the Turkey-backed invasion," in what AP calls "a major shift in the power balance in oil-rich northeastern Syria."
Why Turkey's Baltic stance is in the news now: Very likely because NATO heads of state are scheduled to converge in London next week for a 70th anniversary summit. Reuters has a preview of that summit, here.
Bigger picture: "The plan for the Baltic states and Poland, drawn up at their request after Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, has no direct bearing on Turkey's strategy in Syria, but it raises issues about security on all of NATO's frontiers," Reuters writes.
We asked a few experts about this back in mid-October, just days after Turkey launched its unilateral invasion of northern Syria. At the time, it seemed slightly absurd to doubt a NATO ally's commitment to collective defense. We appear to have been wrong in that assessment.
Said one of those experts, Aurel Sari of the University of Exeter's Law School: "Assuming that an armed attack has occurred and the victim requests assistance, the North Atlantic Treaty favours and seems to foresee a collective, united response. However, nothing precludes nations that share the victim State's assessment that it has suffered an armed attack, and which therefore consider Article 5 to be engaged, to provide assistance bilaterally or plurilaterally, without all nations sharing that view and considering Article 5 as triggered." (Read Sari's analysis of the topic and related issues, "The Mutual Assistance Clauses of the North Atlantic and EU Treaties: The Challenge of Hybrid Threats." See also his Oct. 15 op-ed in Just Security: "Can Turkey be Expelled from NATO? It's Legally Possible, Whether or Not Politically Prudent.")
Said Chris Skaluba of the Atlantic Council: "In practical terms, Turkey couldn't stop alliance members from responding. That's because when it comes to NATO, there are largely four capitals that matter: London, Paris, Berlin and Washington. Even if [Turkish President Recep Erdogan] were to say, 'I'm going to put my stick in the ground and resist this,' the Turkish delegation would have a very hard time holding out over time."
Such a position "may limit how [Turkey] could use NATO command or NATO intelligence. But in most cases, politically the Turks would be under enormous pressure. Even in 2003 during the Iraq invasion, the four capitals were misaligned and NATO wound up being involved and having a role."
It's worth noting in our current era of apparent norm-breaking, said David Auerswald of the National War College, that generating "consensus" among alliance members for Article 5 action "is not so much a rule as a norm. The key is to keep alliance members from vetoing alliance action. During Kosovo, for example, we did that by essentially buying off the Greeks with a series of actions that protected their interests, such that they abstained rather than vetoing the operation."
However, some alliance officials see some room for negotiation with Turkey since, as one diplomatic source explained to Reuters, "Ankara also needs leaders to approve a separate, upgraded military plan detailing how NATO would defend Turkey in the event of an attack." A bit more from Reuters, here.
Meanwhile in northeastern Syria, a car bomb killed at least 17 people "in the village of Tal Half, near the city of Ras al-Ayn," AP reports. Turkey's defense ministry says Syrian Kurdish fighters are responsible; however officials provided no proof to back up their claim. A bit more, here.
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December 2, 2019 Open as PDF
Turkey, the NATO Summit Spoiler
By: Caroline Rose
Turkey is an emerging geopolitical power, and it’s no longer shy about it. To its south it has augmented its presence in northeast Syria, redefining its place in the Middle East; to its north it has intensified its power projection in the Black Sea; and to its immediate west it has increased its gas extraction activities, even in the exclusive economic zones of other states, challenging the status quo in the Mediterranean. Now, Turkey is reaching out even further and redefining its relationship with the West, a step toward a more independent foreign policy and great power status. Ankara’s next act will take place on the stage of the NATO summit in London on Tuesday and Wednesday, where it will pressure the United States and Europe for support on one of its greatest geopolitical priorities: securing a long-term, Turkish-controlled buffer zone in northeast Syria.
Like other recent alliance meetings, this NATO summit will be defined by fundamental questions about NATO’s relevance, cohesion and role in Europe’s security in an environment where few members meet the alliance’s defense spending targets and where there is disagreement on the scale of the threat from Russia (especially from French President Emmanuel Macron, whose reference to NATO’s “brain death” in an October interview is now infamous). Turkey, like many of its NATO counterparts, has begun to challenge the scope of the 70-year-old alliance, which Turkey asserts is too confined to Eastern Europe and should begin to confront threats in Central Asia. The Turkish economy has surged over the past decade and a half or so, during which time the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the wave of protests known as the Arab Spring created power vacuums in the Middle East. And in recent years, particularly since the failed coup attempt in 2016, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has solidified his control over the country, enabling Turkey to more actively pursue its foreign policy priorities. Ankara perceives the London summit not as an opportunity to confront some of the most fundamental issues in Western defense, but as a means to Turkish ends. This highlights what has been blatantly obvious as of late: that Turkish priorities and interests and those of NATO members are not always aligned. Turkey plans to use the summit as a platform to garner Western support and financial patronage for the “safe zone” Turkish armed forces established along the Turkish border in Syria in Operation Peace Spring in October.
The safe zone, what the government dubs a “peace corridor,” is intended to accomplish two short-term goals for Ankara: mass repatriation of Syrian refugees whom Turkey wishes to expel and curbing the influence of the Kurdish Peoples’ Protection Units, or YPG, an organization Ankara asserts is affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in Turkey, a group that is widely recognized as a terrorist organization. But beyond the short term, the safe zone offers greater strategic depth for Turkey. A Turkish bastion in northeast Syria can contain Syrian instability, limit Turkish Kurds’ engagement with potential allies in the Levant, and serve as a wellspring of geopolitical influence against Turkey’s rivals in the Middle East – Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The Turkish military has already effectively achieved military control of the buffer, but to establish long-term control, Turkey needs legitimization, institutional support and, of course, money – over $27 billion, to be exact, according to Ankara’s estimates. To enliven NATO’s birthday party, Turkey intends to propose a donors’ conference to secure funds for the construction of hospitals, football pitches, 6,000 homes, 11 mosques, nine schools and other facilities to help with the planned repatriation of over half of the 3.6 million refugees in Turkey. While Ankara has already secured Qatari funds for the buffer zone, Western backing remains integral to its political justification – and to its defense. While NATO plans to increase its defensive presence in the Intermarium, Turkey believes that northern Syria should be an area of significant concern to the alliance. To Ankara, northeast Syria is a significant flashpoint with great potential for NATO’s easternmost member to clash with Russian forces, fertile grounds for triggering Article 5. Turkey has also lobbied for NATO members to acknowledge terrorist attacks – primarily, from Kurdish organizations – on Turkey within the framework of collective defense, akin to America’s invocation of Article 5 after 9/11, and has been disgruntled by NATO members’ refusal to do so. Yet, the European Union and the U.S. Congress have objected to Turkish attacks on Syrian Democratic Forces units and even have accused Turkey of trying to alter the composition of northeast Syria’s (majority-Kurdish) population via demographic engineering.
The reality is that Europe will be skeptical of support for a Turkish-controlled buffer zone. Acknowledging likely European disinterest, Ankara is prepared to draw – and capable of drawing – a hard line with Europe, exploiting NATO and EU institutional weaknesses to achieve what it wants in northeast Syria. The government’s strategy in pressuring Europe reflects an ever-more unfettered, independent Turkish foreign policy; Ankara will issue a series of threats in exchange for Western recognition of the YPG as a terrorist organization and funds for Turkish-Qatari repatriation projects along the Syrian “peace corridor.” The government plans to carry out this coercive strategy through two methods. First, Turkey intends to threaten non-participation in major NATO missions in the Baltics and Poland. Such a decision would disrupt one of NATO’s most basic decision-making processes: rule by consensus. Turkey’s threat to backlog NATO’s decision-making may not make or break the NATO agenda in Eastern Europe, but it is an indication of the defense organization’s slow-motion implosion and Turkey’s willingness to facilitate it, demonstrating new Turkish priorities that no longer align with those of NATO (or at least the U.S.-Eastern Europe contingency that sees Baltic security against Russia as essential). This move alone strikes at the very core of NATO’s current identity crisis and brings into question the unified action of the group regardless of follow-through.
Second, Turkey will continue to threaten to unleash a major migrant crisis, warning that it will dispatch its nearly 6 million refugees into the southern corridors of Europe. It’s unclear to what extent Turkey can actually follow through on such a threat; opening the “flood gates” to Europe would be perceived by Europe as a deliberate attack on European political stability, amounting to a nuclear option – a risk that Ankara is likely hesitant to take. Nonetheless, Europe may be unwilling to take the risk of calling Turkey’s bluff. Mass migration from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa has been a controversial reality in Europe, contributing to the rise of far-right, anti-immigration and Islamophobic movements, and further fragmenting EU unity. The mass influx of migrants has been a direct challenge to the EU’s strategy, forcing Europe to confront its institutional principles – open-border policies, liberalization and humanitarian assistance.
While Ankara’s obstructiveness may be surprising for some, its deviation from traditional counterparts is not irrational. Turkey has incrementally unbound itself from Western efforts, pursuing its own interests at the expense of greater cooperation with Europe and the United States. Simply put, Turkey and its Western partners are not, inevitably, going to be on the same page given their myriad diverging interests. Turkey has confronted an increasingly hostile situation on its border with Syria, simultaneously confronting its Russian, Syrian, Kurdish and Iranian rivals. After characterizing Operation Peace Spring as a humanitarian and anti-terrorist operation (and getting the green light for the operation from U.S. President Donald Trump), Turkey sought limited support from its NATO allies, something along the lines of operational consultation under Article 4 of the NATO treaty – which Turkey has invoked three times before – but received widespread criticism instead. Exacerbating Turkish resentment toward the West, Ankara has been aggravated by U.S. and European condemnation and proposed sanctions over gas drilling activities in the Greek Cypriot exclusive economic zone, condemnation and proposed U.S. sanctions over its purchasing of Russian S-400 missile defense systems, U.S. tariffs on Turkish steel exports and U.S. scrutiny of a Turkish state-owned bank accused of helping Iran skirt sanctions. Turkish moves in the Eastern Mediterranean and defense acquisitions are in keeping with its aims to capitalize on its growing influence and power in the region.
Turkey’s blackmail campaign is unlikely to succeed – at least not fully – but ultimately that’s unimportant. The implications of Turkey’s obstructionism over the Baltic and Polish defense plan are largely political, and the threat to formally stop enforcing the migrant deal with the EU is an old one that’s best left as a threat. What is notable is Turkey’s decision to experiment with its emerging power within the NATO forum, against the backdrop of the organization’s dysfunction. As more countries begin to question and challenge the NATO framework, Turkey will no doubt continue to be emboldened to achieve independent geopolitical objectives. Turkey no longer perceives a great need to fall in line with European and American expectations, as it has amassed enough muscle against a weakened EU and pushed NATO to carry its own weight.
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Turkey Tests the Waters in the Eastern Mediterranean
With its maritime deal with Libya, Ankara is harkening back to the peak of the Ottoman Empire’s influence.
By Caroline Rose -December 6, 2019Open as PDF
Turkey is seeking to rewrite the rules in the Eastern Mediterranean. Last week, the Turkish government signed a maritime agreement with one of Libya’s two aspiring governments that strengthens Turkey’s position in the region. While legally ambiguous and fraught with logistical challenges, the deal represents Turkey’s latest effort to assert its dominance in the Eastern Mediterranean, to capitalize on the region’s energy resources and to restore the regional influence it lost over a century ago when the Ottoman Empire fell.
Catching Up in the Energy Race
We wrote earlier this week about how Ankara was trying to create a buffer for itself to the south, with Operation Peace Spring in northeastern Syria. Turkey’s efforts in the waters to its west have some related motivations, but they’re also about cashing in on the Eastern Mediterranean’s natural resources. For decades, Turkey has been excluded from benefiting from the oil and gas boom in the Eastern Mediterranean, which has an estimated 3.5 trillion cubic meters of natural gas and 1.7 billion barrels of crude oil. Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and Israel have been quicker and more successful than Turkey in identifying oil and gas fields along their coasts. After Israel identified two natural gas fields in 1999, for example, its government, alongside those in Greece, Cyprus and Egypt, was quick in the early 2000s to reach agreements delineating exclusive economic zones and to launch hydrocarbon exploratory patrols with multinational companies. This enables those countries not only to benefit financially from the discoveries but also to improve their energy independence.
Turkey has struggled to match its Mediterranean peers. Its seismic surveying vessels and deep-sea drills have cost Ankara over $1 billion in the past decade, and yet they have not yielded any oil or gas discoveries. Apparently devoid of such resources along its 994-mile (1,600-kilometer) Mediterranean coastline and with growing demand for and dependence on imported oil and gas, Turkey has been compelled to drill in waters that neighboring governments, namely Greece and Greek Cyprus, argue are part of their sovereign EEZs.
Of course, this isn’t just about fossil fuels. The rivalries in this region are long-standing, and countries like Greece are unenthused by the prospect of an old foe reemerging. Ankara’s historical claims in the Aegean Sea and on Cyprus and certain Greek islands have alarmed its Mediterranean neighbors. Moreover, Turkey is not party to major international maritime legal agreements, such as the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea, giving it leeway in redefining economic zones and territorial waters in the region. Greece and other Mediterranean powers have forged a regional strategy to box Turkey out of their economic projects and regional collaborative frameworks. Take, for example, the EastMed Pipeline, a $7.36 billion underwater natural gas pipeline that will ship gas from Israeli and Cypriot fields across Cyprus and Greece to interconnector terminals in Italy. EastMed will attract lucrative gas export agreements in Europe, where the demand for energy is rising. Despite Turkish interests in the pipeline and the fact that the project intersects with Turkish waters, Mediterranean governments have shut Ankara out, perceiving it as an unwelcome rival – even after Turkey offered to offset the pipeline’s underwater costs by having it run overland through Turkish territory (which would, admittedly, increase Turkey’s leverage over gas transmission). Additionally, Israel, Egypt, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Greece and Cyprus excluded Turkey from the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, a cooperative platform for dialogue on natural resources. Turkey has therefore devised a counterstrategy to get on its rivals’ level as a Mediterranean power, becoming increasingly assertive in what it sees as its historical and legitimate territory.
The Turkey-Libya Agreement
On Nov. 27, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met for two hours with the head of the U.N.-backed Libyan Government of National Accord, Fayez Sarraj. They emerged with two memorandums of understanding, one on security and military cooperation and another called the “Restriction of Maritime Jurisdictions.” Turkey has backed the GNA for years, partly because of its interest in Libya’s oil reserves – estimated to be the largest in Africa and the 10th-largest globally – and partly to counter its Arab and other adversaries (including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Russia), which back the opposite side in the Libyan conflict, the Libyan National Army. In this respect, the Turkey-GNA defense agreement is no surprise; Ankara has a history of providing Sarraj’s forces with drones, military equipment and financial resources to counter Khalifa Haftar’s LNA in eastern Libya. However, it is the maritime agreement that demands special attention. The agreement demarcates new, “equitable” maritime zones, on which both sides exercise sovereignty. The Turkish government hinted that the maritime deal would lead to lucrative oil and gas contracts off the Libyan coast, hydrocarbon exploration activities that would also support Libya’s economic recovery after its civil war, and even a Turkish base in western Libya to increase security cooperation.
Natural Gas Cooperation in the Eastern Med
(click to enlarge)
A Turkish diplomat released a map on Twitter shortly after the deal was forged, outlining Turkey’s revised EEZ and continental coastline (augmented by 30 percent). The new EEZ links up with Libya’s EEZ, which was a strategic maneuver. On paper, the revised zone bifurcates Greece’s EEZ by cutting across Crete’s EEZ, and if enforced, it would effectively undercut any Greek attempt to forge its own delimitation agreements with Egypt, Israel and Cyprus. The deal also attempts to undermine the EastMed Pipeline, which marginalizes Turkey’s regional strategy by cutting through its territorial waters and excluding it from export sales. The maritime deal enables Turkey to augment its maritime control in zones where the underwater pipeline is planned, threatening the pipeline’s construction and operation. But more significantly, the maritime deal offers Turkey greater strategic depth, from North Africa to the Aegean Sea to the Gulf of Antalya, and it challenges Turkey’s adversaries to respond to its reinterpretation of its sovereign maritime boundaries.
Turkey’s strategy in the Mediterranean rests on two approaches. First, the Turkish government knows that it cannot match its adversaries and break out of its isolation alone, so it has sought out and found two partners in the region: the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the Libyan GNA. These allies are feeble, but that makes them exploitable, and for Turkey that’s part of the appeal. The TRNC quite literally depends on Turkish support for its existence. The GNA’s enemy has the support of Saudi Arabia, Russia and Egypt – some of Turkey’s greatest rivals. Despite stepping up oil production and making progress toward resolving the country’s liquidity crisis, the GNA has struggled to maintain control over key economic sectors and militia groups, which are rampant in the country. Furthermore, wavering American support for the GNA and indications of support for Haftar have left Sarraj’s government insecure. Turkey deliberately accompanied the maritime deal with a series of security promises that gave Turkey rights to coastal Libyan drilling fields and authorized an enlarged Turkish naval presence at Libyan ports. It is important to note, however, that the revised EEZ was demarcated along coastal areas outside of the GNA’s control, which will be a logistical challenge for Turkey. This situation could exacerbate the civil war and prove to be a significant flashpoint, where Turkey will seek to strong-arm the GNA and Egypt, and Eastern Mediterranean allies will be more motivated to support LNA forces.
The second element of Turkey’s Mediterranean strategy relies on the use of a historical narrative to assert Turkish rights in the region. Turkish officials have begun to reference the “Blue Homeland,” the concept that the eastern coast of Crete and half of the Aegean Sea – nearly 18,000 square miles – belong to Turkey. The Blue Homeland is popular among neo-Ottomanists in Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, as it harkens back to the peak of the empire’s geopolitical power. Erdogan even posed in front of a map of the Blue Homeland when presenting at the National Defense University. Of course, Ankara is aware that such concepts violate Greek sovereignty and that any attempt at military consolidation could spark an international crisis. But legality is beside the point – Turkey’s ultimate objective is psychological: imposing permanent Turkish influence in the region and notifying its Mediterranean peers that it is here to stay.
Turkey’s agreement with Libya has sparked outrage among its Mediterranean rivals, who accuse Ankara of violating the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the jurisprudence of existing EEZs. Regional governments have been quick to dismiss the deal as legally invalid and “ridiculous,” and questions have been raised about whether the GNA was even empowered to make the deal in the first place, since Sarraj does not have the legal authority to sign any accord outside the scope and purview of the U.N.-brokered Skhirat Agreement that established the government. But Greece and Cyprus have expressed deep concern about the possible ramifications of the maritime deal. Cyprus has appealed to the International Court of Justice to help it defend its claims to its offshore natural resources. Greece has launched a campaign to garner support from the West, making appeals to both the European Union and NATO, as well as accelerating negotiations with Egypt on their own EEZ delimitation agreement.
Turkey’s strategy in the Eastern Mediterranean is about shifting the balance with regional powers and asserting a new psychological reality regarding Turkish influence and sovereign rights in the region. It fits well into Turkey’s broader ambition to develop a bolder, more visible, self-sufficient foreign policy. This policy has Ankara probing in the Balkans, Central Asia, the Levant and the Caucasus, but the Eastern Mediterranean will continue to be where Turkey is playing its most high-stakes game.
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A theme I have been hammering on around here for years.
Can you guys see this?
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WG_Turkey-NG.png?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3A%2F%2Fgeopoliticalfutures.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F12%2FWG_Turkey-NG.png&utm_content&utm_campaign=PAID+-+Everything+as+it%27s+published
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Yes.
A theme I have been hammering on around here for years.
Can you guys see this?
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/WG_Turkey-NG.png?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=https%3A%2F%2Fgeopoliticalfutures.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F12%2FWG_Turkey-NG.png&utm_content&utm_campaign=PAID+-+Everything+as+it%27s+published
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move along, nothing to see.
must be photoshopped:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/senate-passes-resolution-recognizing-turkeys-genocide-of-the-armenian-people/
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move along, nothing to see.
must be photoshopped:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/senate-passes-resolution-recognizing-turkeys-genocide-of-the-armenian-people/
They are not going to be happy.
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OTOH
America wins again!
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/…/actually-the-nato-summ…
First off, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan backed away from a previous threat to block improved NATO support for the Baltic states and Poland. Until Wednesday, Erdogan had been holding out on this unless the alliance recognized the Kurdish YPG group in Syria — an ad hoc ally against the Islamic State in the recent war — as a terrorist organization. Instead, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda observed that the Baltic states and Poland had met with Erdogan and received his support. This is a positive development which suggests that Turkey might reconsider its increasing deference to Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader, after all, will be unhappy with Erdogan for backing NATO's Baltic security strategy.
Moreover, agreement on that security strategy is a big deal in and of itself. The primary threat to NATO's security envelope is a potential Russian blitzkrieg combined arms offensive into the Baltics or through Belarus into Poland. With the 29-member alliance now unified in upgrading its support to those nations — all of which responsibly meet the NATO defense spending target of 2% of GDP — Russia faces a new deterrent. This is not to say a Russian attack is likely, simply that its possibility demands a commensurate counterforce.
Another success is the continued agreement from allies to increase defense spending. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg served as Trump's allies here, pushing other members to meet that 2% target sooner. And in a noteworthy development, the Trump administration took a more conciliatory tone here. The Washington Post reports that Trump "did not threaten other countries in the same way he had done in previous NATO meetings, according to five NATO diplomats and policymakers ..."
This is good news. While Trump is absolutely right to publicly pressure allies to spend more on defense, and has won significant spending increases as a result of this pressure, only Russia benefits where the United States is seen to question NATO's Article Five mutual defense clause. By avoiding that, Trump can leave this summit fairly claiming that he has advanced the need for greater burden sharing, but he has done so in the context of strengthening NATO's unity, not of making threats against allies.
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Having Turkey in NATO is almost as smart as having Iran in NATO.
OTOH
America wins again!
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/…/actually-the-nato-summ…
First off, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan backed away from a previous threat to block improved NATO support for the Baltic states and Poland. Until Wednesday, Erdogan had been holding out on this unless the alliance recognized the Kurdish YPG group in Syria — an ad hoc ally against the Islamic State in the recent war — as a terrorist organization. Instead, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda observed that the Baltic states and Poland had met with Erdogan and received his support. This is a positive development which suggests that Turkey might reconsider its increasing deference to Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader, after all, will be unhappy with Erdogan for backing NATO's Baltic security strategy.
Moreover, agreement on that security strategy is a big deal in and of itself. The primary threat to NATO's security envelope is a potential Russian blitzkrieg combined arms offensive into the Baltics or through Belarus into Poland. With the 29-member alliance now unified in upgrading its support to those nations — all of which responsibly meet the NATO defense spending target of 2% of GDP — Russia faces a new deterrent. This is not to say a Russian attack is likely, simply that its possibility demands a commensurate counterforce.
Another success is the continued agreement from allies to increase defense spending. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg served as Trump's allies here, pushing other members to meet that 2% target sooner. And in a noteworthy development, the Trump administration took a more conciliatory tone here. The Washington Post reports that Trump "did not threaten other countries in the same way he had done in previous NATO meetings, according to five NATO diplomats and policymakers ..."
This is good news. While Trump is absolutely right to publicly pressure allies to spend more on defense, and has won significant spending increases as a result of this pressure, only Russia benefits where the United States is seen to question NATO's Article Five mutual defense clause. By avoiding that, Trump can leave this summit fairly claiming that he has advanced the need for greater burden sharing, but he has done so in the context of strengthening NATO's unity, not of making threats against allies.
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Maybe Trump was right after all?
==========================
December 13, 2019 Open as PDF
Cracks Appear in the Turkey-Russia Partnership
By: Allison Fedirka
The contradictions in the Turkish-Russian relationship, which seemed on the surface to be blossoming in recent months, are beginning to show themselves. Any one of these signs of trouble on its own may not be important. However, when grouped together, they paint a gloomy picture of what may lie ahead for this bilateral relationship. As Turkey gains confidence and asserts itself more aggressively, countries will inevitably be forced to react. In the case of Russia, Turkey’s expansionary efforts make it evident that its days of pragmatic collaboration with Russia, particularly when it comes to security and foreign influence, will eventually reach an end. In Syria, Libya and Central Asia, the makings are underway for Turkey and Russia to be competitors more than collaborators.
Syria
Though the civil war in Syria forced Turkey and Russia to work together politically and on military operations, the two ultimately have different endgames. The nearer Syria’s civil war comes to its conclusion, the less compatible the agreed framework will be. Which regional powers gain influence over the different parts of post-war Syria will directly affect their ability to exert influence. The problem for Russia and Turkey is that they both want the same slice of the pie: northern Syria. Russia’s approach in Syria has been to increase its influence in the region by propping up the Assad government against its enemies, which include Turkey to Syria’s north. Turkey, meanwhile, recognizes that Russia and President Bashar Assad are not going away, but that northern Syria can be a buffer between them and itself.
Russia’s interest in supporting the Assad regime is twofold: to stabilize the region so that the volatility doesn’t spread to Central Asia and the Caucasus, and to maintain a relatively low-cost footprint in Syria (including a naval base at Tartus and a growing number of other military installations) such that it does not fall solidly under the influence of Turkey or Iran. Moscow does not seek direct control over Syria; it wants to be able to check any expansionary movements or migration of Syrians (especially former fighters and opposition members) to the Caucasus and other Russian territories. Turkey, however, has a more ambitious endgame, which includes direct power projection and territorial expansion into Syria. Ankara’s current buffer zone in Syria and its efforts to prevent Kurdish settlement in the area feed into Turkey’s long-term strategy to build a more permanent political influence and military presence to counter Russia, Iran and Assad.
Russia and Turkey’s relationships with two closely related militias – the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which falls under the YPG’s umbrella – are evidence of their competing interests over the fate of northern Syria. So far, Russia has been modestly successful in containing Turkey by limiting Ankara’s border corridor to the areas around the cities of Ras al Ayn and Tel Abyad (as opposed to the desired area totaling 112 square miles) and halving the number of repatriated refugees to 1 million. With the U.S. pulling out, Russia, in tandem with the Assad regime, has courted YPG/SDF fighters to join Assad’s ranks in support of the regime and against Turkey’s advance.
This puts Turkey in a difficult position. In the event Russia and the Assad regime are successful, the YPG/SDF alignment with Assad’s forces would essentially disband much of Turkey's “peace corridor” and thwart Turkey’s all-out attempt to destroy the YPG and its Turkish affiliate, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Based on a presentation by former U.S. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien at the Halifax International Security Forum, Turkey’s countermove to Russia’s efforts has been to support the sale of Syrian oil from the SDF-controlled oil fields, thereby enabling the SDF to pay the salaries of its fighters and undercutting Russia’s efforts to convince the SDF to swing over and support Assad.
Eastern Mediterranean
Turkey’s latest forays in the Eastern Mediterranean pose another point of competition with Russia, this time over offshore energy resources. Turkey recently asserted its influence over the Eastern Mediterranean by signing two agreements with the U.N.-backed Libyan Government of National Accord; one calls for military cooperation and the other demarcates maritime zones in which both parties exercise sovereignty. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has even gone so far as to float the possibility of Turkey sending troops to Libya to support the GNA as it battles for control of the country (and the latest agreement with Libya allows for this).
(click to enlarge)
Prior to the start of its civil war, the country was a major producer of oil. Libya’s land and sea holds an estimated 48 billion barrels of oil deposits, the most in Africa and 9th-most in the world. Right now, the GNA has control of oil revenues, while its opponent, the Libyan National Army led by Khalifa Haftar, controls most of the oil fields. The race to take advantage of postwar oil production has already begun, and foreign allies on each side are jostling for position. Russia certainly had as much in mind this year as it sent more soldiers and mercenaries to Libya to back Haftar’s forces. In a scenario where Libya is stable, European companies will want to increase their presence in Libya's oil industry, since it will be viewed as a reliable source of energy and an alternative to Russian oil. Russia’s presence in the country aims to ensure it gets a piece of the pie on the business end and will still have a hand in energy supplies to Europe even if they don’t directly come from Russia. A strong Russian presence also helps lay the groundwork for greater port access for Russian naval forces that pass through the Mediterranean.
While the idea of Turkish troops in Libya remains suspect – the Turkish military has its hands full in Syria – Turkey and Russia are clearly on opposing sides in Libya. The two countries will likely be able to sort out their differences in the immediate future. Russia does not want to escalate its foreign military ventures, and Turkey faces additional opposition to greater involvement in Libya from well-established rivals such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which will make Turkey think twice before acting.
Central Asia
While Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean are currently the two most active areas of growing competition between Russia and Turkey, there is the potential for Central Asia to join the list as well. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia managed to keep close economic and military ties with the region. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are both members of the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. Russia ranks among the top four export destinations for Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and serves as the first or second leading importer for those countries as well as Tajikistan. In addition, Russia’s prominence in the energy sector has allowed it to join many hydrocarbon production projects and related infrastructure in these countries. In terms of security and defense, Russia serves as the cornerstone for military hardware, training and organization for Central Asia. Russia maintains military bases in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and Russian troops and equipment have reinforced Tajik forces along the latter’s border with Afghanistan.
Turkey’s footprint in Central Asia pales in comparison to that of Russia and even China, whose increasing economic prowess has eroded Russia’s monopoly on the region. Nevertheless, Ankara’s growing interest and economic initiatives in the region do not go unnoticed and should not be underestimated. In the past, Turkey has contemplated the grand venture to revive the dream of a pan-Turkic project in which better ties with Central Asia would open to Turkey new opportunities for gas pipelines, military partnerships and even a buffer zone with Russia. Given the initial success in Syria and advancements in the Eastern Mediterranean, the thought of being able to act on such a project in Central Asia is not completely out of the realm of possibility. For now, however, Turkish involvement in the region is primarily economic in nature.
(click to enlarge)
Turkish companies have substantially increased their participation in the region. For example, as recently as 2016, Turkish companies had a negligible presence in Uzbekistan, but now there are more than 750 Turkish enterprises in the country. In Kazakhstan there are now roughly 2,200 Turkish enterprises, compared to 1,616 in 2013. Bilateral trade has also been on the rise. In January-October 2019, the volume of bilateral trade with Uzbekistan increased by 26.9 percent compared to the same period of 2018, up to $1.97 billion. Trade between Kazakhstan and Turkey from January-August 2019 increased by 63 percent ($782 million) compared to 2018, and totaled $2.01 billion. Also notable are Turkey’s gains in the Turkmen market, where Russia holds a smaller share than other countries in the region. Based on the limited statistics available, Turkey is Turkmenistan’s lead import partner, accounting for 30 percent of Turkmen imports compared to 10 percent from Russia. (Turkey also outranks Russia in exports). Security cooperation is fairly nonexistent, though Turkey and Kazakhstan did sign a military agreement that calls
for the exchange of officers at national defense universities for study. Right now, Turkey’s influence in Central Asia is still limited, but what’s notable is the speed with which Turkish economic engagement with this region is growing. While Russia likely remains fixated on Chinese encroachment, Turkey is now also creeping into its Central Asian backyard.
Black Sea and S-400s
And of course, no conversation on Russian-Turkish spheres of competition would be complete without addressing the Black Sea and Russia’s sale to Turkey of the S-400 air defense missile system. The Black Sea remains a historic battleground between Russia and Turkey. Turkish control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, which serve as a gateway for Russian grains and goods to the wider world, makes Russia permanently uneasy of its vulnerability. Erdogan recently poked the bear over this issue by suggesting that Turkey’s offshore hydrocarbon ambitions may not be limited to the Eastern Mediterranean but could also include the Black Sea. Such rhetoric is mostly political posturing given that both Russian and Turkish hydrocarbon exploration efforts in the Black Sea have not been commercially successful. While Turkey and Russia are permanently at odds over the Black Sea, the chances for confrontation remain negligible at this point. NATO has a strong interest – and accompanying naval presence – to contain Russia in the Black Sea. Any conflict there would risk drawing in the U.S. and European heavyweights, which is not something Russia wants to deal with. Turkey, meanwhile, benefits from the status quo.
(click to enlarge)
As for Turkey’s acquisition of the S-400 system from Russia, despite all the hype, the S-400 is far from a linchpin securing long-term Turkish-Russian ties. Since the 1980s, Turkey has made a concerted effort to develop its domestic military industry. This effort has grown in recent years, and it remains a greater priority for Turkey than stronger ties with Russia. However, Russia is more likely to freely share technology than the United States. Turkey’s agreement with Russia on the purchase of S-400s does include a partial transfer of production technologies to the customer. The U.S., on the other hand, resists technology transfers and often requires other conditional agreements for a major military purchase. Furthermore, Turkey has yet to conduct trial runs on the new system, and it is unclear how effectively it will operate in the Turkish climate (similar Russian systems experienced failures when used in Syria). There is also the fact that this system, and talks to acquire more from Russia, gives Turkey leverage in talks with the U.S., which is far more valuable to Turkey in the here and now than the S-400 itself. The same is true for the possible sale of Russian S-35 fighter jets in the event the U.S. definitively refuses to sell the F-35 to Turkey.
The signs of an eventual fallout in the Turkey-Russia relationship are already apparent. As Turkey continues to push its influence further abroad, it will naturally start to butt up against other countries that seek to preserve their own interests, especially if they run counter to Turkey’s agenda. For Moscow and Ankara, this means their ability to cooperate will grow increasingly constrained, and both countries will need to pursue their own paths, which will likely clash with the other.
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January 2, 2020 Open as PDF
George Friedman's Thoughts: A Speech in Istanbul
By: George Friedman
Turkey's decision to move its economic zone in the Eastern Mediterranean to abut Libya’s and then to announce that it was planning to send troops to support the embattled government in Libya has changed the shape of the Middle East. The Libyan government is under attack by a faction with strong Russian support and troops. If the troops are sent, Turkey will have broken with the Russians by having troops on the ground in Libya.
Russian and Iranian troops began fighting against Turkish supporters in Syria. The United States carried out airstrikes against Iranian targets in Iraq. With Turkey facing the Russians in Libya and Syria, along with Russia’s current ally, Iran, where this leaves Israel is for the moment unclear. Put simply, it seems as though the U.S.-Turkey alliance logically is about to reemerge. This could of course all reverse itself or change shape, but at the moment Turkey has assumed its historic role as a major regional power.
I was invited to speak in late November in Istanbul to update my predictions for Turkey from my book “The Next 100 Years.” I spoke, as I had a decade before, about the inevitable reemergence of Turkey as a great power. I had reached that conclusion using my then-evolving forecasting method. Two things convinced me of this. The first was history. Asia Minor has historically generated empires. The eastern remnant of the Roman Empire was based in Constantinople, named for the great Christian emperor Constantine and later changed to Istanbul. The Muslim Ottomans later seized Asia minor and created an empire that lasted 500 years.
The last 100 years had been freakish. Modern Istanbul had been the seat of an empire ever since the third century, but after World War I, the empire left Istanbul in the hands of the secularists. Turkey, a small and impoverished nation, was all that remained. From my point of view, the last 100 years was a minor disruption in Turkish power. As the British and French left, and the Americans reconsidered their presence, only Turkey was in the geopolitical position to stabilize the region. If Asia Minor was the historic seat of empire, then Turkey was inherently more powerful than its neighbors.
I made the speech based on my model, which I believed, and that I’m sure was the speech my hosts expected I would make. Turkey would extend its power northwest into the Balkans, north into the Black Sea, into the Caucasus and into the Arab world. In addition, I said Turkey would emerge as the dominant power in the Eastern Mediterranean, as it had before. After the establishment of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks made an alliance with the Christian city of Venice to dominate the Mediterranean. These were the rough boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, and before that of the Eastern Roman Empire.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gave the keynote address after my speech. Obviously he made no mention of his intentions in the Mediterranean, but he was strong and passionate in what he said. I had pleasant dinners and meetings with many people, some of whom had to know that Erdogan had already decided on a Mediterranean strategy. Quite reasonably no one mentioned it to me. I had not at all thought that he would begin with a leap into Libya, confronting the Russians and attempting to take control of Libyan oil and the deposits around Cyprus.
My speech was just a speech with my forecast, of no consequence beyond possibly letting senior officials start to think in terms of what was coming. But what it made me see is how much clearer the necessary course of history is from a distance. I could not know Erdogan’s next move. I could know that in due time a Turkish ruler would begin the process of expanding Turkish power. I also knew that the growth of power is not intended but develops from necessity. The United States did not intend in 1938 to occupy Western Europe. It came of small steps toward war, and small steps through the war. Empire falls to those who take care of their next step, and not to those who have dreams of greatness. The dreams come after the achievement.
Such is the case with Turkey. Caught between the Russian intervention in Syria and the long-running U.S. intervention in Iraq, Turkey sought to avoid being dragged into its ally’s war and did not attempt to block Russia when it knew it couldn’t. Turkey pursued an extremely cautious course, not allowing its forces to cross its borders in any significant way. Over time the region became more complex. Iran created an area of control to the Mediterranean, the Israelis attacked it, and the U.S. crippled its economy. The Russians engaged in some adventurism such as in Libya, where its presence was noted, although the weakness of this presence was generally ignored. The Americans railed about the S-400s but not to the extent of rupturing ties with Turkey or of giving up Incirlik air base. The Turks criticized the U.S. for supporting the Kurds in northern Syria. The regional system did not become peaceful but moved into gridlock.
Turkey needs oil that it can control. The Mediterranean would yield some in time, but Libya has it now. The gridlock in the region opened the door, and its need for energy compelled Turkey through the door in a move that should not have surprised me. It would not have surprised me in 10 years, but it did now. It was a move that tended toward reclaiming the Ottomans' sea, and which opens the door to North Africa. Erdogan undoubtedly sensed the significance of what he was doing, but like any founder of an empire, his focus was on the next small move.
He may not ultimately succeed. The Russians do not want their proxies defeated. But the Russians also cannot afford to alienate Turkey, because Turkey can hurt Russia in the Caucasus, the Black Sea and even the Balkans. Plus, treaties or not, Russia needs the Bosporus. Is Libya worth a Russian rupture with Turkey? The United States is focused on undermining Iran in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon and creating an internal crisis in Iran through successful sanctions. Turkey is hostile to the Syrian government and may be prepared to engage the Iranians. Greek and Israeli interests in the Mediterranean have to be secondary to dealing with Libya. Whatever the Russians or Americans say, the Turkish move does not threaten fundamental interests, and both want to be allied with Turkey.
The complexity can go on and on. I haven’t begun to talk about Israel and the Saudis, the Albanians and the Serbs, or Turkey and Azerbaijan. The Turkish move touches on all of these, some heavily, but for the most part, the cost of reversing the Turkish move seems higher than they are likely to play. There is also the question of actually getting troops to Libya and finding them bogged down in an endless war.
Turkey has announced its intentions, and it is likely going to carry them out. But then the complexity of being a great power will start to strike. For every successful move it will encounter complexity upon complexity. But I regarded Turkey as an emerging power precisely because the culture it inherited takes complexity for granted on the smallest things, as well as on great acts of statecraft. I have seen Turks analyze something I have said, extracting meanings I never had and relationships I never heard of. A good discussion with a Turk allows you to be surprised at yourself and left in complete doubt about him. From where I sit, the Turkish move was carefully planned, and while I hope our own intelligence agencies knew what was coming, I certainly didn’t, even though I spoke on it.
My job (self-appointed) is to create a method that allows you to sketch out the future. It is a hard job, and the pay is poor. The most difficult part of the job is getting listeners to distinguish between what you believe will happen and what you want to happen. Many times I have been viewed as an advocate rather than as a disinterested bystander. The danger is that I will be seduced not by a country but rather by my hunger to be right in my forecast. If I did that I would falsify my core thesis about history moving on its own. I am saved from this conundrum by the fact that I have no influence anywhere. But I do sometimes wind up close to an event that confirms my forecast, but to which I am blind at the moment.
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The Regional Ambitions Impelling Turkey to Send Troops to Libya
7 MINS READ
Jan 3, 2020 | 10:30 GMT
Members of Turkey's parliament pass legislation approving a deployment of Turkish troops to Libya on Jan. 2, 2020.
Members of Turkey's parliament vote to send Turkish troops to Libya on Jan. 2. Turkey's strategy of advancing its economic and foreign policy interests via greater involvement in Libya carries a risk of mission creep.
(ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
Turkey's strategy of advancing its economic and foreign policy interests via greater involvement in Libya carries a significant risk of mission creep....
Editor's Note: This assessment is part of a series of analyses supporting Stratfor's 2020 Annual Forecast. These assessments are designed to provide more context and in-depth analysis of key developments over the next quarter and throughout the year.
Turkey faces the risk of mission creep as it increases its involvement and investment in Libya. For the second time in four months, Turkey is planning a controversial military deployment in an Arab country now that Libya's internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA) has requested air, land and sea support from Ankara to help defend Tripoli.
Increased military support from Turkey would certainly help the GNA and the militias trying to turn back an offensive on Tripoli by Khalifa Hifter's self-styled Libyan National Army (LNA) backed by Russian mercenaries and Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, though why Turkey would even consider deploying forces to Tripoli to protect the feeble GNA might perplex some outsiders. The answer is that Ankara must protect the government in Tripoli if it wants to fulfill its regional ambitions.
The Big Picture
Turkey's parliament approved President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's request to send military support, including combat troops, to Libya to prop up the Government of National Accord (GNA), which is facing an existential threat from an offensive by Khalifa Hifter and his self-styled Libyan National Army. The potential installation of a Hifter-led government in Tripoli backed by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates threatens Erdogan's regional ambitions for Turkey, prompting Turkey to deem deployments necessary — at the risk of mission creep.
See Turkey's Resurgence
But increased involvement in Libya comes at great risk: An increased Turkish presence will not win the war for the GNA, and Hifter's foreign backers will undoubtedly increase their support for him. Turkey risks becoming the GNA's only lifeline, and if it does not increase its support, the GNA could well fall — giving rise to a significant risk that Turkey could be drawn into a quagmire.
A Turkish Foreign Policy Shift
Over the past decade, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) have sought to shift Ankara's foreign policy from deepening ties with the European Union (and even NATO) toward a larger role in the Middle East and North Africa, and the larger Muslim world.
The fall of autocratic governments like that of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya during the 2011 Arab Spring presented Ankara with an opportunity to pursue this foreign policy shift. Erdogan and the AKP wasted little time in doing so, supporting Islamist political groups — like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Justice and Construction Party in Libya — closely aligned ideologically with the AKP's populist and grassroots-driven brand of Sunni Islam.
Turkish efforts to restore its historic status in the Muslim world plus the rise of Islamist political groups, however, greatly perturbed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which see Turkey as encroaching on their traditional sphere of influence. Turkish economic, political and military might could effectively curb Emirati and Saudi influence in the region, and Islamist groups that Turkey supports and the democracy it promotes pose an existential threat to Gulf monarchies. A collision course between Abu Dhabi and Riyadh on one side and Ankara on the other thus became inevitable when Turkey decided to become more active in the Arab world.
A Map Showing the Balance of Power Between Turkey and Saudi Arabia in the Middle East.
Despite Turkish support, Islamist governments in the region have faltered. In Egypt, Mohammed Morsi lasted barely a year as president, and his Muslim Brotherhood is now banned. Under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Cairo is now firmly in the Saudi and Emirati-led camp against Turkey. In Tunisia, the Islamist Ennahda party has seen its share of votes decline by nearly 50 percent since 2011 and has been forced to become more moderate to participate in coalition governments. Turkish efforts to support Ennahda triggered intense blowback from Tunisia's liberal and secular political parties and media. To the south in traditionally more Islamist-friendly Sudan, the Islamist government of Omar al Bashir fell in 2019, and the country is now closely aligning itself with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh. Meanwhile, in Libya, although the Muslim Brotherhood clings to power in Tripoli via the GNA despite being routed in 2014 parliamentary elections, the Islamists still play only a minor role in the GNA's overall support base.
Protecting Turkish Interests in Libya
Turkey's ability to project influence through Islamist groups in North Africa is waning, with Libya perhaps its last opportunity to do so. It will struggle to do so, however, given the seemingly bottomless financial, arms, equipment and air support enjoyed by the LNA. The GNA has not received anything like the support the LNA has, prompting Erdogan to step in lest the GNA collapse.
A map showing which factions control what territory in Libya.
Were the GNA to collapse and Hifter to install his own government, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would enjoy yet another strong ideological and military partner. For its part, Turkey would almost certainly lose all its economic ties to Libya, given that the pro-Hifter House of Representatives in Tobruk has banned Turkish contractors from working in Tripoli.
Turkey has significant economic and cultural ties to Libya. It's estimated that Turkish businesses are owed more than $15 billion in unpaid debts in Libya. They are also eyeing Libya's potentially lucrative eventual reconstruction once the civil war ends. Unlike in Syria, Libya has vast oil and natural gas wealth plus roughly $67 billion in assets currently frozen by the Libyan Investment Authority with which to finance its reconstruction. In addition, more than half the population of the powerful merchant city of Misrata — including many prominent figures involved in the current Libyan civil war — have Ottoman ancestry and maintain significant economic ties to Turkey.
Turkey's increased involvement in Libya may be the only way for it to keep its regional strategy alive.
Moreover, as a part of a November defense agreement, Turkey and the GNA signed a second deal delineating a maritime border between the two countries, giving Turkey a rare ally in the eastern Mediterranean. Although the maritime border agreement runs counter to international maritime law, which states that two countries cannot negotiate a maritime border that infringes on another country's claims without involving the third country, this deal purports to give Turkey expanded claims near the Greek island of Crete.
Turkey can cite the agreement as justification for oil and gas exploration projects in the area and exploit increased legal ambiguity to stymie the proposed eastern Mediterranean pipeline project. The pipeline project, backed by Cyprus, Egypt, Greece and Israel, aims to take natural gas produced in Cyprus, Egypt and Israel and export it to Europe via Greece.
The eastern Mediterranean pipeline increases Turkey's incentive to keep the GNA alive. Turkey argues that any energy exploration in Cypriot-claimed waters must be done in cooperation with the Turkish-recognized government of northern Cyprus. At least on paper, its maritime deal with Libya essentially would block a pipeline directly between Greek- and Egyptian- and/or Cypriot-claimed waters, since the pipeline would pass through waters claimed by either Libya or Turkey. This added legal complication could give Turkey de facto veto power over any eastern Mediterranean pipeline to Europe. Were the GNA to fall, however, Hifter and his allies would reverse the decision. Risks aside, Turkey's increased involvement in Libya may be the only way for it to keep its regional strategy alive.
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erdogan
should be nicknamed the Ottoman
erdogen the ottoman
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Indeed. George Friedman (formerly Stratfor, now GPF) call this clearly years ago.
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January 10, 2020 Open as PDF
TurkStream: A New Route to Europe for Russian Gas
By: GPF Staff
(click to enlarge)
Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched the TurkStream gas pipeline at a ceremony in Istanbul also attended by Serbian President Aleksander Vucic and Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov. TurkStream's two strings will deliver Russian gas to two different markets: the Turkish domestic market and countries in southeastern Europe. It will also enable Russia to reduce gas exports through Ukraine and compete with other projects like the Trans-Anatolian pipeline, which will bring Azerbaijani natural gas to Europe through Turkey. Kyiv has said that it has already felt the impact of TurkStream; Russian gas exports destined for Bulgaria, for example, are now bypassing Ukraine and being delivered through Turkey.
According to Ukrainian estimates, the pipeline will decrease gas transit through Ukraine by 15 billion cubic meters in 2020.
Still, Russia’s Gazprom won’t be able to fully realize the benefits of the new pipeline just yet. Exports through the first string will depend on Turkish demand, which may be limited by energy supplies from other sources like Azerbaijan. And construction of some parts of the second string has been delayed. In addition, the project may be subject to U.S. sanctions, according to the 2020 defense budget passed by Congress last month.
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In Turkey, the Road to Proliferation Goes Through a Military Base
6 MINS READ
Jan 21, 2020 | 09:30 GMT
Aircraft prepare to take off from Turkey's Incirlik Air Base, home of Turkey's 10th Tanker Base Command, on Oct. 17, 2019.
For the United States, the military fallout of having to leave Incirlik Air Base might not be too severe -- unlike the political ramifications.
(IBRAHIM ERIKAN/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
HIGHLIGHTS
Turkey has threatened to expel the United States from key bases in Turkey if their bilateral ties deteriorate further amid possible U.S. sanctions against Ankara.
While the loss of the Incirlik and Kurecik facilities in Turkey would be disruptive to Washington, it could find alternative locations elsewhere in the region.
The biggest ramification of such an expulsion could be that it prompts Turkey to pursue a nuclear weapons program.
The United States has troops scattered at bases throughout the Middle East, but few are as significant today as its facilities in Turkey — at least in terms of their political significance, if not their military function. Last month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to retaliate against any U.S. sanctions on Turkey by, among other measures, expelling the United States from Incirlik Air Base and closing down the Kurecik radar base. From an American military standpoint, losing Incirlik and Kurecik wouldn't be the end of the world, as Washington could easily find alternative locations elsewhere in the Middle East. However an explusion, if it happens, could have far-reaching consequences, potentially even precipitating a Turkish nuclear arms program — which could touch off a race for atomic weapons around the region.
The Big Picture
A potential fissure between Turkey, a powerful member of NATO, and the United States could pave the way for a complete transformation of the geopolitical map in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean — particularly in the event of one of the most radical potential outcomes: Turkey's pursuit of a nuclear weapon.
See Turkey's Resurgence
A Base With a Long History
Incirlik has been synonymous with the U.S. military presence in Turkey since the start of the Cold War. The United States initially used the air base, which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built near the Mediterranean coast in the early 1950s, to conduct strategic reconnaissance missions and other intelligence operations against the Soviet Union and its allies before turning the facility into a key air transportation and training site. More recently, Incirlik provided a base for aerial refueling during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and a stopover for U.S. troops rotating home from the Iraq war. Today, Incirlik is the main U.S. base for air missions against the Islamic State. Kurecik, meanwhile, was established in 2012 in eastern Anatolia, deploying the AN/TPY-2 radar as part of NATO's early-warning system against potential Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Europe.
Given the importance of Incirlik and Kurecik, the United States would be loath to lose the bases — especially as the country is struggling to continue its fight against the Islamic State at a time when it is facing potential expulsion from Iraq, which would complicate any efforts to maintain its presence in Syria. What's more, tensions with Iran are hardly subsiding, raising the importance of the wider ballistic missile defense network protecting Europe.
Even so, Incirlik and Kurecik are not irreplaceable. The United States has numerous allies in the Middle East that would be happy to offer up air bases as alternatives, including Jordan, from which U.S. aircraft would be only marginally farther from the areas in Syria that are within the immediate proximity of Incirlik. Washington also has alternatives in Europe, such as Greece, which is already negotiating with the United States to expand the U.S. Air Force presence there. As for Kurecik, the United States could mitigate its loss by conducting additional patrols with destroyers armed with ballistic missile defenses in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea until another replacement site is built in Eastern Europe.
Nuclear Fallout
The fallout of the loss of the bases, instead, would be more political. If Turkey kicks the United States out, for instance, the countries' fissure would almost certainly widen. More pertinent, however, is the nuclear question. Throughout the Cold War and since, Washington has managed to kill two birds with one stone. It has both extended nuclear deterrence to NATO allies like Turkey by protecting it with the B61 U.S. nuclear bombs stationed at Incirlik and, in the process, countered nuclear proliferation by dissuading partners like Turkey from pursuing their own nuclear weapons programs.
Ankara might well calculate that, in the event of a de facto divorce from the United States and the potential emergence of more nuclear powers in the neighborhood, the pros of atomic weapons outweigh the cons.
While there is some doubt as to how up to date Turkey's fighter pilots are with their training and ability to deploy these weapons (the United States could allow Turkish fighter jets to arm themselves with some of the approximately 50 nuclear bombs currently at Incirlik if an outside power ever seriously threatened the country with atomic weapons), there is little doubt that the presence of the weapons in Turkey gives Ankara strong reassurance about its wider security. By taking away the nuclear umbrella, however, Washington could spur Ankara to pursue its own atomic weapons, especially at a time when Turkey is at loggerheads with Israel (a nuclear power), Iran could restart its own nuclear program and Saudi Arabia has floated the idea of developing its own bomb too. As it is, Erdogan has long criticized the notion that nuclear-armed states would deign to forbid Turkey from obtaining its own nuclear weapons.
Without question, Turkey would come under significant economic and political pressure if it were to push ahead with any plans to develop its own nuclear deterrent, but Ankara might well calculate that, in the event of a de facto divorce from the United States and the potential emergence of more nuclear powers in the neighborhood, the pros of an atomic weapons program outweigh the cons. Naturally, such a decision would have other severe ramifications; for one, NATO could expel Turkey from the alliance, while it could also galvanize other countries, such as Greece, to pursue their own programs, thereby further destabilizing the region's fragile balance.
More broadly, the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Incirlik during a messy, U.S.-Turkish breakup could drive other U.S. allies under the American nuclear umbrella to question the long-term viability of their own special arrangements with Washington. The circumstances of the U.S. withdrawal of nuclear weapons from Incirlik might not stain the United States' reliability, but it could feed into increasing calls for nuclear self-autonomy in places like South Korea that are facing a growing nuclear threat amid worries about the future of the American military presence in their country. What this all suggests is that what happens at Incirlik isn't likely to stay at Incirlik.
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second post
Erdoğan's 'Make-Turkey-More-Islamic' Campaign Is a Failure
by Burak Bekdil
The Gatestone Institute
January 15, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60310/erdogans-make-turkey-more-islamic-campaign
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By: GPF Staff
Another crack in the Turkey-Russia alliance. Speaking alongside Ukraine’s president, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan emphasized Turkey’s support for Ukraine’s territorial integrity and denounced Russia's annexation of Crimea. Though Ankara’s position on the matter has long been clear, the statement itself is measuredly provocative in that it comes at the heels of a falling out between the two over the fight for Syria’s Idlib province. Meanwhile, the United States expressed its support for Turkey there as it fights the Syrian government. As tensions between Russia and Turkey rise, there is more opportunity for the U.S. to stand in solidarity with Ankara, which Washington still needs as an ally in the region
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Idlib attacks and counterattacks. After a Syrian bombardment on Monday that killed five Turkish soldiers and wounded five more in Idlib province, Syria, Turkey vowed retaliation. Later that day, Turkish forces shelled 115 targets in Idlib, and Ankara said it had killed 101 Syrian soldiers while destroying three tanks and two artillery pieces. Turkey on Tuesday shot down a Syrian helicopter in Nayrab, killing the two pilots and compelling Bashar Assad’s forces to withdraw from the township. However, the Assad regime has been making moves as well. Regime forces took over the M5 highway linking Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama to Idlib city, a strategic roadway that had been under rebel control since 2012. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed that Syria will pay “a heavy price” for its advance in Idlib and has warned Iran and Russia to end their support for the Assad regime. Russia, meanwhile, has called for all attacks on Syrian and Russian forces to stop at once, urging Turkey to implement the Sochi and Astana peace agreements. While Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin will hold a phone call to discuss de-escalation on Tuesday, talks between diplomatic and military delegations have been fruitless. NATO has condemned the attack on Turkish troops but has mostly concentrated its statements on Russian and Syrian airstrikes on civilian areas, withholding direct mention or words of support for NATO member Turkey. The United States has dispatched a midlevel diplomat and a delegation to Ankara.
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Some really important maps in the original, too bad they do not print here!
Ukraine and Turkey: The Foundations of a Strategic Partnership
By: Ridvan Bari Urcosta
Last week, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky met with his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in Kyiv. During the visit, Erdogan promised to strengthen military and economic cooperation with Ukraine and emphasized his support for the Crimean Tatars. After all, Crimea has long been central to Turkey’s relationship with Ukraine.
Another key factor in this relationship is a common adversary: Russia. Ankara has sought to use Ukraine and its long-standing connections there to its advantage as it engages with Moscow. Erdogan’s trip to Kyiv happened to coincide with a recent shift in Turkey-Russia relations, particularly in Syria, where the two countries appear to be getting closer to a potential confrontation in Idlib, and in Libya, where they support opposing sides in the civil war. Erdogan knows that Ukraine is an especially sensitive issue for the Kremlin, which sees a partnership between its critical buffer to the west and its historical rival to the south as a threat to its strategic interests in the Black Sea. By building closer ties to Kyiv, Ankara sees an opportunity to block Russian expansion in a strategic region historically known as the Pontic Steppe.
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Turkey’s Interests in the Pontic Steppe
At its peak, the Ottoman Empire stretched from the Atlas Mountains in the west to the Zagros Mountains and the Persian Gulf in the east, and to the Balkans and the Caucasus in the north. Former Ottoman territories still play a large role in contemporary Turkish foreign policy, particularly in Erdogan’s ambitious agenda to re-establish Turkish influence in the Persian Gulf, Levant, Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. As GPF forecast, Turkey has already begun to expand its presence in some of these areas, but while its involvement in places like Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean has garnered much attention of late, its relationship with Ukraine seems to have been mostly overlooked.
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Crimea is at the heart of Turkey’s engagement with Ukraine. Beginning in 1475, the Crimean Peninsula came under Ottoman rule, though it still had some autonomy. The Crimean Khanate was useful to the Ottomans as a bulwark against the Russians in the Black Sea for three centuries. With the Ottomans’ help, the khanate controlled strategically important chokepoints in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. These chokepoints are still an integral part of modern-day Turkey’s geopolitical strategy and are crucial in understanding Turkey’s quest to expand its influence north. The Ottomans also controlled three regions north of Crimea that now belong to Ukraine: Odessa, Nikolayev and Kherson. When the Ottoman Empire lost the Crimean Khanate in 1783, it was forced to retreat from many other theaters, particularly the Caucasus and the Pontic Steppe. The Russian Empire then took over these areas that had been occupied by the Turkic people for centuries.
Following the Russo-Crimean Wars in the 16th century, competition between the Ottomans and Russia in Crimea expanded. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, Crimea was officially handed over to the Russians with the signing of the 1774 Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, regarded as a watershed moment marking the beginning of the Ottoman Empire’s protracted decline. After years of revolt against Russian rule, the Russian Empire annexed Crimea in 1783 and began to Slavicize Crimea and the surrounding areas. (Interestingly, Russia’s revival of the Novorossiya, or New Russia, concept in 2014 included claims to the Pontic Steppe. Russia used this concept to justify its incursion into Donbass in eastern Ukraine, though Novorossiya extends beyond Donbass to include Kharkov to the north and Odessa to the west.)
Russia had realized that without destroying the Crimean Khanate, it would have been nearly impossible to carry out military operations deep into the Balkans because the Turks and Crimean Tatars would have been able to sever Russian communications and lines of supply in central Ukraine. With Crimea under Russian control, Russian expansionism was formidable and could be stopped only with the emergence of the Russian Revolution in 1917. The Russian Empire thus expanded in two directions: into the Caucasus and into the Balkans.
For Turkey, the loss of Crimea once again reinforced the geostrategic importance of the Pontic Steppe (present-day Ukraine). Though Russia has failed to regain control of much of this area, it has managed to bring Crimea under its jurisdiction, which Turkey will inevitably see as a threat to its security. Turkey’s strategy in Ukraine, therefore, has been to support not just the Crimean Tatar nation but also Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity. So long as the Tatars – who, for the most part, opposed Russian annexation and pledged their support to Kyiv – remain a factor in Crimea, Ankara will have some degree of influence on the peninsula.
Turkey-Ukraine Relations After 2014
Russian President Vladimir Putin once called the Soviet Union’s collapse “a major geopolitical disaster.” And it’s not hard to see why. Russia had lost access to Crimea’s strategic ports, controlled just a small portion of the Black Sea coast and required access to the Turkish-controlled Bosporus just to be able to conduct maritime trade beyond the Black Sea. Turkey, on the other hand, had superior naval forces, control over strategic waterways (namely, the Turkish Straits), and more sovereignty over a larger portion of the Black Sea coast than any other country in the region. Suffice it to say, Turkey was satisfied with this state of affairs.
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That is, until 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. Since then, Moscow’s position in the Black Sea has strengthened, and the possibility of confrontation between Turkey and Russia in the Black Sea has intensified. Indeed, without control of Crimea, Russia likely would not have been able to conduct military and naval operations in its Syrian campaign through the Eastern Mediterranean. Turkey was alarmed over the rapid geopolitical developments in the region and expressed its support for Ukrainian territorial integrity from the very beginning of the Ukraine crisis, even sending then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to Kyiv for talks in early 2014. To this day, it has not recognized Crimea as part of Russia and maintains close relations with the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People, a body that represents Crimean Tatars and was banned by Russia in 2016. Turkey and Ukraine have also expanded military cooperation; they held joint naval exercises in the Black Sea in March 2016, just a few months after Turkey’s downing of a Russian military jet near the Syrian border. For Ankara, showing that it has a presence in Russia’s critical buffer is a way of increasing pressure on Moscow.
However, military cooperation between the two countries goes back further than 2014. In fact, Turkey has some of the closest ties to Ukraine’s defense industry of any NATO member. Ukraine’s state-owned defense firm Ukroboronprom has collaborated with Turkish companies Hevelsan, ASELSAN and Roketsan, among others. Last year, the two countries set up a joint venture focused on precision weapons and aerospace technologies. They also participated in joint projects to create An-188 and An-178 military transport aircraft, active defense systems for armored vehicles and radar systems. In 2019, Ukraine acquired Turkish-made Bayraktar TB2 drones, armed with high-precision MAM-L bombs purchased from Roketsan. Ukrainian experts are expected to help Turkey develop a new, indigenously built battle tank. They even discussed collaborating on corvettes and surface-to-air missiles. One could argue that Turkey is using Ukraine to sidestep collaborating with Russian defense companies and also to bolster its own defense industry to reduce its dependence on NATO. In the process, the Ukrainian defense sector, which was hurt by the complete disengagement with the Russians, is also benefiting from collaborating with a NATO member, bringing its industry into line with NATO standards.
Economic cooperation has also been growing. During last week’s meeting, Erdogan and Zelensky agreed to complete talks on a free trade agreement, negotiations for which began under former President Petro Poroshenko. Zelensky appears ready to sign a trade deal, even though the benefits to Ukraine, as the weaker of the two economies, are still uncertain. With a deal in place, the two countries hope to bring trade turnover to $10 billion. Turkey also promised to give Ukraine $36 million in military support. Zelensky, in return, promised to help Erdogan on security issues, instructing Ukraine’s Security Service to look into Ukrainian educational centers linked to Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, who Erdogan has accused of orchestrating a coup attempt against him.
In an effort to attract more foreign capital, Zelensky has said he wants to lift a moratorium on farmland sales, raising the issue last year during a speech in Istanbul. (The Ukrainian parliament has since passed a bill that would allow the sale of land to foreigners, except Russian citizens and corporations, beginning in 2024.) Ukraine has also welcomed the Trans-Anatolian pipeline project, which could bring natural gas from Azerbaijan via Turkey to Ukraine, as well as other parts of Europe. Alternative sources of energy are becoming increasingly important as Russia becomes more reluctant to deliver energy to Turkey and Europe via pipelines that pass through Ukraine, such as the Trans-Balkan pipeline.
In addition, Crimea has continued to play a key role in Ukraine-Turkey relations. As part of Turkey’s quest to promote the concept of Neo-Ottomanism, Turkish officials have emphasized the historical and ancestral links between Turkey and the Crimean Tatars. Former Foreign Minister Davutoglu even regularly met with leaders from the Crimean Tatar community. Before 2014, this may have irritated Kyiv, but since the Russian annexation, Crimean Tatar representatives have been included in delegations on official visits. As Davutoglu once put it, Crimea is now considered “a bridge of friendship” between the two countries.
Turkey is also the top trade partner for the three regions of Ukraine north of Crimea: Odessa, Nikolayev and Kherson (all part of the Pontic Steppe). And Turkish ally Qatar recently won a bid to develop Olvia port in Nikolayev region, which will be the biggest foreign investment in a Ukrainian port in history.
Immediately after Crimea’s annexation, Turkey and the Crimean Tatars asked Kyiv for permission to build ethnic settlements in Kherson (once part of the Crimean Khanate) for Tatars who had fled Crimea. Poroshenko avoided making a decision on the issue, but Zelensky has pledged his support. Russia will likely stir up anti-Tatar sentiments among locals there to try to convince them to oppose it.
There are between 1 million and 3 million Crimean Tatars in Turkey, most of whom tend to be pro-Ukraine. Erdogan, therefore, has a political incentive to woo the region. In 2017, he spoke with Putin on behalf of two Crimean Tatar leaders who were jailed for opposing the annexation. And recently, Zelensky asked Erdogan to intervene in a case over Crimean Tatars convicted on extremism charges after Russian authorities accused them of being followers of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that has been banned in Russia.
In addition to political, economic and military links, the two countries have religious connections. In 2019, the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople approved the official decree splitting the Orthodox Church of Ukraine from Russia. Erdogan has declined to comment on religious issues in Ukraine but has met with Bartholomew I of Constantinople, who signed the decree.
It’s worth noting, however, that within the Ukrainian political elite, there is some concern over Turkey’s true intentions and loyalties, especially considering that Ankara has not joined the West in applying sanctions against Russia over Crimea. Ukraine has viewed with suspicion the budding relationship between Putin and Erdogan, which continues despite their countries' disagreements. When Ukraine hoped to import liquefied natural gas through the Black Sea to reduce its reliance on Russian energy, Turkey refused passage of LNG tankers through the Turkish Straits. Turkey has meanwhile kept the straits open to Russian warships that could be used to threaten Ukraine. However, Kyiv hopes the proposed new Istanbul Canal may be blocked for Russian naval ships since, according to Ukraine, it won’t be governed by the Montreux Convention, which regulates transit through the Turkish Straits.
Both countries have benefited from military cooperation and continue to pursue economic ties, including the proposed free trade deal. Turkey sees Ukraine as a key part of its goal to restore its once overwhelmingly dominant position in the Black Sea, and Ukraine sees Turkey as a counterbalance to Russian influence and leverage in the Black Sea. Their relationship is driven by their own strategic interests. So long as they need allies in the Black Sea, they will look to each other as strategic partners.
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https://clarionproject.org/turkey-gives-american-weapons-to-al-qaeda/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=e31b437456-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_02_16_02_35&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-e31b437456-6358189&mc_cid=e31b437456
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Turkey Nearly Killed Off Its Own Air Force
by Michael Peck
The National Interest
February 10, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60437/turkey-nearly-killed-off-its-own-air-force
Fighter pilots aren't cheap. The U.S. Air Force estimates that training a new pilot to fly a plane like the F-35 costs $11 million. And that doesn't count the priceless experience of a veteran pilot who has been flying for years. That's why the U.S. Air Force is willing to offer half-million-dollar bonuses to retain experienced fighter pilots.
So a nation that throws its fighter pilots in jail is not just wasting money, but also an extremely valuable resource. Yet in the name of politics, Turkey's government has purged its air force so badly that it can barely fly its F-16 fighters.
The trouble began on July 15, 2016, when members of Turkey's military "allegedly" launched a coup to topple the Islamist government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The word allegedly is used for a reason. Despite being pros at overthrowing civilian governments (with four successful coups between 1960 and 1997), the 2016 effort was laughable. Soldiers attempted to isolate Istanbul by erecting roadblocks on the Bosporus Bridge—but only blocked the lanes in one direction. YouTube video showed soldiers with Leopard tanks surrendering to police and civilians. As Erdogan was flying back to Istanbul from vacation, two Turkish Air Force F-16s had his aircraft in their sights—but failed to shoot it down.
And the vaunted Turkish military was supposed to be NATO's Cold War southern bulwark against the Soviets? If so, it's a wonder that the Kremlin never seized the Bosporus.
All of which had skeptics wondering whether the coup was actually a false-flag operation by the Turkish government, aimed at providing (or provoking) an excuse to quash secular Turkish generals and covert followers of exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen. Either way, the coup fizzled in less than an hour, and then Erdogan's government took its revenge.
Numerous senior and field-grade officers were purged. More than 300 F-16 pilots were dismissed. This defanged the Turkish military as a political threat, and strengthened the increasingly authoritarian rule of Erdogan and his neo-Ottoman Justice and Development Party, which has imprisoned many journalists. But it left a gaping question: who would be left to fly Turkey's jet fighters?
With war raging in Syria, and Turkish forces grabbing parts of northern Syria, Turkey's military is keeping busy (including an F-16 that shot down a Russian plane over Syria—the Turkish pilot who did it was one of those purged). It hardly seems a propitious time to decimate your pilot cadre.
The Turkish government has been looking overseas to make up the shortfall. However, Washington has rebuffed a request to send over U.S. flight instructors, though Turkish pilots are receiving basic flight training in the United States. Turkey has also sought assistance from Pakistan—which also flies F-16s—though training Turkish pilots could violate U.S. arms export rules. In a sign of desperation, "the Turkish government has issued a decree that threatens 330 former pilots with the revocation of their civil pilot license, unless they return to Air Force duty for four years," notes an Atlantic Council report.
"It is unclear how the decision to compel a return to service will impact unit morale," the report added.
Now, enter Russia—a traditional enemy of Turkey for centuries, and one of whose jets was shot down by the Turks over Syria. Yet Turkey is seeking to buy Russia's S-400 long-range anti-aircraft missiles, which only ratchets up tensions between Washington and Ankara over Syria and other issues.
Turkey has also signed an agreement with Franco-Italian missile maker Eurosam to develop a long-range anti-aircraft missile. And why is Turkey suddenly so interested in surface-to-air missiles? "In aftermath of 15 July, with the operations against the Turkish Armed Forces, there was a reduction in the number of F-16 pilots, creating a need to develop our air defense," said Turkish analyst Verda Ozer. "This is the reason for the S-400 purchase."
But even the S-400 wouldn't totally solve Turkey's air defense travails. "Since the Russian S-400 system cannot be integrated into NATO infrastructure, it cannot be used to protect against missile defense," Ozer notes. Hence, Turkey needs two systems: the S-400 to shoot down hostile aircraft, and a Eurosam weapon to intercept ballistic missiles.
Perhaps it would have been easier not to get rid of those F-16 pilots.
Michael Peck, a Middle East Forum writing fellow, is a defense and historical writer based in Oregon. His work has appeared in Foreign Policy, WarIsBoring, and many other fine publications.
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February 19, 2020 View On Website
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Erdogan Talks Tough but Proceeds With Caution
By: Hilal Khashan
Shortly after Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister of Turkey in 2003, his minister of foreign affairs, Ahmet Davutoglu, said Turkey would embark on a “zero problems policy” with its neighbors. His remarks came after Turkey had pursued European Union membership for years to no avail.
Even before Erdogan’s Justice and Development party, or AKP, rose to power, Turkish prime ministers in the 1990s realized that Turkey stood no chance of becoming part of the European Community. In 1997, Turkish Prime Minister and leader of the Islamist Welfare Party Necmettin Erbakan founded the Organization for Economic Cooperation, which included eight Muslim countries, after seemingly giving up on EU membership. Even secularist prime ministers like Mesut Yilmaz and Tansu Ciller gave up hope of ever joining the bloc, and their skepticism appears well founded. In 2002, former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing said many European politicians privately believed that “Turkey must never be allowed to join the EU.”
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Turkish leaders have instead chosen to pursue stronger relations with Turkey’s Middle East neighbors. In 2009, Bashar Assad said he considered Turkey Syria’s best friend; Erdogan responded by recognizing Assad as a brother. In 2010, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi awarded Erdogan his international prize for human rights. After the 2011 Arab uprisings, Erdogan believed that Turkey’s moment had arrived with the rise of Islamists, especially the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt, Tunisia and Syria. He believed his country was on a path to economic success in the Middle East. When things didn’t go as he planned, however, Erdogan refused to adapt his policy toward the region.
He continued to behave as if Turkey had regained its Ottoman grandeur. In 2014, he built a $615 million presidential palace, and in 2018, he acquired a $500 million presidential plane as a donation from Qatar. Former friends turned into adversaries, save for a couple of exceptions like blockaded Qatar and Libya’s beleaguered Government of National Accord in Tripoli.
Erdogan’s neo-Ottomanism alienated him from Egypt after the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood-backed President Mohammed Morsi in 2013. Turkey’s ambitious objectives also alarmed United Arab Emirates leaders, who feared the rise of political Islam, and Saudi leaders, who did not forget the destruction of the first and second Saudi states in the 19th century at the hands of the Ottomans and their allies.
But perhaps the most significant challenge to Turkey’s plan to boost its position in the Middle East came from Russia, a major economic partner for Turkey. The two countries support opposing sides in the conflicts in Syria and Libya, though their engagement in these conflicts is driven by very different goals.
Russia’s Libya policy is pragmatic and driven by economic interest. After Gadhafi’s regime collapsed in 2011, Russia lost contracts worth $10 billion. Western support for the GNA fell well short of what the UAE, Egypt and the Saudis were giving to Khalifa Haftar, the leader of the opposition Libyan National Army – and Russian President Vladimir Putin seized on the potential opportunity to win lucrative post-conflict contracts by offering Haftar much-needed support. Mercenaries from the Kremlin-associated Wagner Group played a decisive role in pushing GNA forces to the gates of Tripoli. However, had the GNA prevailed against Haftar and promised Russia significant reconstruction deals, Putin could have switched alliances and instead supported the GNA. After all, unlike Greece, Cyprus and Egypt, Russia does not have a real issue with the GNA’s maritime deal with Turkey, which revamped existing economic zones in the Mediterranean. So even though the Turkish SADAT security group has sent some 2,400 members of the pro-Ankara Syrian National Army to fight alongside the GNA, the divide between Russia and Turkey is not over Libya. Rather, it’s over Syria.
In Syria, Turkey’s vital national interests do not sit well with either Russia or the United States. The lingering issue between the U.S. and Turkey pertains to the fate of Syrian Kurds. In October 2019, U.S. President Donald Trump warned Erdogan against pushing the Kurds too hard. In a letter addressed to Erdogan, Trump said he did not “want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy” should Turkey refuse to protect the Kurds during an offensive in northern Syria. Erdogan understands geopolitics and knows he cannot go far in challenging U.S. regional policy without compromising Turkey’s national interest, which vehemently opposes cross-border linkages between Kurds in Turkey and Syria. The U.S. seems to have come to terms with Turkey on this sensitive issue.
Similarly, Erdogan understands Turkey’s history with Russia and is wary about military escalation. After all, the Ottoman Empire’s decline in the Balkans and North Africa was ushered in by the Russian Empire’s victory at the Battle of Stavuchany in 1739 and the subsequent Russo-Turkish wars in the 19th century. In 1853, Russian Czar Nicholas I named the Ottoman Empire the “sick man of Europe.”
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Erdogan does not want a military confrontation with Russia or the Russian-backed Syrian army. Rather, he wants a political deal with Russia, even though he does not trust Putin. Turkey’s involvement in Syria is not popular at home, even within the AKP. And Erdogan also knows that Russia does not want to get bogged down in another drawn-out war, as it did in Afghanistan during the 1980s, which is why Moscow’s participation in the Syrian conflict has been limited to providing air support to the Assad regime.
But Turkey lacks real options to stop the fighting in Idlib. Erdogan will fight in Idlib only to the extent that Putin allows him. He realizes that he has to settle for the establishment of a demilitarized zone along the border to accommodate refugees fleeing Idlib, and he is not willing to jeopardize Turkish interests elsewhere for the sake of victory in northern Syria. Turkey’s economic prosperity is not contingent on seizing Idlib, but it is reliant on cooperation with Russia. More than 7 million Russian tourists visit Turkey every year. Turkey’s nuclear energy program depends heavily on Russian technical expertise and support. The TurkStream natural gas pipeline, which runs from Russia to Turkey, is vital for the country’s economic development. Erdogan wouldn’t allow his anger over Russia’s violation of the Sochi and Astana agreements, which called for de-escalation in Idlib, to obstruct his vision for Turkey. The Syrian regime’s territorial gains following its offensive in Idlib that started in April 2019 and resumed in December are irreversible. The Turkish army can still control the border area, allowing Syrian Arabs to form a buffer zone between themselves and the Kurds. Assad is amenable to such a move because Idlib’s population is not central to his model for a post-conflict Syria.
Putin did not launch Russia’s intervention in Syria to try to end the conflict. Instead, he wanted to make Russia the dominant military power and decisive political player in Syria – and he has succeeded in doing so. Just like in Libya, Russia has economic interests in Syria. In 2018 and 2019, Russian rail transport, agriculture, heavy equipment, hydrocarbons and construction companies were key participants in the Damascus International Fair. And Turkey likewise has economic interests there. It has an opportunity to join in Syria’s reconstruction if it can come to an accommodation with the Syrian regime, which is only a matter of time.
Turkey’s opposition to the Syrian government has therefore become counterproductive. Turkey is an ascending regional power that needs to make peace with its neighbors and focus on economic development instead of aggrandizing power. Russia, however, aspires to play a leading role in the construction of a new security order in the Middle East. Nostalgic about its Soviet past, Russia refuses to accept its status as a regional power and wants to engage the U.S. as its equal. So while Erdogan uses a lot of rhetoric about trying to restore Turkey's former glory, his approach to the Middle East will be more pragmatic.
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Daily Memo: Turkish Operations in Syria
By: GPF Staff
A Turkish offensive? Reports of clashes between pro-Turkey rebels and Syrian government forces in Nayreb, located south of the city of Idlib, have raised concerns that a Turkish offensive in Syria has begun. After Turkish soldiers and allied militias exchanged fire with Syrian regime forces, airstrikes – possibly Russian – killed two Turkish soldiers and forced the others to withdraw. Syrian commanders and several Turkish news agencies have already confirmed that an “operation” is underway. For weeks, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has warned that Turkey would launch an operation by the end of February unless Russian and Syrian forces withdrew to lines outlined in the 2018 Sochi agreement, and that it would attack anything it considered a threat. After Turkey rejected Russia’s offer to create a humanitarian corridor along the Turkish-Syrian border in Idlib, Ankara had been exploring its options before it makes a decisive next step. There are unconfirmed rumors, for example, that it asked NATO to conduct “preventative flights” over Idlib to stave off more Russian air operations.
Even so, discussions over Idlib continue. Ankara and Moscow are still debating the possibility of continuing limited cooperation through joint patrols in the northwest. And hosts of the Astana talks – Turkey, Iran and Russia – plan to meet in Tehran in March to discuss a solution.
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https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ankara-asks-for-patriot-missiles-amid-idlib-tensions-152269
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15649/greece-migrant-crisis
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I have been underlining the issue of the 3.5+M Arab refugees in Turkey for a while now. As related in the FUBAR thread, Turkey now has reason to unleash some of them as a form of practical extortion to get help against the Russians.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8061905/EU-high-alert-30-000-migrants-Turkeys-border-Greece-Bulgaria.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=1490
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Two more Turkish soldiers died in Syria today and right before Turkish President Erdogan departs for new ceasefire talks with Russia's Vladimir Putin in Moscow, AP reports today from the Turkish capital.
To date, Turkish-Syrian fighting in NW Syria has killed 58 Turkish troops over the past month," AP writes, "including 33 soldiers killed Thursday in a single airstrike."
And on Europe's doorstep, "Greek authorities fired tear gas and stun grenades Wednesday morning to repulse a push by migrants to cross its land border from Turkey," AP reports separately today from Turkey's far northwestern border, near Bulgaria.
Bigger picture: "More than 10,000 migrants have been trying to breach the border since Turkey said last Thursday it would no longer abide by a 2016 deal with the European Union to halt illegal migration flows to Europe in return for billions of euros in aid," Reuters reports from the Greek island of Lesbos. "EU leaders on Tuesday pledged 700 million euros to help Greece handle the migrant crisis and urged Turkey to hold up its end of the 2016 accord. They fear a repeat of the 2015-16 migrant crisis, when more than a million migrants came to western Europe via Turkey and the Balkans, straining European security and welfare services and boosting support for far-right parties."
And by the way: "Greece's sea border with Turkey has also come under pressure," AP adds. "In the past few days, hundreds of people have headed to Greek islands from the nearby Turkish coast in dinghies… Greece sent a navy ship to the island of Lesbos Wednesday to house more than 400 of the new arrivals. Tension has mounted with some local residents on the island, where the main migrant camp is massively overcrowded." More here. And The Wall Street Journal's Ahmed Deeb has some arresting images of the migrant journey across Turkey, here.
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A Cease-Fire With Russia Appears to Shrink Turkey's Influence in Syria
4 MINS READ
Mar 5, 2020 | 21:00 GMT
The Big Picture
Turkey and Russia have different strategies in Syria, and they've come up against each other in Idlib province in the country's northwest. Turkey has now faced a serious Russian-backed campaign to retake the province and is scrambling for options to preserve its influence there — and keep its entire Syria strategy from unraveling.
See The Syrian Civil War
By agreeing with Russia to enact a cease-fire in northwestern Syria starting at 12 a.m. March 6, Turkey appears willing to sacrifice significant territory held by the rebel forces it supports to ensure that violence stops as soon as possible. In doing so, Turkey is setting up Russia and Syria for their next offensive in Idlib province with no real solution in sight for refugees in the area. The deal is designed to allow the de-escalation process between Turkey on the one side and Russia, Syria and Iran on the other to begin in earnest and to reduce tensions between Turkey and Russia in Idlib.
The initial details of the cease-fire announced March 5 by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin indicate that Turkey will accept a reduced sphere of influence in Syria, as the current front lines will become the new demarcation zones between the two sides and a demilitarized "security corridor" will cut through a significant portion of the rebel-held territory along the M4 highway. Joint patrols by Turkish and Russian troops are to guarantee the M4 highway corridor's de-escalation, which is set to be 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) deep to the highway's north and south.
From a military perspective, the security corridor along the M4 highway drastically affects the ability of rebel forces supported by Turkey to defend the city of Idlib and areas to the south of it. The rebel-held city of Jisr al-Shughour even falls entirely within the corridor. Rebel forces will no longer be able to build out defensive positions in-depth, something that has helped them to slow and even push back against the most recent Syrian government offensive. If and when fighting were to resume in Idlib, government forces will be able to rapidly advance into this demilitarized security zone, as well as areas to the south of it that will become untenable because of this agreement. As such, the cease-fire has allowed Turkey to protect a portion of rebel-controlled Idlib temporarily, but at a cost to its future sustainability.
Even as its military benefits are questionable, the deal is a diplomatic success for Turkey, albeit a limited one.
Even as its military benefits are questionable, the deal is a diplomatic success for Turkey, albeit a limited one. Turkey increasingly was finding itself having to take greater and greater military risks to deter Syrian advances, including a drone campaign against Syrian government forces. With this cease-fire, Turkey can begin to return its relationship with Russia to a more stable level, and Turkey's working ties with Russia in Syria's northeast, as well as over other defense matters, appear to be uninterrupted, at the moment at least.
As for Turkey's future relationship with Europe, there may be little change in Ankara's current refugee strategy. Turkey is under domestic pressure to ease its refugee share, and with no military reversals in Idlib, some Idlib refugees will continue to push into Turkey for fear that this cease-fire delays rather than prevents future advances by Damascus. Turkey is likely to continue to use Syrian refugees as leverage against Europe to gain new support in the face of this ongoing challenge.
Finally, Turkey's relationship with the United States appears unaltered, with little direct U.S. support for Turkey expected in Idlib. Rhetorical support was forthcoming, but even as Ankara called for no-fly zones and military equipment (specifically U.S. Patriot missile systems), Washington showed little inclination to involve itself in Syria further, setting up Russia as the more valuable partner for Turkey.
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Don't Expect a Turkey-Russia War in Syria
by Jonathan Spyer
The Jerusalem Post
March 6, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60536/turkish-syrian-conflict
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Is Europe on the Cusp of Another Migration Crisis?
Adriano Bosoni
Senior Europe Analyst, Stratfor
Emily Hawthorne
Middle East and North Africa Analyst, Stratfor
9 MINS READ
Mar 6, 2020 | 19:28 GMT
A photo of refugees and migrants waiting in line to receive blankets and food near the Greek border in Edirne, Turkey, on March 5, 2020.
Refugees and migrants wait in line to receive blankets and food near the Greek border in Edirne, Turkey, on March 5, 2020. Thousands have flocked to the border since the Turkish government announced it would allow migrants to cross into Europe on March 1.
HIGHLIGHTS
There is a high chance that a migration crisis in 2020 results in a situation similar to the one that unfolded in 2015, with Greece again bearing most of the weight of the migration influx.
But unlike five years ago, Germany will be more willing to protect the European Union's external border and less interested in accepting a large number of migrants.
Turkey will also be more willing to weaponize the country's landmark migrant agreement with the European Union to secure additional diplomatic and financial help from the bloc.
On March 1, Turkey announced it would no longer enforce an agreement with the European Union to prevent migrants from entering the Continental bloc. Since then, tens of thousands of migrants have been trying to enter Greece from Turkey, fueling fears of another looming migration crisis in Europe. In response, the Greek government has increased security at its borders and announced that no asylum requests would be accepted for a month — though it's far from certain whether Greece will be able to contain a continued flood of migrants at its doorstep. Unless Turkey changes its position in the coming weeks, there's a good chance Greece's sea and land borders will once again become the hottest access point for Europe-bound migrants. But unlike the crisis in 2015, Athens will find even fewer EU countries willing to help lift the load this time around.
The Big Picture
Because of its weak economy, Greece is not the final destination for most migrants. But in 2015, many migrants either ran out of resources to keep moving north to wealthier countries in Europe or they found that other transit countries, such as Serbia and Hungary, had closed their borders. While a new migration crisis will likely repeat some of these patterns, several new developments over the past five years will also play a significant role in shaping how a new crisis could unfold in the coming weeks.
Turkey Lights the Fuse
At the heart of the unfolding new migrant crisis is Turkey's willingness to gamble its landmark migrant agreement with the European Union. Turkey's struggling economy is having a direct political impact on the popularity of its government, and Ankara knows it might ultimately prove unable to ward off a Syrian and Russian incursion into Syria's Idlib province. The popularity of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) also risks waning amid increasingly angry and cash-strapped Turks, who see the country's large refugee population as partially to blame for their grievances. This was made clear by the country's 2019 local elections, in which the AKP suffered sizable losses among urban voters living in closest proximity to refugees. This, combined with the economic headwinds Turkey has experienced since 2015, has created an even more hostile environment in Turkey for refugees. And in 2019, Ankara imposed tighter residency restrictions on refugees.
Against the backdrop of these mounting economic and political threats, an increasingly desperate Ankara has shown that it's willing to breach its migration agreement with the European Union to secure more support from the bloc. Specifically, Turkey wants more money to help provide for the refugees and migrants it is currently hosting, and more EU diplomatic support in its offensive against Syrian and Russian forces, including support for a no-fly zone and long-term refugee resettlement in northern Syria (which Germany has already given support for, but cannot provide alone). Ankara knows that threatening to scrap the existing migrant agreement can help force Brussels to fall in line. And should the March 5 cease-fire between Turkey and Russia fall through, Ankara will be even less likely to remove this lever of migrants as leverage in its EU negotiations.
Similarities to the 2015 Crisis
A new migration crisis would likely repeat some of the patterns of the previous crisis, including:
Greece's lack of capacity. Greece has very limited room to deal with new migrants and is likely already nearing its capacity.
Around 74,600 asylum seekers reached Greece last year, the highest number in the European Union. Some 42,000 of them are trapped in migrant camps in the islands, as Athens does not allow them to move to the mainland until their legal situation is cleared. Reports from the ground say that most migrants are crammed in facilities that are being used well beyond their capacity. In recent months, migrants have protested in some of the islands, particularly in Lesbos, which is home to some 25,000 asylum seekers.
Closed borders along the Balkan migration route. In 2015, many migrants found that countries along the so-called Balkan migration route to Northern Europe, including Serbia and Hungary, had closed their borders. Should another crisis unfold in the coming months, countries like Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia (which are not in the European Union) are likely to again close their borders in an attempt to block the migration route. Hungary, which is an EU member, may also do the same if migratory pressure increases significantly.
More money, less action out of Brussels. Under the European Union's current migration rules, migrants have to apply for asylum in the country where they first enter the bloc, which Greece has long argued unfairly places the burden on them. But a systematic, blocwide effort to distribute migrants across the European Union remains unlikely, as countries in Northern and Eastern Europe will reject any move to alter these rules. If the crisis worsens, and if the number of arrivals in Greece and other countries on the bloc's external border increases, we are instead more likely to see bilateral agreements, under which countries like Germany would accept small groups of migrants in an attempt to ease the pressure on Greece. Brussels, meanwhile, will likely continue to throw money at the problem as it has done in similar situations in the past. And indeed, we've already seen a bit of this, with the European Commission announcing it was sending Greece 700 million euros ($791 million) to help maintain the recent influx of migrants, as well as extra personnel from the European Border and Coast Guard Agency (also known as Frontex) to help protect Greece's borders.
Differences From the 2015 Crisis
In addition to these similarities, there are also some important differences that will shape how a potential migration crisis would unfold in 2020 compared with the crisis in 2015:
Stricter EU asylum policies. Some migrants will now have a harder time requesting asylum in 2020 than they did in 2015, especially those who have been in Turkey for years and cannot really claim to be running away from extreme hardship. While this could weigh negatively on some migrants' cost-benefit analysis of whether to attempt crossing into EU territory, the flow of attempted crossings in recent days shows that for thousands of migrants the risk is still worth taking.
If there is an influx of "new" asylum seekers, that is, people who are currently in Syria and have been displaced because of recent events in Idlib, they may have a better chance of successfully obtaining the refugee status, but it will still be hard. In January, Greece introduced new asylum rules that make the application process faster, which also has the goal of making deportations faster — though Athens will probably continue to struggle to enforce deportations, and many of the migrants whose asylum requests are rejected will probably remain in Greece and live in legal limbo.
If Turkey continues allowing migrants to flood its border, Greece could again become the epicenter of Europe's next migration crisis.
Germany's skepticism around asylum seekers. While Germany may accept a few migrants from Greece, it probably will not open its borders as it did five years ago. Germany reacted to the 2015 migration crisis by welcoming around a million asylum seekers into the country, which, in the long run, has weakened the popularity of Chancellor Angela Merkel and contributed to her decision not to seek reelection in 2021. Germany's open-door policy in 2015 also contributed to the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which has become the main opposition party since the country's 2018 general election. Germany's reaction to a new immigration crisis would, therefore, probably be different this time around. In fact, the German government has been posting tweets in Arabic, Farsi, English and German saying that Berlin supports Athens' recent efforts to protect the bloc's external borders, which is basically meant to discourage migrants from trying to enter the European Union.
Instead of taking in migrants, Germany is likely to support granting additional resources, money and assistance to Greece to help protect the border with Turkey. Berlin will also reach out to Ankara to try to keep the migration agreement in place, and even propose cooperation on issues such as establishing a no-fly zone in northwestern Syria. Finally, Germany will increase pressure on Russia to de-escalate the conflict in Syria. In this, the problem for Germany is that it has very limited influence on Moscow, a key actor in the war, and has little to offer to Turkey other than EU funds and diplomatic support.
Impact on Italy
At least during an early phase of a new migration crisis, Italy is unlikely to be significantly affected, as its weak economy will make it a less attractive final destination for migrants entering the European Union from Turkey compared with more financially secure countries such as Austria, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden. Instead, the main threat for Italy is events in Turkey encouraging migrants in other parts of the world to try to reach the European Union. If this happens, migration routes that have been relatively calm in recent years could be reactivated, such as the Libya-Italy route.
In mid-2017, Italy reached a deal with the Libyan government to have the Libyan coast guard begin intercepting migrant boats in exchange for money, resources and training. But this deal is fragile for two key reasons:
Human trafficking organizations who transport migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to Libya, and then to Italy, may decide that the conditions are ripe again to resume their operations, which could overwhelm Libya's weak and fragile government.
The current Libyan government may also decide that a new migration crisis in Europe is a good opportunity to ask Italy for more money and resources in exchange for keeping their agreement in place.
A significant surge in the arrival of migrants would happen at a very difficult time for Italy. The country is expected to have very low economic growth in 2020, and the impact of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak could put it in a recession. Authorities in Rome recently announced a stimulus package to deal with the economic impact of the outbreak, but an immigration crisis would create additional problems for Rome's already strained coffers. At the same time, the Italian coalition government is fragile, and the opposition League party, which has a strong anti-immigration stance, is polling strongly. An early election in Italy within the context of a recession and immigration crisis would certainly increase the chances of the League winning the vote and accessing power — an outcome that would further spook financial markets and investors' already shaky confidence, given that some League members have pushed for Italy to leave the eurozone.
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https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/03/08/reports-turkish-police-use-drones-to-organise-tear-gas-attacks-on-greek-border-guards/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=todays_hottest_stories&utm_campaign=20200308
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As predicted
https://voiceofeurope.com/2020/03/eu-to-fork-over-another-e500-million-to-the-turkish-regime-to-stop-migrants/
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Can Turkey Defeat Russia's Army in Syria?
by Michael Peck
The National Interest
March 10, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60553/can-turkey-defeat-russias-army-in-syria
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Turkey stands pat. Amid mounting pressure from Europe, Turkey is remaining firm on its refusal to close its border to refugees headed to Europe, a move that the EU said violated the 2016 migrant agreement between Ankara and Brussels. Turkey said that until the EU updates the agreement to meet its expectations on visa-free travel, increased financial assistance and an improved customs union, it will leave its border with Greece open to migrants and refugees. And it appears Turkey may be escalating the border dispute with Athens. A video posted on social media by a correspondent for Germany’s Bild newspaper showed a Turkish Coast Guard vessel ramming a Greek Coast Guard ship off the coast of the Greek island of Kos. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly defended the move, saying that Turkey has taken the moral high ground in defending refugees’ rights and saying, “They will run away and we will chase them. That’s how it will be from now on.” In two other incidents on Wednesday, Turkish special forces reportedly fired across the border over a Greek military vehicle and two Turkish F-16s flew at low altitude over the Evros land border.
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Why is Turkey still in NATO?
Turkey stands pat. Amid mounting pressure from Europe, Turkey is remaining firm on its refusal to close its border to refugees headed to Europe, a move that the EU said violated the 2016 migrant agreement between Ankara and Brussels. Turkey said that until the EU updates the agreement to meet its expectations on visa-free travel, increased financial assistance and an improved customs union, it will leave its border with Greece open to migrants and refugees. And it appears Turkey may be escalating the border dispute with Athens. A video posted on social media by a correspondent for Germany’s Bild newspaper showed a Turkish Coast Guard vessel ramming a Greek Coast Guard ship off the coast of the Greek island of Kos. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan reportedly defended the move, saying that Turkey has taken the moral high ground in defending refugees’ rights and saying, “They will run away and we will chase them. That’s how it will be from now on.” In two other incidents on Wednesday, Turkish special forces reportedly fired across the border over a Greek military vehicle and two Turkish F-16s flew at low altitude over the Evros land border.
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Guessing here-- off the top of my head:
* to keep them from throwing in completely with the Russians;
* because they work well with the Ukrainians
* because three is an uneven number (Turkey, Russia, Iran)
* because they have serious blackmail leverage with 3.7 million Arab refugees
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https://www.meforum.org/60562/kastellorizo-tiny-island-colossal-dispute?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=39d089ea9a-MEF_Bekdil_2020_03_13_06_56&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-39d089ea9a-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-39d089ea9a-33691909&mc_cid=39d089ea9a
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elSL63UaOD8
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Interview: A Greek Perspective on Turkey's Migrant Assault into Europe
by Marilyn Stern
Middle East Forum Radio
March 16, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60578/turkey-instrumentalizes-migrants-to-blackmail-eu
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Turkey and Russia: Not Friends After All
by Burak Bekdil
BESA Center Perspectives
March 26, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60622/turkey-and-russia-not-friends-after-all
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https://www.meforum.org/60630/turks-cover-up-murder-of-iranian-dissident?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=d2e99afb48-Frantzman_2020_04_01_10_33&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-d2e99afb48-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-d2e99afb48-33691909&mc_cid=d2e99afb48
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https://www.meforum.org/60630/turks-cover-up-murder-of-iranian-dissident?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=d2e99afb48-Frantzman_2020_04_01_10_33&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-d2e99afb48-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-d2e99afb48-33691909&mc_cid=d2e99afb48
Working on the not so simple math and logic in front of us: If Turkey is a co-conspirator ally with Iran, helping in this case to cover the murder of this dissident, and Iran is an enemy of the US, actively and currently attacking and killing Americans,,, how is it that we are allies with Turkey??
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As best as I understand the logic at present (the previous logic not really applying any more) and in no particular order:
a) Turkey can unleash the better part of four million Arab refugees into Europe;
b) Turkey has good relations with Ukraine;
c) Turkey is geopolitical counterweight to Iran, Russia
d) We haven't a clue as to how to undo the NATO relationship
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As best as I understand the logic at present (the previous logic not really applying any more) and in no particular order:
a) Turkey can unleash the better part of four million Arab refugees into Europe;
b) Turkey has good relations with Ukraine;
c) Turkey is geopolitical counterweight to Iran, Russia
d) We haven't a clue as to how to undo the NATO relationship
All true, especially the part where we have no idea how to undo the NATO commitment. Giving them the boot from NATO and friendship would drive them even closer to Russia and Iran. Also, the threat of getting the boot from NATO is a better lever before we do it than after. On the other side of the ledger are the dozen, at least, top reasons they are not our ally. Denying us access to a northern front into Saddam's Iraq was one.
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https://www.meforum.org/60720/erdogan-turkey-is-not-coming-back?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=b3f85d2401-MEF_Pipes_2020_04_21_04_46&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-b3f85d2401-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-b3f85d2401-33691909&mc_cid=b3f85d2401
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Turkey's President Erdoğan Underwent Surgery for Cancer, Suffers from Epilepsy
by Abdullah Bozkurt
Nordic Monitor
May 24, 2020
https://www.meforum.org/60978/erdogan-had-cancer-suffers-from-epilepsy
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https://www.meforum.org/60973/israel-turkey-relations-could-be-in-for-a-change?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=8e2ed26b51-MEF_Frantzman_2020_05_22_08_11&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-8e2ed26b51-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-8e2ed26b51-33691909&mc_cid=8e2ed26b51
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U.S., Turkey and S-400s, cont’d. The future of U.S.-Turkish relations once again features prominently in debates surrounding the National Defense Authorization Act for 2021. On Monday, a U.S. senator proposed an amendment calling for the Army to purchase the S-400 missile defense system that Russia sold to Turkey. Another senator made a counterproposal calling for the government to apply sanctions against Turkey within 30 days of passage of the NDAA. Buying the S-400 would effectively remove one of the bigger impediments to U.S.-Turkish cooperation and clear the way for stronger military ties, including the sale of F-35 fighter jets. Applying sanctions would do the opposite. Washington will need all the allies it can get if it intends to follow through on its commitment to withdraw from the Middle East
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France abandoned a NATO mission in the Mediterranean in the wake of an incident with Turkey.
By: Geopolitical Futures
NATO revolves around Turkey. After a seven-month standoff, Turkey finally lifted its veto and allowed the alliance to approve a defense plan for Poland and the Baltic states. Reuters reported in November 2019 that Turkey was blocking the plan in order to pressure its NATO allies to recognize the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG, as a terrorist group. (A number of NATO states, including the U.S., have partnered with the YPG in Syria and thus refused to back down.) The operational outline of the defense plan for the bloc’s eastern frontier is classified, but it reportedly includes bulking up air defenses and speeding up the deployment of allied ground forces in the event of conflict with Russia.
But frictions between Turkey and other NATO member states are far from over. The latest disagreement centers on the Mediterranean Sea. According to Turkey’s ambassador to France, the French informed the Turks and NATO that they are suspending their involvement in NATO’s Operation Sea Guardian. France accused Turkey last month of behaving aggressively toward a French warship, the frigate Courbet, as it was participating in the alliance’s maritime security operation. The Turkish ambassador said Paris’ withdrawal came after a NATO investigation into the incident did not support France’s claims. An unnamed French Armed Forces Ministry official said France had temporarily withdrawn from the mission while it waited for NATO to meet demands it had laid out in a letter.
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Russia Says Turkey Tested Its S-400s on US F-16 Jets
by Seth Frantzman
The Jerusalem Post
July 8, 2020
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Components of the S-400 missile defense system are unloaded from a Russian plane at Akinci Air Base, near Ankara, Turkey, on July 12, 2019. (Reuters)
Turkey, a member of NATO, tested the Russian-made S-400 air defense system on US-made F-16 jets during a drill in November 2019, Russia's state media TASS has reported. The use of the S-400 against the F-16s was already reported last year, but the new details from Russian media appear to cement the claim and infer that something more was going on in those tests.
Russia has an interest in knowing how well its air defense performs against US warplanes. Russia's S-400 is the top tier of its numerous air defense systems. Some of these systems have been called into question due to mistakes. S-200s used by the Syrian regime shot down a Russian airplane by mistake in 2018. Iranian models of Russian systems have scored big in 2019 with the shoot-down of a US drone, but the Iranians also shot down a civilian jetliner in January.
In Syria there are questions about the radar and reliability of the S-300s and Pantsir and other systems abilities to track modern drones and fifth generational jets. Russia's Pantsirs were also destroyed by Turkish drones in battles in Idlib and Libya this year.
Why would Ankara test the S-400 against its own F-16s, unless at the behest of Moscow?
It is therefore of great importance for Russia to know how the S-400 performed against a NATO member's F-16s. What Turkey got out of this test is less clear now. Why would Ankara test the S-400 it bought from Russia against its own F-16s, unless it was at the behest of Moscow, wanting to see how it performed? The narrative last year was that Turkey merely wanted to test communications between the platforms so it didn't shoot down its own jets.
Russia's TASS media only says that a source close to the Turkish defense industry told TASS that the S-400 was tested on the US-made F-16s. The S-400s are the center a controversy with Washington. By acquiring them for billions of dollars, Turkey has distanced itself from its traditional US ally and become a closer ally of Russia.
The US administration has begged Turkey not to move toward Moscow, with one US senator even suggesting to buy the Russian S-400s from Turkey to please Ankara. What exactly the US would do with S-400s it doesn't need is unclear – and it is unclear if Moscow would let the technology be floated on a barge over to the US to be picked apart by US engineers.
Russia's reasoning for bringing up the November tests this week is also unclear. Turkey got the S-400s in July 2019. It began to test them in November and they were supposed to be operational in April 2020. But they don't seem to be operational yet. This raises questions about what was the overall point of Turkey spending billions on air defense it doesn't need. For Russia, the point seems to be its desire to bring this up as part of an attempt to sink any questions about Turkey and the US working more closely.
Seth Frantzman is a Ginsburg-Milstein Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum and senior Middle East correspondent at The Jerusalem Post.
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https://www.meforum.org/61254/turkey-demographics-defy-erdogan-designs?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=22b1a48208-MEF_Bekdil_2020_07_11_08_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-22b1a48208-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-22b1a48208-33691909&mc_cid=22b1a48208
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July 13, 2020 View On Website
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Turkey's Defense Industry and the Projection of Regional Power
A history of mistrust compels Turkey to fend for itself.
By: Hilal Khashan
Turkey’s relations with the West have never been smooth, not even when it adopted secularism and became a member of NATO. This has had a profound effect on the country’s defense industry. A history of arms embargoes and, alternatively, vast supplies of sophisticated weaponry convinced Ankara that it needed to fend for itself.
Indeed, when the West imposed an embargo after Turkey invaded Cyprus in 1974, Ankara established the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation, a significant enterprise that coordinates the activities of 14 arms manufacturers. It’s been busy ever since. In 1975, the Turkish Armed Forces Foundation established the Aselsan Corporation to meet the country’s rapidly expanding military electronic needs, such as advanced automated systems, guidance, electro-optics, communication and information technologies. Roketsan, which specializes in missile launchers and sea defense systems, was founded in 1988 and is Turkey’s leading defense contractor. In 2007, Turkish Aerospace Industries, in collaboration with British AgustaWestland, launched the T-129 helicopter project. The government also established the Presidency of Defense Industries in 1985 to oversee the country’s defense needs and ensure national security. It’s now under the Office of the President. Since President Recep Tayyip Erdogan assumed power in 2003, domestically made military equipment rose from 20 percent to 70 percent.
The plan is for Turkey to become self-sufficient in providing for its military hardware needs and independent from external pressure by 2053. And since the country boasts some first-class manufacturers, it may well be able to.
Inherent Fragility
Turkey is the 14th-largest arms exporter in the world and accounts for 1 percent of total global military exports. It exports mainly wheeled armored vehicles, attack helicopters, howitzers, unmanned aerial vehicles and frigates. It has a fixed customer base in majority-Muslim countries like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Malaysia and Oman. (Poor relations with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates deny Turkey even more lucrative Muslim markets.) Its sales to Guatemala, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago are insignificant, and except for minor sales to the U.S., Germany and the Netherlands, NATO countries tend to not buy Turkish military hardware. Even so, Turkey believes its military exports will bring in (a very optimistic) $25 billion in 2023.
(click to enlarge)
The future of Turkey’s defense industry hinges on the success of its domestic tank and fighter jet projects. The tank is manufactured with technical assistance from South Korean Hyundai Rotem and expected to gradually replace the obsolete Leopard and M-60 tanks. Barring unforeseen technological hurdles, the Otokar company will put the battle tank in service before the end of 2021.
Founded in 1984, TAI specializes in earth observation and surveillance satellites and manufacturing components for the Airbus A350 and Airbus A400M programs. TAI and SSB are involved in a large project to manufacture the TF-X, a fifth-generation fighter that will replace the F-16. The program has gained greater importance for Turkey after the U.S. decided to halt F-35 jet deliveries. Erdogan’s controversial decision to purchase the S-400 surface-to-air missiles angered the U.S. and drove the Trump administration to punish Turkey for turning to Russia for military procurement. The U.S. successfully pressured BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce to withdraw from partnerships with Turkey to build the engines for the TF-X.
Turkey opted instead to manufacture its engine and subcontracted Aselsan and TR Motor to develop an indigenous engine. The United States’ punitive measures will delay the launch of the TF-X maiden flight from 2023 to 2029. Turkish officials tried to market the TF-X project as the first Islamic jet, but their attempts to make the TF-X jet a multi-partied program did not succeed. Ankara invited Malaysia to become a partner, and Kuala Lumpur did not respond. Perceiving the project as a black hole, Pakistan, Indonesia and Kazakhstan chose to stay out of it.
The Turkish defense industry faces serious challenges that include brain drain, currency devaluation, uncertain foreign supplies and regional disputes. The financial crisis in Turkey caused purchasing power for the majority of citizens to plummet. Talented Turkish scientists left the country to pursue lucrative employment offers commensurate with their qualifications. Turkey’s poor relations with most countries in the Middle East dampened the outlook for its arms exports.
Moreover, the defense industry is inherently fragile because it relies heavily on foreign inputs, many of which come from Europe. In the last quarter of 2019, the European Union placed restrictions on the export of raw material and components used in Turkish arms. Frequent sanctions and embargoes hamper its arms production and deny it access to advanced military technology. Its military products are mostly conventional, outdated and poorly made.
Projecting Power
In criticizing the U.S. for excluding Turkey from the F-35 program, Erdogan said Washington awakened a sleeping giant determined to achieve self-sufficiency in fulfilling its military equipment needs. He boasted that Turkey is involved in executing some 700 arms projects. In December 2018, Erdogan signed a decree to privatize the famous Tank and Pallet Factory to be run by a joint Turkish-Qatari firm for 25 years. Many Turkish nationalists have become convinced that involving a foreign country in its operations undermined Turkey's national security interests. Erdogan sees beyond national security in the narrow sense and aspires to establish a greater role for Turkey in regional affairs.
Erdogan believes that a deterrent military capability is essential for achieving regional power status. Already there is evidence to suggest it has. Turkish military support for the Tripoli-based Government of National Accord recently turned the battle against the forces led by Khalifa Haftar, backed by the UAE, Russia and Egypt. A few months ago, Turkish UAVs inflicted heavy casualties on Syrian regime forces and halted their advance on Idlib.
Erdogan does not trust the weapons suppliers in the West and has a political vision that distances him from NATO. He is bitter because eight NATO member states sent troops to Lithuania to deter Russia from intruding into the Baltic states, but none of them expressed interest in sending troops to northern Syria to protect the southern flank of the alliance.
In that sense, Erdogan’s defense industry is part of his larger regional ambitions. He sees himself as a reformer and architect of regional power. To that end, he has reined in the Turkish military, which had previously been seen as the guarantor of secularism and republicanism, and he has dismissed from service all the participants in the 2016 coup attempt, including their supporters in the bureaucracy and academia, jailing about a third of the top brass in the army and air force.
Erdogan’s policies have drawn comparisons to Mahmud II, who became Ottoman sultan in 1808 and endeavored to modernize the ailing empire. The problem is that he is remembered for massacring thousands of Janissary soldiers for dominating the public sphere and corrupting the state machinery.
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This matter of Erdogan threatening additional wave(s) of millions of Arab migrants is something I have commented on a number of times.
It would appear that Greece has manned up!!!
https://www.meforum.org/61260/turkey-how-erdogan-migrant-blackmail-failed?utm_source=Middle+East+Forum&utm_campaign=a50934c24a-MEF_Bekdil_2020_07_13_03_42&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_086cfd423c-a50934c24a-33691909&goal=0_086cfd423c-a50934c24a-33691909&mc_cid=a50934c24a
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Daily Memo: Turkey's Major Discovery in the Black Sea
Ankara hopes the gas discovery will put it on the road to energy independence.
By: Geopolitical Futures
Ankara's big find. Turkey has discovered 320 billion cubic meters of natural gas in the Black Sea, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Friday. The Fatih drill ship found the reserves, which Ankara hopes to put to public use by 2023, in a drilling zone called Tuna 1 on July 20. It could be a key step toward energy independence for the country as it continues to tangle with other countries in the Eastern Mediterranean over energy reserves there.
On Thursday, the Greek government said it would ratify agreements with Egypt and Italy next week on maritime boundaries that Turkey says infringe on its territory in the sea. Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after a meeting at Macron’s summer residence that they would protect EU member states’ sovereignty and defend international law in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Greek government, however, has accused the EU of not being forceful enough against Turkish moves in the region. The Greek prime minister has argued that the EU cannot have a different approach toward Turkey and Belarus, on which the bloc will impose sanctions following its controversial presidential election. Bloc officials, including European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President Charles Michel, said that more time was needed and that the EU would not rush to impose sanctions on Turkey.
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Turkey’s Navy: Searching for an Edge in the Mediterranean
Ankara’s aspirations go far beyond its capabilities.
By Caroline D. Rose -August 28, 2020
It seems that in every corner of the Middle East, Turkey has inserted itself in one way or another. In northern Iraq and Syria, it’s trying to establish buffer zones to prevent insurgents from penetrating its border. In the Caucasus, it’s trying to protect vital energy supply chains and counter Russian influence. In Somalia and Qatar, it operates shared bases and provides military training programs to maintain a foothold in the Horn of Africa and in the Gulf. And in the Black Sea, where it recently discovered significant natural gas reserves, it will be increasingly assertive to protect its access resources.
Yet for Turkey, the most vital theater is the Eastern Mediterranean. It has become the focus of Turkish energy interests, mercantile opportunities and an emerging, forward-leaning defense posture that not only protects existing Turkish interests but expands them. Turkey’s corresponding naval buildup is ambitious. It has invested significant political capital in establishing a greater Mediterranean foothold – using drilling operations off the coasts of Cyprus and Greek islets, intrusion in conflicts like Libya’s civil war, and gunboat diplomacy against regional rivals to “reclaim” its maritime dominance.
Still, Turkey’s immediate focus is closer to home: deterring conventional threats along its Mediterranean coastline. Operational constraints in the southern Mediterranean, logistical challenges, economic and defense limitations, and rising conventional threats will ensure that for now Turkey remains focused on its own backyard, not the dominant Mediterranean power it claims to be.
Turkey’s Vision
It would be an understatement to say that Turkey’s defense posture looks drastically different than it did just a few decades ago. Until the 1990s, Turkey’s inward focus on its economy, political modernization and infrastructural development, combined with the looming threat of the Soviet Union and its own loyalty to NATO, compelled it to follow a foreign policy based on deterrence rather than expansionism. But in the 1990s, Turkey and the West began to drift apart. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian threat waned, as did the interests shared between Turkey and the West. Ankara’s military leadership adopted a “two and one-half war strategy” – the idea that it should be prepared to wage two wars, one to its east and one to its west, simultaneously, while also fighting an ongoing, unconventional “half war” with Kurdish insurgents at home. The strategy essentially saw Turkey’s location, wedged between the Black and Mediterranean seas, as a vulnerability.
In the 21st century, Turkey began to adopt a more independent, assertive military doctrine. The discovery of hydrocarbons in Turkey’s periphery piqued Ankara’s interest, particularly as it struggled to diversify its natural gas suppliers, and it needed a navy that could help defend its claim over them. It continued to drift away from the West as Brussels walked back its commitment to Turkish membership in the European Union and as it continued to butt heads with its NATO allies.
Natural Gas Cooperation in the Eastern Med
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The re-emergence of the Russian threat, an increasingly aggressive Iran and a growing anti-Turkey coalition in the Mediterranean further isolated Ankara. So it introduced the concept of Mavi Vatan, or Blue Homeland, which has dominated strategic thinking among Turkey’s military brass and nationalist politicians. The concept asserts that Turkey should work to dominate the Mediterranean and reclaim the mercantile and maritime supremacy that the Ottomans once had. Essentially, it advocates that Turkey’s location isn’t a vulnerability – it’s an asset that gives the country strategic depth.
The Ottoman Empire, 1683
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The purpose of the strategy is not just to expand Turkish influence abroad but also to fulfill many of Turkey’s domestic and financial imperatives. Having a strong naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean allows Turkey to assert claims to oil and gas reserves in contested waters there – which may help Ankara eventually achieve energy independence and even become an energy hub. Boosting Turkey’s own defense industry to reduce its reliance arms imports, which often come with strings attached, is a key component of the domestic agenda of the ruling Justice and Development Party. Investment in indigenous defense manufacturing has introduced a wave of new financial opportunities for the struggling Turkish economy and has increased Turkey’s prestige abroad.
Turkey’s military spending has thus skyrocketed since the 1990s. It went from being the third-largest arms importer to the 14th-largest arms exporter. The country has reduced its arms imports by 48 percent since 2015 and increased its defense budget by 86 percent in the past decade. Turkey has also launched the highly publicized MILGEM program that will roll out indigenously built corvettes and frigates, Type-214 air independent power submarines and MILDEN attack submarines, as well as torpedoes, missiles and sensory equipment. It also announced that it will build 24 vessels (four of which are MILGEM frigates) by the Turkish Republic’s 100th anniversary in 2023.
Turkey’s Limitations
Despite these advancements, Turkey’s naval capabilities are still limited. While it’s laying the groundwork to have a navy capable of projecting power by the 2030s and 2040s, its current operational capabilities can’t extend much beyond the Aegean and the southern Mediterranean. Moreover, though Turkey’s navy is larger than that of its main rival, Greece, there are several other Mediterranean nations with which it must contend. Increased patrols and joint maritime exercises involving Greece, France, Italy, Egypt and even Israel have raised the stakes for conventional conflict. If Turkey poses a serious threat to Greece – say, by violating the partition in Cyprus or attempting to invade Crete – it will have to face a coalition of capable naval forces with substantial combined firepower that would overwhelm Turkey’s own.
Most of Turkey’s naval projects are years – or even decades – away from being operational. Chief among them is its first amphibious assault ship, the TCG Anadolu, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year. The Anadolu is designed to serve as both a light aircraft carrier and a command center in the Mediterranean. It can sustain combat missions at farther distances by carrying 14 STOVL fighter jets or heavy-lift helicopters, several amphibious assault vehicles, 29 main battle tanks, and four mechanized, two air-cushioned and two personnel landing vehicles. With the ability to carry out an amphibious invasion, it would a threat to the sovereignty of small Aegean islands near Turkey’s coast. It could also aid Turkey’s operations in Libya, allowing for quicker reinforcements, deployment of more equipment for mechanized infantry units and greater airpower projection.
On paper, the TCG Andalou appears to close at least some of the gap in Turkey’s Mediterranean capabilities. But the ship alone won’t give Turkey an edge over the combined forces of France, Egypt, Greece and Israel. The new fleet of locally built ships will assist Turkey’s strategy of defending its perimeter by applying pressure deeper into the Mediterranean, creating new maritime buffers and strengthening its bargaining position against regional rivals. But over the next decade, it will still have to rely mainly on gunboat diplomacy to achieve its defense objectives. Its focus will remain on its littoral waters and projecting power over weaker actors, like Libya and Cyprus and certain Aegean islands. This explains why Turkey’s arsenal doesn’t include a destroyer but does include a growing number of frigates and corvettes that can sail between critical sea lanes and islands in shallow waters.
Until Turkey can secure forward bases and a more powerful maritime fleet, its entire defense strategy will struggle to overcome logistical, refueling and funding constraints. Turkey still faces challenges in equipping enough fuel tankers with an escort fleet that can resupply its vessels, aircraft and patrol boats that venture beyond the Aegean. One light carrier can’t do the job on its own.
Moreover, production delays due to COVID-19 and Turkey’s sluggish economy have raised questions over whether Turkey can complete projects on time, let alone begin production on a second planned assault carrier, the TCG Trakya. Its economic woes have also led to slower growth in Turkey’s defense budget since the country’s 2018 recession. And although the runways of the TCG Anadolu and TCG Trakya have been reportedly designed to also accommodate F-35B Lightning-II jets, Turkey may not even acquire these aircraft given the U.S. decision to cut it out of the F-35 program. Ankara could theoretically acquire comparable aircraft from the U.K., Spain and Italy, but Europe would be reluctant to arm Turkey with fighter jets that could be used to intimidate other Mediterranean states.
Turkey has been juggling its defense priorities in the Levant, Caucasus, Black Sea, Gulf and Red Sea, but it’s now zeroing in on the Eastern Mediterranean, where it hopes to create the impression that it has an operational edge over its regional rivals. But while it incrementally builds up its naval capabilities, its focus will remain on coastal defense – no matter how much it touts its Blue Homeland aspirations.
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The Ups and Downs of Turkish-Israeli Relations
By: Hilal Khashan
Sept. 9, 2020
In 1949, Turkey recognized the state of Israel, becoming the first Muslim country to exchange diplomatic missions with it. Since then, their relations have gone through many highs and lows. In 2004, the American Jewish Congress gave then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan its Profile of Courage award because of his positive attitude toward Israel and the world’s Jewry. Ten years later, it asked him to return it because of his virulent criticism of Israel – which he “gladly” did. Turkish-Israeli relations are once again at a low point, following clashes over the Palestinian issue among other things. But it’s unlikely they will stay that way; both countries are in need of regional allies, and their economic and security interests will outweigh any diplomatic disputes or gestures of disapproval.
The Honeymoon Phase
The relationship between the state of Israel and Turkey extends back decades. In 1957, the two countries established secret intelligence and security relations in response to the Soviet Union’s penetration into the Middle East to supply Egypt and Syria with military hardware and technical assistance. A year later, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion met secretly with his Turkish counterpart and formed the Peripheral Pact, an alliance devoted to military and intelligence cooperation and containing communism.
However, they have also been at odds at various points throughout their relationship. In 1956, Turkey downgraded its diplomatic mission to Israel after Israel participated in the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt. Ankara did so again in 1980 when the Israeli parliament voted to annex the Golan Heights. Turkey voted in favor of U.N. Resolution 3379 that equated Zionism with racism in 1975 and allowed the Palestine Liberation Organization to open an office in Ankara in 1979. Indeed, though the Turks never questioned Israel’s right to exist, the Palestinian issue has been a persistent roadblock to improving ties between the two countries.
But after the signing of the Oslo Accords between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Washington in 1993, Turkey and Israel went through a diplomatic honeymoon phase. The Palestinian Authority was formed shortly thereafter, in 1994, and Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, who led the secular True Path Party, visited Gaza and promised to support the Palestinians in any way she could, including by helping to build an airport, a harbor, housing and other infrastructure projects.
The honeymoon lasted a decade and in addition to improved economic and tourism ties included security partnership and technology transfers that helped strengthen the Turkish military. Contrary to expectations, Turkish-Israeli relations actually strengthened after Necmettin Erbakan, who led the Islamist Refah Party, became prime minister in 1996. During his brief time in office, Turkey agreed to allow Israeli air force pilots to train in Turkish air space.
Deteriorating Relations
Their relationship began to change in 2003 when Recep Tayyip Erdogan became prime minister. After Israel assassinated Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Erdogan described his killing as state terrorism. And in September 2007, the Israeli air force flew over Turkish air space during a mission to destroy an illicit Syrian nuclear reactor northeast of Damascus, thwarting Turkey’s efforts to make peace between Syria and Israel.
In 2008, Erdogan walked out of a World Economic Forum summit in Davos to protest Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement. And in 2009, he blocked the Israeli air force from participating in the Anatolian Eagle exercises because of Israel’s offensive in Gaza that year, causing the drills to be canceled.
Relations bottomed out in 2010, when Israeli commandoes killed 10 Turkish activists aboard the Mavi Marmara as the ship tried to break the blockade against Gaza. After Israel refused to apologize for the incident, Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador to Ankara.
Still, the two countries continued to cooperate on several fronts. In 2012, Israel repaired five Israeli-built Heron unmanned aerial vehicles and returned them to Turkey. Turkey used them to manufacture its own Bayraktar drones, which were used in Libya and Syria. That same year, Erdogan dispatched a high-level representative to meet with Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in an effort to revive diplomatic relations. In 2013, Israel’s Elta Systems agreed, after U.S. prodding, to deliver to the Turkish air force airborne electronic systems to fit on four Boeing-737s as a confidence-building measure to lay to rest the Mavi Marmara flotilla affair. Then, in 2016, U.S. President Barack Obama helped broker a rapprochement as the two countries restored diplomatic relations and returned their ambassadors to their posts.
But the warming of relations did not last long. Turkey again expelled the Israeli ambassador in response to Israel’s killing of 290 Palestinian demonstrators demanding an end to the blockade of Gaza in 2018. After openly admitting to intelligence sharing for 24 years, Turkey refused to publicize its intelligence meetings with Israel. It has continued to wield influence among dozens of Palestinian groups inside Israel’s green line, including Jerusalem, through financial aid and other types of support.
Every time Israel attacks Gaza and inflicts significant casualties, Erdogan labels it state terrorism. He has repeatedly warned that he will not allow Israel to annex parts of the West Bank. But his threats ring hollow. It would be militarily unwise and politically impossible for Turkey to stop Israel from moving into the Palestinian territories. Indeed, his threats are mostly rhetorical and don’t extend much beyond recalling ambassadors and decreasing diplomatic missions. The two countries continue to share economic interests that have always risen above their political disagreements. In fact, despite their frayed relationship, the value of their trade increased from $4.7 billion in 2015 to $6.1 billion in 2019.
The two countries also continue to coordinate on security matters, as adversarial countries often do to prevent further deterioration of relations. The last known meeting between the Turkish and Israeli intelligence chiefs occurred in Washington in January. Both countries share concerns over the presence of Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, in Syria. In fact, Israel Defense Forces followed with great interest the Turkish army’s defeat of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan unit in Idlib last February.
Rebuilding the Relationship
Following the Arab uprisings, Erdogan believed that political change would sweep the region and bolster Turkey’s regional position. But the counterrevolutions dashed his hopes for regional supremacy and turned many Arab states against Ankara. Israel, however, is still eager to restore close ties with Turkey, which it believes can help counter the Iranian threat. Ankara’s growing ties in Central Asia and its promotion of pan-Turkism complicate Tehran’s ability to expand into these former Soviet republics where Russian, Chinese and American influences are paramount.
Erdogan was highly critical of the recent Israeli-Emirati peace agreement, but he’s unlikely to make any retaliatory moves. The deal includes a powerful component on the structure of the region’s future economy, and Turkey does not want to be excluded. Its chances of joining the European Union are slim, and its exclusion from the unfolding economy of the Middle East would ruin its prospects for economic development. Although a 2020 Israeli intelligence report included Turkey in the list of countries and organizations that pose a threat to Israel’s national security, Israeli decision-makers tend to view Erdogan’s fiery rhetoric as strategically insignificant, more of an aggravation than a real threat. Israel is keen on maintaining an open channel of communication with Turkey, irrespective of what Erdogan says.
Among Turkey’s biggest concerns over Israel is its cooperation with Egypt, Greece and Cyprus in the Eastern Mediterranean. The exclusive economic zone that Turkey recently declared in the Eastern Mediterranean technically overlaps with shipping routes used for 99 percent of Israel’s foreign trade. But there is potential for cooperation between the two countries in this area. Israel isn’t opposed to signing a maritime agreement with Turkey to ease tensions in the region; it actually declined to endorse a joint declaration in May signed by the foreign ministers of France, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and the UAE denouncing Turkish provocation in the Eastern Mediterranean. And considering its dire economic state and need for natural resources, Turkey would likely also be open to maintaining good working relations with Israel (and, by extension, Washington).
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The litmus test of improving Turkish-Israeli relations is the resumption of their diplomatic relations at the ambassador level. Turkey, which is now isolated from much of the Middle East and Europe, has a compelling reason to restore ties. Israel, which has forged strong relations with all of Ankara’s adversaries, likewise is looking for more allies in the region. In reference to Necmettin Erbakan’s ascension to the role of prime minister in the 1990s, Israeli President Shimon Peres said, “Governments may change, but basic interests remain.” These two countries don’t need to agree on everything, but what they have in common exceeds what separates them.
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Sep. 30, 2020
As Turkey’s Economy Goes, So Goes Its Ambitions
By Caroline D. Rose
Turkey’s economy is in dire straits. In September, the Turkish lira fell to a 20-year low as investors withdrew billions from Turkey’s currency bond and stock market. In a scramble to keep its currency afloat, the government has blown through almost half the foreign reserves it had at the beginning of the year. With little liquidity left and its largest banks on the brink of collapse, Ankara has realized that its current strategy of fueling economic growth through cheap borrowing cannot hold.
The country has been here before, of course. Just two years ago, it burned through its foreign reserves to protect the lira’s value and hid its debt problem behind defaults and bailouts. But this time is different. Turkey is drawing from far fewer reserves, relying only on Qatari currency swaps to keep them afloat, and its banking sector is depleted. Turkey is working with far fewer reserves and with a depleted banking system. Unless it fundamentally reforms its decrepit institutions – or receives a generous bailout – its economy is in trouble.
Economic duress can be an agent of change in any country, but in Turkey, with its history of coups and complicated relationship with secularism and Islamism, the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, has even more cause for concern because of the potential geopolitical consequences it carries. Turkey has been quickly expanding its regional presence and influencing the behavior of neighboring countries through aggressive action in the Eastern Mediterranean and in northern Syria. But now that the coronavirus pandemic has slammed an economy already in trouble – and with an election just two years away – the ruling party will change its strategy, focusing its foreign policy closer to home and prioritizing regime survival at all costs.
How Did Turkey Get Here?
At the beginning of this year, Ankara had some room to breathe. In December 2019, the economy recorded 0.9 percent gross domestic product growth after a year of recession and debt. GDP growth rates had been fueled by cheap borrowing policies, which created a liquidity crisis and steep bank debt that devalued the lira by 30 percent against the dollar but raised inflation to nearly 12 percent in August. Put simply, the crisis revealed deep structural vulnerabilities in the Turkish economic system.
The problem is that, curiously, Ankara has continued to repeat many of the same mistakes it made before the 2018-19 recession. The government directed Turkey’s central bank to increase cheap loan distribution, which in turn put pressure on the lira and led to increased dollar borrowing from domestic banks to stave off devaluation. As investors began to bet against the lira, the government blew through $65 billion of its foreign reserves from the start of 2020. Eventually, interest rates put pressure on selling and drove the lira to all-time lows (roughly 7.7 lira to the dollar in September), even as the government kept rates below national inflation levels of 11.8 percent. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan prevented the ostensibly independent central bank from changing interest rates for months, concerned as he was that relaxing rates would worsen a future recession. Only in mid-September did Turkey finally adjust its interest rate from 8.25 percent to 10.25 percent, giving the lira a temporary boost to 7.62 against the dollar, but many believed it was too little too late.
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Naturally, the timing of Erdogan’s long-term plans will suffer. 2023 was supposed to be a big year for Turkey. It’s the country’s 100th birthday and a big year for general elections in which the ruling party was banking on a comfortable win. More important, it is supposed to be a year of promises kept. In 2013, the AKP rolled out a series of ambitious goals called “2023 Vision” that would be reached within a decade, including an increase in annual exports to $500 billion, slashing the unemployment rate from 11 percent to 5 percent, bumping per capita income to $25,000, boosting the country’s tourism and finance sectors, achieving full participation in state-operated health insurance programs, putting the country’s domestically made automobile, defense and iron and steel industries on the map, and becoming a top-10 economy, with a GDP target of $2.6 trillion. Turkey’s defense industry also set 2023 as its target to roll out eyebrow-raising military technology, promising to domestically produce 75 percent of Turkey’s defense needs, increase defense industry revenues to $26.9 billion, and roll out local drone, naval vessels, armored vehicles, helicopters and main battle tank programs.
It was always a tall order. But not only was it wildly expensive, it lacked attendant economic restructuring and institutional reform that would allow the country to manage high levels of spending. Though Turkey made progress on its automobile production industry, naval production, tourism sector and foreign trade volume, its financial institutions began to crumble.
Despite efforts to create the impression that the country was less in debt than it was, the Turkish government understood that it couldn’t forestall the coming recession. Time was limited, but the government hoped it could stay afloat until elections, distracting the public with a series of foreign policy ventures and a false sense of economic health. The pandemic made this untenable. Just months after it hit Turkey, reports emerged that Erdogan was serious about changing the date of the 2023 presidential election – bumping up the date not by a few days but two and a half years. Doing so would insulate him from the consequences of future bank collapses, economic struggle and inevitable fallout from COVID-19, salvaging the base of public support he currently has to keep a grip on power, or so the thinking goes. Calling snap elections would also prevent newer opposition parties from gaining momentum. While Erdogan has played coy by denying the idea of early elections and stating that “only the opposition” has circulated these rumors, the country’s economic health could force him to reschedule.
Where Will Turkey Go From Here?
Over the past year, Turkey has taken extensive and at times provocative actions to expand its presence along its periphery in the Mediterranean and the Levant, and outward into the greater Mediterranean, Red Sea and Horn of Africa – a pattern that resembles the country’s mighty predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. But to maintain this kind of momentum, Turkey must have a strong economy. If it can weather this financial storm, it can pursue its ambitions of becoming a regional power. If not, then Erdogan will have to fight just to maintain the gains Turkey has made so far.
Until election day – whenever that may be – survival will be priority one for Turkey’s government. Expect the government to double-down on its opposition, increase control over institutions of power, raise taxes, cut services and borrow more money. Ankara will try to scale back some of its most expensive commitments in faraway theaters – such as the Horn of Africa, the Arab Gulf and the Sahel – and reduce foreign military imports, hoping that its own defense industry will see it through. A slowdown on long-term defense projects – particularly conventional projects scheduled to debut in the next 20 years, such as Turkey’s second amphibious assault ship and a line of MILGEM frigates and corvettes – should also be expected.
But don’t think Turkey will stand down in the Mediterranean and the Levant. Turkey will look to politicize opportunities in its periphery to maintain popular support and preserve geo-strategic interests including by increasing the country’s energy independence, preventing violence from spilling over its southern border, defending itself against regional rivals, and so on. Even without the conventional equipment planned to debut in the next few years, Ankara can afford to maintain its strategy of gunboat diplomacy in Aegean littoral waters, using fishing, drilling and small naval vessels to keep up the pressure on Greece and Cyprus.
This strategy is, notably, politically popular at home. A majority of Turks want to renegotiate terms with Greece to expand Turkish maritime territory and thus to stake more claims to hydrocarbon resources in the region. They see Turkey’s harassment tactics as a means to those ends. Even the ruling party’s staunchest opponents in the Republican People’s Party support Turkey’s Mediterranean campaign. Likewise, Turkey will continue its operations in northern Syria and Iraq: It’s simply too important an issue to Turkish voters, who see it as the preservation of their borders against migrants and militant organizations.
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But none of this will necessarily lessen the pain of Turkey’s economic disrepair. Laborers at nuclear plants and construction sites are working without wages, with some initiating legal proceedings and protesting poor management. Many small-business owners have had trouble accessing state-subsidized loans, and workers are unable to obtain financial support, leading to higher poverty rates and food insecurity – largely among the AKP’s conservative, lower-class base. These economic conditions will force Turkey to provide some kind of economic relief and impact the future of the ruling party.
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https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2020/10/greece-joins-turkey-russia-s-400-saga-and-congress-wants-answers/169103/
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https://www.newsweek.com/its-time-trump-soberly-confront-rising-turkish-threat-opinion-1536864
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http://carolineglick.com/who-will-deal-with-turkey/
Who will deal with Turkey?
10/09/2020
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For the past several months, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has busily dispelled any residual doubts about his hostility toward the U.S. and its allies in NATO and the Middle East. He has accomplished this in multiple ways. Erdogan purchased Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system and, in a swipe at the U.S. and NATO, announced his intention to test the system next week.
He threatens and seeks to subvert Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. He has destroyed his nation’s longstanding strategic alliance with Israel.
He has cast his lot with the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world, and with Iran against his Arab enemies. Indeed, Erdogan has effectively appointed himself the head of the Muslim Brotherhood. An associate of his recently published a map of a new Ottoman Empire, or “Greater Turkey”—with Erdogan as sultan. It included vast territories spanning from northern Greece to the east Aegean islands, half of Bulgaria, Cyprus, most of Armenia and large swaths of Georgia, Iraq and Syria.
Erdogan is fighting on behalf of Sunni jihadists in Syria and in Libya.
On the positive side, Erdogan’s fights in Syria and Libya place Turkey in confrontation with Russia, which is siding with the opposite side in both wars. Erdogan started a new fight with Russia over the past couple of months, which now threatens to transform into a major war. Erdogan is fighting with Azerbaijan against Russia’s client Armenia for control over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh area that both Armenia and Azerbaijan claim.
How is the U.S. supposed to deal with Erdogan, the head of NATO member Turkey—a strategically placed ally, traversing two continents, that Washington has long viewed as indispensable?
The Pentagon rejects calls to walk away from Turkey. And a brief look at the map makes clear the generals’ reluctance. Perched on Russia’s backyard, Turkey’s massive landmass provides U.S. forces with easy access to key theaters in Asia, the Middle East and Russia.
To uphold the alliance, the U.S. has consistently bowed its head in the face of Turkish aggression against its allies and partners. In 2019, the U.S. agreed to ditch the Kurdish forces in Syria, despite their central role in assisting U.S. efforts to destroy ISIS’s caliphate, in order to avoid a direct confrontation between U.S. and Turkish forces. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just visited Greece and told its leaders to stand down against Turkey and seek a diplomatic solution to Turkey’s aggression.
Owing to Turkey’s strategic importance, the U.S. has turned a blind eye to its sponsorship of Hamas. The U.S. has not called Turkey to account in a serious way for its willingness to permit ISIS to use Turkey as its logistics and mobilization base, or economic hub, during the years that the murderous jihadist group controlled large portions of Syria and Iraq.
During Barack Obama‘s presidency, kowtowing to Erdogan was of a piece with Obama’s foreign policy vision. Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, sought to restructure the U.S. alliance system in the Middle East away from Israel and the U.S.’s traditional Sunni Arab allies and toward Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Given its radical thrust, it made sense when Obama told an interviewer in 2012 that he spoke with Erdogan more than any other foreign leader.
The Obama administration was sympathetically inclined toward the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It pushed for the overthrow of U.S. ally and long-serving Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in 2012, and supported the Muslim Brotherhood regime that took power in 2013. Like Erdogan, the Obama-Biden administration was livid when, following mass protests throughout the country and the drying up of Egypt’s financial reserves that brought the country of 90 million to the brink of starvation, the Egyptian military ousted the Muslim Brotherhood from power and installed Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as president.
Throughout their second term, Obama and Biden did nothing to stop Erdogan’s efforts to destabilize and subvert Sisi’s government and return the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Today, some 20,000 members of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are living in Turkey, which has become their center of operations just as the nation serves as the operational center of Hamas.
The Obama-Biden administration also did not seriously object to Erdogan’s efforts on behalf of Iran when he transformed Turkey into a major economic hub for Iranian sanctions busting. Obama’s decision to appease Tehran through the nuclear deal that gave Iran an open road to a nuclear arsenal and enriched the mullocracy by abrogating the UN economic sanctions against it made him, by consequence, supportive of Turkey’s outreach and support for the Iranian regime.
The Obama-Biden desire to appease Iran precluded their administration from taking effective action against Syrian President, and Iranian and Russian client, Bashar Assad. Obama’s unwillingness to confront Iran empowered Russia to deploy forces to Syria for the first time since 1982. Obama’s supine policy in Syria also played a role in Erdogan’s decision to begin negotiations regarding the purchase of Russia’s S-400 system, which drove a stake into the NATO alliance.
Biden has pledged to reinstate Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East and worldwide if he is elected next month.
On the surface, Trump’s policies toward Turkey don’t appear that different from Obama’s. He has not challenged Turkey’s membership in NATO. He has bowed to Turkey’s demands in Syria. Although he did block the delivery of F-35s to Turkey, he has refused to-date to sanction Turkey for its aggressive behavior toward Greece and Turkey. He hasn’t removed U.S. forces and nuclear warheads from Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. And he continues to refer to Erdogan as a leader he respects.
But in practice, Trump’s policy is very different from the Obama-Biden policies. Trump is not an ideologue except insofar as “America First” can be considered an ideological position. His commitment to advancing U.S. interests has compelled Trump to set aside traditional policies if they do not conform to realities on the ground. Traditionally, for instance, it has been considered impossible to forge peace between Israel and the Arab states so long as the Palestinian conflict with Israel remains unresolved. Trump saw, however, that Israel and several Gulf Arab states and Egypt were maintaining intense, friendly ties and realized that the traditional perceptions of the Middle East were wrong.
From the time of Ronald Reagan, the prevailing wisdom in Washington was that the U.S. had to cut a deal with the ayatollahs in Iran. Trump realized that no one had succeeded because the Iranian regime seeks to destroy the U.S.—not make peace with it. The Iranians even refused to sign their nuclear deal with Obama, lest they be perceived as making peace with “the Great Satan.”
The consistent themes of Trump’s foreign policies in the Middle East and throughout the world are that he has insisted on judging leaders by their deeds, and not their words; judging policies by their success in making the U.S. and its allies better off, and not by the support they receive from the foreign policy establishment; and basing U.S. partnerships with foreign states on the presence of shared interests, rather than relying on formal alliance structures to advance American interests and goals.
All of these aspects of Trump’s foreign policies are vital for developing and maintaining a successful U.S. policy toward Erdogan’s Turkey, as Erdogan exposes himself as a foe interested in pitting all sides against one another to enable his efforts to construct a new Ottoman Empire. Many commentators advocate expelling Turkey from NATO. But it isn’t clear that a head-on confrontation with Erdogan would neutralize him. It could well empower him by helping him to rally the Turkish public behind him at a time when Turkey’s economy stands on the brink of collapse.
Given Erdogan’s multipronged aggression, the first goal of a realistic policy would be to diminish his power by severely weakening Turkey economically. This may mean imposing economic sanctions on Turkey for its aggression against Greece and Cyprus. Or it may mean simply giving Turkey a gentle push over the economic cliff.
Without raising the issue of removing Turkey from NATO, the U.S. can simply not sell Turkey advanced platforms while demonstrating its support for Greece and Cyprus, as well as Israel and its Arab partners.
True, China is already seeking to supplant the U.S. in sponsoring the Turkish economy and selling Turkey arms—but by keeping Turkey in NATO, the U.S. still has more leverage over Turkey than China.
A passive-aggressive policy for diminishing Erdogan’s power and the threat he can mount is right up Trump’s alley. Trump doesn’t often directly attack his opponents. He embraced North Korean leader Kim Jong-un even as he imposed the harshest economic sanctions ever on North Korea and redesignated it a state sponsor of terrorism. He has acted similarly with Putin and with Erdogan himself.
Erdogan’s belief that he can rebuild the Ottoman Empire while attacking EU and NATO members, the U.S., its key allies in the Middle East as well as Russia, owes to his narcissism that Obama and Biden did so much to feed.
With Erdogan now openly threatening multiple U.S. allies, it is increasingly apparent that the largest and fastest rising threat to stability and peace in the Middle East is Turkey—and the victor in next month’s U.S. presidential election will have no lead time to deal with it.
Trump’s reality-based foreign policy, his preference for indirect confrontations and empowerment of U.S. partners to defend themselves from aggression, rather than dictating their actions or fighting their battles for them, give the president the flexibility to diminish Erdogan’s maneuver room, his economic independence and his popularity at home—while also empowering U.S. allies directly affected by the strongman’s aggression to stand up to him effectively, with or without direct U.S. involvement.
Originally published in Newsweek under the title “It’s time for Trump to soberly confront the rising Turkish threat.”
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https://www.investigativeproject.org/8595/as-turkey-lira-tumbles-erdogan-pursues-neo
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https://www.investigativeproject.org/8623/turkey-is-the-center-of-the-new-islamist
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16797/erdogan-bogus-democratic-reforms
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16809/turkey-erdogan-threatens-europe
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Sometimes Stratfor strikes me as glib:
S-400 Sanctions Risk Further Deteriorating U.S.-Turkey Relations
4 MINS READ
Dec 15, 2020 | 19:11 GMT
HIGHLIGHTS
New U.S. sanctions will stymie Turkey’s strategy to develop an indigenous defense sector, prompting Ankara to continue exploring alternative security ties while intensifying bilateral tensions for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration. On Dec. 14, the United States announced a series of defense sector-aimed sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), fulfilling long-term threats that Washington would impose penalties on its fellow NATO ally for the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system. The sanctions target Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries (SSB), including its chief Ismail Demir and three other senior officials, and come as the U.S. Congress was poised to mandate CAATSA sanctions through the annual National Defense Authorization Act. ...
New U.S. sanctions will stymie Turkey’s strategy to develop an indigenous defense sector, prompting Ankara to continue exploring alternative security ties while intensifying bilateral tensions for U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration. On Dec. 14, the United States announced a series of defense sector-aimed sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), fulfilling long-term threats that Washington would impose penalties on its fellow NATO ally for the purchase of the Russian S-400 missile system. The sanctions target Turkey’s Presidency of Defense Industries (SSB), including its chief Ismail Demir and three other senior officials, and come as the U.S. Congress was poised to mandate CAATSA sanctions through the annual National Defense Authorization Act.
Washington also issued an export license ban to SSB, which is the main Turkish civil institution that brings together the Turkish presidency, armed forces and defense ministry for decisions on foreign procurement and the domestic production of military equipment.
Despite targeting a relatively narrow aspect of Turkey's defense sector, the sanctions will still complicate Ankara’s procurement of U.S. defense technologies and materials, including those that Turkey uses in its own national defense industry. The sanctions will make procurement from foreign suppliers much more complicated, disrupting the Turkish government’s ambitious plans to build out its indigenous defense industry and achieve self-sufficiency in defense production by 2023.
Turkey’s defense sector only makes up about one percent of its economy and employs about 30,000 workers compared with the country’s 31 million-strong labor market.
Turkey claims that its defense sector is 70% independent and has aggressively sought to expand exports of military equipment to boost domestic production. Defense exports amounted to $2.74 billion in 2019 after Ankara first surpassed $2 billion the year prior.
The sanctions will likely produce a nationalist surge in Turkey that will only embolden Ankara to continue building up its own indigenous defense capacity, as well as explore alternative defense ties to other major arms exporters, such as Russia and China. Turkey’s indigenous military-industrial sector is politically sensitive given its direct links to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The U.S. sanctions will thus prove as much a political hit for Erdogan — especially as the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic continues to strain his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)’s economic record.
In recent years, Erdogan has prioritized building out Turkey’s military-industrial sector to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign suppliers.
The SSB was brought more directly under the Turkish president’s control in 2018, reflecting the strategic importance with which Erdogan views the sector.
Heightened U.S.-Turkey tensions will also thwart the Biden administration’s ability to foster a more productive relationship with Ankara upon taking office. The Biden administration has said it will seek engagement with Turkey in areas of mutual interest, such as Syria. The new White House is also hoping to utilize Turkey as part of a more multilateral approach to the region after the past four years of U.S. President Donald Trump’s unilateral diplomacy. But while the Biden administration will seek engagement, its predecessor’s sanctions will likely only continue Turkey’s drift away from the West toward China and Russia.
Tony Blinken, Biden’s presumptive-secretary of state, has specifically highlighted cooperation in Syria as a key aspect of the U.S.-Turkey relationship that the new administration seeks to reset.
Beyond the S-400, Turkey has also explored the option of purchasing the Russian SU-35 jet to offset the loss of the American F-35, and has already purchased Chinese ballistic missile technology.
In addition to the ruling AKP, Turkey’s opposition Republican People's Party and ultranationalist splinter Iyi Party have also condemned the new U.S. sanctions, with an official from the former even urging Turkey to activate its S-400 system despite the risk of creating another crisis with the United States.
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https://webmail.earthlink.net/wam/index.jsp?x=1142238375&x=-214086787
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Turkey Adjusts Its Foreign Policy
After hitting some roadblocks, Ankara is reevaluating its foreign relations.
By: Hilal Khashan
Turkey’s long-term goal is to become a military and economic power with global outreach. Its path to success, however, isn’t a straight line. Crises will inevitably emerge, requiring tactical pauses or a strategic redirection. Today, Turkey is facing mounting challenges in the international system, forcing the country to rethink its foreign policy. It’s therefore making an effort to stop the deterioration of its foreign relations and to stabilize its financial situation, so that it can resume its quest to become a global power.
Reviving Its Past Glory
Turkey’s claims to great power status have a long history. In the 1930s, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk endorsed the sun language theory – the belief that all languages are derived from an early iteration of the Turkish language. Ataturk, who was a big proponent of Turkish nationalism, wanted to convince European nations that Turkey was one of them. During his time, Turkish historians traced the origins of Turkish nationalism to the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 when the Seljuks defeated the Byzantine army and conquered Anatolia. They emphasized Anatolia’s Hellenistic heritage to advocate that it had a place in Europe.
Like Ataturk, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a populist leader and staunch modernizer. Both men also realized quickly that Russia would not be an ally in Turkey’s quest for greatness. For Ataturk, it was clear that the Soviet model was not one he wanted to follow, and for Erdogan, the two countries’ histories, geographies and perceptions of their own power stood in the way of strategic cooperation. The difference between Erdogan and Ataturk, however, is that Ataturk looked to Europe as a model of modernity that he wanted to replicate in Turkey, whereas Erdogan wants to reconnect Turkey with its Ottoman roots.
Erdogan’s campaign to resurrect Turkey’s past glory and transform it into a military and economic power explains some of Ankara’s recent achievements. Earlier this month, Erdogan announced that Turkey planned to send an unmanned spacecraft to the surface of the moon in 2023. Ankara also plans to launch its first domestic-made communication satellite in 2022.
Over the past two decades, Turkey has developed a robust defense industry that now meets 70 percent of the country’s military equipment needs, with plans to become self-sufficient by 2053. Turkey is one of just 10 countries that manufactures warships and is already working on building a modern main battle tank and a fifth-generation fighter.
Turkey has also experienced impressive economic development over the past 30 years. Its economy is the world’s 19th largest and 13th largest in terms of purchasing power parity. Its human development index rose from 0.58 in 1990 to 0.82 in 2019, placing it in the very high human development category. It has a modern economic structure, with 65 percent of the labor force involved in the services sector, 27 percent in industry, and 8 percent in agriculture. Despite the economic slump of 2018 and the COVID-19 pandemic, the Turkish economy is expected to grow by 4 percent this year.
Turkey's Gross Domestic Product
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Turkey's Human Development Index
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Recent Foreign Policy Changes
Since the 2016 failed coup, Turkey’s foreign policy has seen a raft of changes. Former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s 2004 “zero problems with our neighbors” policy has been replaced with a bewildering array of enemies in the Middle East and beyond. Over the past five years, Turkey has participated in armed conflicts in northern Iraq, Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. It also maintains significant military contingents in Qatar, Northern Cyprus and Somalia. Ankara’s relations with Europe and the United States have deteriorated thanks to its military adventurism, purchase of Russian-made S-400 missiles (which led to a U.S. ban on arms exports to Turkey and Ankara’s expulsion from the F-35 fighter jet program), and recent activities in the Eastern Mediterranean.
However, Turkey appears determined to make 2021 the year of political flexibility and diplomacy. Erdogan is keen on engaging the new U.S. administration – despite President Joe Biden's calling Erdogan an autocrat during his election campaign and his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, saying that Turkey was not acting as an ally. Erdogan continues to believe that U.S. support for the Syrian Kurds is at the center of the rift between the two countries, but he has softened his tone, signaling that Turkey’s problems with the outside world can be resolved through dialogue. Turkey’s minister of defense also suggested the country was willing not to use the S-400s in an effort to defuse tensions and avoid incurring sanctions.
Erdogan has also expressed an openness to working with Europe. In part, that’s because European leaders already approved sanctions on Turkey over its drilling activities in the Eastern Mediterranean. Turkey’s apparent willingness to restart talks with Greece on demarcating exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean doesn’t change its fundamental position. But the move shows that Ankara would rather use diplomacy than flex its military muscle (which angered NATO, and especially France) to defend its drilling rights in Mediterranean waters. Erdogan has also toned down his criticism of France, after calling French President Emmanuel Macron a thug. Turkey’s foreign affairs minister expressed willingness to start a constructive dialogue with France to resolve their differences on issues ranging from Syria to Libya and the Eastern Mediterranean. Erdogan also urged Europe to remove obstacles blocking its accession to the European Union and European customs union and stalling visa-free entry into the EU for Turkish citizens.
(click to enlarge)
Erdogan has also extended an olive branch to Egypt. Last September, he spoke of the deep historical ties between Turkey and Egypt. He called for dialogue with Cairo and recognized Egypt’s interests in Libya, eager to strike a maritime agreement similar to the one Ankara reached with Libya’s Government of National Accord. Erdogan emphasized that intelligence cooperation between the two countries continued despite their political differences. (Erdogan was a supporter of former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who was ousted in a 2013 military coup led by current President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi.) Turkey has also made overtures to Israel, appointing a new ambassador in December after leaving the post vacant for two years.
Constraints on Policy Shifts
Despite showing room for negotiation on some fronts, Turkey’s position on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and People’s Protection Units (YPG) remains unshakeable. Ankara views these groups as existential threats because it believes leaving them unchecked could lead to Turkey’s demise. Ankara was angered by the U.S. State Department’s statement earlier this week on the deaths of 13 Turks in Iraq because the statement made its condemnation of the killings contingent on verification that the PKK carried them out – rather than accepting Ankara’s account. That Blinken called his Turkish counterpart to accept the Turkish version of events attests to the Biden administration’s openness to dialogue.
In the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey does not recognize the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea because Ankara believes it favors Greece and Cyprus. Turkey does not expect to reach an agreement with Greece in 2021 to delineate their exclusive economic zones. Though Erdogan is willing to negotiate, he’s not willing to concede much on this issue, which enjoys rare national consensus in Turkey.
With Russia, Turkey has many ongoing disagreements, including over Syria, Libya and Nagorno-Karabakh. In Syria, Turkey wants an end to Bashar Assad’s regime and a comprehensive political settlement that allows the return of displaced Syrian refugees. In Nagorno-Karabakh, Turkey managed to penetrate Russia’s backyard by backing Azerbaijan’s war to reclaim the disputed region last year. In doing so, it gained access to the Nakhchivan Corridor, linking it to Azerbaijan, as well as Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan via the Caspian Sea.
Future Outlook
Despite its diplomatic overtures, Turkey will face a number of challenges this year. Its relationship with the U.S. will not normalize in 2021, though it’s unlikely to deteriorate any further. Erdogan isn’t willing to burn bridges with an administration that just took office. His most formidable challenge, however, is defining Turkey’s relationship with Russia. Both countries will be bound by dialogue, but their disagreements especially over Syria’s fate will be an obstacle to any rapprochement.
Ankara’s diplomatic outreach may be more successful among its Middle East neighbors. The Saudis, concerned about a shift in Washington’s Gulf policy, especially on Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, seem to have opened up to Turkey to try to secure a semblance of a regional balance. The Saudis are quite interested in allying with Israel, but they cannot do so without the backing of a major Muslim country, such as Turkey. Indicators point to the opening of a new chapter of friendly relations between Riyadh and Ankara. (Turkey also maintains good relations with Qatar, which was the subject of a 3 1/2-year Saudi-led blockade that recently ended.)
Erdogan’s pursuit of an independent Turkish foreign policy sends signals to the West that Turkey will no longer be subservient. In this sense, his foreign policy approach is close to that of Ataturk, who fiercely defended Turkey’s sovereignty and independence. Erdogan is probably the Middle Eastern leader best equipped to seize opportunities when they arise and change his position when circumstances permit, as they do now.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17399/turkey-damage-jews
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The original post in this thread is not without prescience:
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17486/germany-extremists-grey-wolves
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Turkey's Strategy in the Eastern Med
The pandemic has created a complex reality that increases the potential for tensions in the region.
By: Antonia Colibasanu
As Turkey’s dreams of joining the European Union have faded, Ankara has shifted its strategy toward the West. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Eastern Mediterranean. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s latest moves – a visit to the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and the announcement of a resumption of Turkish energy exploration in the area – are meant to show that he will continue to pursue his neo-Ottoman “Mavi Vatan” (Blue Homeland) doctrine. Whether development of any large finds in the Eastern Mediterranean would be viable in the current climate is questionable, but Turkey needs to deter conventional threats along its coastline, and under the circumstances, energy exploration may be the best excuse. At the same time, Erdogan may use the potential for a new crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean to distract Turks from economic problems at home that threaten to destabilize his rule. Though this strategy may work under normal circumstances, the pandemic has created a complex reality that increases the potential for tensions in the Eastern Mediterranean to spiral out of Ankara’s control.
Recent Developments
After peaking last summer, tensions seem to have decreased between Turkey and the European Union (especially Greece) over exploration for oil and gas off the coast of Cyprus. However, there is still no constructive dialogue between the two parties. Most recently, on July 20, Erdogan visited Northern Cyprus and said U.N. efforts to unite the island – which is divided between a Greek Cypriot south and a Turkish north – had failed. The strategy should be abandoned in favor of a two-state solution, he said. Erdogan also backed the opening of the town of Varosha, once the island’s top resort but whose Greek Cypriot population fled during the 1974 Turkish invasion.
(click to enlarge)
Erdogan’s trip to Northern Cyprus came just three days after Turkey’s U.N. envoy spoke with the U.N. secretary-general about Greece’s “continuous flagrant violations” of international law in the Aegean and Mediterranean. Contravening the 1923 Lausanne Treaty, the envoy said, Athens has militarized islands near Turkey that are supposed to remain demilitarized. Ultimately, Turkey wants to amend or cancel the treaty, which gave Greece sovereignty over the islands close to Turkey’s coast, including the right to explore for and extract natural resources from the sea, thus denying Turkey a significant exclusive economic zone.
While the opening of Varosha and the statements about a two-state solution for Cyprus made headlines, it is important to note that ahead of the visit Erdogan also said Turkey will continue energy exploration in the Eastern Mediterranean. This declaration seems to undercut prior declarations promising no further provocations.
It was the discovery of energy resources that revived long-standing disputes between Turkey and Greece. In 2019 and 2020, tensions between Ankara and Athens flared as Turkey sent seismic research ships to waters contested by Greece and the Republic of Cyprus, intervened in Libya’s civil war and signed a maritime delimitation agreement with Tripoli. In fact, the early 21st century finds the region in a completely different reality than that of a few decades ago. The reemergence of the Russian threat, an increasingly aggressive Iran, the weakening of the EU due to its socio-economic problems, and the growing anti-Turkish coalition in the Middle East have forced Ankara to rethink its position in the region. Moreover, the country’s economic problems – predating the pandemic but increasing in complexity since it hit – have added to the government’s list of problems. Ankara had already begun adopting a more assertive, more independent military doctrine as it drifted from the West – which started once it became clear that Turkey would not become an EU member state – despite being a NATO member. Given the current context, the diplomatic dispute between Turkey and the U.N., as well as the renewed dispute between Turkey and Greece, must be seen as part of a potential realignment among the regional powers that will affect broader strategic alliances.
A Summary of Turkish-Greek Disputes
Signed on July 24, 1923, the Lausanne Treaty ended hostilities between Turkey and Greece at the end of World War I and especially after the Turkish War of Independence, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s troops drove the Greeks out of Anatolia and, consequently, the Greeks retained most of the Aegean islands. At the time, Cyprus was a British colony. The terms of the treaty led to reconciliation between the two countries during the interwar period, and they even signed a friendship treaty in 1930 and the Balkan Pact in 1934.
However, several events contributed to the deterioration of bilateral relations after World War II. First, defeated Italy ceded the Dodecanese archipelago in the southern Aegean to Greece, to the annoyance of Turkey, which did not enter the war against the Axis powers until February 1945, so late that it did not get any of the spoils.
Second, the decolonization of Cyprus sparked serious conflicts between the Greeks and the Turks living on the island, during what should have been the Cypriot state-building process. In 1974, the fragile equilibrium was finally broken when a Greek junta overthrew the regime of Archbishop Makarios III, a proponent of the island’s independence and opponent of Greek interference in Cypriot affairs, triggering a Turkish military intervention in the north of the island. Despite the international community’s attempts at diplomacy, this led to the partition of the island and establishment of the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in 1983, which only Turkey recognizes.
Third, the development of the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea in the 1950s created a lasting dispute between Athens and Ankara, as the latter refused to subscribe to the law’s main conventions, which Turkey said gave Greece complete sovereignty in the Aegean Sea. Instead, Turkey made its own demands, which Greece accepted. In particular, Turkey said that if Greece extended its territorial waters in the Aegean to 12 nautical miles, then Turkey would consider it a casus belli. On two occasions, in 1987 and 1996, the disputes between the two states almost degenerated into war. But after Turkey applied to join the European Union in 1999, there were no such tensions until very recently.
The EU’s Influence – and Absence
Relations between the two countries have slowly deteriorated since Turkey realized EU accession was no longer viable. A divided Cyprus joined the EU in 2004, while Turkey has managed to close only one negotiating chapter out of 35. Turkey hasn’t formally renounced its desire to join the bloc, but its efforts have shifted toward updating the EU-Turkey customs union and visa liberalization. The socio-economic crisis in Europe, coupled with the refugee crisis, made Ankara change its relationship with Brussels. Considering one of the main migration routes from the Middle East passes through the Aegean, Turkey and the European Union (and notably Greece, as the first receiving country) have had to cooperate on managing the flow of migrants. When Turkey highlights Greece’s militarization of islands, much of it has to do with the placement of security personnel to ensure that migrant flows are well-managed and locals are exposed to minimal risks.
At the same time, Turkey has tried to establish itself as a key transit country within Europe's southern gas supply corridor through its involvement in the TANAP and TurkStream pipelines, which move gas from the Caucasus and Russia, respectively. When energy discoveries were made in the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkish aspirations to become a regional energy hub grew further – even as hopes for better relations between Turkey, Cyprus and Greece diminished. After the failure of the last round of negotiations on Cyprus’ fate in 2017, the Republic of Cyprus announced the exploitation of its deposits. Turkey denounced the decision as a violation of the rights of Turkish Cypriots and launched its “gunboat policy,” sending warships to prevent this initiative and to conduct its own exploration in disputed areas.
Turkey, Cyprus and Greece are not alone in the new energy game emerging in the Eastern Mediterranean. The first beneficiary of gas from the region was Israel, which has become an exporter of gas since the discovery in 2010. Egypt joined the club in 2011. The two countries have complex relations with Turkey, something that further complicated the Turkish position in the region, especially since Greece, Cyprus and Israel have moved closer together after the first gas discoveries.
Blue Homeland
Countries then established exclusive economic zones over the areas in which energy was discovered. This lead to the appropriation of certain areas and, consequently, made Turkey feel as though it was being boxed in again – hardly a happy outcome for an aspiring regional power. It thus developed its “Blue Homeland” strategy, whereby Turkey would develop its navy and strengthen its ability to protect Turkish interests overseas. Under Erdogan, it has since become synonymous with the designation of maritime areas from which Turkey is said to have been unjustly deprived in its near abroad. Blue Homeland was, for example, the justification for Turkey’s intervention in Libya, which in 2019 resulted in the signing of a bilateral treaty that delimitated an EEZ with Libya in the Eastern Mediterranean. Erdogan hopes to open a corridor between the Greek positions in the Aegean Sea and the gas fields of the Eastern Mediterranean and control the space crossed by a potential underwater gas pipeline that would be built and served by a Greek-Cypriot-Israeli consortium.
Delimiting Exclusive Economic Zones in the Eastern Mediterranean
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The purpose of the Blue Homeland strategy is not just to expand Turkish influence abroad but also to pursue many of Turkey’s domestic and financial interests. Implicit in the concept is the idea that Turkey should dominate the Mediterranean and reclaim the mercantile and maritime power once held by the Ottomans. It argues that Turkey’s geographic position is an asset, not a vulnerability. Having a strong naval presence in the Mediterranean, particularly the Eastern Mediterranean, would allow Turkey to assert claims to oil and gas reserves in contested waters there. This would in turn help Ankara become an energy hub and achieve energy independence, and the reclamation of prominence is something the ruling party can use to distract voters from the plight of the Turkish economy.
Cautious Management
Considering how badly the pandemic affected the energy markets, it’s hard to believe an underwater gas pipeline will be built under the Mediterranean anytime soon. So even though current conditions are urging Ankara to act, it needs to act carefully. While its emerging economic status has helped its aggressiveness, the pandemic weakened the Turkish economy and, in effect, its socio-political stability. This is why Turkey can’t afford to be too aggressive in the Eastern Mediterranean. By choosing diplomacy first, Ankara makes sure it keeps its options open.
Take the recent dust-up in Varosha. Erdogan claimed that the U.N. had failed to resolve the situation and expressed support for the opening of the city for settlement. Every permanent member of the U.N. Security Council urged him not to do so. It was a subtle way for Erdogan to remind them that he is still there and can destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean if he wants to.
Greece, on the other hand, is counting on the EU and NATO to contain Turkey’s ambitions. The problem with the EU is that its member states are divided on how to resolve a potential crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean. France has chosen to support Greece, while Germany is avoiding direct involvement in the matter. But generally, with the expectation that another wave of migration would follow any unrest, the EU is managing its relationship with Turkey cautiously.
Within NATO, of which both Greece and Turkey are members, things are even more complex. First, there is the relationship between Turkey and the U.S. Even if relations are tense, they are too important to forego. The U.S. may have reduced its military footprint in the Middle East, but it will never accept the fastest sea link between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean to be compromised. Moreover, the U.S. strategy toward Russia depends on containment and preventive action through NATO. The more tensions between Greece and Turkey increase, the more it divides NATO, which Washington doesn’t want. Considering the growing anti-Turkish sentiment in the Middle East and the reemergence of Russia and Iran, Turkey also needs to keep its ties to the U.S.
And so while they appear calm from a distance, the waters of the Mediterranean are busy in the east: combat ships and aircraft crew, rotating between sea policing, core military missions, sovereignty actions and safeguarding shipwrecked migrants, are all setting a complex reality of switching from one framework of legitimacy to another on a daily basis. The region is simply too important for interested parties to ignore it. Increased diplomatic tensions between Turkey and Greece, coupled with the presence of increasingly sophisticated defense systems on ships or ashore, raise the risk of misunderstandings during maneuvers – which makes for the increased potential of tensions.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17574/turkey-west-drifting-apart
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September 22, 2021
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Turkey’s Ambitious Plans for Africa
Ankara hopes to secure a foothold in areas once ruled by the Ottomans.
By: Abubakar Alhassan
For years, Turkey has pursued an ambitious agenda, expanding its influence in countries and regions formerly under Ottoman control. It may not be able to absorb these regions as part of its territory as its predecessor once did, but it is increasingly defending its economic, political and strategic interests in areas far beyond its own borders, including in parts of North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Here, Turkey’s goals are wide-ranging. It needs to secure access to vital maritime routes through the Red Sea and to energy resources in the eastern Mediterranean. With economic expectations among average Turks rising, Ankara also sees these regions as a gateway to emerging markets and resource hubs in the Sahel – which can encourage further economic growth. But it also faces a number of constraints, particularly competition from its rivals in the Middle East, that may limit its influence in the Arab world.
Turkish Imperatives
Turkish history seems to give its leaders good reason to set their sights high. The Ottomans, after all, oversaw an empire that, at its height, ruled parts of Europe, the Middle East and North and East Africa. This effectively gave the Ottomans control over many of the world’s most important trade routes and some of its most resource-rich regions. However, the empire crumbled in 1918 after the First World War, in which it backed the losing side, and its territories were divided among Britain, France and Russia. Following the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, Turkey seemed to accept its fate as a far more modest power, but memories of its past glory never faded completely.
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One of Turkey’s biggest sources of strength is its control over the Sea of Marmara, which effectively gives it control over the Bosporus, a critical waterway separating the European and Asian parts of Turkey and connecting the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea. Access through the strait is key for the transportation of oil, wheat and other goods to Europe from Asia. It forces Black Sea coastal countries, particularly Russia, to avoid direct confrontation with Turkey, or else potentially lose their ability to conduct trade with Europe through the Mediterranean.
One of Turkey’s biggest weaknesses, however, is the presence of countless Greek-controlled islands that lay in the Aegean Sea beyond the Sea of Marmara and another critical waterway, the Dardanelles. These islands could restrict Turkey’s access to major sea lanes, making the country vulnerable to a possible blockade or even an attack by other maritime powers. Its other major weakness is its lack of domestic energy resources that could sustain its industrial power ambitions, making its economy highly dependent on energy imports. This is why Turkey has in recent years become increasingly forceful in asserting its claims to hydrocarbon deposits in the eastern Mediterranean.
Turkey and the Black Sea
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Turkey in North Africa
Turkey’s expanding interests in the Mediterranean led to its growing involvement in North Africa. Ankara relies primarily on political engagement to increase its influence there. Though it has a naval presence in the Mediterranean, the Turkish navy is weak compared to the navies of other global powers that patrol the sea. It’s currently undergoing an ambitious modernization drive, but any progress will be slow, especially considering Turkey’s weak industrial base and procurement budget. Moreover, many of its Mediterranean rivals have the backing of more powerful allies that can help defend their competing claims in the sea. Greece, for example, has maritime defense pacts with France, Italy and Egypt. Thus, Turkey’s current operational capabilities are mostly limited to the Aegean and southern Mediterranean.
Since it can’t rely on brute force, Turkey is attempting to expand its influence by taking a page out of the Ottoman playbook. After the Ottomans seized control of parts of North Africa in the 15th century, they relied, at least in part, on local proxies to maintain power. (It also helped that the Ottomans had a comparably powerful navy.) Today, Turkey is trying to build leverage in the region by supporting allied Islamist regimes – some of which rose to power following the Arab Spring, a series of pro-democracy uprisings across the Arab world. In Egypt, for example, Turkey provided financial and technical support to help bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power in 2012. In Tunisia, it provided funding and other support for the Islamist Ennahda party, which won a parliamentary majority in 2011. These moves alarmed its geopolitical rivals, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which see Turkey’s attempt to spread its brand of political Islam to the Middle East and North Africa as a threat to their monarchical systems and leadership over the Sunni Muslim world.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE responded by forming a strategic alliance, at the center of which was a united foreign policy that strived to alienate their main rivals: Qatar, Turkey and Iran. Saudi Arabia and the UAE viewed these countries as threats to their interests – including their desire to stop the spread of democracy in the region, which could lead to the election of Islamist regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood. In Egypt, they took advantage of the Brotherhood’s inability to consolidate power and the worsening economic and security situations in the country, all of which eventually led to protests calling for the ouster of the Brotherhood-led government. The demonstrations culminated in a coup in 2014 led by then-Egyptian army chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, who received financial support from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Saudis and UAE deployed the same tactics recently in Tunisia, where protests erupted in July over the economic crisis that has proliferated under the Ennahda-led government. Following the demonstrations, the country’s president, who was supported by the Saudis and UAE, suspended parliament and dismissed the prime minister.
The Saudis and UAE fear Islamist groups like these, when put in positions of power, could provide a safe haven for Islamists and terrorists groups closer to home, particularly in Yemen, where Riyadh is already at war with the Iran-backed Islamist Houthi rebels, who seized the capital, Sanaa, in 2015. Turkey, on the other hand, viewed the elections of Ennahda in Tunisia and Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as an opportunity to gain a foothold in strategic countries along the Mediterranean coast.
Turkey in the Horn of Africa and Sahel
Turkish influence has also been growing in the Horn of Africa. The Horn of Africa is adjacent to one of the busiest trade routes in the world, from the Indian Ocean to Europe through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, passing the Bab el-Mandeb strait between Djibouti and Yemen. This means, if it wants to control its fate, Turkey will likely eventually have to maintain a robust naval presence here to secure the passage of its commercial and military vessels from the Middle East and Europe to North Africa in addition to power projection in the Horn of Africa.
The Red Sea
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Despite its current limitations, Turkey is attempting to lay the groundwork for such a force. For example, it tried to revive the Suakin port, a defunct commercial and military base along Sudan’s Red Sea coast. Suakin was a major port for the Ottoman Empire when it ruled Sudan in the 15th century. However, after Sudan’s military ousted pro-Turkish leader Omar Bashir following widespread protests against his autocratic rule, the new Sudanese regime suspended the revival project in April 2019. The new regime did not want to be viewed as puppets of Ankara. Nevertheless, Turkey and Sudan still have warm ties, and the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding to boost cooperation in banking, energy and defense in August 2021.
Ankara has had to focus mostly on soft power to advance its interests in the Horn of Africa, but even this approach has its limits. Turkey has prioritized trade and investment relations with the region’s largest economy, Ethiopia, with Ankara being the third-largest foreign investor in the country behind China and Saudi Arabia. But when Turkey tried to wield its influence and offered to mediate a border dispute between Ethiopia and Sudan, presenting itself as an alternative to the U.S. in the Horn, Addis Ababa rejected the offer.
Somalia represents the only success story so far for Turkey in the region. Ankara is the dominant foreign actor in Somalia and has been able to ward off attempts by the Saudi-UAE anti-Turkey alliance to displace it. Ankara's extensive economic aid to Somalia when it was facing a devastating famine in 2011 earned it goodwill in the country. Ankara used this political capital to support local allied groups, particularly Islamist groups. Turkey opened a military base in Mogadishu in 2017, the largest of its kind outside of Turkey, to train Somali troops. It has also established a firm foothold in Somalia’s airports and seaports, which it views as critical for power projection across the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Thanks to its efforts, when the UAE made financial overtures to try to convince Somalia to cut ties with Turkey and Qatar, the Somali leadership refused.
Nevertheless, Turkey's economic problems are still a major constraint on its actions in the Horn. Its main problem is that its currency, the lira, is in continuous freefall, resulting in rapidly rising inflation. Turkey’s adventurism has also made it the target of U.S. and EU sanctions. In October 2019, Ankara launched military offensives against U.S.-allied Kurdish forces in Syria. It also detained an American citizen whom it accused of supporting a 2016 failed coup against Erdogan. And its illegal gas drilling in Cypriot waters prompted sanctions from Brussels. Western sanctions directly affected Turkey’s steel and aluminum industries. Exports plummeted, and the Turkish lira fell by 10 percent.
The prolonged economic struggles have alarmed investors, who worry about political interference affecting monetary policy as well as the country’s rising foreign debts. This is a problem for Turkey because it needs outside investment for its industrial economy. Erdogan has therefore been trying to improve ties with the U.S and other geopolitical rivals, notably the UAE, to regain the confidence of investors. Erdogan held a bilateral meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in June, during which he declared a new era of relations based on positive and constructive ties with Washington. He also said in August that Ankara wants to have a good relationship with the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
And this is where the Sahel enters the Turkish strategy. Turkey sees the Sahel as a place to expand trade and acquire natural resources needed for its industries. While Turkey’s motives are primarily economic, its strategy includes a significant security and military component. This is necessary because any foreign actor hoping to engage with Sahel countries must gain influence and trust by proving it is capable of helping them address their security challenges. Turkey can do this because of its growing defense industry.
Turkish Military Influence in the Sahel
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Turkey’s strategy in Somalia provides a blueprint for how Ankara plans to pursue its interests in the Sahel. In short, the Somalia model consists of propping up allied local groups. Turkey hopes to take advantage of growing anti-French sentiment and France’s shrinking presence in the Sahel to present itself as an alternative security partner. It could then use its newfound political capital to partner with local groups and flood markets with Turkish-made weapons and other goods. Such partnerships would also help Turkey access and secure the region’s rich natural resources for its industries. These extractive projects also attract the interest of insurgent and criminal groups, so they often require a strong security component. This is why Turkey pursued military cooperation agreements with Sahel countries like Niger, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.
Turkey’s ability to wield influence in West Africa and the Sahel is significantly constrained by established powers in the region such as the U.S., France and China. Then there are emerging powers in the region like Russia, which has already deployed mercenaries to support friendly regimes and protect the Kremlin’s interests. Ankara hopes to counter this by calling on Islamic solidarity. The majority of the citizens in the region practice Islam, so it would bankroll projects casting Turkey as the custodian of Islamic culture, like building mosques and hospitals in Sahel states like Mali and Niger. This would help Ankara build close ties with local communities, contrary to Moscow’s elite-based diplomacy, which focuses on close ties with incumbent national leaders.
Turkey’s broad strategy in Africa is focused on recreating a neo-Ottoman sphere of influence in North and East Africa. Turkey is eying energy exploration and vital sea routes for trade with sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel, where it hopes to secure raw materials to bolster its ailing economy and eventually become a leading industrial power. However, Turkey must overcome its ailing economy, relatively weak navy and the activities of its geopolitical rivals in these areas.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17763/turkey-nato-russia-taliban
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September 29, 2021
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The Same Old Song in Russia and Turkey
Bilateral ties follow a predictable pattern.
By: Ekaterina Zolotova
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan are meeting Wednesday to address their usual topics of discussion: bilateral relations, the situation in Syria, and the like. But the mood before the meeting was overshadowed by Erdogan's recent statements to the United Nations about not recognizing the results of legislative elections in Crimea and upholding the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. Add to this the fresh tensions in Syria and the sudden refutation of a number of Russian COVID-19 vaccines and you have a much more fraught meeting between the leaders of these historically competitive yet closely intertwined states.
Areas of Conflict
The history of Russian-Turkish relations is never boring, even if it’s predictable. Periods of hostility give way to periods of friendly agendas and active dialogue, after which they again plunge into a period of misunderstanding. In 2015, for example, Turkey shot down a Russian Su-24 aircraft. Tensions flared, then gave way to active cooperation and ended with the construction of a large gas pipeline, the delivery of S-400 air defense systems, the launch of construction of a nuclear power plant and an overall increase in bilateral trade.
Russo-Turkish Economic Relations
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The complexity of their relationship is rooted in several regions in which their interests collide. First, access to the Black Sea and its adjacent straits, over which Turkey's sovereignty has been established, was always imperative for Russia. These straits are an essential artery that provides access to the Mediterranean. They can play an important logistical role in Russia’s Syrian operations and, by extension, the advancement of Russian interests southward. The fact that Moscow can use them only with Ankara’s permission obviously raises tensions.
Second, Turkey's presence in the South Caucasus and Central Asia, where it is cultivating ties with Azerbaijan and to a lesser extent Georgia, rankles Russia, which sees this area as its own sphere of influence and a vital buffer for its southern borders.
Then there is Syria, an important albeit new area in which Turkey and Russia have diametrically opposing interests. Ankara’s efforts to pacify the northern Kurdish areas of Syria directly confront Russia’s support of the Syrian government.
In Libya, Russia and Turkey also find themselves on opposite sides – Russia would like to have control over local oil fields, which would allow it to control the supply of resources to the European Union and other countries and generally strengthen its presence in the Mediterranean Sea, while Turkey is expanding its presence into Libya’s exclusive economic zone and looking for ways to gain access to energy supplies. Initially, Turkey supported the Government of National Accord as Russia spoke with the Libyan National Army, under the command of Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, and sent about 2,000 fighters from private military company Wagner. (Although in March both of Libya’s governments transferred their powers to the next interim government, which was able to unite the conflicting parties, the differences between Turkey and Russia remain.)
A potentially new area in which Turkey and Russia will be at odds is Afghanistan. Russia is interested in ensuring the security of its buffer zones in Central Asia and preventing the spread of terrorism and extremism into the post-Soviet republics. Turkey is looking to be a mediator and an important partner in the region.
Some of these areas of conflict are pronounced now more than ever. In Syria, for example, Moscow has repeatedly accused the Turks of non-compliance with the Sochi agreements to stabilize the situation in Idlib and arming terrorists, and Turkey often expresses its dissatisfaction with bombing civilians and supporting the Assad regime. More, in a meeting in September with Syrian President Bashar Assad, Putin criticized the presence of “foreign forces” in Syria – a thinly veiled dig at Turkey. A few weeks earlier, Russia conducted several strikes on militant targets in Idlib, one of which killed three Turkish soldiers. It’s little surprise, then, that just before Wednesday’s meeting with Putin, Erdogan sent additional troops to northwest Syria to remind Russia just how much weight Turkey can throw around during negotiations.
Things are also particularly dicey in the Caucasus, where Moscow was concerned over recent Turkish-Azerbaijani exercises in Lachin region, near disputed Nagorno-Karabakh, and was displeased with Ankara’s participation in Turkish-Azerbaijani-Pakistani drills in Azerbaijan.
Bound Together
Even so, don’t expect much from Wednesday’s meeting. In fact, that their imperatives are so different means there can be little compromise on the Idlib crisis, Nagorno-Karabakh and a number of other issues. Indeed, even if Moscow and Ankara sign some kind of agreement that in one way or another limits the country's actions in these areas of conflict, they are almost always violated, often right before the next meeting. Moscow isn’t prepared to concede its position either in Syria or in the Caucasus, and neither is Ankara.
Meetings like this, then, are important for a different reason. Dialogue and process are important for Turkey and Russia, especially as they bind the countries to each other. The two countries understand neither of them alone can decide the fate of Syria. Neither has the money to do so in a place with so many other competing players like the United States and Iran. And besides, Turkey and Russia have been engaged in Syria for six years and have managed not to instigate a war between them.
Similarly, it’s all but impossible to find a compromise in the Caucasus, Central Asia or the Black Sea, where neither side is ready or willing to pay the price of displacing the other. Turkey cannot close the straits for Russian ships, for example, and Russia cannot stop gas supplies without extreme escalation – doing so would hurt themselves as much as the other. Both know they can continue to pursue their own policies in these regions simultaneously and mend the wounds as they happen.
Hence their history of uneasy cooperation. Russia and Turkey are cooperating more effectively and deeply than they were just a few years ago. They are linked by the supply of the S-400 air defense system, the Turkish Stream pipeline, the Akkuyu nuclear power plant, which is extremely important for an energy-deficient Turkey, Russian tourists at Turkish beaches, and Russia's food imports from Turkey.
Expect much more of the same song and dance. The heads of state meet on an unresolved issue, one pokes the other right before talks take place, they negotiate, then they sign an agreement they have no intention of honoring. It’s ironic that this process more often than not actually deepens ties.
A referral is the best compliment.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17839/turkey-airstrikes-syria-iraq
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https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/10/there-will-be-no-withdrawal-syrian-allies-say-us-has-promised-keep-some-troops-there/185972/
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The Geopolitics of Crimea
Russian control has never been uncontested.
By: Ridvan Bari Urcosta
GPF
Cooperation between Ukraine and Turkey is intensifying. Just a few days ago, the Ukrainian military used Turkish-made drones to strike fighters in Donbass, a disputed region in the eastern part of Ukraine that is supported by Russia. Meanwhile, Turkey and Ukraine announced they would create a facility near Kyiv to maintain, repair and modernize combat drones. Caught literally in the middle is the Crimean Peninsula.
Russia has long claimed Crimea as being in its sphere of influence, using the peninsula to increase its strategic depth, improve its position in the Black Sea and provide a strategic location for sophisticated military bases. In 2014, it dispensed with appearances and straight up annexed the region. Yet, despite Moscow’s influence there, history shows that maintaining permanent control is difficult because doing so brings it directly against Turkish interests.
Expanding to the Sea
To understand Russia’s options in Crimea, we need to examine the geopolitics of the peninsula. Extending off a thin isthmus from mainland Ukraine, Crimea sits in the middle of the Black Sea. It covers approximately 10,000 square miles (26,000 square kilometers) and is home to roughly 2.5 million people, many of whom recently migrated to the area from other parts of Russia. Its subtropical climate produces mild winters compared to the rest of Eastern Europe, its harbors secure against major storms, and its mountains have shielded it from invaders (and are now a great location of air defense installations).
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Over the years, Crimea’s natural defenses attracted just about every Eurasian and European power, which would leverage their positions to create favorable maritime security and commercial environments. The Greeks occupied the peninsula as early as the 7th century B.C., creating a hub for cultural and economic exchanges between Eastern Europe, the Eurasian nomadic world and the ancient Greco-Roman world. Centuries later, the eastern part of Crimea and the Kerch Peninsula would be home to a strong Greco-Scythian state known as the Bosporan Kingdom, which controlled one of the most important chokepoints in the region. Along with the southern portion of Crimea, this kingdom became part of the Roman Empire and, later, the Byzantium Empire. But only the Crimean south was controlled by the Roman Empire, and the geographic division of the region would influence power struggles there for centuries to come – between the Romans, the Byzantines, the Goths, the Huns, the Khazarians, the Vikings, and so on. Naturally, this dramatically affected the cultural and religious composition of the peninsula, though Catholics and Orthodox Christians would eventually emerge as the two most significant practitioners. (Islam would come a little later.)
By the 1400s, the Mongolian Empire had taken control of much of Eurasia. One of its constituent parts, the Crimean Khanate, ruled the lands from Moldova to the North Caucasus, Crimea and the entire modern Ukrainian coastline. Its rulers repeatedly laid siege to Moscow, even destroying it in 1571. Russia fought back, expanding to the south and southeast with mixed results. By the 18th century, the Russian Empire was eager as ever to destroy the khanate and gain access to the Sea of Azov and eventually to the Black Sea. The khanate, however, was the main source of the Ottomans’ military presence in Eastern and Central Europe. This laid the groundwork for the ensuing Russia-Turkey rivalry over the coming centuries.
As the Russian Empire grew more powerful, it came to understand more intimately the geostrategic importance of Crimea and its role as the main obstacle in its expansion into the Balkans, Caucasus and what we now call Ukraine. Similarly, the Ottomans came to realize their entire strategy in the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Balkans rested on Crimea. The last chance Turkey and its Crimean allies had to stop Russia’s advance came with the Swedish invasion of Russia. Russia defeated Sweden in the Battle of Poltava in 1709, so Crimea and Istanbul, worried that they would be the next targets of Russian expansionism, preemptively declared war on Russia in 1710. Crimean Khan Devlet II Giray constructed an alliance with Sweden, a small fraction of pro-Turkish Cossacks and the anti-Russian faction of Poles. They defeated Russia at the Battle of Pruth in 1711, and as punishment, the Ottoman Empire, already in control of the Kerch Strait, deprived Russia of access to the Sea of Azov.
Turkey and Russia went to war again over this area in 1768. This time, Crimea, the Ottoman Empire and Poland lost and were immediately absorbed into the Russian Empire. The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca in 1774 gave Russia full access to the Black Sea and rights to Russian merchant fleet to pass through the Turkish Straits. Russia annexed Crimea in 1783. The gateways to the Caucasus and the Balkans were opened.
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What Russia Can’t Afford
But Russia’s domination of the Black Sea was never uncontested. By the middle of the 19th century, Russia had penetrated deeply into the Balkans and Caucasus, thanks to its possession of former Ottoman territories and the Crimean Khanate (now southern Ukraine). Moreover, the Russian navy became much stronger than Turkey’s in Sevastopol. European powers found this imbalance in power concerning, so they partnered with the Ottoman Empire to successfully defeat Russia in the Crimean War of 1853-56.
World War I gave the Ottoman Empire another opportunity to retake control of Crimea and Sevastopol from Russia. The peninsula was an important stop for the Germans who were invading Russian territory. Germany needed an ally, a state that could prevent Russia from dominating the Black Sea. The presence in the Black Sea could have allowed Germany to control Russian merchant ships because the main flow of Russian exports went through the straits. On the eve of World War I, more than 60 percent of Russian grain exports went through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. In other words, Germany needed Turkey. Russia declared war on Turkey, and Moscow ended up controlling Crimea after the Entente lost.
The peninsula was similarly important in World War II, situated as it was on the route to the oil-rich Caucasus. It was also a valuable aviation base. Losing Crimea would mean that the Soviet Union would lose the ability to raid the Romanian oil fields, and the Germans would have been able to strike at targets in the Caucasus. Russia thus bogged down German troops throughout the war and secured the land after its conclusion.
One of the most pivotal decisions on Crimea came in 1954, after Josef Stalin died, when new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea to Ukraine. But the region still retained importance to the Soviet regime. In the Soviet era, the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol was responsible for the Black Sea, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean. Migration escalated the ethnic tensions, which were often based on a particular group’s attitude toward Russia’s role in Crimea. The future of Sevastopol became a highly contentious issue, too. (Pro-Russian officers threatened to use weapons if the Black Sea Fleet transferred to Ukraine.) Only in 1997 did Ukraine and Russia reach an agreement regarding Sevastopol. Kyiv made multiple concessions, the last of which occurred in 2010, when Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych extended the Russian presence till 2042. In 2014, after the Ukrainian revolution, Russia annexed Crimea and attained full control over the peninsula and Sevastopol. Unfettered control over Sevastopol allowed Russia to establish uninterrupted communication lanes between Russia and Syria during the active phase of the Syrian campaign. Moreover, the Black Sea became the main base of the 5th Operational Squadron, which is operating in the Mediterranean near Syrian shores.
Crimea’s geostrategic position gives Moscow both defensive and offensive advantages. Defensively, it would be next to impossible for an enemy to carry out an assault on Russia's southern borders without destroying its military assets in Crimea. It has one of the strongest concentrations of military forces in Eurasia along with Kaliningrad. Both regions are key to Russia's defenses in the west, one in the south and the other in the north.
Russian Military Presence in Crimea, 2014 & 2018
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Offensively, Crimea is an important source of power projection in the Black Sea and Eastern Mediterranean. Possession of Crimea and Abkhazia gave Russia the biggest share of the Black Sea coastline of any power in the region. Before this, its coastline was more or less equal to that of Georgia or Romania. More, the fleet in Sevastopol is the main source of Russian defense against NATO warships. In case of military conflict with Ukraine and NATO, Russia could initiate offensive operations using its Crimean assets along the more than 500-kilometer Ukrainian shore on the Black Sea and Sea of Azov to cut western supply lines to Odessa or even to Romania. It could also block NATO warships at the entrance to the Black Sea (i.e., the Bosporus Strait) using Russian warships and air defense systems stationed in Crimea. Moscow could also impose a blockade of Ukraine and even penetrate into its southern regions and support military formations in the Moldovan breakaway region of Trans-Dniester.
For Russia, another benefit of controlling Crimea is that, with a population of more than 2 million ethnic Slavs, the peninsula helped improve Russia's demographic situation. Its annexation ensured that the population balance in the country, especially relating to non-Slavic groups in the North Caucasus, stayed in Moscow's favor.
Nearly eight years since Crimea's annexation, there is still a possibility of further escalation of conflict. Turkey supports the Crimean Tatars on the peninsula, with whom it shares ethnic and religious ties. It also provides military and economic support to Kyiv, acting as a counterweight to Russia. For Ankara, the entire northern Black Sea region with Crimea at the center is key to its security. If Russia were to occupy Odessa, it would amount to a return to the 18th century when Turkey lost key parts of its foothold in the region and a path was opened for Russian expansion into the Caucasus and the Balkans.
Russian influence in Crimea has strengthened, but Russia continues to fight for Crimea in other ways. Crimea remains unrecognized by many states of the world, which creates additional pressure on the introduction of Russia's foreign trade. Social and economic issues, such as water supply and the development of the region in general, require immediate solutions, large financial investments and effective projects – none of which Russia can really afford right now. But it can’t afford to ignore Crimea either.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17889/turkey-erdogan-sharia-alliance
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In fairness to Biden, Turkey presents a hideously complex problem.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17987/biden-agenda-turkey
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Lira collapse
The Turkish lira plunged this week to a new record low of nearly 17 to the dollar, as concerns snowballed over President Erdogan's risky monetary policy. He believes in an unorthodox approach that higher rates cause inflation, rather than prevent it, but despite the beliefs the annual figure reached 21.3% alone in November. Soaring inflation has had devastating impacts on Turkey's import-reliant economy, while sharply eroding Turks' earnings and savings.
Analyst commentary: "Last week's apparent relative stability of TRY was artificial and non-sustainable. Now we see the build-up pressure unfolding, driving lira weakness to the next level," Commerzbank said in a research note. "Ultimately, the CBRT needs to show the market some sign of caring about taming inflation," added Henrik Gullberg, a macro strategist at Coex Partners. "What we have seen so far is not enough to stop the rout."
The latest crash followed the central bank's fourth market intervention in two weeks, though the currency continued sliding into the weekend. Under pressure from Erdogan, Turkey's central bank slashed its policy rate by another 100 basis points to 14% this, marking the fourth cut since September. Prior to the news, the S&P affirmed Turkey's long-term foreign currency rating at B+, but revised its outlook to negative on an uncertain policy direction.
Next steps? The unconventional monetary policy has seen the Turkish lira lose 40% of its value against the dollar since September, making it one of the worst performing investments in the world. Meanwhile, Erdogan has fired three central bank chiefs over the last two years due to disagreements over monetary policy. Brawls and fistfights have even broken out among lawmakers in the Turkish parliament as the opposition fight the government's handling of the economy.
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Also see:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/turkey-halts-all-stock-trading-currency-disintegrates-central-bank-powerless-halt-collapse?utm_source=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=363
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December 23, 2021
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Erdogan’s Last Stand
The Turkish president is taking a big gamble through his unorthodox financial policies.
By: Hilal Khashan
Turkey is in deep financial crisis. Inflation reached 21.3 percent in late November and is expected to hit 25 percent by the end of December. Estimates are that average inflation will reach 10.8 percent in 2022 and 5.1 percent in 2023. The value of the country’s currency has also plummeted throughout the past year. Many blame the crisis on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s insistence on lowering interest rates. While major central banks around the world are aiming to raise rates to curb soaring inflation, Erdogan stands alone in his pursuit of a low interest policy. He has also sought financial managers who align with his views, firing three central bank governors in the past two years and replacing his finance minister just a few weeks ago. He has essentially declared war on the international financial system, and as he faces election in 2023, his unprecedented policies will come under more scrutiny.
‘Evil’
Earlier this month, the central bank lowered the interest rate to 14 percent after slashing it from 19 percent to 15 percent between August and November. These changes came at the behest of the president, who has described interest rates as “the mother and father of all evil.” In an apparent plea to his conservative religious base, he has portrayed interest rates as un-Islamic.
Erdogan is aware of the potential political risks of heavy government management of the economy. Turkey has a long history of centralized control of the economy, which began with the country’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. As a populist leader, Ataturk charted a certain course that was followed by subsequent leaders, including Erdogan. Unlike Ataturk, however, Erdogan is justifying his moves on religious grounds. Defending the decision to cut rates, Erdogan recently said, “As a Muslim, I will continue to do what is required by nas,” referring to Islamic teachings.
Erdogan believes his approach will help promote growth. He has argued that Western investment banks would be the primary beneficiaries of high rates, which would increase the public debt and budget deficit. Economic experts have dismissed Erdogan’s policies, but the president insists that reducing rates will curb inflation – contrary to classical economic theories.
Turkey's Falling Currency Value and Rising Inflation
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Erdogan is also unconcerned about the lira’s precipitous fall, believing that a competitive exchange rate will encourage investment and create more jobs. Earlier this week, the Turkish central bank introduced measures to try to prop up the currency, which increased in value by 30 percent on Monday. But ad hoc measures like these are not viable as a financial policy. A similar strategy was tried by Prime Minister Tansu Ciller in the 1990s, when the interest rate hit 500 percent, and by Erdogan’s Justice and Development party (or AKP) in 2002, when it hit 50 percent.
Economic Reforms
Turkey’s economic success in the AKP’s first decade of governing, which began in 2002, was partly due to the party’s sound policies. After the 2007-08 global financial crisis, many investors wanted to avoid the U.S. market and sought new places to store their money. Much of it went to emerging economies like Turkey. The funds were concentrated in the construction and tourism sectors – with government cronies profiting handsomely. But by 2015, Western economies had recovered from the recession, and funds began to flow back to developed countries and out of emerging markets, which contributed to Turkey’s currency crisis.
The Turkish economy, whose nominal volume is around $800 billion, depends heavily on imported raw materials to manufacture goods. Top imports include organic chemicals, mineral fuels, iron and steel, pharmaceutical products and electrical machinery. In 2020, imports exceeded $220 billion, and exports totaled $170 billion. A central part of Erdogan’s economic plan is to reverse this trade imbalance by 2023.
His approach to the financial crisis echoes Prime Minister Turgut Ozal’s policies of the 1980s. Ozal devalued the lira, encouraged an export-oriented economy, did little to stop prices from rising and supported free market policies. He transformed the Turkish economy and was lauded by experts. He succeeded because of Western backing, as well as the army’s pledge to contain public protests against his financial measures. Erdogan has the full support of the military too.
However, he faces certain obstacles. Erdogan and his family have been criticized for their alleged corruption. The truth is that financial corruption is rife among Turkey’s political class. Former President Suleyman Demirel spent time in prison for embezzling millions of dollars. Prime ministers Mesut Yilmaz and Tansu Ciller faced accusations of stealing public funds. Family members of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who was forced to resign by the military in 1987, also came under fire for siphoning public money. The army charged former Prime Minister Adnan Menderes with corruption and cronyism, leading to his execution in 1961. In Turkey, corruption is often enabled by populist politics, which has stultified democratic transition and complicated structural economic reforms.
Erdogan’s Political Future
As Erdogan faces reelection in 2023, one of the most important groups of voters will be young Turks, 9 million of whom will be eligible to vote. Youth unemployment in Turkey is the fourth highest in the world at about 25 percent. Many young Turks who are employed are not paid well and want to emigrate. This will be a tough demographic for Erdogan to win over.
Turkish Opinions on Economic Conditions and Employment Status
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Although Erdogan is Turkey’s longest-serving public official since the country’s founding in 1923 (he’s even surpassed Ataturk by four years), his staying power is a result more of the opposition’s fragmentation and less of his own political competence. Senior AKP members have already warned him that his unorthodox financial policies and public disaffection are encouraging the opposition. Erdogan, however, has failed to take heed, believing his working-class base will support him regardless of how much the lira is worth. But public support for the AKP has dropped from 40 percent in 2018 to 30 percent today and is likely to keep falling if the government fails to curb inflation.
Turkish Opinion of Economic Management
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Working together in 2019 municipal elections, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) and the Good Party (IYI Party) defeated AKP candidates in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, Turkey’s three largest cities. They hope to expand their alliance to six parties and unseat Erdogan in 2023, or in a snap election while the economic crisis is still severe. The fractured opposition has little in common beyond wanting to overthrow Erdogan and the AKP, and will likely return to political wrangling if it ousts him, especially since it wants to undo the presidential system that was introduced under Erdogan and reinstate the parliamentary system, which accentuated Turkey’s ideological and ethnic divisions.
Turkish Elections 2018 & 19
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For Erdogan, what’s at stake in the upcoming vote is not just reelection but also his legacy as Turkey’s longest-serving leader and as the architect of Turkey’s economic power. His strategy of diversifying the economy through the import-substitution model aims to achieve economic sovereignty. Whether he will succeed is still up for debate, and the voters will have the final say in 2023.
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Turkey Struggles, Even in the Balkans
Ankara’s power is shaky in friendly states ripe for influence.
By: Francesco Casarotto
Now is an interesting time for Turkey, a historical powerhouse that can’t quite live up to its current expectations. That’s not because it isn’t trying. It wants to expand its influence in the lands once part of the Ottoman Empire, and in that regard, it has been fairly active lately. After a strong but unsuccessful push for expansion in the Mediterranean, Libya and, to a lesser extent, Syria, Ankara is now setting its sights on a smaller, more vulnerable region close to home: the Balkans. The current political crisis in Bosnia-Herzegovina – where the government of a majority ethnic Serb area recently adopted a non-binding resolution that could lead to its withdrawal from key state institutions – is for Turkey an ideal opportunity.
Interests
Turkey’s interest in the Balkans is explained by the region’s proximity to Istanbul, a strategically located economic engine that also serves as Turkey’s gateway to the rest of the world. The city straddles the Sea of Marmara, which connects the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea – and therefore, the Mediterranean – via the Bosporus and the Dardanelles straits. The Bosporus is an essential maritime chokepoint for oil transit and for grain shipping, particularly for inland countries with Black Sea coasts such as Ukraine and Russia. Control of the Bosporus is an essential source of Turkish power. However, the Marmara also borders the Balkan peninsula, so any destabilization of the Balkans is a direct threat to Turkish power. This is precisely why Ankara has a vested interest in preserving the stability of the region – and doing so without the help of other outside powers.
Turkey and the Black Sea
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And plenty of those powers have long been interested in the region. The Balkans sits at the crossroads of Christianity and Islam, and its strategic location by the Adriatic, the Mediterranean, the Aegean and the Black seas has always made it an appealing hub for projecting power even farther afield.
The Ottoman heritage, responsible for establishing and spreading Islamic communities present in the territory, represents a tool for Ankara to influence the regional dynamics. In particular, Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo are the countries that historically are the ones with closer relations with Ankara.
The Ottoman Empire, which initially spread Islam in the Balkans and thus gives modern-day Turkey its Islamic bona fides, took control of the region in the 14th century. It maintained that control in what it called the “millet” system. This system consisted of decentralized administrative entities based on religious creed, with religious chiefs sitting at the head of each millet. In this way, freedom of religion was relatively respected, even if Muslims were given more breaks than their Christian counterparts. The system also granted the existence of different identities in a relatively small territory, something that persists still today, even as Ottoman control ended in the 19th century.
Limits
Well-positioned though Turkey may be to project power into the Balkans, there are several things that limit its ability to do so. Ankara may have free trade agreements with several Balkans countries, including Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia, but in truth it hasn’t been able to economically penetrate as much as it wants to. It isn’t a leading trade partner of any country in the region – not even for the non-EU Muslim-majority ones. Turkey may be the second-largest investor in Kosovo and the fifth-largest in Albania, but it is only 13th in Bosnia, outranked by countries like Germany, Italy and Austria. Turkish standing is even less favorable in Balkan EU members such as Slovenia and Croatia or non-Muslim-majority countries such as Serbia and North Macedonia. Traditional powers such as Germany and Russia tend to have more economic influence.
Turkey's Trade Share in the Balkans | 2020
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More, Turkey’s own economic problems have prevented it from adventuring abroad. In December, inflation reached 36 percent. The lira has consequently fallen in recent months, reducing purchasing power for consumers and sparking popular protests against the government. Put simply, what economic resources Ankara does have are focused on solving domestic problems. Turkey cannot compete with other countries that can offer more favorable terms for economic cooperation.
Turkey’s economic constraints also have hindered Turkish security and military operations that would otherwise enable it to expand its sphere of influence. In 2018-19, Turkey was extremely active in theaters like the Eastern Mediterranean, Libya and Syria. But as its economy crumbled, it was forced to scale back its operations.
Given its economic and security limits, Turkey has more recently been forced to rely on softer power – namely its cultural ties to the Balkans. Since the dissolution of Yugoslavia, Turkey has positioned itself as the patron of Muslim communities in the Balkans. For instance, several branches of the Yunus Emre Institute, which aims to promote the Turkish language and culture overseas, are present in the Balkans, especially in the Muslim-majority countries.
Another powerful tool for shoring up cultural influence is the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), an organization managed by the Turkish Ministry of Culture that funds cultural and educational efforts in Turkic communities. Unsurprisingly, TIKA is also present in the Balkans and has been particularly active in the restoration of Ottoman-era religious and cultural monuments.
Soft power has limits too, of course, and cultural influence does not automatically translate into deeper power projection overall. Even so, cultural ties remain the most efficient tools at Turkey’s disposal to try to shape the future of the region.
Opportunities
However, the current political crisis in Bosnia gives Turkey an opportunity to strengthen its political influence in the Balkans. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Ankara will push to host talks between representatives of the three constituent communities – Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks – to resolve the political impasse and avoid the disintegration of Bosnia. And given the common cultural heritage of Bosniaks and Turks – for instance, many Bosniaks migrated toward Turkey during the Ottoman era, so many Turkish citizens today have Bosniak origins – Turkey is in a strong position to mediate.
(click to enlarge)
What’s more, traditional extra-regional power brokers like Russia, the U.S. and the EU that could challenge Turkey are disinterested or distracted. EU enlargement into the Balkans is gridlocked. The U.S. has put on the table sanctions against the Bosnian Serb leader, but not much else. And Russia’s attention is concentrated on its borderland. If Turkey managed to fill the vacuum and present itself as an effective political mediator, it could reestablish its political leverage in the region and parlay it into greater influence.
Further facilitating Turkey’s potential as a mediator is that local players, namely Serbia, are not opposed. Erdogan has recently discussed the issue with his Serbian counterpart, Aleksandar Vucic, and both pledged to intensify diplomatic talks to resolve the crisis. This is somewhat surprising, because Ankara and Belgrade typically stand on opposing sides of the barricade on these issues. Serbia, due to ethnic ties, is a firm supporter of the Bosnian Serbs who are trying to gain independence from state institutions. Turkey, on the other hand, is the patron of the Muslim Bosniaks and opposes the secessionist forces. At the moment, however, Serbia welcomes Turkey’s mediation offer because Belgrade seems unwilling to support Republika Srpska’s secessionist sentiments. Any change in the status quo in Bosnia and Republika Srpska could trigger massive instability in the region that would be damaging for Serbia. Belgrade also does not want to bear the financial responsibility for Bosnian Serb independence, even if it could be executed without major unrest. To be economically viable, Republika Srpska would need to integrate with Serbia. The annexation of the republic would be an economic burden that Belgrade cannot afford at the moment, given the fragile economic situation. Finally, explicit support for the secessionist Serbs in Bosnia risks alienating Serbia’s other regional and European partners, with potentially high costs in terms of diplomatic and economic ties. This is why Serbia welcomed Turkey’s offer to mediate. For their part, the Bosnian Serbs don’t have much choice but to follow the lead of Belgrade, their only patron.
The Muslim Bosniaks also will likely accept Turkish mediation in order to prevent Bosnia’s fragmentation. They know that, in the event of Bosnia’s breakup, they will be encircled by the newly independent Republika Srpska and Croatia, once again presenting the security dilemma that defined the first phases of the Bosnian War in the 1990s, when Bosniaks saw Serbs and Croats trying to carve up the country. Turkish mediation is therefore their most obvious insurance against such a scenario.
For Turkey, growing its cultural and political influence in the Balkans is a necessary but insufficient first step toward fully restoring the influence Ankara had during the Ottoman Empire. So long as Ankara’s economic footprint in the Balkans remains modest and its use of force to back up its moves is constrained, Turkey will fall short of its ultimate goal. But right now, cultural and political influence are the only tools Turkey has at its disposal to shape the region. Noting that its options are limited does not mean Turkey has lost interest in the Balkans. On the contrary, as an emerging power, it is fair to expect more Turkish efforts to shape the future of the region.
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Pressure To Punish Russia Puts Turkey in a Tough Spot
6 MIN READFeb 28, 2022 | 21:16 GMT
(Turkish Presidential Press Office via Getty Images)
Driven by its need to keep stable relations with Russia, Turkey will resist pressure to join NATO’s isolation campaign against Moscow in response to the Ukraine invasion. Turkey’s historically strained relations with Russia are facing a new test as Russian military forces invade Ukraine and Ankara’s Western allies line up to isolate and punish Moscow. But Turkey is reliant on Russian tourists, energy and good diplomatic relations; it’s also still interested in diversifying defense ties away from NATO. This has left the country hesitant to embrace the West’s sanctions strategy, with Ankara so far avoiding direct cuts to Russian economic ties. On Feb. 27, Turkey said it would enact provisions of the 1936 Montreaux Treaty that allow it to block its key straits to countries engaged in battle. Ankara, however, also stuck to the stipulations of the treaty that allow Russian warships to pass to return to base, which — combined with the fact that the Russian ships needed for the invasion were already in place — renders the move ineffective in changing the dynamics of Moscow’s ongoing military campaign. Unless Moscow directly provokes Ankara in some way, the measures Turkey takes against Russia will likely continue to remain largely symbolic.
Turkey and Russia have deep economic and defense ties. In 2020, Russia was Turkey’s 10th largest export market. Russia also provided the third-largest market for Turkish imports that same year. In addition, Russians made up 4.7 million of the 24.7 million tourists who visited Turkey in 2021. 21% of Turkey’s overseas construction activity takes place in Russia, and 64% of the country’s imported wheat comes from Russia. Turkey has also purchased the Russian S-400 missile system to diversify its defense sector.
Turkey’s ties with Ukraine are smaller than those it has with Russia, but remain important to Ankara. Ukraine was the 20th largest export market for Turkish products in 2021, while just over 2 million Ukrainians visited the country in 2021. Ukrainian wheat made up 13.4% of all Turkish imports. Turkey has also sold its Bayraktar TB2 UAV combat drones to Ukraine and, in February 2022, agreed to co-produce them with Kyiv.
Under the 1936 Montreaux Convention, the Turkish Straits are to remain open to commercial and military traffic. But the treaty allows Turkey to block military traffic during wartime, which it did during World War II to keep Axis ships from attacking the Soviet Union, as well as during the 2008 Russo-Georgian War to keep large U.S. ships from entering the Black Sea.
In an effort to both avoid Russian retaliation and showcase its independence from NATO, Turkey will not fully block Russian military activity in the Black Sea, cut off economic ties to Russia, or join in on Western sanctions designed to block Russian business internationally. In 2015-16, Russia enacted sanctions on Turkey after tensions flared over the two countries’ backing of rival factions in the Syrian civil war. As part of the sanctions, Moscow suspended its visa-free travel program in Turkey, which ultimately led to a collapse in Russian tourism that has only recently begun to recover. In October 2020, Russia also bombed a Turkish-backed proxy force in northwestern Syria’s Idlib province in retaliation for Turkey’s involvement in the Azeri-Armenian war that year, demonstrating that Russia will respond to actions in one theater with retaliation in another. Turkey’s food and energy prices have been rising as well, with the country’s annual inflation rate now nearly 50% — making Turkey even more vulnerable to restrictions on Russian exports of wheat and energy.
In Syria, Turkey backs rebel groups that guard some 1 million refugees the Turkish government does not want to take in. Syrian President Bashar al Assad’s government, meanwhile, remains backed by substantial Russian and Iranian forces able to conduct a fresh military operation that could displace those Turkey-backed forces.
Turkey is relying on a strong tourism season this upcoming summer to help rebuild its foreign currency exchanges and restore a key economic sector, which took a substantial hit during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Any loss in Russian tourism would worsen Turkey’s economic outlook by harming its vital tourism sector and weakening its access to foreign currency.
In January, Turkey had to cut energy supplies by 40% to its industrial zones because of a gas interruption from nearby Iran. This cut impacted Turkey’s manufacturing sector, a key area of economic strength, and has made Ankara more risk-averse to future interruptions.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continues, Western allies will likely ratchet up their sanctions pressure and economic isolation of Russia and try to corral Turkey to join the campaign. But unless Russia itself provokes Turkey, Ankara is unlikely to shift its strategy. While the West sanctions Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and his inner circle, Turkey will likely resist calls to join Western sanctions by cutting its substantial economic ties with Moscow. Ankara will also likely resist calls to cut all defense ties with Russia, such as by dismantling the Russian S-400 missile system Turkey took delivery of, for fear that such a move will undermine Turkey’s drive for independence from Western influence.
However, Turkey’s calculation about joining the Western-led isolation campaign would change in response to potential Russian provocations, whether those are accidental strikes on Turkish shipping in the Black Sea, harm to Turkish civilians abroad, or a fresh flare-up of fighting in Syria between Turkish-backed rebels and Russian troops.
On Feb. 24, a Turkish-owned ship was damaged in the Black Sea by a projectile. Turkey did not immediately assign blame, but the attack highlights the risks to Turkish shipping in the region as fighting continues. Should Russia clearly be responsible for a future attack, Turkey could fully close the Turkish Straits or impose sanctions of its own on Russia.
Errant air defense and fighter jet missiles have the potential to travel hundreds of miles off target and strike neutral civilian areas, ships or aircraft. If Turkish civilians are caught up in an incident like that and Ankara blames Russia, it could bring Ankara closer to the West’s isolation campaign.
As Syria and its allies carry out provocative moves near Turkish-controlled territory to remind Ankara of their capability to rapidly escalate, rising food prices will increase instability in both Turkish-controlled and government-held Syrian territory, potentially spurring offensives by rebel groups against Syrian government forces designed to force Damascus to increase aid. However, such attacks could escalate and draw both Turkey and Russia in on opposite sides, spurring Turkey to move closer to the Western isolation campaign of Russia.
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March 2, 2022
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Turkey Walks a Tightrope in the Russia-Ukraine Crisis
Ankara is trying to keep its options open.
By: Hilal Khashan
The war in Ukraine caught Turkey unprepared. It came amid Turkey’s grinding economic crisis, currency meltdown and attempts to reformulate its regional policy, in part by restoring ties with countries like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel. But Turkey’s relations with the West are also in need of a reboot. The war has put Ankara in a challenging position, caught ill-prepared to deal with Russia’s resurgence as a global power and its impact on Turkey’s own assertion as a Black Sea heavyweight. Its economic ties with Moscow have hampered its ability to express its opposition to the war and Russia’s objectives there – namely, to restore the status quo ante, shattered by NATO’s eastward expansion, and to renew imperial Russia’s territorial hold over the Black Sea basin, an area that was under Ottoman control until the late 17th century.
Turkey’s Dilemma
Despite being a historical adversary of Russia and supporter of Ukraine, Turkey finds itself in a complicated position. It has developed significant military and economic relations with Kyiv. The two countries established the Black Sea Shield for aviation industries, and Ukraine produces the engines for Turkey’s ATAK-2 attack helicopters, scheduled to become operational in 2023. But Ankara also cooperates with Russia on vital economic issues and security arrangements in Libya, Syria and Azerbaijan. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has worked to repair relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin after years of tension, and in 2017, Turkey purchased the Russian-made S-400 surface-to-air missile system. The trade balance between the two countries favors Russia, whose 2020 exports to Turkey neared $18 billion, compared to $5 billion in imports, which included 10 million metric tons of Russian wheat. Moscow also invested in huge Turkish energy projects, including the Akkuyu nuclear plant in Mersin and the TurkStream pipeline, which will transport natural gas to Turkey and Europe.
Erdogan even offered to mediate the Russia-Ukraine crisis – though Putin seemed uninterested. Turkey didn’t want to see the conflict descend into an all-out war because it would require Erdogan to make choices that would reveal his government’s precarious position. Turkey worries about the crisis’ impact on its mutual understanding with Russia on the South Caucasus, Syria and Libya. Erdogan also doesn’t want to jeopardize Turkey’s vital economic ties with Russia by coming down too hard on Moscow, fearing the U.S. could reach a deal with the Kremlin without Turkey. Ankara doesn’t trust its Western allies who, for years, ignored its interests and national security concerns, even expressing outright hostility.
The Black Sea Basin
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Turkey is thus crafting an ad hoc foreign policy, one that expresses solidarity with Kyiv and condemns the unjustified aggression against it while at the same time keeps its options open. It would be risky for Turkey to, say, close the Bosporus Strait to Russian naval vessels per the 1936 Montreux Convention, as requested by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Even in war, the convention entitles Russia to return its ships from the Mediterranean to their home bases in the Black Sea. Turkey, however, decided on Tuesday, apparently after consultation with the U.S., to restrict movement of warships through the Bosporus and Dardanelles for all countries. It will only allow vessels to return to their bases in the Black Sea – meaning Russia cannot bring its Baltic and Pacific fleets to the sea.
Russia’s Threat
Turkey plays a critical role in counterbalancing Russia’s influence in the Black Sea basin, the Caucasus and Central Asia. In the Caucasus, it sided with Azerbaijan in its successful campaign against Armenia in the recent Nagorno-Karabakh war. In the Black Sea basin, its partnership with Ukraine has grown significantly since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, which Ankara condemned. In fact, after a 2020 meeting with Zelenskiy in Ankara, Erdogan called for an end to Russia’s occupation of the peninsula and the reinstatement of Kyiv’s sovereignty over Donetsk and Luhansk. Their cooperation on the military front includes Turkey’s building of four corvettes for the Ukrainian navy and supplying other hardware, including cruise missiles and Bayraktar drones, which have proved effective in the fight for Donbass.
Turkey sees Russia’s expansion in the Black Sea basin – which also includes its seizure of Abkhazia from Georgia in 2008 – as extremely problematic. In the current Ukraine conflict, the Russians advanced in the Sea of Azov and nearly captured Kherson on the Black Sea coast. If Russia succeeds in becoming the dominant power there, it would end the balance of power with Turkey that has been in place since the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Turkey is thus bracing to become a minor Black Sea power if Russia prevails.
Still, Turkey was the only NATO country that managed to help Ukraine develop its military capabilities without instigating a confrontation with Moscow. The West should have perceived the extent of the Russian threat and seized the opportunity to channel more military assistance to Ukraine via Turkey – but it didn’t. For the U.S., the Black Sea is vital because of the six coastal states, three (Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria) are NATO members and two others (Ukraine and Georgia) are Western-friendly nations. Russia’s advances there weaken NATO and compromise its southern flank. The U.S. realizes that Turkey’s role in halting Russia’s encroachment is critical, so mending relations between Ankara and the West is essential. But Turkey’s neutrality in this conflict will irreversibly undermine the entire Western alliance.
Overhauling Turkey’s Foreign Policy
Most Western countries regard Turkey’s foreign policy objectives, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, as problematic. Even Ankara’s past secular governments experienced tensions with Western countries. Following Turkey’s invasion of Northern Cyprus in 1974, for example, the U.S. Congress imposed a three-and-a-half-year arms embargo on Turkey, despite its essential role in defending NATO’s southern flank. Ankara also has grievances against Washington, mostly because it supported Kurdish militias in northeastern Syria and did not repatriate Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, whom Ankara accuses of masterminding the 2016 failed coup. In 2015, NATO failed to back Turkey after it shot down a Russian fighter jet that violated its airspace. France dismissed the idea that NATO should defend Turkey against Russia, and many Western officials even demanded that Turkey be expelled from the alliance. Turkey’s improved relations with Russia upset the U.S., which removed Ankara from the F-35 fighter program and imposed sanctions on its defense industry after its purchase of S-400s.
Now NATO is demanding that Ankara fully endorse its anti-Russian policies, though the U.S. and its European allies were also uninterested in Turkey playing mediator between the two sides. They want Turkey to take an unequivocal position. It will be difficult for Turkey to resist demands to close its airspace to Russian aircraft, since most European countries have already done so. Even Switzerland has adopted the European Union’s sanctions on Russia, making it increasingly impossible for Turkey to claim neutrality in this conflict without inviting the wrath of the West.
Erdogan is still somewhat reluctant to stand against Russia because he sees Turkey as vulnerable and isolated in Europe. For years, Turkey failed to convince the West that it’s critically important to European security. It correctly predicted the Russian threat to Eastern Europe, which explains why it fostered close cooperation with Ukraine. It can play a decisive role in checking Russia’s intrusion in the Black Sea basin but still must work closely with NATO.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will probably shelve or at least postpone U.S. plans to withdraw from Europe and the Middle East to focus on the Pacific. Putin’s ultimate objective is to pressure NATO to withdraw from the 14 countries that joined the alliance after 1997. If Russia prevails in the war, it will reshape the entire continent – an unacceptable outcome for NATO. Putin’s expansionist Black Sea policy will reorient Turkey’s policy toward the West. Ultimately, the two sides need each other.
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I'm guessing Turkey feels pretty useful in the Uke-Russia war right about now and figures this is a good moment to bust a move.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18228/turkey-cyprus-agression
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18467/turkey-nato-putin-ally
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D1
Turkey's President Recep Erdogan is still trying to shake more Kurds out of northern Europe, including nearly three dozen that Turkey wants repatriated from Sweden and Finland. "So you won't give us back terrorists but you ask us for NATO membership?" Erdogan said on state TV Wednesday. "NATO is an entity for security, an organization for security. Therefore, we cannot say 'yes' to this security organization being deprived of security," he said. Reuters has more.
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GPF
Ankara has reportedly outlined its requirements for accepting new members into NATO.
By: Geopolitical Futures
Possible opening. According to a Bloomberg report, Turkey is making several demands before it will accept NATO membership for Sweden and Finland, both of which officially submitted their applications on Wednesday. The report said Ankara wants European countries to lift restrictions on the export of weapons to Turkey. Ankara is also demanding that the United States readmit Turkey into the F-35 fighter jet program and lift sanctions that were imposed because of Turkey’s acquisition of Russian S-400 missile defense systems. Ankara also insists, according to the report, that Sweden and Finland denounce not just the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) but also its affiliates, including the Syrian-based People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey considers a terrorist organization.
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Turkey's Risky Strategy of Blocking Finland's and Sweden's NATO Membership
5 MIN READMay 20, 2022 | 17:21 GMT
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 18, 2022, at the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on May 18, 2022, at the Turkish Grand National Assembly in Ankara.
(ADEM ALTAN/AFP via Getty Images)
Ankara's strategy of delaying Finnish and Swedish membership in NATO to wrest concessions from Helsinki and Stockholm could jeopardize arms deals and aid packages for Turkey from NATO members. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to veto Sweden's and Finland's efforts to join NATO in a bid for a foreign policy win he can display to Turkish voters increasingly skeptical of his government. To this end, Erdogan has objected to the two Nordic nations' entry into the trans-Atlantic alliance because of their support for Kurdish separatist organizations, and because they have prohibited arms exports to Turkey on human rights grounds. Erdogan has said he cannot accept new NATO members backing policies he deems anti-Turkey, even though Finland and Sweden both have banned the most militant Kurdish group, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), from operating on their territory.
Turkey joined NATO in 1952; under Article 10 of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty that founded the alliance, any country can veto a new candidate's membership.
Sweden and Finland, each longtime neutral countries, have recently ended their nonaligned foreign policies in reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Sweden banned the PKK in 1984, and Finland followed suit after a 2002 EU ban. Even so, the PKK has managed to fund-raise and organize activities through shell organizations or partners thanks to lax enforcement of European bans. The People's Protection Units (YPG), a key Western ally in Syria against the Islamic State, is a PKK splinter group that Europe and the United States have not banned. This angers Ankara, which considers the YPG and PKK the same organization.
Sweden and Finland banned arms exports to Turkey after Turkey made an incursion in Syria in late 2019 to battle the YPG during an abortive U.S. withdrawal.
A Map of Nato Expansion
Turkey will prevent Sweden's and Finland's rapid accession to the NATO alliance as Ankara seeks concessions from them. On May 18, Turkey blocked a rapid vote to allow the formal beginning of the accession process and is poised to continue doing so as it awaits concessions from Stockholm and Helsinki. Though this delay was unpopular with other members of NATO, neither Sweden nor Finland is under imminent threat of Russian military aggression, giving Turkey some time to delay the process while it negotiates with the pair. So far, no NATO member has floated the possibility of punitive measures against Turkey, preferring to focus on a diplomatic solution to maintain alliance cohesion amid its newfound purpose in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
Sweden will struggle to accept Turkey's demands, in part because the Swedish government includes members of parliament of Kurdish descent. Sweden has also softened its stance on the PKK after a 2020 inquest cleared the group of involvement in the 1986 killing of former Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme.
Far fewer Kurds call Finland home, but Helsinki's long-standing commitment to human rights shapes its arms export policies, complicating ending its arms export ban to Turkey amid Ankara's controversial military operations against Kurds in Iraq, Syria and Turkey.
Turkey is unlikely to permanently block the two countries' NATO accession given the substantial pushback Ankara would endure from the rest of the alliance for doing so. Turkey's role in NATO is already controversial some alliance member countries. Turkey has come close to war with fellow NATO member Greece in the past over ongoing territorial disputes in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. If Turkey permanently blocked Sweden's and Finland's accession to the alliance, countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany could respond with punitive measures like sanctions, reduced defense ties and questions over Ankara's place in the alliance. That kind of pushback could destabilize Turkey's already frail economy and undermine Erdogan's current foreign policy of reaching out to former rivals to build up trade links and offset some of the economic pain at home. It would also play into the hands of the Turkish opposition, which would use it to reinforce public perceptions of Erdogan as erratic and ineffective.
NATO has never ejected a member; what this process might look like is not specified by the alliance's founding charter.
Even a delayed accession process could harden anti-Turkey sentiment in Europe and the United States, delaying or disrupting aid and arms deals. As Turkey drags out the process, some — including Turkey critics in the U.S. Congress — will want to pressure Ankara to drop its veto. Congress might be tempted to block U.S. arms deals, such as a potential sale of F-16s to Turkey; it might also enact new punitive measures against Turkey, such as sanctions over the government's human rights record. EU politicians could question the annual 6 billion euros (about $6 billion) the bloc sends to Turkey to support the 4 million refugees living in the country and the billions of euros it gets from the EU budget as an EU candidate country. Activists meanwhile might call for a boycott of Turkish goods throughout the Continent.
Turkey's defense industry is already sanctioned under the U.S. Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which went into effect after Turkey took delivery of the Russian S-400 missile system in 2020. Congress also remains critical of Turkey's refusal to recognize the World War I-era widespread killings of Armenians as a genocide, and some in Congress see Ankara as undermining U.S. counterterrorism strategy in Syria by targeting the YPG.
The European Union imposed sanctions on Turkey's energy industry in reaction to Turkey's aggressive drilling off the coast of Cyprus, which the European Union saw as a violation of Cypriot sovereignty. The sanctions had only a minor effect on Turkey's overall economy, and did not stop Turkey from drilling in the disputed waters. The European Union also remains concerned about the authoritarian drift of the Erdogan government, though it has yet to impose sanctions over that issue.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18483/getting-erdogans-moves-wrong
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GRAPHICS
Turkey May Expand Buffer Zone in Syria
1 MIN READJun 3, 2022 | 20:35 GMT
On May 23, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to militarily expand Turkey's buffer zone along the Syrian border. Since then, the Syrian cities of Manbij, Tal Rifaat and Kobani have emerged as possible targets of a new Turkish operation. Controlling these cities — which are held by the Kurdish-dominated, U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces — would help Turkey secure a 30-kilometer (about 18.64-mile) deep buffer zone between Syrian government-held territory and Turkey's border. Ankara hopes to use this buffer zone to resettle up to 1 million Syrian refugees, block Kurdish militants from entering Turkey and entrench Turkish influence in Syria for years to come.
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Looks like Trump's instincts in getting us out of there were correct?
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August 18, 2022
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Turkey’s Tangled Search for a Balanced Foreign Policy
Next year’s presidential election will determine the future of the country.
By: Hilal Khashan
Turkey is at a crossroads. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the standoff between the U.S. and China in the South China Sea gave Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan the impression that the world is witnessing a reconfiguration of international balances. He aspires to place Turkey at the center of the emerging world order. Erdogan’s perceived opportunity coincides with a severe economic crisis at home, with runaway inflation and mounting opposition threatening his reelection bid next year. Erdogan’s plan for transforming Turkey into a power hub is ambitious yet risky because it does not consider how other countries might respond to his stated objective or the possibility of losing the election.
Political and Economic Evolution
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the Turkish Republic in 1923 and sought to dissociate it from its Ottoman past. He distanced Turkey from the Middle East and aimed to make it a secular European country. He raised the slogan of “peace at home, peace in the world,” which became the dictum guiding Turkey’s foreign policy.
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The end of the Cold War enabled Turkey to reformulate its foreign policy to achieve geostrategic depth. The collapse of the Soviet Union ended the danger on its northern border and allowed it to act more freely. In 1991, Turkish President Turgut Ozal granted the Islamist parties freedom of political action. He began implementing an ambitious economic reform project to transform Turkey into a dynamic and affluent country. Ozal realized that the concept of a national economy based on the local market was no longer viable. He also attempted to break the military’s monopoly of political power and restore respect for religion within society. The old Turkish foreign policy, under the control of the military establishment, was unrealistic because it assumed the country could join the European Union. It bet on the possibility of becoming part of Europe because of Turkey’s pivotal role in NATO and close ties with Israel.
In 1996, Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the Islamist Welfare Party, became prime minister. The following year, he proposed establishing an economic group of eight emerging Muslim countries. He left office before he could translate his wish into a reality. Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rose to power in 2002, Turkey has abandoned its voluntary isolation from its Middle Eastern surroundings, rid itself of the illusion of joining the West, and looked toward the East, where it shares historical experiences, customs and religion. Erdogan appreciated the importance of the Arab region, viewing it as a natural arena for Turkish foreign policy involvement. The geostrategic impact of the Arab world lies in the fact that events in it cross political boundaries to reach the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The centrality of the Arab region lies in the phenomenon of the Arab Afghans who fought the Red Army in Afghanistan during the 1980s and the influx of thousands of non-Arab fighters to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State and other jihadist movements.
Erdogan’s Strategy
Erdogan is developing a third direction of foreign policy. His approach rests on the premise of harmonious diplomacy that establishes multidirectional relationships based on concord, not contradiction. He hopes the plan will promote Turkey’s political independence without favoring one party against another. The current Turkish foreign policy rests on strengthening relations with the major countries in the West and the East. It seeks to establish flexible and multidimensional alliances that avoid dependence on a dominant ally, taking advantage of global polarization to balance its relations. Since the outbreak of Russia’s war on Ukraine, Ankara has been keen to play the role of facilitator between Kyiv and Moscow while maintaining good relations with both. The context of Turkey’s emerging foreign policy relies on the application of soft and hard power, depending on the situation.
In dealing with Greece in the Aegean Sea and the Cypriot exclusive maritime economic zone, Erdogan adopted a resolute naval policy. Turkey’s uncompromising position on the Kurdish Democratic Union (PYD) and its military component, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), view them as extensions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). It ignores the U.S. perception of them as essential allies in the defeat of the Islamic State. This disagreement between Washington and Ankara contributed immensely to the souring of their relations since 2015. Erdogan once claimed that the U.S. armed and protected them and turned the region into a “pond of blood.”
Erdogan reasons that the more independent Turkey’s military policy becomes, the more independent its foreign policy becomes. Furthermore, the more experience Turkish security institutions have in foreign operations, the more active Turkey will be in foreign policy. Turkey’s new orientation in the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean focuses on calming tensions and crises and accelerating the normalization of relations with countries of the region. Ankara will continue to expand its influence in every corner of the world, emphasizing the Turkic-speaking countries.
Russia and Ukraine are two essential business partners for Turkey. Since Turkey is the world’s third largest wheat importer, its economic ties with Moscow and Kyiv – the leading grain exporters – are critical. In addition to natural gas from Russia, which accounts for 45 percent of its domestic needs, Turkey’s top imports from Ukraine include iron, steel and cereal. During his participation in the Antalya Diplomacy Forum in March, the EU high representative for foreign affairs and security policy noted that Ankara had a pivotal role to play in mediating the Ukraine war. He lauded Turkish efforts to bring delegates from Russia and Ukraine to negotiate an end to the conflict.
Africa has also become a significant focus of the strategy of extending Turkish influence since the AKP came to power, with Erdogan visiting more than 30 African countries since 2003. Numerous summits have been held since 2010 to enhance sustainable development and integration. The latest high-level conference took place in Istanbul in December 2021. Turkey is trying to give the impression that it is an emerging country less threatening than China. It also distances itself from the old colonial powers by employing a Third World discourse of cooperation that appeals to Africans. Relations between Turkey and African Union countries have developed amazingly, and the volume of trade has increased fivefold, from $5 billion to $25 billion. Turkey has also established 43 embassies, and Turkish airlines has linked Istanbul to many African cities.
Turkey is also trying to extend its space and influence in the Sahel and sub-Saharan countries, using the soft power policy it skillfully applies. Turkey plays on the religious factor in countries with strong Islamic traditions. The Turkish Religious Affairs Authority has spearheaded this policy for several years, and it plans to fund the construction of mosques and engage in charitable works. However, Turkey is far from being an active player in the economic development of the Sahel countries. While the European Union pumped more than $8 billion into the region from 2014 to 2019, Turkey spent only $61 million.
Erdogan’s Challenges
According to public opinion polls, Erdogan faces a tough challenge from the opposition in next year’s presidential elections. Current polling shows he will lose his bid for another term. Opposition to Erdogan mounted during Istanbul’s 2013 Taksim Gezi Park protests against his autocratic rule and failure to stop inflation. Since then, the economic situation has worsened, and inflation rates hit a record high. In 2019, the ruling AKP lost the most prominent cities, including Istanbul and Ankara, to opposition candidates.
Turkey's Falling Currency Value and Rising Inflation
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Turkey’s isolation, both regionally and internationally, peaked by 2020. It had grave issues with the West and lost many friends in the Middle East because of its support for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas. Erdogan wanted to dismantle the anti-Turkish alliances, especially the bloc of Egypt, the Emirates, Israel and Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, to end his isolation in the region. He decided to return to the “zero problems with neighbors” policy to boost the flagging Turkish economy, which itself had emerged as a formidable political opponent ahead of next year’s presidential election – a vote that will determine the future of Turkey.
Eastern Mediterranean Hydrocarbon Reserves: Overlapping Claims
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Erdogan is trying to secure sufficient dollars to cover the growing deficit in Turkey’s current account. Turkey needs the Gulf oil countries to pump in urgently needed investments to lift its economy out of recession. The difficult economic situation prompted Erdogan to take the initiative and open up to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates after years of bitter hostility. The UAE pledged to invest $10 billion in Turkey, while Erdogan asked for a $20 billion bank deposit from the Saudis.
The normalization of relations with the Gulf states and Israel and the efforts made in Ukraine will not be enough to polish Turkey’s image abroad. Europeans view Erdogan as an authoritarian and belligerent leader who cannot be predicted or trusted. Turkish attempts to court Egypt are just a tactic, not a strategic choice. Erdogan has not abandoned his expansionist tendencies. To regain trust, Turkey would need to return to its actual size, rid itself of the illusion of re-establishing the caliphate and give up its imperialist ambitions. Former President Turgut Ozal considered Central Asia Turkey’s main field of operation, through which it could convince the West of its importance. Islam represented the most effective tool in Turkish foreign policy in Central Asia, but the growing Islamic trend of the AKP threatened its countries. The rulers of Central Asian countries, except for Azerbaijan, were not enthusiastic about cooperation with Turkey.
Turkey presently seeks friendship with all countries. But it is inherently unstable because of the scramble for power within its fragmented political landscape and the claim that Erdogan’s presidential system led to the rise of personal diplomacy. One of the opposition’s complaints against Erdogan is his assurance of maintaining a proper balance between security and democracy. In reality, his leadership could lead to an imbalance favoring autocratic rule under the guise of national interest.
Erdogan is executing a plan that, if successful, would strengthen Turkey’s international standing. He has not undertaken such a proactive diplomatic endeavor in more than a decade. Erdogan is using the zero-problems policy as a lifeline to help him in next year’s elections, which coincide with the centenary of the founding of the Turkish Republic. The presidential elections, which will also measure voter satisfaction, will determine the identity of the political system and the economic project to extricate the country from its stagnation. The opposition wants to quit the Middle East and re-position Turkey with the European Union.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18742/turkey-terrorist-threat
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A Desperate Erdogan Cozies Up to Iran and Russia
by Hany Ghoraba
IPT News
September 12, 2022
https://www.investigativeproject.org/9257/a-desperate-erdogan-cozies-up-to-iran-and-russia
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The Putin Pawns in the NATO Alliance? How the West Emboldens Erdoğan's Aggression
by Burak Bekdil • October 25, 2022 at 5:00 am
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Turkey's Islamist President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been militarily threatening a fellow NATO ally, Greece, using increasingly threatening language. He also proudly announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin has promised him to make Turkey an international natural gas hub, therefore selling his gas via Turkey, avoiding Western sanctions.
What does Erdoğan get in return? Huge American (and other Western) pats on the back.
Erdoğan, while explicitly threatening a NATO ally, has a plan to seriously undermine Western sanctions on Russia.... The project will enable Turkey to store Russian gas in Thrace and sell it to willing European buyers. This will effectively kill Western sanctions on Russia. Turkey will earn transit fees from every cubic meter of Russian gas sold to European buyers. A win-win for two autocrats.
What was the U.S. administration's response to all that? Approval for fighter jet sales!... An earlier version of the bill had linked the sale to the condition that Turkey would not use the aircraft against Greece.
Erdoğan is now hopeful that Congress should give the green light to the F-16 deal before the end of the year.
What other insane, anti-Western moves should Erdoğan make before U.S. President Joe Biden understands that Turkey's Islamist autocrat is a Putin pawn inside the NATO alliance?
Or is Biden a Putin pawn as well?
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Turkey as a gas hub. Iran has unveiled plans to increase natural gas exports to Turkey over the next six months. In a recent meeting between the National Iranian Gas Co. and Turkey’s state-owned BOTAS, the two countries agreed to coordinate on projects relating to gas exports to Turkey. Ankara hopes supplies from Iran will help it become a major hub for natural gas.
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Turkish expansion. Libya and Turkey signed two agreements on Tuesday that will help implement a 2019 deal in which Ankara laid claim to large and potentially gas-rich areas of the eastern Mediterranean, angering Greece, France and the European Union. Another deal signed by Libya and Turkey on Tuesday aims to increase the capacity of the Libyan air force using Turkish expertise. Ankara continues to expand its regional presence while other players are preoccupied with the Ukraine conflict.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19028/turkey-nato-ally
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December 22, 2022
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Turkey’s Struggle to Define Itself
Ankara’s shifting priorities have blocked its ability to establish a national identity.
By: Hilal Khashan
In June 2023, the Turkish people will head to the polls to choose their next president. Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) will face stiff competition from a coalition of six opposition parties, led by the Republican People’s Party (CHP). Erdogan is promising voters that, if he is elected, Turkey will become one of the 10 most advanced countries in the world within the 21st century. The CHP, meanwhile, says it has an ambitious economic plan of its own that will spur growth as Turkey heads into its centennial.
But Turkey is unlikely to become an economic powerhouse unless it meets another pressing challenge: forging a national identity that reconciles Islam and democracy and incorporates its diverse religious and ethnic populations. Turkey must streamline its foreign policy, devise a realistic approach to its ties with Europe, and let go of its elusive goal of joining the European Union. It can rise as a significant power only if it makes peace with itself before engaging the outside world.
Fascination With Europe
Turkey’s relations with Europe were shaped early on by the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 and the subsequent wars with European empires as Ottoman armies penetrated the eastern regions of the Continent. The Ottoman Empire grew to become a leading power in Europe, but its failure to capture Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Austrian Empire, in 1529 ultimately led to its gradual decline in Europe. It didn’t play a role in the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution – which transformed Europe socially, economically and militarily – and instead emerged as the sick man of Europe. Its restive Christian populations in the Balkans led in the 19th century to its demise, which was aggravated in the next century by the rise of irredentist nationalism. Ottoman Turkey remained impervious to the 1848 anti-monarchical revolutions that spread from Sicily to France, the German states, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Though the revolutions failed, they planted the seeds of liberalism and democracy that eventually pervaded Western and Central Europe.
However, Turkey and Europe drew closer, politically and economically, under the leadership of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. To highlight Europe’s importance to Turkey, 16 out of the 26 ambassadors he assigned to foreign missions served in key European capitals. In 1959, Turkey applied for associate membership in the European Economic Community, the predecessor to the European Union. They signed the Ankara Agreement in 1963 as a framework for cooperation and Turkey’s accession to the bloc. In 1987, Turkey officially applied for membership, and two years later, the bloc confirmed its eventual accession. In 1996, Turkey was admitted into the European Customs Union.
But membership has remained elusive. Turkey tried to convince Europe that the entire country, not just Istanbul, was part of Western civilization and deserved to join the EU. The Europeans, however, considered Turkey part of West Asia. They believed Turkish democracy was superficial and were critical of its treatment of minorities.
The Europeans don’t want Turkey to become an integral part of the West. Former French President Valery Giscard d’Estaing publicly admitted as much, saying Turkey did not belong in Europe. But they also don’t want to see it achieving economic independence or emerging as an economic force. Expressing her exasperation with the stalled accession process, former Turkish Prime Minister Tansu Ciller said the Europeans didn’t want Turkey to join the bloc because it was a Muslim country.
Internal Tensions
The country also experienced tensions within Turkish society itself. This was in part a result of Ataturk’s effort to build ties with Europe by introducing laws that would shift Turkey’s orientation from the Middle East to Europe. To that end, he changed the weekly holiday from Friday to Sunday and discarded the Arabic alphabet in favor of the Latin alphabet. Secularism in Turkey thus developed not as a historical process of modernization but as a Kemalist endeavor to create a new state religion guided by a sacred ideology.
Ataturk disconnected Turkey from a millennium of Islamic cultural heritage, viewing its Arab neighbors as inimical. For decades, the authoritarian imposition of secularism fostered cultural estrangement, creating a profound identity crisis and generating public pressure to broaden religious freedoms. The Turkish military dominated government institutions for eight decades and controlled the country’s foreign policy, promoting an association with the secular West. It curbed the role of religion in public life instead of simply separating politics from religion as Western democracies had done.
Religious Groups in Turkey
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But these efforts failed to dislodge Islam from the public sphere. In 1970, Necmettin Erbakan founded the Islamic-oriented National Order Party, which was banned by the government a year later because it promoted values incompatible with the state’s secular orientation. Its successor, the National Salvation Party, was established in 1972. The CHP and the military’s attempts to impose secularism on Turkish society created a severe ideological schism that has yet to be resolved. Turkish governments can neither abandon Europe nor ignore Islam. Ankara hasn’t made a convincing claim that it can act as an intermediary between East and West, having failed to embrace Western civilization and its core values.
Turkey's Ethnic Composition
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Unpredictable Foreign Policy
Turkey’s struggle to define itself also extends to its foreign policy, which is inconsistent and often unpredictable. It combines Turkey’s five political constants: NATO membership, Black Sea security, imagined European identity, strategic partnership with the U.S., and pan-Turkism. But these are sometimes conflicting. Turkey frequently encounters problems with its NATO allies, especially France and Greece, over Cyprus, resources in the Eastern Mediterranean and islands in the Aegean Sea.
Ankara also has complicated relationships with other foreign actors. Though it has bouts of cooperation with its historical rival Russia, tensions inevitably arise. Following the 2011 Arab uprisings, which Turkey supported, Ankara portrayed itself as an ally of the protesters with a staunch anti-Zionist policy line. However, as its grew more isolated from the Arab region, Turkey signaled to Israel that it was ready to restore ties. Concerned that he might lose next year’s election, Erdogan recently asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to host a summit with the president of Syria to facilitate the repatriation of 3.5 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey, where anti-Arab sentiment is rising.
Whereas Europe controls the scope of its relations with Turkey, the situation is different in Turkey’s relations with the Middle East. Here, Ankara has emerged as the third party in many of the region’s conflicts. Under the AKP, Turkey became entangled in Arab affairs, driven by both ideology and domestic interests. After defeating the uprisings and reasserting power over their domestic affairs, Arab regimes were alarmed by Erdogan’s intrusive approach. Since coming to power in 2003, he predicated Turkey’s relationships with its Middle Eastern neighbors on the ability to wield power, maximizing its material capabilities and building alliances. Ankara uses brute force to pacify the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, while applying a soft power approach elsewhere in the Middle East. In Central Asia, he presented Turkey as a partner but curtailed its influence in the region – except in Azerbaijan, which Ankara backed in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Its lack of consistency reflects its divisive domestic politics.
Potential vs. Reality
Upon its founding in 2001, the AKP sought to resolve Turkey’s identity crisis by combining elements of Islam, modernity and secularism. The AKP hoped to reconcile Turkey’s cultural identity, rooted in Islam, with its geopolitical identity, rooted in Europe, to energize its economy and repair its relations with Europe.
Over the past few years, however, its economy has hit a snag, and its relations with Europe have deteriorated even further. Religious differences aside, Turkey’s economic potential might be its biggest barrier to joining the European Union. Its population of 85 million people would make it the most populous member state. Its growing labor force, exceeding 34 million people, is Europe’s third largest. Some 800,000 students graduate from Turkish universities annually, giving its labor force the skills needed to work in a modern economy. The country’s well-developed economic infrastructure includes 55 civilian airports, two of the 10 largest airlines in Europe, an advanced railway system, and developed marine transportation facilities.
The Middle East, meanwhile, is witnessing a deescalation of tensions and shifting its focus to economic cooperation. Rather than waste more time waiting on EU membership, Turkey needs to reinvent its national character and integrate its ethnic and religious minorities. It cannot develop without making peace with itself and shifting its focus away from rectifying past injustices.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19175/turkey-crushes-human-rights
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As Elections Near, Turkey Will Still Block Sweden and Finland's NATO Aspirations
5 MIN READJan 20, 2023 | 16:39 GMT
A breakthrough in NATO accession negotiations between Turkey and Sweden and Finland is unlikely before Turkey's national elections later this year, hampering the U.S. sale of F-16s to Ankara and reinforcing those in the West questioning Turkey's place in the military alliance. Political calculations in Turkey are slowing negotiations between the country and would-be NATO members Sweden and Finland, as Ankara redoubles its call for Stockholm and Helsinki to take politically difficult (and legally questionable) steps to target individuals on their soil whom Ankara accuses of supporting Kurdish militancy. On Jan. 16, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan added a fresh demand: Finland and Sweden must extradite some 130 publicly unnamed individuals before the country's parliament would ratify their accession to NATO. The comments came just days after Turkey demanded that Sweden prosecute protesters who hanged Erdogan in effigy during a protest. After that incident, Turkey canceled a visit by Sweden's speaker of parliament, Andreas Norlen, to Ankara. Despite the Turkish demands, a Swedish prosecutor said that there would be no investigation into the incident, which Swedish politicians said was protected by the country's free speech laws.
Both Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO in the spring of 2022, just weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine shifted their neutral stances on East-West confrontations. But Turkey objected, citing alleged Swedish and Finnish political support for groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party (better known by its Kurdish initials, PKK), and demanded the two Nordic countries take stronger steps against the group before Ankara would support their accession to the alliance (which requires unanimous support from all members). Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish initials, AKP) is using the issue to win over nationalists in the upcoming national polls — which are likely in May, though they are currently scheduled for June — in which the AKP is competing with opposition parties for the nationalist vote to control parliament.
NATO states like the United States have informally committed themselves to defending the Nordic countries' borders regardless of their status as NATO members. This has diminished the urgency of bringing the two nations into the alliance, giving Turkey time to drag out the accession process in the pursuit of concessions.
Because of their constitutional systems, the Finns and Swedes will be unable legally to take further steps against public expressions of support for Kurdish militants, while Turkey is unlikely to step back from its maximalist demands so long as they benefit the AKP's political strategy ahead of the elections. This makes a breakthrough before the Turkish national elections unlikely. Finland and Sweden both already outlaw the PKK as a terrorist organization, but as constitutional democracies, they are unable to take further steps demanded by Turkey, like prosecuting individuals for general pro-Kurdish, anti-Turkish sentiment — sentiments only growing stronger because of Turkey's obstruction of the ongoing accession process. Meanwhile, dropping its demands ahead of the national elections without these major Nordic concessions could cost the AKP swing voters. Such voters could switch to the opposition nationalist Iyi Party, abandoning the AKP and its ultranationalist ally the Nationalist Movement Party, which is struggling to stay above the 7% electoral threshold needed to enter parliament.
Turkey has not always provided specific names for extradition, causing some observers to speculate Ankara wants to use the issue as a talking point for domestic politics rather than a major attempt to force a sentiment change in Finland and Sweden.
In December 2022, a Swedish court blocked the extradition of Bulent Kenes, a Turkish journalist demanded by the Turkish government because of his alleged ties with the now-outlawed Gulenist government. Kenes accused Erdogan of demanding his extradition because he was a known opposition journalist rather than having a specific, strong case against him.
The United States is likely to keep its upcoming F-16 sale to Turkey tied to the entry of Finland and Sweden into NATO, while Turkey's blocking policy will also reinforce general Western sentiments that Ankara's policies are undermining the effectiveness of the alliance. In the long term, this will translate into greater political pressure for the United States to try to force Turkey to shift policies and better align with the alliance. In January 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration was preparing to notify Congress of a long-sought F-16 sale to Turkey to modernize the country's air force, but that the sale would be contingent on both congressional approval and Turkey's acquiescence to the Nordic countries entering NATO. In Congress, Sen. Robert Menendez — who often delays arms sales through his position as chairman of the Armed Services Committee — also threatened to hold up the sale based in part on Turkey's position regarding accession and because of Ankara's human rights record. Such positions appear likely to harden if, after the elections later this year, a breakthrough on the entry of the Nordic countries to the alliance still does not occur.
Turkish-Western ties are also strained by other Turkish policies, including its relative neutrality on the Russia-Ukraine war, where Ankara has so far refused to enact sanctions against Moscow to avoid hurting Turkey's unstable economy. Turkey and the United States have also long been at odds over Washington's close relationship with the Syrian Democratic Forces, which use Kurdish fighters Turkey accuses of being terrorists; Turkey's purchase of the Russian S-400 air defense system; and Turkey's general human rights record.
In September 2022, U.S. and EU officials quietly pressured Ankara to end the use of Russia's Mir payment system in order to isolate Russia's economy, a step Turkey had initially resisted in an attempt to retain economic relations with Moscow. These threats did not emerge into forceful sanctions, but were indicative of the West's increased willingness to pressure Turkey to move away from its neutral position on the Russian-Ukraine war.
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Good article:
https://asiatimes.com/2023/02/how-erdogan-got-back-in-the-money/
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Yes.
In this moment it may be of interest to reread the George Friedman piece that begins this thread.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnwQHrJMxCU
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May 11, 2023
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The Battle for Turkey’s Future
Elections this weekend will serve as a watershed in Turkey’s political and economic development.
By: Hilal Khashan
On May 14, voters in Turkey will head to the polls to cast their ballots in presidential and parliamentary elections, which are shaping up to be the most competitive vote since the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. The race will come down to the country’s two main political coalitions: the People’s Alliance, led by AKP chief Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Nation Alliance, led by Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Though the race is a battle for Turkey’s future, it’ll be profoundly influenced by Turkey’s past. The failed coup in 2016 reshaped the country’s political landscape, resulting in a shift to a presidential system and the formation of new political alliances. Since then, Turkey has witnessed a political struggle over national identity and religious inclusion. The two major parties, the AKP and the CHP, forged competing coalitions and redefined the country’s political discourse and foreign policy. While the AKP continues to promote radical religious ideology, the CHP has toned down its secularist rhetoric and apologized for its past mistakes, which for decades alienated Turkey’s broad conservative bloc. Regardless of the outcome, this election will be a watershed in Turkey’s political and economic development.
Erdogan’s Declining Popularity
Apathy has become widespread among many Turkish voters, especially in the south, where a massive earthquake killed more than 50,000 people in February. Ordinary Turks don’t think the economic situation will improve regardless of who wins the upcoming elections. They’re tired of the deep-rooted divisions between political parties. Low voter turnout in heavily Kurdish areas could be Erdogan’s best hope of securing another term. He has limited support in the east and southeast, where the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) is running under the lists of the Green Left Party (YSP), which has already announced its support for Kilicdaroglu. Though the Kurdish Islamist Free Cause Party has said it will back Erdogan for the presidency, its support won’t offset the loss of votes from the Democracy and Progress Party and the Future Party, which previously split from the AKP.
The AKP is unlikely to secure a simple majority in the 600-member parliament, largely because of the overlap in its electoral base and that of its main coalition partner, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP). Many voters who reject Erdogan’s autocratic rule have shifted to the MHP. They will still vote for Erdogan over Kilicdaroglu in the presidential race but will support their party’s parliamentary candidates, not the AKP’s.
The AKP used to enjoy unwavering support from conservative women, who saw Erdogan as an ally after he lifted a ban on headscarves for public sector workers. The shift in policy – which made it possible for women wearing veils to become police officers, judges and university professors – was one of the biggest reasons for Erdogan’s popularity in the 2000s. However, more than 20 years after the AKP came to power, Turkish women have begun to view the rights they gained as unalienable.
Erdogan has repeatedly invoked his removal of the veil ban to make the case that he has done more for women than many of his predecessors since the founding of the republic in 1923. What’s most striking is that in his speeches he talks about women in a traditional manner, portraying them primarily as mothers and caretakers. His discourse on gender has not kept pace with the country’s social development and rapid urbanization. In Turkey today, women, including those who wear veils, want the same rights to work as men.
Another example of this trend is Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention on the elimination of violence against women in 2021. It’s all part of the government’s adoption of rhetoric in defense of family values and targeting what it calls the corrupt, decadent West. There has been some pushback, however. Erdogan’s decision to include two Islamist parties that demanded that the withdraw from the Istanbul Convention in his coalition has caused friction within the AKP.
Disappointed in the changes they’ve seen in the AKP, many conservative women could choose to stay home on election day rather than vote for either Erdogan or Kilicdaroglu. Erdogan is also no longer seen as a champion of the younger generation who have become accustomed to a certain lifestyle attributable to the achievements made during the Erdogan era. The financial crisis has eroded the economic progress of the first few years of Erdogan’s rule, leading to an erosion of his base of support.
Power of the Conservative Bloc
The conservative voting bloc is a decisive element in most Turkish elections, especially in presidential votes. Conservatives brought Erdogan and the AKP to power 21 years ago and continue to support him. Former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, founder of the CHP-allied Future Party, has said that the opposition needs to win over conservatives to defeat Erdogan at the polls.
For decades, a conflict has been raging in Turkey between conservative and secular forces, especially the CHP. Conservatives, including the religious and national Islamic movement, represent about 45 percent of the population. When counting Kurdish religious groups, conservatives increase to more than 50 percent of Turkey’s population. In previous elections, Erdogan managed to win the votes of conservative Kurds, which makes sense considering that about a third of AKP lawmakers are Kurdish. With the AKP dominating elections since 2002, the CHP has tried to attract conservative voters by promoting tolerance toward religious groups, respecting religious dress and allying with Islamic parties. Conservatives, however, still see Erdogan as the only political leader capable of achieving the aspirations of the Turkish people. He has repeatedly reminded his supporters that he succeeded in reopening the Hagia Sophia Mosque for worship in 2020 after Mustafa Kemal Ataturk transformed it into a museum in 1935.
Indeed, Erdogan has taken on many conservative causes, resulting in significant confrontations with secular forces and the army, which culminated in the botched coup in 2016. Erdogan overcame these obstacles, but the upcoming elections present a major new challenge for him as economic conditions worsen and inflation soars. Erdogan has sought to prevent the Turkish public, especially his supporters, from focusing on the country’s economic problems. He even shrugged off rising food prices, telling voters at a recent rally, “You wouldn’t sacrifice your leader for onion or potato.” The comment came in response to an opposition-led campaign that held him responsible for skyrocketing prices for staple food items. The price of onions, an essential ingredient in Turkish cuisine that recently served as a symbol in an anti-Erdogan campaign, has quadrupled over the past three months. Though this is a minor point in a broader platform, it’s still an embarrassment for Erdogan, who has in turn accused Kilicdaroglu and his allies of treason and betraying Turkey’s national interests. He condemned them for coordinating their election campaign with the HDP, which Erdogan brands as an extension of the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
Wild Card
Several months ago, Erdogan sent a delegation to the headquarters of the HDP in Ankara, proposing dialogue on a democratic solution to the Kurdish issue. Party leaders rejected the proposal, questioning Erdogan’s promises and intentions because of the imprisonment of prominent HDP leaders, in addition to many members of parliament, more than 40 mayors, and several thousand HDP supporters. In the 2019 municipal elections, the HDP’s support for CHP candidates in Istanbul and Ankara led to the AKP’s defeat. However, the opposition parties’ lukewarm attitude toward the Kurds after the election reinforced Kurdish beliefs that Erdogan’s opponents are untrustworthy.
Erdogan must now try to court the Alevis, a sect that accounts for between 15 and 20 percent of Turkey’s population. The center-left-leaning group is suspicious of the aims of the Islamist-rooted AKP after the party’s previous attempts to address the concerns of the sect failed. The Alevis have demanded official recognition of their places of worship, and Erdogan appears to have agreed, even though the conservative base of the AKP views the Alevis as a cult, not an Islamic sect. (Notably, Kilicdaroglu is himself an Alevi.)
Razor’s Edge
The Nation Alliance has pledged to reverse many of Erdogan’s policies if it wins the election. It promises a return to parliamentary democracy, tighter monetary control and a significant shift in the country’s foreign policy. It has also pledged to work toward obtaining full membership in the European Union, to improve relations with the United States and to return Turkey to the F-35 fighter jet program.
The AKP, meanwhile, is trying to win over undecided voters by using conciliatory language that appeals to all segments of Turkish society. Erdogan’s chances of winning the vote are boosted by the fact that the leaders of the Nation Alliance parties come from a wide political spectrum – which exposes them to making mistakes on the campaign trail. The parties are unlikely allies with very different bases of support. Except for the Good Party, they did not present independent electoral lists but formed joint lists with the CHP, which could lead many voters to cast their ballots for Erdogan and the AKP instead.
Both Erdogan and Kilicdaroglu have promised to stimulate the economy, control inflation, increase annual per capita income and reduce unemployment. Erdogan has also pressed for big infrastructure, energy and defense projects. It will be an uphill battle, however, as even a pro-AKP journalist acknowledged that Erdogan’s election chances are on a razor’s edge.
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In Turkey's Election, the Kurds Will Be the Kingmaker
May 12, 2023 | 19:40 GMT
Syrian Kurds gather in the northeastern city of Qamishli on May 10, 2023, to show their support for the Turkish opposition ahead of Turkey's election. Images of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), are seen on some demonstrators' placards and clothing.
Syrian Kurds gather in the northeastern city of Qamishli on May 10, 2023, to show their support for the Turkish opposition ahead of Turkey's election. Images of Abdullah Ocalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK), are seen on some demonstrators' placards and clothing.
(DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP via Getty Images)
The Kurdish vote will be key in determining the outcome of Turkey's upcoming elections, which could oust President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and see Kurdish parties further integrate with the Turkish opposition. On May 14, Turkey will hold national elections for parliament and the presidency. While control of the legislature is also at stake, the most contentious race is for the presidency, where incumbent candidate Erodgan from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is facing off against Kemal Kilicdaroglu from Turkey's largest opposition party, the centrist Republican People's Party (CHP). Kurdish voters have been moving closer to Kilicdaroglu and the CHP-led ''Nation Alliance,'' the six-party opposition coalition trying to oust Erdogan and the AKP. Kurdish political parties have similarly begun aligning with the opposition, with the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) — the largest Kurdish party in Turkey and the second-largest opposition party in parliament — announcing in March that it would not field a presidential candidate to presumably consolidate support for Kilicdaroglu. With Kurds making up 15-20% of Turkey's population, the Kurdish vote is seen as the ''kingmaker'' of the upcoming election: if the majority of Kurds cast their ballots for Kilicdaroglu, he stands a much greater chance of defeating Erdogan and ending the nationalist leader's 20-year reign over the country.
Following a March meeting with HDP co-chairs, Kilicdaroglu reiterated that if elected president, he would use the democratic tools at his disposal to address the ''Kurdish issue,'' a term which is broadly used to define the historical mistreatment and systematic oppression of ethnic Kurds in Turkey. He also criticized the AKP's policies toward Kurds, including restrictions on the Kurdish language.
On April 17, Kilicdaroglu released a Twitter video defending Kurdish voters as ''brothers'' of Turks and condemning the AKP's attempts to portray them as terrorists as ''shameful.''
In a report published on April 11, pollster Rawest Research found that support for the CHP has quadrupled in Turkey's Kurdish provinces since 2018, and that Kurdish voters' support for the ruling AKP has steadily declined since 2015. According to Rawest Research, the AKP has lost at least a third of the Kurdish voters who backed it in the 2018 parliamentary elections.
On March 9, jailed former HDP leader Selahattin Demirtas endorsed Kilicdaroglu and called for unity between the HDP and CHP in ousting Erdogan.
Turkey's Kurdish Issue
Kurds are the largest ethnic minority in Turkey and are concentrated mostly in the country's southeast. Ever since the founding of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, successive governments have forcibly repressed and assimilated the Kurdish people, language and culture as Turkish nationalists have viewed them as threats to national unity. In the late 1970s, the left-wing Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) was formed to campaign for Kurdish rights in Turkey and in 1984 began organizing an armed insurgency to create an independent Kurdistan. The Turkish government has responded to the PKK's insurgency with violent crackdowns on the Kurdish population, which has fueled accusations of human rights abuses among the United Nations, the European Council of Human Rights and other international organizations. But the PKK has also faced international condemnation, specifically for targeting civilians, and is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and most Western countries, including the United States.
Kurdish languages were banned from use in public and private life in Turkey following the 1980 coup, during a period of intense Turkish nationalism promoted by the military government which viewed Kurdish cultural and linguistic expression as a threat to Turkish nationalism and security.
The Turkish government officially denied the existence of Kurds until 1991.
Kurdish support for the opposition follows years of tensions with Erdogan and his ruling AKP despite prior attempts at peace. Between 2009 and 2015, the AKP-led Turkish government made efforts to end the longstanding conflict with the Kurds in an effort to garner support among Kurdish voters, as well as pave the way for Turkey's accession to the European Union. This period saw the government expand linguistic rights for Kurds, grant partial amnesty for PKK members who had surrendered to the government, and issue an official state apology for the 1937-1938 Dersim Massacre that killed thousands of Kurds. However, the peace process ended in 2015, when the government launched its military offensives against the PKK and other Kurdish groups in both Turkey, as well as in neighboring Iraq and Syria. These offensives came as armed Kurdish groups had become much more active amid ongoing fighting against Islamic State. They also followed a general election in Turkey in which the AKP lost its parliamentary majority, in part due to the HDP's strong electoral performance. Since 2015, the AKP has embraced a more staunchly anti-Kurdish vision of Turkish nationalism, which intensified after a faction of the Turkish military unsuccessfully tried to overthrow Erdogan's government in 2016. This has seen heavy-handed crackdowns against the Kurdish population and its political movement led by the HDP, which the government has attempted to justify through allegations of PKK or PKK-linked activity. The Turkish military has also launched operations against Kurdish groups in Iraq and especially Syria in an effort to combat what Turkey sees as a major militant threat.
On April 25, the Turkish government arrested 110 HDP officials over their alleged ties to militant groups, which was largely seen as an attempt to intimidate Kurdish voters ahead of the May 14 elections.
Since 2016, the AKP-led government has removed 54 democratically elected Kurdish mayors from office and replaced them with government-appointed bureaucrats.
In November 2016, the co-chairs of the HDP, notably including Selahattin Demirtas, were arrested on several charges, including supporting violent protests and associating with the PKK (which the HDP leaders deny), and they remain imprisoned.
Nation Alliance members' differing policies toward the Kurds will challenge the opposition's informal partnership with the HDP. The HDP's primary election goal is to oust Erdogan. And it knows that Kilicdaroglu, the joint candidate of the Nation Alliance, stands the best chance of accomplishing that goal. But the Nation Alliance also lacks a unified vision concerning its member parties' relationship with Kurdish parties and voters. For example, though the CHP (the largest opposition party) has courted Kurdish voters, the nationalist Iyi Party — another Nation Alliance member — has continued to accuse the HDP of maintaining connections with the PKK (which the HDP rejects). These distinctions are important because in order to defeat Erdogan, Kilicdaroglu will need to secure a resounding majority of the Kurdish vote. In the absence of an HDP presidential candidate, Kurdish voters are more likely to vote for Kilicdaroglu over Erdogan. But whether they turn out in droves for the opposition candidate is more uncertain given the diversity of the Kurdish voting bloc, which includes many conservative members. Before 2015, the AKP was more willing than the CHP to advance Kurdish rights. And this, combined with the ruling party's attempt to use religion as a unifier in its recent campaign messaging, could still see some of those conservative Kurds vote for Erodgan in the upcoming election. Indeed, despite his post-2015 shift toward anti-Kurdish policies, Erodgan has managed to maintain support among some Kurds. While it appears unlikely, a larger-than-expected turnout of Kurdish AKP supporters that sways the presidential race in Erdogan's favor thus cannot be ruled out.
While the HDP is moving closer to the Nation Alliance, it has not formally joined the coalition due to disagreements with other party members like the Iyi Party. On March 28, Iyi lawmaker Yavuz Agiralioglu submitted his resignation in protest of Kilicdaroglu's visit to the HDP's headquarters.
In the leadup to the June 2015 elections, Kilicdaroglu ruled out any potential negotiations or coalition with the HDP over concerns that such an alliance would weaken support for the CHP — a position he has now reversed but is emblematic of historic tensions.
In 2020, a poll showed that approximately 30% of Kurdish voters would vote for the AKP.
An opposition victory could significantly alter Turkish policies toward the Kurds, whereas an AKP victory would continue hard-line anti-Kurdish policies and complicate the HDP's future ability to cooperate with other opposition parties. If Kilicdaroglu secures enough Kurdish votes to defeat Erdogan (and does not lose substantial support to candidates from other opposition parties), he would head a new CHP-led government that would likely continue to move closer to the Kurds. This would result in significantly more Kurdish influence over policymaking. In the event that the opposition gains control of both the presidency and the parliament, a CHP-led government would likely seek to begin negotiations with Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime, with the goal of eventually withdrawing Turkish forces from the Kurdish regions in (XX northern?) Syria. At home, this broadly would help to cool tensions between authorities and the Kurdish population in southern Turkey, likely reducing (though not ending) the Kurdish militant threat within the country. However, if supporters of the conservative or nationalist parties in the opposition Nation Alliance, like the Iyi Party, end up voting for Erdogan, it could result in his re-election — in which case, the same tensions between the government and Kurds would continue. If Kilicdaroglu loses to Erodgan, the opposition would also likely see collaboration with the Kurds as a failed experiment, and focus its efforts on regaining nationalist and conservative support in future elections — likely ruling out a future partnership with the HDP.
Kurds' political future in Turkey will hinge largely on the outcome of the parliamentary elections, as Kilicdaroglu has promised to solve the Kurdish issue through negotiations in the legislature. The HDP is running candidates in the parliamentary vote under the banner of the Green Left Party amid the ongoing AKP-led case to shut the HDP down due to allegations of association with the PKK. If Kilicdaroglu is elected president, the Green Left Party would thus most likely be the party representing Kurdish interests in any future parliamentary negotiations.
Compared with the presidential race, where Erodgan and Kilicdaroglu are polling closely, the outcome of the parliamentary election is more assured, with the opposition widely expected to win a majority. However, the expanded executive powers that Erdogan has amassed during his tenure means it is unlikely that the Turkish government's policies toward the Kurds would change significantly if the opposition gains control of the parliament but not the presidency.
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How The West Sanctions Enemies: Floods Them with Rewards
by Burak Bekdil • May 24, 2023 at 5:00 am
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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tirelessly struggles to harm Western interests. He should be punished and sanctioned for doing that. Instead, the UN, under U.S. direction, rewarded Turkey by appointing a close Erdoğan confidant to a critical Afghan post, and the Biden administration rewarded Erdoğan by requesting Congressional authorization to sell critical fighter jet parts to Turkey.
In an effort to help Putin evade sanctions, Turkey agreed to pay 25% of its natural gas bill to Russia in rubles. In return, to help Erdoğan find a way out of a punishing economic crisis, Putin deferred repayment Turkey's $20 billion gas debts to Russia until 2024.
By contrast, Turkey's relations with the West have seen one bottom after another.
Erdoğan's request for the extradition [from Sweden and Finland] of "terrorists" does not fit into the judicial system of any democratic country: he insists that everyone who opposes his rule is a "terrorist" -- therefore more than half of 85 million Turkish citizens are terrorists.
On April 17, the Biden administration officially notified Congress about the planned sale to Turkey of critical avionics software upgrades for its current fleet of F-16 fighter aircraft. "Turkey is a longstanding and valued NATO ally," a State Department spokesperson said in a statement. "The Biden administration supports Turkey's efforts to bring the avionics of its F-16 fleet up to standard."
Anything for a sale?
Perhaps the Turkish foreign minister was right to call Biden "charlatan."
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As I suspected :
https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2023/05/28/most-unfair-election-turkish-opposition-laments-defeat-erdogan/
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Perhaps a good moment to reread the post that opens this thread 16 years ago.
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https://dailycaller.com/2023/07/11/blackmail-biden-admin-conveniently-approves-transfer-of-fighter-jets-to-turkey-after-it-approves-swedens-nato-bid/?utm_source=piano&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=29912&pnespid=uqZkCTtHbLocg6bD9ivqF5LTuAKwDp9pJ.O5mvRkrhBmxgJu.InVVT2HxV.ZtRREsZn8sQdm
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ASSESSMENTS
The Modern Geopolitics of Turkey
Jul 21, 2023 | 14:32 GMT
A Natural Middle Power
Turkey is a classic geopolitical middle power. It’s not strong enough to unilaterally impose its policies, but not weak enough to be forced into the orbit of another great power. This middle power status is rooted in its geographic position between Europe and Asia, which affords Turkey great economic opportunities and knowledge transfers, but also exposes it to security threats by placing it between numerous powerful countries and potential invaders.
Turkey is best able to pursue its own core interests — internal unity, access to global markets, and external security — when the global geopolitical environment is fragmented. But Turkey cannot do so in the face of determined great power opposition without also exposing itself to threats that could unravel the state. Together, these realities mean that while Turkey can (and does) independently pursue many of its policies, it must still be measured in its behavior abroad.
Map of natural resources in Turkey
Anatolia: Turkey's Geographic Core
Anatolia, Asia's westernmost point, is the geographic heart of Turkey, as it was for numerous empires and provinces of great empires throughout human history. This is no accident: the geographic strengths of the peninsula — with the Black Sea to its north, Iran to its east, Europe to its west, the Mediterranean Sea to its southwest, and Iraq and Syria to its southeast — lend themselves to geopolitical power by both connecting the region to the world while also partially shielding it.
Anatolia's position between the Black and Mediterranean seas not only creates trade links to Russia, southeastern Europe and North Africa, but forms barriers to invasions if enemies lack sufficient sea power to travel the waves. To the southwest, the arid deserts of Iraq and Syria also deter invaders, as well as undermine the growth of major civilizations that could threaten Anatolia. Anatolia's position between Iran and Europe gives it access to economic, cultural and technological powerhouses to trade with and learn from, while simultaneously giving rise to states that seek to dominate the peninsula. But attacking Anatolia from the west requires crossing the Aegean Sea, creating an obstacle for any European power that lacks a strong navy. And attacking the region from the east requires crossing the cold and rugged mountains that hem in the attractive central Anatolian plateau, creating a logistical constraint that helps anchor the modern Iranian-Turkish border.
For a state that takes control of Anatolia, economic benefits abound. Its mild climate and adequate rainfall favor agriculture and timber, as well as improve the attractiveness of settlements, while the region's rivers (including the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates) provide farms with reliable water supplies. Anatolia's iron, copper, coal, gold, marble, and other natural resources also provide the raw materials for an advanced material culture. And its position between Russia and the Mediterranean, and between Europe and Asia more broadly, makes it a natural waypoint for trade routes, of which Anatolian states have always in some form or another taken their cut. On the route between Russia and the Mediterranean, Anatolian states control the critical Turkish straits, through which passes the breadbasket of Ukrainian and Russian grain to the rest of the world. These benefits have long made Anatolia a center of urban human civilization: one of the earliest cities in the world, Catalhoyuk, was founded in southwestern Anatolia an estimated 9,400 years ago.
These early advantages gave rise to great powers basing themselves in Anatolia, like the Hittites, Byzantines and Ottomans. But the disadvantages of being surrounded by other advanced civilizations — and in more recent times, advanced nation-states — have also exposed Anatolian powers to the potential of multifront challenges that at times they have been unable to balance. Anatolia's position on major trade routes brings material wealth, but also foreign ideas, cultures and religions that can destabilize the cultural heartland, disorganize the state, and open it up to internal divisions that external challengers can then exploit. The history of civilization in Anatolia generally experiences phases in which states are effective in balancing these factors and phases in which they collapse because they cannot.
Modern Anatolia has had centuries of settlement patterns that have left behind various cultural and religious artifacts. But it was the coming of the Turks in the 11th and 12th centuries that have since defined the region's dominant identity. The Turkish people, originally from Central-East Asia, settled down into the Anatolian plains and steadily colonized and transformed the demographic landscape, pushing out the region's Christian Greco-Roman identity and replacing it with Muslim Turkish culture over several centuries. One Turkish-speaking family — the Ottomans — founded a dynasty that would eventually expand into many of the same regions as the former Roman and Byzantine Empires along the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. For centuries, the Ottomans, a great power themselves, achieved the necessary balance to maintain the empire.
Map of population density in Turkey
Turkey's Opportunities and Constraints in the 20th Century
Turkey's 20th-century experience went through four distinct phases: the late Ottoman period, the interwar republic, the Cold War, and the era of U.S.-led globalization that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. For Turkey, the century began with collapse, followed by consolidation, and then alignment.
Prior to the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was a great Mediterranean power. In the 16th century, the empire had vassals and territory extending from Algeria to Crimea and dominated the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean's shores on borders similar to that of the Roman-Byzantine Empire at its own height. But by the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire was facing a resurgent Europe, where the Renaissance sparked new ideas, including military technologies, and the New World provided new wealth that helped European countries (like the Austrian Empire, Spain, Russia and Portugal) push Ottoman power back. In this era, the Ottoman state embarked on a period of strategic balancing, both at home and abroad. Internally, the sultanate tried to reform the empire without breaking its frail, multi-ethnic and religious social contract, sometimes without success. And externally, the Ottoman Empire abandoned expansionism in favor of playing European rivalries off against one another.
This strategy lasted hundreds of years, but its failure was inevitable amid the rise of new ideological, technological and strategic forces from Europe. The Ottoman Empire's fall came about as other multi-ethnic, dynastic systems around Europe were collapsing in the face of rising nationalism, industrialization, ideological conflict and increasing great power competition. Traditional empires were not well-suited to these challenges, including the Ottoman system. By the time of World War I, it was a matter of when, not if, the Ottoman Empire would fall. After defeat in 1918 and the Treaty of Sevres in 1919, the empire collapsed in all but name.
But the defeat of the Ottoman Empire did not mean the end of the Turkish people. Unlike previous phases of conquest, which had resulted in population displacement by foreigners moving into Anatolia, the victorious Allies in 1919 were in no position to colonize the region. With their demographic dominance further assured by the genocide of the Armenians during World War I, the numerous Turks living in Anatolia reorganized under Turkish Gen. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and successfully counterattacked. The Turkish War of Independence began the interwar period of reorganization and consolidation to create a modern Turkish state able to hold off the challenges of the 20th century.
General Ataturk and his supporters won the war against the Allies, but they inherited a disorganized state, along with a population divided by sect, ethnicity, class and region, and the rise of expansionary ideologies like fascism and communism. Ataturk's own political establishment was just as divided, and the prospect of recurrent civil wars loomed. Meanwhile, even beyond the clash of ideologies, Turkey still faced traditional foreign challenges. Turkey had already lost its Arab territories, and both Greece and its Kurdish populations aimed to further shrink Turkey's borders. To maintain a stable state, Turkey focused on national and political unity, producing an ideology able to compete with foreign ones, and navigate between hostile camps without being dragged into their wars.
General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his supporters — dubbed Kemalists — decided the best way to confront these ideological, political, security and diplomatic challenges was to build a secular, nationalist Turkish republic. To glue the Turkish people themselves together, they chose to embrace and build upon Turkish nationalism. This also required a break with the past: they began purging the Ottoman Empire's old associations with pan-Islamic ideals (but not from Islam itself), first by abolishing the caliphate in 1924 and then by adopting enforced secular norms that would last until the 21st century. They sought to emphasize Turkishness, replacing the Arabic alphabet with the Latin script in 1928. They moved the capital to the Anatolian heartland, Ankara, away from the baggage of the traditional capital of Constantinople (which had since been renamed Istanbul). Rather than a new Turkish monarchy or empire, they also chose to establish a republic, which would be less likely to suffer the dynastic hang-ups among the elites that had plagued the Ottomans. And to prevent revanchism by the still-powerful Muslim establishment, they created one of the first modern deep-states within this republic: a cadre of generals, politicians and businesspeople who would overthrow the political process should populists or Islamists pull Turkey back toward the failed policies of the Ottoman era. The enduring influence of these military, political and business leaders continues to shape Turkish politics, even as their ability to overthrow governments has waned.
Notably, this choice of Turkish nationalism left out one of Turkey's last remaining minorities: the Kurds, an independent ethnic group with roots in the country's isolated, mountainous southeast dating back thousands of years. In the 1920s, the Kurds did not seem to pose a major threat to Turkey; they lived in tribal and undeveloped regions and had never controlled their own country or empire. But Turkish nationalism provided an ideological foil that eventually saw the Kurds develop their own distinct identity, creating a long-term ethnically-based challenge to Turkish unity that crossed borders to other Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran.
A map of the Ottoman Empire at its height in the 17th century
Abroad, the new state in Turkey realized it had to narrow its ambitions greatly from the imperial era, which overstretched the Ottoman Empire by bringing it into too many conflicts on too many fronts, and caused imperial models of governance to become increasingly difficult to sustain. In the interwar and World War II periods, Ankara stayed strictly neutral on international conflicts, preferring to await a victor in the competition between capitalist democracy, fascism and communism.
After World War II, Turkey began a period of alignment with the West against the Soviets, who had inherited Moscow's ambition to dominate the Turkish straits (this time through a communist revolution in Turkey). For decades, the Cold War defined most Turkish foreign interests: fears of a communist uprising and a Soviet-backed insurgency, particularly in the non-Turkish Kurdish southeast, kept Ankara largely aligned with the West for decades. This era saw Turkey use its access to Western technology, capital and defense industries to modernize and rebuild its military and economy to bury the Ottoman past further. At home, the Kemalist establishment, backed by the military, intervened in politics through coups or threats of coups in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997, maintaining the secular ideology of the state in the face of a surge of Islamic fundamentalism that began in the 1960s and 1970s.
There were hints of the old Anatolian impulses, however. In 1974, spurred by Turkish nationalists and exploiting a moment of NATO disunity over the future of Cyprus, Turkey launched an invasion of the northern part of the island, where thousands of ethnic Turks remained from the Ottoman era. This resulted in the creation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which only Turkey recognizes. But in the Cold War, such moments were rare; Turkey had few opportunities to maneuver in places where the United States or the Soviets were not already active.
But with the end of the Cold War and the bipolar world order it created, would end, Turkey's opportunities and constraints would again shift.
The Erdogan Era and the Return to a Multipolar World
Though the Cold War ended in victory for the West, it produced only a short-lived unipolar moment, where international norms and behaviors were often shaped by the foreign policies set out by the West. As the United States embarked on military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and its economy and social contract were hit by the 2008 financial crisis, the United States became increasingly unable to impose its global vision, while both rivals (like Russia, China and Iran) and friends (like France and Germany) grew bolder in asserting their own interests, even if it meant placing themselves in competition with the world's last superpower. A multipolar world, like that which dominated the global system before World War II, began to re-emerge. By the mid-2010s, this multipolar world order was firmly in swing, as the United States shifted its attention to China and away from the Middle East. The United States was not gone, but its interests had a different priority; policymakers no longer assumed they could chase all American interests equally as they had in the 1990s. With the global order redefined, Turkey's own interests were reshaped as well.
Turkey's own political and social institutions were undergoing their own transformation. By the late 1990s, the fear of reverting to failed Ottoman-era policies had long disappeared. Meanwhile, Islamist ideas and institutions were growing in popularity, often fused with Turkish nationalism. The meaning of Turkish unity thus changed and weakened the Kemalist argument for strictly enforced secularism, even at the expense of democracy and popular will.
These internal changes in attitudes and political redlines, combined with the establishment's loss of legitimacy in the wake of a weak Turkish economy, gave way to a shocking election victory for the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 — bringing an Islamist government to power, led by Prime Minister (and eventually President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after almost a century of secular parties. The AKP leaned into these shifting attitudes, weakening the Kemalist establishment by taking control of the judiciary, the media and eventually the military. After the 2016 coup attempt against the AKP, a widespread purge allowed the ruling party to purge the government of the old Kemalist deep state and, in parts, replace it with its own. This process largely retained the old, centralized structure of the secular state, swapping out the Kemalist ideology for Turko-Islamist nationalism that better fit the public mood. The process was then furthered when Turkey swapped to a presidential system from a parliamentary one in 2018.
Meanwhile, regional developments also created challenges and opportunities for Turkey. The U.S. wars with Iraq created a power vacuum on Turkey's southern border that was filled by Iran, Islamist militants like al Qaeda, and eventually the Islamic State (IS). Most challenging to Turkey, an autonomous Kurdish region eventually organized as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that sought to formally establish the world's first Kurdish nation-state.
The Arab Spring in the early 2010s also provided openings for Turkish power, as well as challenges to it. The collapse of the Arab authoritarian regional order enabled Turkey, alongside Qatar, to try to spread its Islamist political vision to the Arab world; Turkish-aligned or -friendly Islamist governments emerged in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya before conventional counter-revolutionary forces, led by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, eventually emerged to overthrow or deter them.
In Syria, the Arab Spring brought civil war, which Turkey initially saw as an opportunity to replace Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime with one that might be more friendly to Ankara. But Turkey eventually saw the conflict as another power vacuum amid the emergence of a fresh Kurdish statelet, the Rojava region, led by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Russia's intervention in Syria in 2015 also brought Russian forces close to Turkish ones in northern Syria, where Turkey was trying to prevent the expansion of the Rojava statelet — creating periods of confrontation and cooperation between Ankara and Moscow, whose interests clashed and converged in the course of the civil war.
Turkey's internal ideology also drove policy much further abroad — to Central Asia and Islamic Asia, where Ankara was postured as a leader of both the world's Muslim population and Turkish-speaking peoples. This did not provide a direct economic or military benefit to Ankara, and actually came with risks, as Turkey had to downplay China's policies against its Turkic-speaking and Uyghur Muslim minority populations to preserve commercial contacts with Beijing. But it did help legitimize the AKP in the eyes of the Turkish citizens looking for ideologically consistent leaders. While its ideological posturing abroad remained largely a political imperative, Turkey would only provide supportive rhetoric and limited aid, wary of entanglements that might come at the expense of other Turkish priorities, or spark pushback from important regional powers like China.
The Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 added another chapter to Turkey's views of the global order. With Europe returning to an East-West military confrontation, Turkey staked out a middle ground: it would trade and buy weapons from Russia, but also support Ukraine's territorial integrity and, after 2022, provide arms to Kyiv.
The Imperatives of Modern Turkey
Today, Turkey exists in a global order with greater maneuvering for middle powers than in the 1990s and 2000s. It does not see itself as strictly a Middle Eastern, European, Turkic, Islamic or Western power, but as having ties to all these regions, with distinct differences that also separate Turkey from each.
There are no alignments that push Ankara into one camp or another permanently, but rather Turkey's interests in internal unity, access to global markets, and avoiding multi-front challenges that drive Turkish behavior.
Turkey is aware that some of its core interests are not the same as its NATO allies, and thus knows it cannot count on its fellow NATO members' support in pursuing those interests. Additionally, Turkey knows that some of its interests are in direct competition or contradiction with other great powers, including the United States, European Union, Russia, China and Iran. But Turkey knows these great powers are also in competition with one another and do not necessarily have the power to block all Turkish policies.
Within this context, Turkey's approach to great powers is often risk-averse and pragmatic, while its approach to minor and middle powers is often risk-friendly and more ideological — two broad patterns typical of middle powers.
Turkey's Modern Imperatives
Economic: Maintain access to global markets and investment flows, especially Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia.
Security: Prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state in Syria, Iraq and southeastern Turkey; develop an indigenous arms industry able to free the country's military to operate with fewer diplomatic constraints.
Political: Paper over differences between various Muslim sects, ethnic groups and economic classes by leaning on an Islamo-nationalist ideology that draws on Ottoman, Kemalist, and pan-Islamic historical and social traditions.
Geographic: Secure the Turkish Straits, the Aegean coast, the Kurdish southeast and the Eastern Mediterranean to gain access to resources and trade, and/or block potential encroachment from rivals (like Russia, Egypt, Israel and Greece).
Diplomatic: Preserve access to NATO's military hardware by maintaining a working relationship with both NATO and the European Union; prevent the NATO alliance from drawing Turkey into extra-regional conflicts.
Turkey lacks the military, diplomatic, or economic strength to directly challenge great powers like the United States, China and Russia, or European powers like the United Kingdom, France and Germany. But these states, too, are increasingly constrained and distracted by the multipolar environment they are operating in — creating windows of opportunity for Turkey to periodically push for its interests, as well as play these powers' rivalries off one another to Turkey's benefit.
Turkey's current, oft-contentious relationships with the United States, the European Union and NATO exemplify this dynamic. Western politicians often expect Turkey to align with their strategies, much as it did during the Cold War. But Ankara increasingly sees daylight between Western interests and Ankara. While the West sees Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a challenge to the global order, Turkey does not ascribe to this vision. The ongoing war affects Turkish energy and food supplies, threatens the economies of its trade partners, and creates Western sanctions risks for Ankara. But Turkey is less concerned with the actual outcome of the conflict, as whoever ends up controlling Ukrainian territory will not affect Turkey's overarching strategies. For that matter, the NATO-Russia confrontation, with NATO steadily cutting Russia off from their economies, is also not a direct interest of Turkey, which needs Russian energy, grain, tourism and investment. But Turkey is not naturally aligned with Moscow either; it has little opinion on Moscow's goals to push back Western influence from post-Soviet states. And in some places — like the Caucuses, Syria and Libya — Turkey has come to blows with Russian forces or proxies.
When it comes to dealing with minor powers or fellow middle powers (like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), Turkey is able to challenge, and even impose, conditions on rivals without incurring the dangerous blowback that it would from challenging a great power. In these interactions, Turkey's ideological and political goals drive policy more often, as evidenced by Ankara's recurrent military operations against Kurds in Syria and Iraq, despite protests from Damascus and Baghdad. Turkey can support its fellow Islamist powers (like Libya and Qatar) with force against anti-Islamist powers (like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). But Turkey often compartmentalizes these competitions, aware that pushing too far with too many regional powers can create a multifront challenge or escalation Ankara does not desire. Turkey can trade with Iran while battling its proxies in Syria on the same day, or take investment from the United Arab Emirates while also backing opposing UAE and Egyptian-backed factions in Libya. Knowing the dangers of escalation, Turkish statecraft focuses narrowly on achievable goals.
Turkey's Imperative Outlook and Risks
Turkey's future geopolitical compulsions will be founded on the pursuit of its core interests. Instead of being defined by coherent blocs as they develop in the multipolar world, Turkey will maneuver within and between them, only aligning with a particular bloc should its interests strongly overlap with Turkey's. To this end, Ankara will take weak or ambivalent positions on the NATO-Russia and U.S.-China confrontations unless these conflicts threaten its own unity, produce power vacuums on its borders, threaten access to markets or create the prospect of a multi-front challenge to Turkey itself.
At home, Turkish nationalism will evolve to meet the ideological and social challenges of the 21st century. Kemalism, the secular ideology that helped establish the Turkish state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, has already largely run its course, with fewer and fewer Turks worried about Islamist influence, so Turkish nationalism will grow to include more elements of Islam. But at the same time, a better-educated population more connected to the world will constrain the over-Islamization of Turkish society. Therefore, Islamization will be described as a process of liberalization against a strictly secular state, rather than as a reversion to an Islamist authoritarian past.
But with Islamo-nationalism at the country's ideological core, Turkey's political system is unlikely to integrate the religiously diverse Kurds. Instead, Kurds will experience cycles of toleration and suppression; periods of toleration will likely involve government-led pushes for assimilation, and when Kurds resist these efforts, Turkey will revert to suppression until the dust settles, kicking off the cycle anew.
Because Turkey will be unable to solve the Kurdish challenge at home, it will also have to prioritize strategies that block the creation of a Kurdish state in any of its neighbors. This will mean coming to regional accommodations with the powers that might enable, intentionally or not, a Kurdish state, like Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the United States.
These accommodations will be shaped by diplomacy and force. Since Iran, Iraq and Syria also oppose a Kurdish state, Turkey will use diplomatic connections with them to coordinate action against Kurdish secessionism and militancy. But if these states are too weak to be effective partners, Turkey will resort to military force. In the near term, military forces will have to maneuver around the United States and Russia, neither of which want to see Turkey expand into Iran, Iraq or Syria. But as both the United States and Russia become more focused on other global priorities, they will also likely retrench from the region, which will give Turkey greater freedom to operate against the Kurds. Turkey will also carefully follow the normalization of territorial expansionism; should the multipolar world order enable expansionism, Ankara may be tempted to convert its current buffer zones in Syria and Iraq into occupied territories, proxy republics or even Turkish territory if such tactics would enable it to prevent the formation of a Kurdish state.
Beyond the Kurdish question, Turkey must have access to foreign energy, goods and resources, which will inevitably include sourcing such imports from countries engaged in rivalries and even war with one another. For example, Western sanctions regimes may escalate over the coming years, particularly in the case of a crisis with China or a further escalation of tensions with Russia, and these sanctions will aim to stop nations like Turkey from importing goods from targeted countries. But Turkey will resist such pressure by using its middle position to earn exemptions and concessions from its Western allies, only fully cooperating if the West offsets the economic impact of such trade cutoffs. As part of this pattern, Turko-EU relations will remain pragmatic, if fraught; the European Union will not allow Turkey to enter the bloc as long as Turkey's ideological and political imperatives undermine its democratic institutions, but neither will the European Union use its economic heft against Turkey to force potentially destabilizing political change inside the country. Turkey will also resist the European Union's pressure to democratize, seeing joining the bloc as a weaker imperative than maintaining its internal political stability.
Finally, Turkey will use both its position in NATO and its independence from it to avoid being dragged into damaging foreign conflicts. Hypothetical wars like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or a U.S-Iranian war are unlikely to inspire Turkey to join its NATO allies barring direct threats to Turkish security. However, Turkey's NATO membership will help deter Iranian, Greek or Russian aggression, which means Ankara will not leave the alliance of its own accord. Turkey will also use its NATO membership to ensure that when it asserts its own interests, pushback from the West remains diplomatic and economic, rather than military. Overall, Turkey will rarely be fully aligned with or against NATO's interests.
But even as this approach to the multipolar world appears to minimize risks, Ankara will at times misjudge shifts in the global strategic environment and could suffer serious consequences as a result. Its Islamo-Turkish ideology will bind its governments to anti-Kurdish policies that at times could spark Western sanctions or produce military confrontations for which the country is not prepared. This same ideology will also drive economic policies that may be out of sync with more orthodox approaches, leaving Turkey in greater debt and more exposed to downturns in the global macroeconomic environment. Its political centralization at home will not be entirely popular, either, and at times it will spark unrest, protests and widespread violence. Such unrest could grow significant enough to affect the Turkish economy or disorganize the government, potentially leading to prolonged periods of internal stability that would make it difficult for Turkey to assert its foreign policies.
Turkey's multipolar balance will hinge on successful navigation between great power rivalries and wars, but its ideological inclinations will at times sabotage this balance. This ideological contradiction with orthodox strategy appears unlikely to produce a crisis too great for the modern Turkish state to balance, but it will result in significant setbacks and behavior that some will see as erratic. However unlikely, this contradiction carries with it a low, long-term risk of serious destabilization in Turkey that could begin another cycle of collapse, consolidation and alignment.
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The Modern Geopolitics of Turkey
Jul 21, 2023 | 14:32 GMT
A Natural Middle Power
Turkey is a classic geopolitical middle power. It’s not strong enough to unilaterally impose its policies, but not weak enough to be forced into the orbit of another great power. This middle power status is rooted in its geographic position between Europe and Asia, which affords Turkey great economic opportunities and knowledge transfers, but also exposes it to security threats by placing it between numerous powerful countries and potential invaders.
Turkey is best able to pursue its own core interests — internal unity, access to global markets, and external security — when the global geopolitical environment is fragmented. But Turkey cannot do so in the face of determined great power opposition without also exposing itself to threats that could unravel the state. Together, these realities mean that while Turkey can (and does) independently pursue many of its policies, it must still be measured in its behavior abroad.
Map of natural resources in Turkey
Anatolia: Turkey's Geographic Core
Anatolia, Asia's westernmost point, is the geographic heart of Turkey, as it was for numerous empires and provinces of great empires throughout human history. This is no accident: the geographic strengths of the peninsula — with the Black Sea to its north, Iran to its east, Europe to its west, the Mediterranean Sea to its southwest, and Iraq and Syria to its southeast — lend themselves to geopolitical power by both connecting the region to the world while also partially shielding it.
Anatolia's position between the Black and Mediterranean seas not only creates trade links to Russia, southeastern Europe and North Africa, but forms barriers to invasions if enemies lack sufficient sea power to travel the waves. To the southwest, the arid deserts of Iraq and Syria also deter invaders, as well as undermine the growth of major civilizations that could threaten Anatolia. Anatolia's position between Iran and Europe gives it access to economic, cultural and technological powerhouses to trade with and learn from, while simultaneously giving rise to states that seek to dominate the peninsula. But attacking Anatolia from the west requires crossing the Aegean Sea, creating an obstacle for any European power that lacks a strong navy. And attacking the region from the east requires crossing the cold and rugged mountains that hem in the attractive central Anatolian plateau, creating a logistical constraint that helps anchor the modern Iranian-Turkish border.
For a state that takes control of Anatolia, economic benefits abound. Its mild climate and adequate rainfall favor agriculture and timber, as well as improve the attractiveness of settlements, while the region's rivers (including the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates) provide farms with reliable water supplies. Anatolia's iron, copper, coal, gold, marble, and other natural resources also provide the raw materials for an advanced material culture. And its position between Russia and the Mediterranean, and between Europe and Asia more broadly, makes it a natural waypoint for trade routes, of which Anatolian states have always in some form or another taken their cut. On the route between Russia and the Mediterranean, Anatolian states control the critical Turkish straits, through which passes the breadbasket of Ukrainian and Russian grain to the rest of the world. These benefits have long made Anatolia a center of urban human civilization: one of the earliest cities in the world, Catalhoyuk, was founded in southwestern Anatolia an estimated 9,400 years ago.
These early advantages gave rise to great powers basing themselves in Anatolia, like the Hittites, Byzantines and Ottomans. But the disadvantages of being surrounded by other advanced civilizations — and in more recent times, advanced nation-states — have also exposed Anatolian powers to the potential of multifront challenges that at times they have been unable to balance. Anatolia's position on major trade routes brings material wealth, but also foreign ideas, cultures and religions that can destabilize the cultural heartland, disorganize the state, and open it up to internal divisions that external challengers can then exploit. The history of civilization in Anatolia generally experiences phases in which states are effective in balancing these factors and phases in which they collapse because they cannot.
Modern Anatolia has had centuries of settlement patterns that have left behind various cultural and religious artifacts. But it was the coming of the Turks in the 11th and 12th centuries that have since defined the region's dominant identity. The Turkish people, originally from Central-East Asia, settled down into the Anatolian plains and steadily colonized and transformed the demographic landscape, pushing out the region's Christian Greco-Roman identity and replacing it with Muslim Turkish culture over several centuries. One Turkish-speaking family — the Ottomans — founded a dynasty that would eventually expand into many of the same regions as the former Roman and Byzantine Empires along the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean. For centuries, the Ottomans, a great power themselves, achieved the necessary balance to maintain the empire.
Map of population density in Turkey
Turkey's Opportunities and Constraints in the 20th Century
Turkey's 20th-century experience went through four distinct phases: the late Ottoman period, the interwar republic, the Cold War, and the era of U.S.-led globalization that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. For Turkey, the century began with collapse, followed by consolidation, and then alignment.
Prior to the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire was a great Mediterranean power. In the 16th century, the empire had vassals and territory extending from Algeria to Crimea and dominated the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean's shores on borders similar to that of the Roman-Byzantine Empire at its own height. But by the 1600s, the Ottoman Empire was facing a resurgent Europe, where the Renaissance sparked new ideas, including military technologies, and the New World provided new wealth that helped European countries (like the Austrian Empire, Spain, Russia and Portugal) push Ottoman power back. In this era, the Ottoman state embarked on a period of strategic balancing, both at home and abroad. Internally, the sultanate tried to reform the empire without breaking its frail, multi-ethnic and religious social contract, sometimes without success. And externally, the Ottoman Empire abandoned expansionism in favor of playing European rivalries off against one another.
This strategy lasted hundreds of years, but its failure was inevitable amid the rise of new ideological, technological and strategic forces from Europe. The Ottoman Empire's fall came about as other multi-ethnic, dynastic systems around Europe were collapsing in the face of rising nationalism, industrialization, ideological conflict and increasing great power competition. Traditional empires were not well-suited to these challenges, including the Ottoman system. By the time of World War I, it was a matter of when, not if, the Ottoman Empire would fall. After defeat in 1918 and the Treaty of Sevres in 1919, the empire collapsed in all but name.
But the defeat of the Ottoman Empire did not mean the end of the Turkish people. Unlike previous phases of conquest, which had resulted in population displacement by foreigners moving into Anatolia, the victorious Allies in 1919 were in no position to colonize the region. With their demographic dominance further assured by the genocide of the Armenians during World War I, the numerous Turks living in Anatolia reorganized under Turkish Gen. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and successfully counterattacked. The Turkish War of Independence began the interwar period of reorganization and consolidation to create a modern Turkish state able to hold off the challenges of the 20th century.
General Ataturk and his supporters won the war against the Allies, but they inherited a disorganized state, along with a population divided by sect, ethnicity, class and region, and the rise of expansionary ideologies like fascism and communism. Ataturk's own political establishment was just as divided, and the prospect of recurrent civil wars loomed. Meanwhile, even beyond the clash of ideologies, Turkey still faced traditional foreign challenges. Turkey had already lost its Arab territories, and both Greece and its Kurdish populations aimed to further shrink Turkey's borders. To maintain a stable state, Turkey focused on national and political unity, producing an ideology able to compete with foreign ones, and navigate between hostile camps without being dragged into their wars.
General Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his supporters — dubbed Kemalists — decided the best way to confront these ideological, political, security and diplomatic challenges was to build a secular, nationalist Turkish republic. To glue the Turkish people themselves together, they chose to embrace and build upon Turkish nationalism. This also required a break with the past: they began purging the Ottoman Empire's old associations with pan-Islamic ideals (but not from Islam itself), first by abolishing the caliphate in 1924 and then by adopting enforced secular norms that would last until the 21st century. They sought to emphasize Turkishness, replacing the Arabic alphabet with the Latin script in 1928. They moved the capital to the Anatolian heartland, Ankara, away from the baggage of the traditional capital of Constantinople (which had since been renamed Istanbul). Rather than a new Turkish monarchy or empire, they also chose to establish a republic, which would be less likely to suffer the dynastic hang-ups among the elites that had plagued the Ottomans. And to prevent revanchism by the still-powerful Muslim establishment, they created one of the first modern deep-states within this republic: a cadre of generals, politicians and businesspeople who would overthrow the political process should populists or Islamists pull Turkey back toward the failed policies of the Ottoman era. The enduring influence of these military, political and business leaders continues to shape Turkish politics, even as their ability to overthrow governments has waned.
Notably, this choice of Turkish nationalism left out one of Turkey's last remaining minorities: the Kurds, an independent ethnic group with roots in the country's isolated, mountainous southeast dating back thousands of years. In the 1920s, the Kurds did not seem to pose a major threat to Turkey; they lived in tribal and undeveloped regions and had never controlled their own country or empire. But Turkish nationalism provided an ideological foil that eventually saw the Kurds develop their own distinct identity, creating a long-term ethnically-based challenge to Turkish unity that crossed borders to other Kurdish regions in Syria, Iraq and Iran.
A map of the Ottoman Empire at its height in the 17th century
Abroad, the new state in Turkey realized it had to narrow its ambitions greatly from the imperial era, which overstretched the Ottoman Empire by bringing it into too many conflicts on too many fronts, and caused imperial models of governance to become increasingly difficult to sustain. In the interwar and World War II periods, Ankara stayed strictly neutral on international conflicts, preferring to await a victor in the competition between capitalist democracy, fascism and communism.
After World War II, Turkey began a period of alignment with the West against the Soviets, who had inherited Moscow's ambition to dominate the Turkish straits (this time through a communist revolution in Turkey). For decades, the Cold War defined most Turkish foreign interests: fears of a communist uprising and a Soviet-backed insurgency, particularly in the non-Turkish Kurdish southeast, kept Ankara largely aligned with the West for decades. This era saw Turkey use its access to Western technology, capital and defense industries to modernize and rebuild its military and economy to bury the Ottoman past further. At home, the Kemalist establishment, backed by the military, intervened in politics through coups or threats of coups in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997, maintaining the secular ideology of the state in the face of a surge of Islamic fundamentalism that began in the 1960s and 1970s.
There were hints of the old Anatolian impulses, however. In 1974, spurred by Turkish nationalists and exploiting a moment of NATO disunity over the future of Cyprus, Turkey launched an invasion of the northern part of the island, where thousands of ethnic Turks remained from the Ottoman era. This resulted in the creation of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which only Turkey recognizes. But in the Cold War, such moments were rare; Turkey had few opportunities to maneuver in places where the United States or the Soviets were not already active.
But with the end of the Cold War and the bipolar world order it created, would end, Turkey's opportunities and constraints would again shift.
The Erdogan Era and the Return to a Multipolar World
Though the Cold War ended in victory for the West, it produced only a short-lived unipolar moment, where international norms and behaviors were often shaped by the foreign policies set out by the West. As the United States embarked on military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and its economy and social contract were hit by the 2008 financial crisis, the United States became increasingly unable to impose its global vision, while both rivals (like Russia, China and Iran) and friends (like France and Germany) grew bolder in asserting their own interests, even if it meant placing themselves in competition with the world's last superpower. A multipolar world, like that which dominated the global system before World War II, began to re-emerge. By the mid-2010s, this multipolar world order was firmly in swing, as the United States shifted its attention to China and away from the Middle East. The United States was not gone, but its interests had a different priority; policymakers no longer assumed they could chase all American interests equally as they had in the 1990s. With the global order redefined, Turkey's own interests were reshaped as well.
Turkey's own political and social institutions were undergoing their own transformation. By the late 1990s, the fear of reverting to failed Ottoman-era policies had long disappeared. Meanwhile, Islamist ideas and institutions were growing in popularity, often fused with Turkish nationalism. The meaning of Turkish unity thus changed and weakened the Kemalist argument for strictly enforced secularism, even at the expense of democracy and popular will.
These internal changes in attitudes and political redlines, combined with the establishment's loss of legitimacy in the wake of a weak Turkish economy, gave way to a shocking election victory for the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2002 — bringing an Islamist government to power, led by Prime Minister (and eventually President) Recep Tayyip Erdogan, after almost a century of secular parties. The AKP leaned into these shifting attitudes, weakening the Kemalist establishment by taking control of the judiciary, the media and eventually the military. After the 2016 coup attempt against the AKP, a widespread purge allowed the ruling party to purge the government of the old Kemalist deep state and, in parts, replace it with its own. This process largely retained the old, centralized structure of the secular state, swapping out the Kemalist ideology for Turko-Islamist nationalism that better fit the public mood. The process was then furthered when Turkey swapped to a presidential system from a parliamentary one in 2018.
Meanwhile, regional developments also created challenges and opportunities for Turkey. The U.S. wars with Iraq created a power vacuum on Turkey's southern border that was filled by Iran, Islamist militants like al Qaeda, and eventually the Islamic State (IS). Most challenging to Turkey, an autonomous Kurdish region eventually organized as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) that sought to formally establish the world's first Kurdish nation-state.
The Arab Spring in the early 2010s also provided openings for Turkish power, as well as challenges to it. The collapse of the Arab authoritarian regional order enabled Turkey, alongside Qatar, to try to spread its Islamist political vision to the Arab world; Turkish-aligned or -friendly Islamist governments emerged in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya before conventional counter-revolutionary forces, led by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, eventually emerged to overthrow or deter them.
In Syria, the Arab Spring brought civil war, which Turkey initially saw as an opportunity to replace Syrian President Bashar al Assad's regime with one that might be more friendly to Ankara. But Turkey eventually saw the conflict as another power vacuum amid the emergence of a fresh Kurdish statelet, the Rojava region, led by the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Russia's intervention in Syria in 2015 also brought Russian forces close to Turkish ones in northern Syria, where Turkey was trying to prevent the expansion of the Rojava statelet — creating periods of confrontation and cooperation between Ankara and Moscow, whose interests clashed and converged in the course of the civil war.
Turkey's internal ideology also drove policy much further abroad — to Central Asia and Islamic Asia, where Ankara was postured as a leader of both the world's Muslim population and Turkish-speaking peoples. This did not provide a direct economic or military benefit to Ankara, and actually came with risks, as Turkey had to downplay China's policies against its Turkic-speaking and Uyghur Muslim minority populations to preserve commercial contacts with Beijing. But it did help legitimize the AKP in the eyes of the Turkish citizens looking for ideologically consistent leaders. While its ideological posturing abroad remained largely a political imperative, Turkey would only provide supportive rhetoric and limited aid, wary of entanglements that might come at the expense of other Turkish priorities, or spark pushback from important regional powers like China.
The Russian invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 added another chapter to Turkey's views of the global order. With Europe returning to an East-West military confrontation, Turkey staked out a middle ground: it would trade and buy weapons from Russia, but also support Ukraine's territorial integrity and, after 2022, provide arms to Kyiv.
The Imperatives of Modern Turkey
Today, Turkey exists in a global order with greater maneuvering for middle powers than in the 1990s and 2000s. It does not see itself as strictly a Middle Eastern, European, Turkic, Islamic or Western power, but as having ties to all these regions, with distinct differences that also separate Turkey from each.
There are no alignments that push Ankara into one camp or another permanently, but rather Turkey's interests in internal unity, access to global markets, and avoiding multi-front challenges that drive Turkish behavior.
Turkey is aware that some of its core interests are not the same as its NATO allies, and thus knows it cannot count on its fellow NATO members' support in pursuing those interests. Additionally, Turkey knows that some of its interests are in direct competition or contradiction with other great powers, including the United States, European Union, Russia, China and Iran. But Turkey knows these great powers are also in competition with one another and do not necessarily have the power to block all Turkish policies.
Within this context, Turkey's approach to great powers is often risk-averse and pragmatic, while its approach to minor and middle powers is often risk-friendly and more ideological — two broad patterns typical of middle powers.
Turkey's Modern Imperatives
Economic: Maintain access to global markets and investment flows, especially Europe, Russia, the Middle East, and Asia.
Security: Prevent the emergence of an independent Kurdish state in Syria, Iraq and southeastern Turkey; develop an indigenous arms industry able to free the country's military to operate with fewer diplomatic constraints.
Political: Paper over differences between various Muslim sects, ethnic groups and economic classes by leaning on an Islamo-nationalist ideology that draws on Ottoman, Kemalist, and pan-Islamic historical and social traditions.
Geographic: Secure the Turkish Straits, the Aegean coast, the Kurdish southeast and the Eastern Mediterranean to gain access to resources and trade, and/or block potential encroachment from rivals (like Russia, Egypt, Israel and Greece).
Diplomatic: Preserve access to NATO's military hardware by maintaining a working relationship with both NATO and the European Union; prevent the NATO alliance from drawing Turkey into extra-regional conflicts.
Turkey lacks the military, diplomatic, or economic strength to directly challenge great powers like the United States, China and Russia, or European powers like the United Kingdom, France and Germany. But these states, too, are increasingly constrained and distracted by the multipolar environment they are operating in — creating windows of opportunity for Turkey to periodically push for its interests, as well as play these powers' rivalries off one another to Turkey's benefit.
Turkey's current, oft-contentious relationships with the United States, the European Union and NATO exemplify this dynamic. Western politicians often expect Turkey to align with their strategies, much as it did during the Cold War. But Ankara increasingly sees daylight between Western interests and Ankara. While the West sees Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine as a challenge to the global order, Turkey does not ascribe to this vision. The ongoing war affects Turkish energy and food supplies, threatens the economies of its trade partners, and creates Western sanctions risks for Ankara. But Turkey is less concerned with the actual outcome of the conflict, as whoever ends up controlling Ukrainian territory will not affect Turkey's overarching strategies. For that matter, the NATO-Russia confrontation, with NATO steadily cutting Russia off from their economies, is also not a direct interest of Turkey, which needs Russian energy, grain, tourism and investment. But Turkey is not naturally aligned with Moscow either; it has little opinion on Moscow's goals to push back Western influence from post-Soviet states. And in some places — like the Caucuses, Syria and Libya — Turkey has come to blows with Russian forces or proxies.
When it comes to dealing with minor powers or fellow middle powers (like Syria, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), Turkey is able to challenge, and even impose, conditions on rivals without incurring the dangerous blowback that it would from challenging a great power. In these interactions, Turkey's ideological and political goals drive policy more often, as evidenced by Ankara's recurrent military operations against Kurds in Syria and Iraq, despite protests from Damascus and Baghdad. Turkey can support its fellow Islamist powers (like Libya and Qatar) with force against anti-Islamist powers (like Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates). But Turkey often compartmentalizes these competitions, aware that pushing too far with too many regional powers can create a multifront challenge or escalation Ankara does not desire. Turkey can trade with Iran while battling its proxies in Syria on the same day, or take investment from the United Arab Emirates while also backing opposing UAE and Egyptian-backed factions in Libya. Knowing the dangers of escalation, Turkish statecraft focuses narrowly on achievable goals.
Turkey's Imperative Outlook and Risks
Turkey's future geopolitical compulsions will be founded on the pursuit of its core interests. Instead of being defined by coherent blocs as they develop in the multipolar world, Turkey will maneuver within and between them, only aligning with a particular bloc should its interests strongly overlap with Turkey's. To this end, Ankara will take weak or ambivalent positions on the NATO-Russia and U.S.-China confrontations unless these conflicts threaten its own unity, produce power vacuums on its borders, threaten access to markets or create the prospect of a multi-front challenge to Turkey itself.
At home, Turkish nationalism will evolve to meet the ideological and social challenges of the 21st century. Kemalism, the secular ideology that helped establish the Turkish state after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, has already largely run its course, with fewer and fewer Turks worried about Islamist influence, so Turkish nationalism will grow to include more elements of Islam. But at the same time, a better-educated population more connected to the world will constrain the over-Islamization of Turkish society. Therefore, Islamization will be described as a process of liberalization against a strictly secular state, rather than as a reversion to an Islamist authoritarian past.
But with Islamo-nationalism at the country's ideological core, Turkey's political system is unlikely to integrate the religiously diverse Kurds. Instead, Kurds will experience cycles of toleration and suppression; periods of toleration will likely involve government-led pushes for assimilation, and when Kurds resist these efforts, Turkey will revert to suppression until the dust settles, kicking off the cycle anew.
Because Turkey will be unable to solve the Kurdish challenge at home, it will also have to prioritize strategies that block the creation of a Kurdish state in any of its neighbors. This will mean coming to regional accommodations with the powers that might enable, intentionally or not, a Kurdish state, like Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the United States.
These accommodations will be shaped by diplomacy and force. Since Iran, Iraq and Syria also oppose a Kurdish state, Turkey will use diplomatic connections with them to coordinate action against Kurdish secessionism and militancy. But if these states are too weak to be effective partners, Turkey will resort to military force. In the near term, military forces will have to maneuver around the United States and Russia, neither of which want to see Turkey expand into Iran, Iraq or Syria. But as both the United States and Russia become more focused on other global priorities, they will also likely retrench from the region, which will give Turkey greater freedom to operate against the Kurds. Turkey will also carefully follow the normalization of territorial expansionism; should the multipolar world order enable expansionism, Ankara may be tempted to convert its current buffer zones in Syria and Iraq into occupied territories, proxy republics or even Turkish territory if such tactics would enable it to prevent the formation of a Kurdish state.
Beyond the Kurdish question, Turkey must have access to foreign energy, goods and resources, which will inevitably include sourcing such imports from countries engaged in rivalries and even war with one another. For example, Western sanctions regimes may escalate over the coming years, particularly in the case of a crisis with China or a further escalation of tensions with Russia, and these sanctions will aim to stop nations like Turkey from importing goods from targeted countries. But Turkey will resist such pressure by using its middle position to earn exemptions and concessions from its Western allies, only fully cooperating if the West offsets the economic impact of such trade cutoffs. As part of this pattern, Turko-EU relations will remain pragmatic, if fraught; the European Union will not allow Turkey to enter the bloc as long as Turkey's ideological and political imperatives undermine its democratic institutions, but neither will the European Union use its economic heft against Turkey to force potentially destabilizing political change inside the country. Turkey will also resist the European Union's pressure to democratize, seeing joining the bloc as a weaker imperative than maintaining its internal political stability.
Finally, Turkey will use both its position in NATO and its independence from it to avoid being dragged into damaging foreign conflicts. Hypothetical wars like a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or a U.S-Iranian war are unlikely to inspire Turkey to join its NATO allies barring direct threats to Turkish security. However, Turkey's NATO membership will help deter Iranian, Greek or Russian aggression, which means Ankara will not leave the alliance of its own accord. Turkey will also use its NATO membership to ensure that when it asserts its own interests, pushback from the West remains diplomatic and economic, rather than military. Overall, Turkey will rarely be fully aligned with or against NATO's interests.
But even as this approach to the multipolar world appears to minimize risks, Ankara will at times misjudge shifts in the global strategic environment and could suffer serious consequences as a result. Its Islamo-Turkish ideology will bind its governments to anti-Kurdish policies that at times could spark Western sanctions or produce military confrontations for which the country is not prepared. This same ideology will also drive economic policies that may be out of sync with more orthodox approaches, leaving Turkey in greater debt and more exposed to downturns in the global macroeconomic environment. Its political centralization at home will not be entirely popular, either, and at times it will spark unrest, protests and widespread violence. Such unrest could grow significant enough to affect the Turkish economy or disorganize the government, potentially leading to prolonged periods of internal stability that would make it difficult for Turkey to assert its foreign policies.
Turkey's multipolar balance will hinge on successful navigation between great power rivalries and wars, but its ideological inclinations will at times sabotage this balance. This ideological contradiction with orthodox strategy appears unlikely to produce a crisis too great for the modern Turkish state to balance, but it will result in significant setbacks and behavior that some will see as erratic. However unlikely, this contradiction carries with it a low, long-term risk of serious destabilization in Turkey that could begin another cycle of collapse, consolidation and alignment.
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August 30, 2023
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Turkey’s Pivot to the West
Its influence with Russia is dwindling and its economy is in dire need of foreign investment.
By: Ekaterina Zolotova
As a geopolitical actor, Turkey’s greatest advantage is its domination of intersections. It sits at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and Africa, and it controls the passage of ships between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. During the first year and a half of the Russia-Ukraine war, these features granted Turkey outsize influence. Immediately, Ankara blocked warships from transiting the Turkish straits in a bid to contain the conflict. It served as a mediator between the warring parties and, later, as a guarantor of the U.N.-brokered Black Sea grain corridor. As the West and Russia escalated their economic standoff, Turkey sensed an opportunity to serve as a transit point for the goods trade and voiced ambitions to establish itself as a natural gas trading hub.
But with the war dragging on, the perks of being Turkey are fading. In the short term, space for mediation has almost completely closed, while over the long term, Turkey’s advantages are challenged by the emergence of alternative trade routes. If relative neutrality ceases to be profitable, it may prompt Ankara to seek stability through closer alignment with the United States.
End of the Road
Turkey’s dream of regional leadership will be difficult to achieve if it is simultaneously battling energy price volatility, a fragile economy, an unstable society, and threats to regional trade stemming from an intensifying conflict in the Black Sea. Therefore, after years spent trying to defy economic gravity, newly reelected President Recep Tayyip Erdogan apparently has embraced serious reform.
The Turkish economy is weighed down by a significant trade deficit and extremely high inflation, which peaked in October 2022 at 85.5 percent and is forecast by the central bank to finish 2023 at 58 percent. After securing another five-year term in May, Erdogan assembled a new economic team charged with reducing the country’s large external imbalances, restoring fiscal discipline and, most important, moving away from an unorthodox monetary policy. (Despite inflation creeping higher, Turkey’s central bank beginning in 2021 cut interest rates to as low as 8.5 percent from 19 percent.) New Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, a moderate who previously held the same post from 2009 to 2015, raised taxes and worked to charm foreign investors and executives. Meanwhile, new central bank chief Hafize Gaye Erkan embarked on the perilous path to wind down an expensive bank scheme that shields lira deposits from foreign exchange depreciation. She also hiked Turkey’s key rate for the first time since 2021; after an unexpectedly large increase last week, it now sits at 25 percent, up from 8.5 percent.
Turkey | Interest Rate
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So far, Turkey’s policy normalization has not paid off. The first two rate hikes turned out to be too weak, and inflation started to accelerate again. Relative to last year, consumer prices rose 38.2 percent in June and 47.8 percent in July. Real estate prices have kept soaring, and consumer confidence fell in August. The Turkish lira accelerated its slide against the dollar, peaking at 27.2 per dollar. It strengthened to 25.5 lira per dollar after the most recent rate hike before weakening again the very next day.
Turkey | Inflation
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Turkey | Exchange Rate
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Besides inconclusive reforms, Ankara is threatened with the sudden diminution of its regional influence and transit-state status. First, the Bosporus has ceased to be Russia’s only warm-water outlet for cargo. In August, the first Russian train carrying commercial cargo arrived in Iran through the Incheh-Borun border crossing with Turkmenistan en route to the port of Bandar Abbas and then Saudi Arabia. The route, part of the International North-South Transport Corridor, enables Russia to export goods to Saudi Arabia at nearly half the usual cost in customs tariffs. Separately, exports of Russian oil and oil products started to shift from the Azov, Caspian and Black seas to ports on the Baltic and in the Far East.
The second challenge to Turkey’s regional status follows from the termination in July of the Black Sea grain deal, which facilitated the safe travel of Ukrainian grain through the sea’s contested waters and elevated Turkey’s significance as a transit country for grain from Eurasia to the developing world. Erdogan has nothing to show for his efforts to revive the deal but is due to visit Russia in early September to try again. In the meantime, Kyiv declared the waters around six Russian Black Sea ports to be part of the war zone. Moscow has repeatedly launched missiles and drones at Ukraine’s seaports as well as port infrastructure on the Danube, which Ukraine and the West rely on to replace the Black Sea routes. Ukrainian and EU efforts to establish alternate routes can only further eat into Turkey’s significance in the grain trade.
Appeals to Foreign Investors
In summary, Turkey’s temporary boost from bridging the divide between Russia and the West is fading, and its gradual return to economic orthodoxy is yielding few immediate benefits. Even if its policy U-turn reduces inflation and stabilizes the lira, it is unlikely to do away with Turkey’s chronic trade deficit. Nor will it solve Turkey’s government debt (about 31.2 percent of gross domestic product) or the debts of the central bank, which has borrowed a ton of foreign exchange from domestic banks and other governments to defend the lira. Therefore, to accelerate the repairs to the economy, Turkey will need to attract foreign investment.
But the circle of investors who are ready to put their money in Turkey is limited. Russia is not an option because of sanctions, the enfeebled state of the Russian economy and the volatility of trade flows. Simsek, the finance minister, said Turkey wants to restart EU accession talks, but the bloc has its own problems with inflation and a sluggish economy, and anyway, the accession process is measured in years and could be facing major reform.
Ankara has had more success with its new outreach to the Gulf countries. In July, Erdogan signed $50 billion worth of deals during a three-day tour of the Persian Gulf. Turkey and Saudi Arabia recently implemented a plan to increase bilateral trade and signed a memorandum of understanding to cooperate on the mining of critical minerals. How many of these agreements will materialize is an open question. The Gulf states will expect results from Turkey’s economic reforms. Turks’ rising hostility toward Arab migrants could also become an issue; the country still hosts approximately 4 million Syrian refugees and more than half a million Iraqis. Turkish authorities have started removing Arabic from business signs, and the interior minister said all Arabic shop signs would be replaced by the end of the year. Finally, Turkey’s regional ambitions are not always popular with Arab states. For example, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are wary of Turkey’s economic interests in Sudan and its increased presence in the strategically important Horn of Africa more generally.
The country with perhaps the most to offer is the United States. The U.S. is Turkey's second-largest destination for exports after Germany. The U.S. is ready to invest, especially in a country that hosts critical U.S. military bases and that plays a pivotal role in the ongoing confrontation with Russia. In addition, Turkey has an educated workforce and strong industrial base, but it could use help moving into more high-end manufacturing (more than half of Turkish manufacturers are engaged in low-tech production) – something that would also suit U.S. interests.
The main obstacle to greater U.S. investment in Turkey is the poor state of bilateral relations. A month before Turkey’s elections in May, Ankara accused Washington of trying to create a Kurdish terrorist state near Turkey’s borders, and Erdogan was furious when the U.S. ambassador to the country met with his main political rival and head of the opposition coalition. However, both sides seem ready to turn the page on this ugly chapter of relations. They recently held their largest joint military exercises in seven years, involving warships, Turkish F-16s and U.S. F-18s. Also, Selcuk Bayraktar, the head of the Turkish drone maker, toured the USS Gerald R. Ford at the U.S. ambassador’s invitation while the carrier was visiting the port of Antalya.
Turkey has not set aside its ambition to become a significant Mediterranean power, but it was becoming too difficult to sustain its previous course. Under intense Western pressure, Russia is turning toward Asia and the BRICS, building trade routes that bypass Turkey and becoming less conciliatory on issues of common interest like the collapsed grain deal. Meanwhile, Turkey’s new economic team is implementing reforms but can’t deliver miracles. The country needs foreign investment, and investors are waiting for clarity – including on Turkey’s strategic alignment. One way or another, Turkey will have to put things in order not just domestically but also in its international relations, especially with the United States.
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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20020/putin-erdogan
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October 26, 2023
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Gaza War Wrecks Turkey’s Middle East Policy
Ankara can no longer steer clear of regional entanglements.
By: Kamran Bokhari
The Israel-Hamas war is a major conundrum for Turkey. Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the ensuing conflict have upset Ankara’s recent efforts to avoid entanglements in the Middle East and have forced the Turks back into the regional arena. Turkey’s options, however, are limited and will be constrained by the actions of its historic rival Iran, which has far greater influence over Hamas and thus the outcome of this conflict.
On Oct. 25, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, “Hamas is not a terrorist organization, it is a group of mujahideen defending their lands.” Addressing a gathering of lawmakers from his ruling Justice and Development Party, the Turkish leader announced that he was canceling plans to visit Israel because of its “inhumane” war. Meanwhile, during a joint press conference with his Qatari counterpart in Doha, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan accused Israel of committing “a crime against humanity” in its counteroffensive in Gaza. Earlier, Fidan was in Abu Dhabi to confer with the United Arab Emirates’ leadership on how humanitarian assistance could be delivered to Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip.
When Hamas launched its unprecedented attack on Israel, Turkey was focused on its northern flank. Ankara has been hoping to geopolitically benefit from its ally Azerbaijan’s major victory over rival Armenia in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region. It has also been exploring opportunities to expand its influence in the Black Sea basin in light of Russia’s weakening due to the war in Ukraine. As far as the Middle East is concerned, Turkey’s policy had undergone a significant shift in recent years, with Ankara trying to improve relations with Israel as well as the Arab states.
This policy reversal followed several setbacks in Ankara’s previous approach. First, Turkish proxies, primarily Islamist forces of the Muslim Brotherhood type, were unable to benefit from the Arab Spring uprisings. Saudi Arabia and the UAE helped Arab states and anti-Islamist factions to reverse the initial rise of the Brotherhood. Second, Iran and Russia helped the Assad regime defeat largely Turkish-backed rebels and restrict Turkey’s push into Syria, confining Turkish forces to a limited presence in Syria’s north. Third, Washington’s support for Kurdish forces in northeast Syria served as another major obstacle for Ankara. Finally, a domestic political-economic crisis for Ankara amid the failed 2016 coup contributed to a financial crisis.
These factors forced a rethink in Turkey’s strategy in 2021. The Erdogan government moved to normalize ties with Israel after they soured in 2010 when a Turkish flotilla tried to break an Israeli blockade of Gaza, leading to a clash with the Israel Defense Forces in which 10 Turkish activists were killed and several others wounded. Similarly, Turkey, along with its lone Arab state ally Qatar, moved to improve relations with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt after years of tensions over Turkish support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, especially during the 2009, 2012 and 2014 Gaza wars. For Turkey, better relations were necessary for its economic revival, and it realized that there were too many arrestors in its path toward becoming a leader in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, regional conditions also seemed to be stabilizing. Despite another Gaza war in 2021, the Israel-Hamas conflict was contained. Most significantly, Arab states led by the United Arab Emirates inked the Abraham Accords and established diplomatic relations with Israel. Iran was on the defensive because of the nixing of the nuclear deal coupled with additional sanctions, Israel’s targeting of its nuclear program, the elimination of the head of its Quds force, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in a U.S. airstrike, and growing domestic unrest. In other words, the regional situation permitted the Turks to focus on rebuilding their political economy, which was particularly important given the decline in Erdogan’s popularity.
Iran and Hamas had a shared imperative to block this developing regional arrangement, especially with Saudi Arabia and Israel making rapid progress toward normalizing relations. The Oct. 7 attack was designed to jolt the region and force key stakeholders to alter their behavior, especially toward Israel, thereby undermining the American strategy to manage the region. Hamas, backed by Tehran, knew well the consequences of an attack of this magnitude. In fact, they sought massive Israeli retaliation, which would make it difficult for the Turks and the Arab states to normalize relations with Israel.
In many ways, Hamas and Iran likely achieved far greater success than they had hoped for. They have forced regional players not just to distance themselves from Israel but also to take a tough stance against it. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan have been sharply critical of Israel while rebuffing Washington. But there are limits to how far the Arab states will re-position themselves. Turkey, on the other hand, could not afford moderation given its history and its stance under the Erdogan regime, which has sought a prominent role in the Arab and broader Muslim worlds.
Therefore, Turkey needed to take a tough stance to uphold its credentials as a champion of the Palestinian cause and maintain its standing within the Arab world, Islamist circles and global Muslim milieus. The conundrum it faces is that the scale of the crisis is likely beyond its diplomatic abilities. Turkey is unlikely to prevent Israel from conducting a military operation aimed at dislodging the Hamas regime from Gaza. It will therefore be forced to take an even tougher stance diplomatically against Israel and the United States. This will exacerbate matters for Ankara’s geopolitical position.
Such a scenario works to the advantage of Tehran, which, as a revisionist actor, aims to benefit from an aggravation of the current crisis. In contrast with Turkey, which is risk averse, Iran’s strategic disposition is quite forward-leaning. Through Hamas’ actions, the Iranians have already forced the Turks into a position that they were not planning on assuming. Turkey will struggle to disentangle itself from Iran’s trap.
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re NATO membership?
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/01/13/turkey-erdogan-nato-crucial-corrosive-ally/
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Certainly Turkey is deserving of expulstion but, question presented: Where do they go/what do they do in response?
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Turning the page. Defense officials from Turkey and Greece are meeting in Ankara in an effort to turn the page on bilateral tensions. They will discuss coordination between their air and naval operations in the Aegean Sea and other confidence-building measures. The meeting comes after talks between the Turkish and Greek leaders in July and more than three years since the last defense talks were held between the two countries.
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Hamas in Turkey. Hamas leaders held a secret meeting in Turkey last week, according to Israeli public broadcaster KAN. The meeting included the deputy chairman of Hamas’ Political Bureau, Saleh al-Arouri, and former Hamas leader Khaled Mashal. Ankara reportedly agreed to guarantee the attendees security and confidentiality.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/turkey-follows-china-in-move-likely-to-infuriate-putin/ar-AA1n8oGE?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=f769bcff2d724e32b6c4905cc9a958cd&ei=17
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Turkey’s Meager Influence in the Middle East
Its latest outreach to Egypt, which fears a flood of Palestinian refugees, is likely going nowhere.
By Kamran Bokhari -February 23, 2024
Despite its significant size, stature and history, Turkey has been unable to shape the outcome of the major regional conflict that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Its impotence largely stems from the fact that Iran, Turkey’s historical rival, is the dominant power in the two Arab countries that border Turkey. To carve out a role for itself, Ankara has recently tried to leverage the risk that the war in Gaza will spill over into Egypt. However, Turkey’s lack of influence with the parties in the conflict will likely doom these efforts.
Strategic Rethink
This month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan paid a visit to Cairo, his first in nearly a dozen years. His Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, greeted him warmly and announced Cairo’s intent to at least double bilateral trade with Ankara over the next five years from its 2023 value of $6.6 billion. After saying a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was a priority for both governments, Erdogan said Turkey was “ready to work with Egypt” on Gaza’s reconstruction over the medium term. Ten days earlier, Turkey’s foreign minister told journalists that Ankara would provide drones to Cairo.
Promises aside, Erdogan’s visit failed to yield any tangible outcomes. This lack of progress isn’t surprising, given that the visit was the culmination of Turkey’s efforts since early 2021 to reconcile differences stemming from the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, which saw the overthrow of Egypt’s former leader, Hosni Mubarak. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party shares ideological ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s main opposition group. When the Brotherhood secured victories in both the parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011-12, Turkey anticipated that the Brotherhood-led government would align with Ankara and its vision of a new regional order. In this reordered Middle East, the Turks would be preeminent, just as their Ottoman forefathers had been for almost four centuries until World War I. However, Erdogan’s support for the Brotherhood proved to be a miscalculation.
In 2013, Turkey’s ambitions – supported by Qatar, its lone Arab ally – suffered a major setback when Egypt’s then-military chief, el-Sissi, backed by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, toppled the Brotherhood-led government. Nevertheless, the Turks continued to believe for years that el-Sissi’s military regime was weak and vulnerable. Apparently reinforcing their view was the ascendance of Sunni Islamists on Egypt’s western flank, in Libya and Tunisia, as well as their fight against Bashar Assad’s beleaguered regime to Egypt’s east in Syria. But Iran’s victory (with Russian support) over the Syrian insurrection, the international campaign against Islamic State and the staunch support for el-Sissi’s government from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi ultimately thwarted Turkey’s plans.
Around the same time, Turkey ran into serious domestic problems, notably the 2016 coup attempt, which precipitated widespread turmoil and led to a severe economic downturn. Concurrently, Turkey’s relationship with the United States deteriorated due to disagreements over the U.S.’ alignment with Syrian Kurds in the battle against IS as well as Turkey’s decision to forge closer ties with Russia, highlighted by its purchase of the S-400 anti-missile system from Moscow. Amid these developments, the Abraham Accords, facilitated by the U.S., fostered unprecedented normalization between Israel and Gulf and other Arab states, including a detente between Saudi Arabia and Israel. This occurred as Turkey’s relations with Israel languished, still strained from the fallout over the 2010 Mavi Marmara incident, despite attempts at reconciliation.
Confronted with internal crises and setbacks abroad, Turkey was forced to reassess its strategy. As a result, in 2021, Turkey embarked on a diplomatic mission to repair relations with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. Not coincidentally, its regional ally, Qatar, at the same time healed its own rift with the Saudis and Emiratis after four years of hostility. Doha’s motivations were multifaceted, whereas Ankara sought investment and trade opportunities with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi as a remedy for its financial woes. A series of diplomatic exchanges ensued. Erdogan visited Saudi Arabia in April 2022, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman reciprocated with a trip to Ankara two months later. The following year, in June 2023, UAE President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan made his way to Istanbul, and Erdogan returned the gesture in July, signing several deals in Abu Dhabi valued at $50.7 billion.
Such was the trajectory of Turkey’s relations with the Arab world a mere three months before the Hamas attack. When the Palestinian group stormed into Israel, killed more than a thousand people and took hundreds of hostages, it diminished the significance of Turkey’s diplomatic advances and placed the Turks in an uncomfortable position amid the conflicting interests of Israel, the Arab states and Hamas.
Limited Offerings
Turkey’s ambition to be a significant force in the Middle East and a leader in the Islamic world compelled it to take a firm stance against the response of the Israeli military, which in the course of trying to dismantle Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of Palestinian civilians. Erdogan publicly lashed out at Israel and even voiced support for Hamas. However, Turkey lacks the diplomatic influence to orchestrate a cease-fire. Iran, on the other hand, has through its regional proxies affirmed its preeminence in the Muslim world.
The Turks, it seemed, would have to settle for being bystanders. But as Israeli operations moved south, the potential displacement of Palestinian refugees into the Sinai Peninsula came into play. Turkey perceives the mounting strain on Cairo and the growing tensions between Egypt and Israel as an opportunity to assert itself. Ankara hopes it can use the situation to finally play a significant role in ending the conflict, while influencing the political landscape that follows and contributing to Gaza’s reconstruction.
But Erdogan’s trip to Cairo came and went without any notable achievements. There are several reasons for this. Although Egypt could benefit from Turkish support in managing the refugee situation and stabilizing Gaza, there is reluctance to accept such assistance at the cost of enabling Turkey to further its agenda. Cairo is especially wary of Ankara’s complex history with the Muslim Brotherhood, despite reports that Turkey revoked the citizenship it had granted to as many as 50 senior Brotherhood figures after Egypt’s crackdown on the group in 2013.
Furthermore, Egypt maintains close communication with Hamas, and the role of lead regional mediator is already occupied by Qatar, where most of Hamas’ senior leadership is based. Turkey’s strained relationship with Israel further complicates matters.
Egypt is closely coordinating its efforts with a broader coalition that includes the United States, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Given these dynamics, Turkey currently has little to offer, suggesting that Ankara’s challenges in shaping Middle Eastern geopolitics are likely to persist for at least the medium term.
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It'll be interesting to see how Erdogan's losses here impact his dealings w/ NATO et al:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/turkey-s-erdogan-dealt-major-election-blow-as-opposition-party-wins-big-cities/ar-BB1kSqgL?ocid=socialshare