Turkey and the U.S. – Hearing But Not Listening
November 21, 2013 § 5 Comments
I spent the better part of last week in Istanbul talking U.S. and Turkish foreign policy under the auspices of the Hollings Center, and I came away with a lot to mull over, but if there was one big overarching takeaway, it is that the U.S. and Turkey have a serious and real communication problem. There are structural issues that are complicating the bilateral relationship as well, and I’ll save those for a different post, but much of the recent downturn in relations (and yes, the relationship at the moment is at an ebb, no matter how much spin and damage control came from Ahmet Davutoğlu prior to his Washington visit this week) is resulting from a lack on both sides of understanding the other country’s priorities. The U.S. and Turkey are hearing each other, but not really listening.
This has manifested itself in a few ways, but the easiest way of illustrating the problem is by looking at the contretemps over Turkey’s decision to chose a Chinese firm to partner with in order to build an anti-missile defense system. When Turkey announced the decision, the reaction from the U.S. and other NATO allies was swift and furious. In their eyes, Turkey was turning its back on the NATO alliance and going with a Chinese firm – one that is under sanctions, no less – simply because it was cheaper. Turkey’s reaction to U.S. displeasure was that the U.S. does not understand the “new Turkey” that is stronger and more independent than it has been in the past, and does not feel like it needs to be tied down to whatever U.S. preferences are in every situation.
The Turkish decision, the U.S. reaction, and the Turkish counter-reaction have been acutely felt in both places, but in both instances they are partially predicated on fundamental misunderstandings of decision making and preferences in each country. Starting with Turkey, the decision to go with the Chinese tender was not made on the basis of price alone, nor was it done to stick a thumb in NATO’s eye. As Aaron Stein very accurately pointed out at the time, the Chinese firm offered a complete technology transfer and a favorable co-production agreement, and co-production was the most important factor in the decision on which of the four bids to accept. As multiple of my Turkish colleagues stressed to me last week, the Turkish defense industry has been on a mission for years to become self-sustaining, and the anti-missile defense system is no exception. Prime Minister Erdoğan actually changed the tender process midway through in order to incorporate co-production agreements, which effectively eliminated the U.S. bid since there are export control laws against this sort of thing. The point was not, however, to put the U.S. at a disadvantage, but to benefit the Turkish defense industry to the maximum possible amount. Yes, this had the side effect of making the U.S. bid a surefire loser, but that was not what Turkey was purposely aiming to do. According to the Turks, this was a strategic decision at heart, and while the Chinese bid was the highest rated one on both cost and price, it was the technology transfer and the co-production that were the decisive variables. The U.S. is understandably and justifiably upset at a NATO ally going to China to purchase an anti-missile system that is not able to be integrated into existing NATO defenses, but the U.S. government seems to be misunderstanding how the decision was made and what factors were most important to Turkey.
On the flip side, the Turks are downplaying U.S. and NATO anger under a mistaken impression that this is about lost money for Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or a desire not to see Turkey pursue an independent defense policy. What Turkey does not understand is that accepting the Chinese bid is an enormous deal because the Chinese system cannot and will not be integrated into NATO combat management systems – can you imagine giving the Chinese access to such sensitive information? – and Turkey is now cut out of the NATO sensor system. Following the deployment of the X-Band radar on Turkish territory and Patriot missile batteries in Gaziantep, Turkish obtuseness on this issue is puzzling, to say the least. I was told that the defense industry committee that made the decision to accept the Chinese bid did not involve the foreign ministry at all, which makes the picture a bit clearer, as had there been any type of foreign policy aspect to this decision, the Chinese firm would have been eliminated from the start. To reiterate, this is a Chinese firm that is under sanctions for violating the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act, and by going with this firm, the Turkish defense industry is opening itself up to its own round of sanctions. U.S. anger on this is genuine, yet the Turks keep on insisting that the Chinese system will be compatible with NATO – which is incorrect – and that the penalties for cooperating with a firm under sanctions won’t apply to Turkey – which is also incorrect. Turkey is convincing itself that U.S. anger is about not wanting to see an independent Turkey, which is a load of utter nonsense, and is missing the point about the message that it sends to the U.S. and NATO, who do not see why a desire for co-production outweighs a defense alliance that is more than half a century old.
The fallout from this decision is going to reverberate, and hopefully going forward each side will do a better job of realizing the core interests of the other. In the meantime though, if Turkey thinks it can smooth things over by referring ad nauseam to the countries’ shared values and pretending in hindsight that it welcomed the Gezi protests, then there is a delusion at the heart of Turkish foreign policymaking these days that is worse than I thought.
Is Turkey Really An Unhelpful Ally?
February 28, 2013 § 1 Comment
Halil Karaveli has an op-ed in today’s New York Times with the title “Turkey, The Unhelpful Ally” and in it he argues that Turkey is acting at cross purposes to American goals in Syria by exacerbating civil strife in backing Sunni groups to the exclusion of others. Karaveli actually takes the argument even further and maintains that in not reining Turkey in, the U.S. risks having sectarian tensions blow up into a regional war. He thinks that the U.S. has empowered Turkey and encouraged it to behave as a Sunni power in order to confront Iranian interests, and that doing so is creating incentives for unhelpful behavior on Turkey’s part.
Karaveli is correct that Turkey’s actions are contributing to sectarian strife and he is accurately describing the effects of Turkey’s policy choices, but I don’t think Turkey’s intentions are quite so nefarious. It is true that Turkey’s foreign policy has tended toward boosting Sunni power, and I am sure that Tayyip Erdoğan and Ahmet Davutoğlu harbor ambitions of being the great leader of the Sunni world, but what’s taking place in the Syrian context is something different. Other than Syrians themselves, Ankara wants Assad gone more than anyone, and it will do whatever it can to make that happen. In fact, the Turkish government so desperately wants to see Assad go that who or what replaces him has become a second order concern following the primary objective of just making sure that he is removed from power. To this end, Turkey did not back the Syrian National Council and now the Syrian National Coalition primarily because these groups are Sunni or Sunni-dominated, but because it was clear early on that they represented the best chance to remove Assad due to their strength, resources, organization and outside backing. That they are Sunni groups likely to act more favorably toward Turkey rather than Iran should they ultimately replace Assad is beneficial and part of the calculus, but it is not the only thing going on here.
Turkey is looking to back the group or groups best suited to overthrow the Syrian regime, and concern for a harmonious patchwork of Sunni and minority groups is not a priority at the moment because it is putting the cart before the horse. Karaveli writes that “the Turkish government has made no attempt to show sympathy for the fears of the country’s Alawite, Christian and Kurdish minorities. The Alawites and the Christians have backed the government in large numbers and fear retribution if Mr. Assad is toppled.” The minority groups in Syria are right to be concerned, but if this means that Turkey should drop its desire to see Assad go, it is simply not a reasonable suggestion given all of Turkey’s other interests. The aftermath of Assad’s fall, should it ever happen, is bound to be messy and it will be part of Turkey’s job as a responsible actor to exert its influence over Sunni groups to make sure that sectarian violence and retributions do not break out. None of that can happen though until Assad goes, and there does not seem to be a good way to get to that eventuality without backing the large Sunni opposition parties. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be negative externalities to Turkey’s policy, but I think Karaveli is downplaying the challenges Ankara is facing.
There is also the issue of Karaveli’s assertion that Turkey is behaving this way because of a rift with Iran. Yes, relations between Turkey and Iran are strained, but the idea that Turkey has decided to confront Iran in the same manner as the U.S. or the Gulf monarchies is not supported by the available evidence. Karaveli cites Turkey’s consent to deploying the NATO X-Band radar system on its territory, but Turkey ultimately had little choice in that matter if it wanted to remain in good standing with its fellow NATO countries, not to mention that the Turkish government went out of its way to assure that the radar would not be used as a way to protect Israel from any Iranian nuclear threat. Furthermore, Turkey has been helping Iran evade sanctions for months by using gold to buy Iranian natural gas and thereby get around the ban on financial transactions with Iranian banks. New sanctions aimed at just this activity have ground the creative evasion to a halt rather than a desire to confront Iran, and it is a curious assertion that the U.S. desire to pressure Iran has translated to Turkey and transformed its behavior in a negative way given Turkey’s cautious but non-hostile posture when it comes to Iran.
There are plenty of reasons to criticize Turkish behavior in the Syrian and Iranian spheres, but Karaveli should give Turkey a bit more breathing room than he does. Ankara’s motives are complex in this case, but there is no reason to believe that it does not genuinely want Assad gone for humanitarian, security, and stability reasons, rather than simply out of a desire to promote Sunni hegemony within Syria and the greater region.
A Golden Age At All Costs
April 2, 2012 § 1 Comment
Hugh Pope has a long and excellent roundup in the Cairo Review of Erdoğan’s first decade at Turkey’s helm, and it is a useful summary of the important trends that have taken place, particular in the foreign policy realm. Something that jumped out at me is Pope’s analysis of the U.S.-Turkey relationship, to which he does not devote an entire section but which pops up in a few places. He describes Erdoğan’s rushing to placate the U.S. following his embarrassment at the parliamentary vote denying help with the Iraq War, and that Turkish granting of overflight rights and supply routes and the subsequent deal for U.S. intelligence on the PKK helped usher in what Ankara has described at a golden age in relations with Washington. Pope also points to the return of a Cold War dynamic in which the U.S. looks the other way in ignoring Turkish authoritarian behavior at home in return for a reliable ally that secures American interests.
Certainly, Turkish government officials like to play up the relationship with Washington and what they see as a vital partnership, and they like to point out similarities in the two countries’ political development. I heard Davutoğlu speak at Georgetown in 2010 in a talk titled “Turkish Foreign Policy and Turkish-U.S. Partnership in the 21st Century” in which he embraced Obama’s term of a”model partnership” and then talked about Turkey’s four “political restorations” (the Tanzimat reforms, establishment of the republic, multiparty democracy, and what is going on now with AKP constitutional reforms) and cleverly made a comparison to the U.S. by asserting that it too went through four political restorations. Especially as Turkey has drifted farther away from Europe, first as European countries openly snubbed its EU membership bid and then as Turkey determined that it did not need Europe as much as it had originally thought, it has moved even closer to the U.S. Even though this should not be a point that ever bears repeating, casual observers tend to forget that Turkey is a member of NATO and that it is a valuable strategic ally in numerous ways.
The upshot of this is that in thinking about Erdoğan’s comments over the past week regarding Iran’s nuclear program, and how no state has the right to threaten Iran over what he deems to be an entirely peaceful pursuit of nuclear power, and how the NATO X-Band radar is not directed at thwarting or containing Iran, ultimately it’s not going to make a lick of difference. The growing chasm between Turkey and Europe along with its loss of Syria as its primary Arab ally mean that the relationship with the U.S. is even more inviolate than ever. Erdoğan did everything he could to repair ties with Washington following the Iraq War, and despite the perception of a Turkish turn to the east, Erdoğan and Davutoğlu are too savvy to go back to the dark days of spring 2003 when it comes to the U.S., even if it eventually means tossing Iran overboard and not looking back. The announcement on Friday that Turkey would be cutting back its imports of Iranian oil is the most recent datapoint in this regard, and no doubt if the U.S. decides to go even further and eventually take military action, Turkey will quietly follow along. I still stand by my musings from last week about Erdoğan’s perplexing move of jetting straight to Tehran from Seoul, and it makes sense in this context since Turkey has perhaps the most to lose from a U.S.-Iranian confrontation and will do anything it can to prevent it from happening. Turkey benefits from its relationship with Iran and does not want to lose it, but now that it has lost Syria and Europe, it simply cannot lose the U.S. as well.
The implications for U.S. pressure on Turkey to maintain its liberalizing reforms and not roll back any progress that was made between 2002 and 2009 are that no such pressure will be forthcoming any time soon. The U.S.-Turkey relationship has moved firmly into the realm of realpolitik, and anyone expecting Washington to speak out on press intimidation or harassing of political opponents will be waiting a long time. The U.S. needs Turkey more than ever in the wake of the Arab Spring and Turkey equally needs the U.S., and so the golden age/model partnership is going to be maintained no matter the hardships on either side. If it means Ankara sacrificing its relationship with Iran or the U.S. appearing to cynically give an ally a free pass, so be it.
