Turkey Is More Than Just A Bridge Between Iran And Everyone Else
April 17, 2012 § 1 Comment
Laura Rozen has a fun behind the scenes recap of the P5+1 Istanbul talks, but the best nugget is the reporting that Davutoğlu tried to set up a number of bilateral meetings between Iran and other states, and that Iran rebuffed him because it does not want to give Davutoğlu and Turkey a diplomatic victory in light of the newfound tension between Turkey and Iran. If this is indeed the reason why Iran would not agree to any bilateral meetings aside from one with China, then it suggests a high degree of Iranian naivete and miscalculation. Recall that as of only a couple of weeks ago, Erdoğan was describing Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful and as a purely civilian project, and criticizing reporters for focusing on Iranian nuclear efforts but not calling out Israel on its nuclear arsenal. Since then, Iran has angered Turkey by waffling on holding the talks in Istanbul which prompted Erdoğan to question Iran’s sincerity and truthfulness, and then after seemingly smoothing things over, has now decided to put playing childish games ahead of securing Turkish support. For a country that is increasingly isolated and facing devastating oil sanctions from the EU in a few months, this is a puzzling move in the extreme. It either means that Iran is very confident that it has managed to avoid a strike on its nuclear facilities, or that Iran is the little boy in a room full of grown men. There is no good reason to annoy the Turks, who will be critical in convincing the U.S. to sit tight and give negotiations a chance, or who will be valuable from a logistics and supply chain perspective should the U.S. decide to attack. Making Davutoğlu look impotent in front of a powerful international audience is only going to backfire, and it is a strange move for a state with few powerful friends left to purposely offend an influential potential supporter.
This incident also underscores the changing environment that Ankara will have to navigate going forward as it rethinks its global role and adjusts accordingly. Turkey has made a big deal under its current government of being a valuable bridge between the West and its own neighbors farther east. Part of the zero problems with neighbors strategy was to establish Turkish credibility in the region so that it could serve as a go-between and become more influential with the U.S. and Europe. That Davutoğlu would be running around trying to set up bilateral meetings is completely in character with this strategy, and the fact that he was not able to deliver is not a knock on him but an indicator of how Turkey needs to shift course. Becoming a regional power means less neutrality and more forcefulness. Turkey is now demonstrating that with regard to Syria, as it has over the past months moved away from trying to gently influence Assad to organizing efforts with an eye toward forcing him to leave. It might mean a loss of credibility as an arbiter or mediator, but the flip side is a more muscular role for Turkish power in the region. The same thing is true with Iran. Turkey may now find it more difficult to act as the middle man that brings Iran and the West together, but having a stronger independent voice and taking sides will bring with it a different array of benefits. Just as Turkey shifted course with Syria, I expect the same thing to eventually happen with Iran, since Davutoğlu is too smart to stick with an outdated policy that no longer matches Turkey’s reach or its geopolitical circumstances. The fiction that Turkey could somehow remain neutral on all issues and be friends with everybody has been exposed by the Arab Spring, the chaos in Syria, and now by Iran. It’s time for Ankara to drop the charade, acknowledge that it is not going to be able to rewrite the rules of international politics all by itself, and come up with a new grand strategy and slogan that recognizes that being a regional power means having to act like a bully sometimes.
A Foreign Policy Based on Personal Slights
April 6, 2012 § Leave a comment
Turkey’s patience with Iran appears to be running out. Erdoğan finally voiced the conclusion yesterday that the rest of the world has suspected for some time, namely that Iran is being less than forthright about its nuclear program. Erdoğan accused Tehran of not being being honest and of trying to sabotage the P5+1 nuclear talks before they begin by purposely suggesting venues that it knows will not be acceptable to the countries on the other side of the negotiating table. It seems that the PM received personal assurances from Khameini and Ahmadinejad while meeting with them last week that the Iranian nuclear program is benign and intended only for civilian purposes, and is now infuriated that after talking to Iranian leaders face to face they are refusing to hold talks in Istanbul and trying to delay negotiations. Erdoğan’s anger is reminiscent of what first led to the downgrade in Turkey’s relations with Israel, when Erdoğan felt personally insulted that Israel launched Operation Cast Lead without warning immediately after Erdoğan had met with Olmert to broker a peace deal with Syria. Turkish officials still routinely mention how betrayed and humiliated Erdoğan felt, and this residual anger is contributing as much as anything to the continuing feud between Israel and Turkey.
On the one hand, it is a positive thing that the Iranian leadership has shown its true colors and cost itself Turkey’s support. Turkey stood out as a NATO member and staunch Western ally insisting that Iran’s intentions were peaceful and that it should be given the benefit of the doubt, and if Turkey moves away from a trust-but-verify position regarding Iran, it will put more pressure on the Iranian government and hopefully avert a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. It is not, however, a generally good idea to conduct foreign policy based on Erdoğan’s personal relationship with world leaders. Certainly it is not good for either Israel or Turkey to have downgraded their relationship so rapidly and intensely, and while there are of course many other contributing factors, Erdoğan’s bruised feelings drove the initial tension between the two countries. On Syria, Turkey lagged behind at the beginning and felt that Assad could eventually be brought around, which was due to the friendship between the countries’ leaders. The Turkish 180, culminating in the call for Assad to step down, was again partially the result of Erdoğan feeling betrayed by Assad’s lies to him about his intentions and repeated broken promises to stop killing civilians. Much like with Iran, the end result is a good one, but the delay in getting there resulted from a personal relationship between the PM and another world leader, and only once the personal relationship deteriorated did the policy shift. As Mehmet Ali Birand points out in Hurriyet, Turkey takes Iran’s words at face value, and Davutoğlu returned from Iran convinced that the Iranian leadership was being truthful and forthright. It is thus unsurprising that Erdoğan and Davutoğlu would now feel stabbed in the back, but it shouldn’t have taken a personal betrayal for them to wake up to the fact that Iran is not exactly a blameless actor. As Turkey takes on a greater geopolitical role and unveils its new “virtuous power” defense doctrine, it should take greater care to let objective analysis be the controlling factor at all times rather than passion and personalities.
Guenter Grass’s Notion of Threat Perception
April 5, 2012 § 2 Comments
Günter Grass, the German nobel laureate, is in the news for publishing a poem yesterday declaring that Israel is a threat to world peace and that it is Israel’s nuclear program that is suspect rather than Iran’s. I will leave it to others, such as Bibi Netanyahu, to rail against Grass’s anti-Semitism, nor will I harp on the irony of a former Waffen-SS member who for decades lied about his past accusing Jews of lying about their true intentions and criticizing Israel’s warlike nature. Rather, I’d like to briefly point out some flaws in Grass’s theory of threat assessment.
Grass believes that Israel’s nuclear program and its alleged claiming of a right to launch a preemptive nuclear strike against Iran makes Israel a threat to world peace. In contrast, he finds no proof that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear capability for anything other than peaceful purposes, IAEA assessments be damned. There are two glaring problems with this analysis. First, it entirely ignores threats directed by Iran toward Israel, acting as if Israel has threatened Iran with military action entirely unprovoked. One can debate whether Khamenei and Ahmadinejad’s blustering about Israel and Zionists is merely empty rhetoric (which is my view) rather than a signal of true intentions to nuke Israel given the chance, but there is no reasonable question that the Iranian leadership consistently threatens Israel and its government (this long list of examples via Jeffrey Goldberg is already three years old). States evaluate threats in a number of different ways; Stephen Walt famously listed strength, proximity, capabilities, and intentions as the four most salient factors, and certainly Iran presents a credible threat to Israel based on proximity and intentions, and to a lesser extent based on strength. Just because Israel might be seen as presenting a credible threat to Iran, it does not automatically follow, as Grass seems to assume, that the reverse is not also true. So while Grass may not see Iran as posing any sort of threat to Israel whatsoever, it must be because his command of international relations theory is more highly evolved than the current state of thinking in the field.
Second, Grass’s allegations of Israeli willingness to launch a first strike and his exhortation of Germany not to sell Israel submarines capable of launching nuclear weapons ignores the fact that Israel has had nuclear weapons since the late 1960s and has fought subsequent wars with Egypt and Lebanon along with suffering Scud missile attacks from Iraq, and yet has in every instance exercised restraint and not used its nuclear arsenal. This is not to laud Israel for any special behavior; no nuclear state has utilized its cache of atomic weapons since the U.S. against the Japanese in ending WWII. It is to point out that Israel should not be treated with heightened suspicion or accused of being a threat to world peace just because it is a nuclear power. Indeed, Israel’s history of not using its nuclear weapons makes it less suspect than Iran, which has no similar track record of responsible nuclear behavior.
Grass may think that Israel is wrong for its treatment of Palestinians, or may not like its current government, or maybe he just has a problem with Jews (let’s not forget that he was, after all, a Nazi). His grasp of threats and nuclear behavior, however, do not back up his polemic.
Time to Learn How To Spell Azerbaijan in Hebrew
March 28, 2012 § 2 Comments
Mark Perry has a long piece on the FP website contending that Israel is gearing up to use Azerbaijan as a possible staging ground for an attack on Iran, and that at the very least Azerbaijan will provide a safe landing point for Israeli bombers following a strike in addition to serving as a base for search and rescue operations. It is tough for me to know quite what to make of Perry’s reporting. At first glance, this seems like a strange move for the Azeris to make. They stand to create a diplomatic firestorm with Iran and Turkey, both of whom are Azerbaijan’s neighbors and both of whom are significantly larger and militarily more powerful than Azerbaijan. To openly assist Israel in attacking Iran would place Azerbaijan in the path of certain Iranian retaliation, and unlike U.S. backing of Israel, no such protection and military help is guaranteed to come Azerbaijan’s way. From an international relations perspective, given its proximity to Iran, the power imbalance between the two countries, and the absence of great power backing, it seems to make more sense for Azerbaijan to bandwagon with Iran than to help Israel balance against it.
On the other hand, in many ways Azeri assistance to Israel in an effort to poke Iran in the eye has been a long time coming. Iran and Azerbaijan have an extremely tense relationship dating back to the fact that Azerbaijan was once part of Iran and there are 20 million ethnic Azeris living in Iran over whom the Azeri government oftentimes claims sovereignty. The relationship between the Iranian government and its Azeri citizens mirrors that of Turkey and its Kurdish citizens, with the Iranian government discriminating against Azeri language and culture in an effort to make Azeris more Iranian. In addition, Azerbaijan recently arrested 22 people on charges of spying for Iran, and after Israel canceled its $140 million deal to provide Turkey with drones it turned around and announced a $1.5 billion arms deal with Azerbaijan that included drones and missile defense. Azerbaijan provides 30% of Israel’s oil and transports it there via an Azeri pipeline, which is another move that must antagonize the Iranian government. There are also lingering disputes over Iranian trade deals with Armenia and a host of other issues that make the Iran-Azerbaijan relationship one fraught with danger.
The sum total of all this is that it makes perfect sense to me that Israel is trying very hard to secure Azeri assistance for all sorts of contingencies as it makes military plans to deal with Iran. It does not necessarily follow, however, that Azerbaijan will take what would be a massive escalatory step forward in actively helping Israel attack Iran. I buy Perry’s argument on allowing Israel to launch search and rescue missions from Azeri territory more than I buy the notion of Israeli bombers using Azeri airfields as a secret staging ground for bombing runs. The first would come dangerously close to the line of open hostility toward Iran while the second would blow right past it, and I’m not sure that Azerbaijan is in a secure enough position to risk the latter scenario.
