A Poor Use Of Turkey As An Excuse To Intervene In Syria
September 27, 2012 § Leave a comment
Michael Doran and Max Boot wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times calling for U.S. intervention in Syria and arguing that there are a number of reasons why this is the opportune time to do so. Plenty of people who spend a lot more time than I do thinking about Syria and the costs and benefits of U.S. intervention, including Doran and Boot, have been writing about this issue for months, and so while I happen to think that intervention is not a great idea, I’m not sure that I have anything new to add to the debate. Doran and Boot did, however, invoke Turkey a number of times in their piece, and each time it was in the course of making claims about Turkey that are incorrect.
First, Doran and Boot wrote that “a more muscular American policy could keep the conflict from spreading. Syria’s civil war has already exacerbated sectarian strife in Lebanon and Iraq — and the Turkish government has accused Mr. Assad of supporting Kurdish militants in order to inflame tensions between the Kurds and Turkey.” Turkey has indeed accused the Syrian government on multiple occasions of supporting the PKK, and maybe Assad is and maybe he isn’t (I think that he probably is), but Doran and Boot are still inflating the benefits of intervention here. To begin with, the Syrian civil war is in absolutely zero danger of spreading to Turkey in the form of sectarian strife, and that won’t change even if it rages for a decade. More relevant though is that the PKK foothold in Syria is firmly established and American intervention and the removal of Assad will not change that. The PYD, which is the Syrian equivalent of the PKK, controls a large swath of territory along the Turkish-Syrian border, and American intervention would not be aimed at dislodging the PYD. What this means is that it actually doesn’t matter all that much anymore whether Assad stays or goes when it comes to the PKK inflaming tensions between Turkey and its Kurdish population since the PKK’s safe haven is pretty well established. That ship has already sailed, and using Turkish concerns about Assad’s support for the PKK as an excuse to advocate U.S. intervention is a red herring.
Second, they argue that “American leadership on Syria could improve relations with key allies like Turkey and Qatar. Both the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and his Qatari counterpart have criticized the United States for offering only nonlethal support to the rebellion. Both favor establishing a no-fly zone and ‘safe zones’ for civilians in Syrian territory.” As anyone who spends any time studying the U.S.-Turkey relationship knows, bilateral ties between the two countries hardly need improving, and it can be argued that they have actually never been closer at any point in history as they are now. It is correct that Ankara is frustrated that it has not had much luck budging the Obama administration on intervening, but the implication that our relationship with Turkey is in need of repair falls somewhere between ludicrous and absurd. Doran and Boot are both extremely sophisticated analysts who know that catering to Turkish or Qatari wishes is not a good enough reason for the U.S. to undertake military action, and so they threw in the suggestion that by not intervening we are endangering ties with our allies in the region. As far as Turkey goes, that is just not the case.
Finally, in what is perhaps the most egregious mistake in their piece, Doran and Boot posited, “The F.S.A. already controls much of the territory between the city [Aleppo] and the Turkish border, only 40 miles away. With American support, Turkish troops could easily establish a corridor for humanitarian aid and military supplies.” Sounds like a piece of cake, right? In reality, the claim that this would be an easy and cost-free mission for the Turkish military is a highly dubious one. As it is, Turkey is having a difficult time dealing with the PKK inside its own borders and has suffered high military casualties in the past few months of fighting. Then consider the fact that establishing, but even more saliently then holding and defending, a corridor for aid and supply lines is no easy task under any circumstances, least of all during a civil war when you will be targeted along a miles-long corridor by whatever is left of Syrian troops, PKK terrorists, and possibly PYD fighters as well. Tack on that the Turkish military has no experience with this type of mission, is currently bogged down fighting the PKK, and is facing leadership and morale issues at the top stemming from the Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledeghammer) cases and the simultaneous resignations of its chief of staff and service heads last year, and you will start to see just how the “easily establish a corridor” line begins to break down. In addition, from a political perspective, Turkey’s Syria policy is not popular domestically and a military invasion would be even less so. It would be certain to result in Turkish casualties, and so the decision to launch an invasion to establish a corridor inside Syria is not going to be an easy one for the government to make, which might explain why despite months of bellicose threats, it hasn’t yet happened.
There may be lots of good reasons why the U.S. should be intervening in Syria, but let’s not pretend that we should do so for Turkey’s benefit, or that our stepping in will solve Turkey’s PKK problem, or that our partnering with Turkey in a Syrian invasion will be a cost-free enterprise for our Turkish allies. If we are going to have a debate about intervention, it should be based on reality rather than on fantasy.
Practicing What I Preach
August 29, 2012 § 3 Comments
One of the themes that I continuously harp on in the course of writing this blog is the vital importance of the U.S.-Turkish relationship. The U.S. and Turkey are strategic partners and have been for decades and cooperate on a host of security and trade issues. While U.S.-Turkey ties rest on a shared foundation of common interests, they are ultimately sustained by government officials, business leaders, and opinion makers in both countries who are committed to keeping the relationship strong. Starting today, I am officially going to be part of this group.
For the next two weeks (and then again for two weeks in Turkey in the spring) I will be participating in the Young Turkey Young America program, which is run by the Atlantic Council and sponsored by the State Department and aims to connect 30 young professionals from the United States and Turkey to examine key foreign policy issues and build a group of emerging leaders committed to bilateral cooperation. This year’s group has a bunch of really impressive Americans and Turks who are, among other things, government advisers, journalists, non-profit executive directors, CEOs, local elected officials, and academics, and I can’t help but feel that I kind of snuck in the back door. We are starting off in Minneapolis today, then moving on to New York and finally Washington, and will be having meetings and panels with members of Congress, executive branch officials in charge of Turkey policy, corporate leaders, academics, and policy experts. The agenda looks great, and I am really excited to spend the next two weeks constantly thinking and speaking about the current and future state of the U.S.-Turkey relationship with smart and talented folks from both countries.
Keeping up my usual daily blogging schedule over the next two weeks is going to be tough, but I am going to try to blog as often as possible. Many of the conversations and meetings the group will be having are going to be off the record and so I am not going to be able to write about them specifically, but I plan on writing about the general insights that I glean from my colleagues – particularly the Turkish ones – about the opportunities and challenges in the bilateral relationship, and some thoughts about where U.S.-Turkey ties are headed. So basically, the blog is going have a changed tenor for the next two weeks and will not be as news-focused as usual, but hopefully it will be just as interesting (to the extent that it is ever interesting) in a different way. And don’t worry, if something big happens in Israel or Turkey I will make sure to leave all of you with my two cents.
Opportunities and Pitfalls for The U.S. and Turkey
May 10, 2012 § 1 Comment
The Council on Foreign Relations has a new report out on U.S.-Turkish relations that looks at Turkey’s rising geopolitical role while acknowledging some of the more worrisome authoritarian trends taking place, and calls for growing the U.S. bilateral relationship into more of an equal partnership in order to recognize and take advantage of Turkey’s new position. I was at the report’s DC rollout yesterday where Madeleine Albright, Steven Hadley, and Steven Cook talked about the report’s conclusions and answered questions, and I have some thoughts about some of their comments and the recommendations contained in the report. I think that the report is overall an excellent document with a great assessment of Turkish accomplishments and ambitions, and it is undoubtedly good strategy for the U.S. to deepens its strategic relationship with Turkey and expand it on issues of joint interest. I do worry, however, that too heavy a reliance on Turkey risks putting the U.S. in a bind since there are going to be issues on which the two countries are never going to agree and Turkey’s rising ambitions may get in the way of U.S. interests in crucial areas.
As the report notes, Turkey has recently been an important and helpful ally in many ways, and the U.S. would be smart to deepen the relationship across all sectors of government and the bureaucracy. Either Steven Cook or Steve Hadley (don’t remember which) observed that relations have traditionally been based on defense and military issues but that this is changing and is part of a natural evolution. I actually wonder if defense issues are going to become even more important in the years ahead while the relationship’s foundation broadens. Aaron Stein pointed out to me yesterday that there is a split in NATO over hosting U.S. nuclear weapons, with Turkey and Italy agreeing with the U.S. on keeping nuclear-armed aircraft on their soil and Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands wanting them gone sometime during the next decade. This makes Turkey an even more valuable defense ally than it already is, and makes me wonder whether the combination of the differences within NATO over its future and the fact that Turkey already has the largest military in Europe means that there will be an eventual shift away from U.S. reliance on NATO and more of an ad hoc coalition between the U.S., Turkey, Britain, and other countries. No matter what happens, a real partnership with Turkey is unquestionably in U.S. interests and will only be beneficial since it makes lots of sense to closely align ourselves with the dominant growing power in the region.
What concerns me is a point made by Albright, when she said that people ask her if its a problem that we are too reliant on picking up the phone and calling Erdoğan whenever we need something, and her response to that is that its not and that we should be relying on him even more. On some issues our interests with Turkey align perfectly but on others they don’t, and this notion that the U.S. should be depending on Erdoğan to always advance our interests is a dangerous one. Turkey has its own goals for the region and the world, and on issues from Iran to Israel to Sudan its interests might not be in concert with American ones. Turkey is also madly casting around for ways to solve its growing energy consumption problem and this inevitably leads it to look to Russia, and tighter ties between Turkey and Russia are not necessarily a good thing for the U.S. given recent Russian intransigence on a number of issues and the return of Putin as president. All of this is perfectly understandable on Turkey’s part, but it means that leaning on Erdoğan and Turkey to solve all of our problems has the potential to seriously backfire. Albright’s stance on this appears to be more extreme than that laid out in the task force report, but the report does suggest that better lines of communication might have averted the spat over the Turkey-Brazil-Iran nuclear fuel deal, whereas I am not so sure that is the case. Aligning more closely with Turkey is smart, but farming out parts of our regional policy in the Middle East to Ankara is not.
There is also the fact that Turkey has been displaying some worrying authoritarian tendencies which the report does not at all downplay or whitewash, but that might throw a wrench into developing a genuine partnership. One of the reasons that it has become easy to view Turkey as a real ally is because of its democratic status, but it hints of cynicism to continue deepening the relationship on all levels and relying on the friendship between President Obama and PM Erdoğan while Turkey continues to imprison journalists and even members of parliament at an alarming rate and prosecute officers in trials that have become discredited. It is beginning to cause embarrassing incidents with other countries, and both Erdoğan and Hüseyin Çelik acknowledged yesterday that the February 28 coup prosecutions are beginning to get out of hand, with Çelik worrying aloud about “trouble in the international arena” over the nature of the trials. This suggests that Turkey recognizes that it has a growing public relations problem, although not necessarily that it thinks a solution is required other than speeding up the process. This kind of thing needs to be solved and Turkey needs to move unambiguously in a democratic direction lest it gum up progress on modernizing the U.S.-Turkey relationship.
Two other observations from yesterday. First, much of the discussion got off track and moved away from Turkey and toward the issue of American intervention in Syria, which both Hadley and Albright went on record as supporting (although Albright qualified it by noting that intervention encompasses a wide range of action). I don’t know if this is a harbinger of more intense U.S. involvement down the road, but it’s something to think about. Second, I wonder what Israel’s reaction is to the bipartisan call for a deeper and more equal partnership with Turkey. One of the problems noted by Steven Cook is that stereotypes and negative views of Turkey are more prevalent on the Hill than in the administration which is a barrier that must be overcome, but in my view it will be difficult for this happen while Israel and Turkey are still feuding given the pro-Israel sentiment in Congress. Yet another good reason for Turkey and Israel to resolve their differences…
P.S. Perhaps the best thing about yesterday was Yigal Schleifer suggesting that I find a picture of Ben-Gurion as a law student in Istanbul to use as my blog icon, which I promptly did. So next time you share one of my posts on Facebook, you will be rewarded with the image of Ben-Gurion wearing a tarboosh and looking like quite the Ottoman Zionist.
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.
