On Sunday, Turkey’s foreign minister indicated that President Trump had not dropped the controversial idea of extraditing Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim religious leader and longtime U.S. resident accused of instigating a coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016. The U.S. should not be in the business of trading residents for better relationships with authoritarian rulers.
Speaking in Doha, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said, “Last time we met in Buenos Aires, President Trump told President Erdogan that they have been working on that,” he explained in reference to Gulen’s extradition. He added, “we need to see concrete steps because it has been already two years, almost three year,” reiterating the demand for extradition.
Gulen has been living in self-imposed exile in the United States since the 1990’s. In the aftermath of the 2016 coup, seized upon by Erdogan as an opportunity to strengthen his own power at the expense of democracy, the government implicated and arrested thousands on charges of attempting to overthrow the government, supposedly at the direction of Gulen. The arrests and purges that followed ensnared teachers, opposition leaders and the recently freed American pastor Andrew Brunson, who was held on bogus terrorism charges.
Since 2016, the Turkish government has repeatedly requested the extradition of Gulen. But the U.S. does not simply hand over its residents. Following U.S. law, the Justice Department reviewed the evidence provided by Turkey against the cleric. After extensive investigation, the Justice Department determined that there was not enough evidence to meet the standard for extradition.
Turkey, however, was never happy with that outcome and has been pressuring Trump to intervene. Last month, it came out that the White House had considered extradition as a means to buy cooperation from Turkey in easing pressure on Saudi Arabia, a close U.S. ally, following the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The Trump administration has signaled its willingness to re-open the investigation, not because of new evidence but because of the geopolitical aim of improving its relationship with Erdogan’s government.
But “working on” Gulen’s extradition is not something that the president of the United States should be doing. Presidents are not supposed to trade legal U.S. residents in order to smooth over international matters. That Trump has talked about doing so signals a disturbing increase in the use of human bargaining chips for foreign policy.
Indeed, Trump’s remarks about possibly releasing Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou as part of a better trade deal with China point to a similar tactic.
The Trump administration is, of course, right to pursue better relations with countries like China and Turkey, but the use of human bargaining chips to that end is both wrong and bound to backfire.
