There was once a country in what used to be called the Near East that was much admired in the United States and often regarded as America’s most valuable asset in the region.
Although the country was predominantly Muslim, its government was resolutely secular in outlook and committed to “modernizing” its deeply traditional culture: Women enjoyed unprecedented equality, for example, and nearby Israel was a strategic ally. Located on the southern edge of the Russian/Soviet empire, it served as an essential buffer between Moscow and the oil-rich Arab kingdoms—a genuine East/West crossroads—and its diplomats and soldiers developed deep relationships with their Western counterparts.
Of course, the place that I am describing is Iran, or was until 1979, but this might just as easily apply to Turkey.
I should mention, at this juncture, that I am one who believes that the rise of Turkey’s autocratic, Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has prompted American journalists and statesmen to romanticize our modern relations with the Turkish state. Or to paraphrase Governor Cuomo, Turkey was never that great. Its membership in NATO was largely a matter of strategic convenience, not conviction. And while nominally a democracy, real political power was vested in Turkey’s armed forces—the generals overthrew more than their share of governments—in a nation where the phrase “deep state” was invented.
It is true, as Christopher Caldwell has written in these pages, that Erdogan’s recent aggrandizement of power has largely transformed the Turkish head of state into something resembling a French or American president. Still, while Erdogan exercises considerably more arbitrary personal power than Emmanuel Macron or Donald Trump, he may aptly be described as a product of Turkish democracy, which of course renders Turkey’s evolution more disturbing.
It would be comforting to believe that Erdogan’s thuggish autocracy and reflexive anti-Americanism—not to mention anti-Semitism—were reflections of a single, expendable politician. But they are not: Erdogan is widely admired among Turks, and he and his fellow Islamists in the Justice and Development party (AKP) keep winning elections. Moreover, if public opinion polls are to be believed, the United States is not just unpopular in Turkey but overwhelmingly reviled, an attitude that long antedates the advent of President Trump.
Of course, if public opinion polls or temporary differences of opinion among statesmen were decisive in these matters, the world would be a much more volatile place than it is. Yet Erdogan’s statecraft and Turkey’s behavior generate predictions that would have been unthinkable—very nearly unmentionable—a decade ago. In particular, Turkey’s continued membership in NATO is an open question.
For as Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out in the Washington Post last week (“It’s time for Turkey and NATO to go their separate ways”), American defenders of Turkey’s status within the alliance seem resolutely blind to what “15 years of Erdogan has done to the United States’ former ally. In short, they confuse Turkey of yesteryear with Turkey today.” And Turkey today is, by any measure, inimical to the interests of the United States and NATO.
Turkish policies facilitated the growth and nourishment of the Islamic State, allowing ISIS fighters to pass through Turkey with impunity. And Turkey’s ongoing war against its Kurdish minority has not just hampered America’s war on terror—preventing access to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq via Turkey’s border during the Iraq war—but has brought it close to open conflict with U.S. forces in northern Syria.
As Rubin points out, “Turkish nationalists have attacked American sailors when U.S. ships are docked in Turkish ports,” the AKP has demanded the arrest of American airmen
stationed at NATO’s Incirlik Air Base, and Turkish security personnel have a habit of attacking and beating American civilians on American soil, most recently in Washington, D.C. In all of these instances, it should be emphasized, the official Turkish reaction has not been conciliatory, or apologetic, but defiant. And Erdogan has now turned his attention toward Moscow, where he seeks to purchase Russian missiles for Turkey’s air defenses.
Inasmuch as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949 as a Western bulwark against Soviet expansion, the notion of a NATO member in 2018 integrating its defenses with Moscow’s must necessarily concentrate minds in Brussels. And in Washington, too. For while the United States and its NATO allies have historically averted their eyes from Turkish adventurism, most notably during its 1974 invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus, the only lesson Turkey has faithfully absorbed is that concession is the automatic Western response.
Which brings us to President Trump. Six decades of Turkish membership in NATO have yielded a wide-ranging apparatus of American appeasement: hundreds of retired military officers with happy memories of Turkish brothers-in-arms; scores of ex-diplomats and ex-CIA officers; lobbyists and well-paid scholar/publicists by the dozens. To some degree, the old machinery may still be relied upon to rationalize Ankara’s policies and pretend that Erdogan’s behavior is exceptional, just as the State Department will stick to its antique talking points. But the contrary evidence about Turkey has reached critical mass, and if any American president is inclined to overlook convenient fictions and react swiftly and instinctively, it’s Trump.
In present circumstances, this has been refreshing. The case of the hapless American pastor Andrew Brunson, detained in Izmir as a diplomatic hostage, has prompted Trump to bypass the customary channels and defend U.S. (as well as European) interests by calling Erdogan’s bluff. Trump’s diplomatic sanctions against two Turkish cabinet ministers, as well as stiff tariffs on Turkish manufacturing, have sent the lira into a tailspin and prompted more threats and maledictions from Ankara.
No doubt Erdogan will respond as he and his precursors have customarily done, with bullying tactics and offensive rhetoric (“Are you ready to give [Americans] an Ottoman slap?” he asked at a recent rally). But while the future of Turkey rests in Erdogan’s hands, the future of Turkish-American—indeed, Turkish-NATO—relations stands at an obvious crossroads.
Lord Palmerston once famously observed that nations have no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. Iran is now our enemy but once was our friend. And who knows where the mullahs, or Erdogan’s regime, are headed? American interests remain permanent, if not always obvious.
