Today, eastward from the Atlantic, America faces more hostility and can count on less support than ever. Although US foreign policy is not wholly responsible for this predicament, its incompetence contributes to it. US policy toward Turkey, as ever part of Europe, of the Middle East, and of Eurasia, is the prime object lesson.
The geopolitical importance of whoever controls the Black Sea straits has been obvious since the Greco-Persian war of the fifth century BC.
In AD 330 the Romans moved half their empire to Constantinople, straddling the Bosphorus. When the Ottoman Turks turned it into Istanbul in 1453 they became great among nations, conquering southwestern Europe and the entire Middle East while pushing back the Russians. In the 19th and 20th centuries, as the Turks weakened, European nations and Russia knew that advantage over one another depended substantially on influencing them or on taking their territories.
During the Cold War, America had no stronger Nato ally than Turkey, and counted on it as a bastion of democracy in the Middle East and Eurasia. Robert Strauz-Hupé dean of America’s students of geopolitics, ended his career as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to Turkey. That was then.
Today Turkey, Nato membership notwithstanding, is in the grip of a dictatorial Islamist regime. Part and parcel of the Muslim Brotherhood, it works against Western interests pretty much everywhere.
Since most of Nato’s other European members are essentially impotent vis a vis their own problems with the Muslim world and Russia, and since their ruling class is increasingly open in its cultural divergence from America, Americans cannot now count on the nation seeing their interests confluent with ours. Turkey poses its own problems for us, and helps sap Europe’s vestigial vitality.
This might have happened all by itself – in Western Europe as a result of de-christianization, the welfare culture, bureaucratic government, etc. and in Turkey from people’s natural dissatisfaction with Ataturk’s militantly secular, Westernizing legacy. But it did not.
Today, because of where Turkey is, because it is led by a Sunni Islamist government, because of the choices this government has made in the 21st Century, the country is literally in the middle of the Middle Eastern cauldron of terrorism, which cauldron its government stirs vigorously and incompetently.
US foreign policy helps it stir, just as it abetted Turkey’s political change from ally to adversary and Western Europe’s turn from allies to drags, by pretending that today’s Turkey and Europe are what they once were.
Recep Erdogan, effectively Turkey’s dictator, seems to aim simultaneously to foster all manner of anti-Western Islamism, to help the Sunni side in the Muslim world war, and to rebuild as much of the Ottoman empire as possible. It is not unlikely that he harbors the intention of returning the Caliphate to Istanbul with himself as Caliph.
Meanwhile, he wages war against the roughly one-third of Turkey’s population who are Kurds. The incompatibilities inherent in these simultaneous pursuits have placed Turkey in precarious military and diplomatic straits. US foreign policy’s attempts to help Erdogan navigate these straits have only sunk America in the Middle eastern morass.
Erdogan’s Turkey has been waging war against Syria’s Alawite (Shia) regime by supporting various Sunni rebels against it, including Daesh, the Islamic State. In so doing, he has tried to avoid excessively provoking Iran, the Syrian regime’s main sustenance and the very core of the Shia side in the great war, by allying with Qatar, with which Iran shares the world’s biggest gas field, and Iran’s only other state ally.
Qatar literally finances the Erdogan regime. In return, it hosts a Turkish army base that serves as a sort of guarantee against invasion from Saudi Arabia. Turkey and Qatar’s attempts to make themselves acceptable to the rest of the Sunni world’s governments by touting their Sunni credentials have not succeeded because the groups they finance, the Muslim Brotherhood foremost, considering nearly all Sunni regimes to be insufficiently religious and insufficiently anti-Western, are at war with them as much as with Westerners.
Thus Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf states, because of Turkey and Qatar’s strong support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempted takeover of Egypt, cannot help but see Turkey and Qatar, as well as the groups they fund, as mortal enemies.
As a result, the Syrian civil war is also a proxy war between these states and Turkey. Add to this the fact that Erdogan’s day-to-day military/political priority in this war is to limit the growth of an incipient Kurdish entity along almost its entire southern border, and you see Turkey’s problem. Continuing present policies offers no good outcome. Retreat would acknowledge the regime’s faulty premises. Hence, Erdogan bets on continuing the status quo indefinitely, and on the United States making it happen.
Historically, US foreign policy’s problems have stemmed from confusing America’s own interests with those of allies, from letting others’ tails wag our dog. In this case, so many states and groups are involved in and around Syria’s civil war with interests so peculiar to themselves, so interwoven with one another, and so differently tangential to America’s that it would have been surprising had US policy not succumbed. Herewith, one instance.
America’s own interest in our safety requires convincing all the region’s potentates, minor and major, that any terrorist act against Americans that comes from their jurisdictions or for which we attribute responsibility to them will result in their annihilation. That is why the US is committed physically to annihilate ISIS. But ISIS survived as long as it did largely because Turkey provided logistical space for it, and because Qatar paid for it.
Even as US troops lead a coalition of the willing to finish it off, Turkey conditions US logistics on the US essentially join it in limiting the Kurds. At the same time, Turkey helps fortify Qatar against the demands of the Gulf Cooperation Council that Qatar stop supporting terrorists, in part by shutting down the al Jazeera television network which has done so much to foster it.
Were US policy strictly to pursue America’s interest to make an example of terrorists and those who enable them, it would inform Turkey of our intent to do that as we think best, remind Erdogan that our relationship with Turkey depends on what Turkey does for us, and ask him to consider the consequences of open enmity to America.
As for Qatar, US policy would applaud the GCC’s demands regarding al Jazeera. That is because, while America values being able to fly out of Qatar’s al Udeid air base to kill terrorists by the dozen, it will no longer tolerate Qatar’s operation of a TV station that recruits terrorists by the thousand.
But no. The US foreign policy establishment considers Turkey and Qatar to be allies so valuable as to warrant placing good relations with them ahead of the reasons why we deal with them in the first place.
Qatar hosts an air base of ours. Turkey does that too, and is inherently very important. Sure. But what is Qatar’s net effect for us? Turkey’s present malignant regime turns that importance against us. Pretending it were not so only make us partners in the harm done us.
None of this is to suggest that US policy embrace the Saudi-Egyptian alliance that seeks to monopolize the Sunni side in the Sunni-Shia war under an anti-terrorist banner. Unfortunately terrorism is the Muslim world’s default tool in international relations. Saudi Arabia is the mother-house and nursery of Wahhabism, which motivates more terrorists than any other ideology.
Egypt, under Nasser, invented al Fatah, the grandaddy of modern terrorist groups. But today, Saudi Arabia, and above all Egypt, fear Sunni movements like ISIS, and are even more afraid of ones based on the Muslim Brotherhood, like Hamas, which get support from both Sunni and Shia. And they fear Iran. That is why they are at odds with Turkey and with its financier, Qatar.
US policy should be limited strictly to making use of these fears to serve the American people’s chief interest in such countries and in their quarrels: preventing harm to ourselves.
Dear Angelo,
Any discussion of terrorism and what serves and motivates US to engage with Islamic parties and designation of terrorist group without mentioning the entity of Israel is totally meaningless. It would be like discussing Christianity and never mentioning Jesus. …The whole reason US is picking and choose its terror groups and terrorizing Syria and courting Saudi regime and UAE with Billions of arms sales is that the tails that wage its dog (Israel) has been doing everything it can to start a war with Iran. If in fact US was looking for its interest and was interested in Freedom and Democracy and stability, it would have partnered with Iran to defeat ISIS & Al Qeda and even move on to Afghanistan against Taliban. Unfortunately, due to influence of AIPAC and Likudnicks in Senate and the House, the US policy is titled toward Israeli interest and not American interest and every action they take is to contain Iran rather than fighting terrorism. Its not the Black sea that holds the key to future…Its actually the Country of Iran that will be the most important Geo-strategic that would allow Chinese to control the future (through its road-belt plan). US is rapidly loosing this game due to the influence of Israel in manipulating US policies. US could easily block and contain Russia and China if it would stop its belligerence with Iran and partner with it, instead, we are clinging to the useless allies which we think are our friends.
US, British, and French imperialism’s program in West Asia has been constant for a century; control over a large part of the world’s hydrocarbon resources. In the post WWII period, they undermined secular regimes and promoted reactionary Islam. This is why we have ISIS , the MB, and Hamas. This is why Iran is not secular. This is why Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Libya are wrecked.
As for the Kurds, the US always supported Turkey as it waged war on the Kurds with US weapons. Now it wants to carve out a Kurdistan for its own reasons, a sort of Middle East Kosovo. This conflicts with Turkey.
The US doesn’t really worry about terrorism. It is a useful tool to advance US foreign policy objectives. If it were worried about terrorism, it would undermine and overthrow the Saud regime as it has dozens of others, like in Latin America. But it doesn’t, just like it doesn’t undermine fascist regimes, like Franco Spain or Apartheid South Africa. These are allies against left or progressive governments throughout the world. History proves this. Then everything is woven together in an elaborate fabric of lies.
This is a rather shallow piece on Turkey. I am very surprised to read that somebody who knows so little about my country presumes to call ‘dictator’ a leader for whom I have voted many times. Not only have I voted for this government but I have also defended it against a military coup attempt on 15 July 2016. How would this author have described the coup, had it succeeded in overthrowing Turkey’s elected leaders? A victory for democracy, perhaps?
To succeed in cooperating with Turkey, it is necessary to understand Turkey’s proper place in the world. Turkey cannot be a member of an international system designed by the US (or indeed, any other country) because such a relationship would benefit the designers of that system at the expense of Turkey’s taxpaying public who would rather see their country great again. Turkey should be the leading member of any international club of which she is a member because Turkey has a historic experience that makes other arrangements impossible to stomach for this nation.
As one might expect, past attempts at joining other people’s clubs have failed. For example, Turkey’s European Union membership bid was rejected because Turkey was ‘too Muslim, too poor and too crowded’ to be part of the European project. Turkey’s relations with the US have deteriorated for a very similar reason. US authorities are making delusional assumptions about how that relationship should work. Turkey’s has been calling on its ally to terminate its unseemly cooperation and cosiness with the PKK, the Kurdish terror group, so far without any success. The reason is that the Americans see their own country as a global power and Turkey as a mere regional power, meaning that their national interest must take precedence over Turkish national interest.
Sir, your pattern of analysis is part of the problem. You are not going to achieve anything by shifting the blame to the others and groping for scapegoats. Those who want Turkey to accept a less prominent place in the world are pushing against a concrete wall. If you want to achieve anything in your relations with Turkey, then start thinking in terms of win-win solutions instead.
Mate u are very biased and misleading , Its bit Unfortunate if Boston university employees your kindda professor emeritus at international facility
Works at Gold Coast University Hospital – GCUH
Mate u are very biased and misleading , Its bit Unfortunate if Boston university employees your kindda professor emeritus at international relations faculty
One of the most idiotic piece of analysis that I ever read in my life.
I see a terrorist Jew in every line of this article. What a delusion that this writer has! He thinks Americans are the only ones who can classify which ones are terrorists and which ones are not. He thinks America is still in its 50’s to 80’s heydays. In today’s multipolar world, USA has ceased to be the only dominant player. China is now a major challenger to US exceptionalism. Since the past decades, there have been some realinement of loyaties among states. Unfortuantely for the US, many of their former allies have shifted loyalty to China if not, more weight to China than the US. This new alinement of loyaties lessens the US influence. This writer is always thinking that US can always manipulate the world as long as it wants. When can people like him realize that USA has lost its influence in the world diplomacy?
Mineral and petrodollar dictate.
Exchange of commodity for hardware works to their advantage.
Peaceful era works against this interest. Stiring unrest bring economic benefits.
Until and unless confrontations are solved internally or regionally, inviting others for protection is akin to allowing leeches onto youself.
"When the Ottoman Turks turned it into Istanbul in 1453" shows lack of basic education, and the rest is biased pile of cow dung.
How on earth somebody like this can be professor emeritus! :-)))
This dude is a Professor?? Really?? This is not a well constructed, well thought out article on Turkey and its place in the Middle East!!
U nonsense. Get some treatment first. Your india and Pakistan was nowhere when kashmir existed. Why should we go to Pakistan. This is our land. Our ancestors lived here. I blend with the soil of this land. Leave kashmir and beg pardon for years of oppression, loot, rapes, murders, torture, and you will be forgiven. Otherwise prepare for your doomsday. We will soon drag you out of our land.
Free kashmir. They can take our lives but they can’t take our freedom. Even if U. N. O has betrayed us, still we will fight, for the evil, oppression is bound to vanish
Greetings from Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. I want to inform you that Stanley and I conducted a secret experiment using quantum entanglement and telepathy to communicate with an interface. Aliens do indeed exist in another realm now and the Akashic Records. The interface with GOD/ Grand Galactics and aliens is on Facebook. Although, he has not seen the aliens physically, he talks to the ones that have lost their forms in evolution. This experiment was so secret, that even the United States government did not know about it. Stanley insisted on the independence and secrecy of the project. Namely, talking with the dead and/or aliens. It brings me great joy and pleasure to inform you that the experiment was a total success. The interface’s telepathy with us has verifiable proof on Facebook and he is willing to undergo a battery of tests and scrutiny to show his evolution to a higher state of consciousness. No other private or governmental agencies have been successful in talking to formless aliens, Grand Galactics / GOD. Our interface is a Photographer, United States Marine, Artist, Underwater Explorer, Aviation Technician, Lawyer, Humanities major and has direct DNA links to Shamans and Rulers at Gobekli Tepe , Anatolian / Armenian Kings , Biblical Heroes and interestingly for Stanley, he is also related to Napoleon, Jefferson, Franklin and one of the interface’s favorite minds, Tesla. Aliester Crowley/ 666 was also instrumental in the evolutionary development of the telepath’s higher state of consciousness. Erdogan has been branded with The Mark of the Beast 666.
Arthur C. Clarke
Stanley Kubrick
666
This guy must be a CIA asset writing pure hog wash long winded non sense
To the Americans, Saudi and Asisi are thier poodles… democracy and human rights have no place in thier foreign policy.
Another Educated Idiot From Boston University.
Your article is full of lie and far from Truth and proofing that you know nothing abt Turkey and Government. An ignorant like you has guts to accuse President Erdogan as a Dictator not Despot Coup leaders of 1960, 70, 80 and 2016 because they were lap dogs of your interest, isn’t it? oh also Al Sisi of Egypt another buffon you guys admire so very much.
Erdogan won each and every election since 2002 by increasing votes despite all hurdle and attack from you and your government(s) and still he is a Dictator.
Any way, you are doing your job to misinform the world as a known acadamic? but it proofing that all you know abt Turkey and Erdogan is Negativity.
Learn more abt Turkey and then talk abt her and her Leader, Erdogan.
Please leave Turkey, her people and President Erdogan Alone, They are very happy with Him.
btw: I’m not Turk but I know Turkey, Politics and Erdogan well enough to debate and expose lies against her.
Be Objective as a Preofessor at least.
"……US intervened in 83 global elections…"
Yes,when the is turned they are crybabies.
I could not believe that somebody writing for a paper would be so crassly subjective writing about a country he obviously knows so little about and with such profound bias which could only be an attribute of a propagandist. This casts a negative light on the paper itself which allows propaganda pieces.
Abhijit Gupta …..poor hindu slum dweller…ever living in fear of Pakistan….dont worry Pakistan is quite capable of taking out ever reactor that gutter slumland India has and will do so if you dont stop dreaming….LOL
To begin with, it was a "fabricated coup" by the AKP to ease the way to start the "emergency state" governance. Since then, a whole year has been spent allegedly "fighting the FETO". During the last 12 months not a single judiciary institution is authorized to control the government’s (read dictaror’s) actions. In other words, the dictator is above all; the constitıtion, the law and the parliament.
If we can not get past this definition of the happenings in the last 12 months, there is no way a consensus can be reached among ourselves, let alone in the international playforms.
Mehmet Turgut Dagdelen