WHY TURKEY MATTERS
Doug Sarro

Huffington Post
May 13 2010

Turkey is a country on the move. Its economy is growing like
wildfire–6% a year on average between 2002 and 2008, nearly three
times as fast as the rest of the OECD.

Yet its politics seem to be stuck in neutral. Its Prime Minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, also a newly-minted TIME 100 member, is best-known in
the West for bashing Israel, palling around with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
and eroding Turkey’s secular values. Some commentators have wondered
aloud whether the West has "lost" Turkey.

Last month I had the chance to travel to Turkey with the Toronto-based
Trudeau Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies. For about a week
and a half, we met with movers and shakers in Ankara, Istanbul,
and Diyarbakir to get a sense of where Turkey is going.

I can tell you this–the West hasn’t lost Turkey. But unless Washington
makes a deliberate effort to engage Turkey in the long-run, Ankara
will likely continue to distance itself from the West.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee’s 23-22 vote to recognize the
Armenian genocide, which caused the Turks to withdraw their Ambassador
to Washington (he has since returned), didn’t help much in this regard.

Did the Committee get its history right? Sure it did. Every credible
historian who has studied the events of 1915 will tell you that a
genocide was committed by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians.

But politicians have different responsibilities than historians–their
first priority should be the future rather than the past. This means
safeguarding an important relationship for the West by giving Turkey
space to recognize what its Ottoman predecessors did in Armenia at
its own pace, something the Turks slowly seem to be doing.

Why is Turkey so important to Washington?

First of all, with the largest army in Europe, Turkey is well-placed
to take a leadership role in Afghanistan. Afghans, Turkish officials
are quick to note, prefer dealing with Muslim troops from Turkey
to American or European ones. Washington will likely need Turkey to
increase its commitment to Afghanistan as its troops withdraw from
the country.

Turkey is also a valuable partner in Tehran, with clout and contacts
that Washington could only dream to have&mash;assets that will continue
to be useful as the West tracks Iran’s nuclear program.

Also, Ankara may yet prove a useful mediator between the Israelis and
Palestinians. The 2008 Israeli incursion into Gaza may have dumped
cold water on Turkish-Israeli relations, but this won’t last. Ankara
still covets the role of Middle Eastern mediator, which means it’s
only a matter of time before it finds a way to make amends with Israel.

American engagement with Turkey is doubly important now, because
Turkish-Western relations are headed for a serious rupture; the
failure of Turkey’s 23-year-old bid to join the European Union, which,
possibly next to its membership in NATO, is Turkey’s most important
tether to the West.

Both Brussels and Ankara know Turkey’s bid will be rejected. France
will never support anything that shifts the EU’s power center away from
Paris, and European public opinion is cold to the idea of admitting
a Muslim country to their ranks.

For now, Erdogan prefers to pretend his EU bid is still alive, as it
gives him the political capital he needs to push through democratic
reforms that further marginalize his rivals in the Turkish army.

But it’s only a matter of time before the curtain falls on this
long-running bit of Kabuki theater. The EU’s popularity in Turkey is
falling, and the Greek economic crisis will likely exacerbate that
trend. And how long will the Turks tolerate living in EU limbo? Five
years? Ten years? Some think the EU bid could drag on for another
fifteen or twenty years, but I doubt Ankara will be able to justify
waiting this long before calling it quits.

Washington will need to find a way to soften the blow this rupture
between Turkey and the EU will do to Turkish sentiment toward the West,
and the groundwork for this needs to start now.

U.S. engagement helps Turkey as much as it helps the United
States. The EU bid, futile though it is, has been crucial to Turkey’s
modernization–it drove Turkey’s elites to begin recognizing minority
rights, and made democratically-elected politicians, rather than army
generals, the key decision-makers in Ankara.

The Turkish government, though reluctant to admit it, will benefit from
continued Western engagement as it tries to reconcile Islam with its
secular government, accommodate its long-suppressed Kurdish minority,
and, of course, come to grips with the events of 1915.

No matter what happens, Turkey’s economy is likely to continue to
grow, as will its significance to the region. Whether Turkey’s rise
will benefit all of its citizens, along with the West, will depend
on what Washington does.