UNDERSTANDING TURKEY’S TILT
International Relations & Security Network, Zurich
March 4 2015
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
According to Svante Cornell, Turkey has become a less stable and
reliable ally of the United States than it was during the Cold War. In
fact, Ankara’s recent foreign policy tilts may well cause irreparable
damage to the US-Turkish alliance.
By Svante E. Cornell for JINSA
This article first appeared in The Journal of International Security
Affairs (No. 27, Fall/Winter 2014), published by the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs (JINSA).
Turkey has never been an easy ally for the United States. The
U.S.-Turkish relationship is idealized in many quarters, with the
golden age of the Turgut Ozal era in the early 1990s often cited as
an example. But it also has had numerous challenges: to mention only
a few, several crises over Cyprus, controversy over Turkish military
coups, human rights violations, and the perpetual brinkmanship over
the Armenian genocide issue. During and immediately after the Cold
War, Turkey was a stable and generally predictable ally, but the
deficiencies of Cold War-era Turkey should not be forgotten: at its
core, the Turkish republic had a schizophrenic attitude to the West.
On the one hand, it was decidedly western and secular, and sought
acceptance by the West of its European civilizational identity. On
the other, the Turkish elite was deeply suspicious of and even
occasionally hostile to western powers, which it blamed for having
sought to dismantle Turkey through the 1920 Sèvres treaty. Ever
since, suspicion has constantly surfaced that western powers covertly
conspired with Turkey’s enemies to keep the country weak and divided.
It is important to keep this background in mind when considering the
trajectory of the Turkish-American alliance. Under the increasingly
autocratic rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey is once again
a troublesome ally. Especially in the Middle East, Turkey is
increasingly acting in ways that diverge from American interests. Its
antagonism toward Israel is pronounced, and its policies after the
Arab upheavals of 2011 went against U.S. interest, endorsing the
Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt supporting radical jihadi groups in the
Syrian civil war. President Erdogan, once among President Obama’s
five preferred world leaders, has also increasingly sharpened his
rhetoric against the United States.
The key question for American policymakers, then, is whether dealing
with Turkey today is fundamentally different than it has been in the
past. And on that score, there is significant reason to argue that
Turkey has indeed changed in ways that have caused irreparable harm
to the U.S.-Turkish alliance.
Divergent interests
In the past decade, the trajectory of Turkey’s foreign policy has
been relatively stable. Since the Justice and Development Party, or
AKP, came to power, the Turkish government has focused on developing
Turkey’s influence in the Middle East. This represented an important
break with the past; dating back to Ataturk’s days, the foreign
policy run by the secular center-right parties in conjunction with
the military and bureaucratic elites saw the Middle East primarily
as a source of problems, and a region to be avoided. This policy was
rooted in equal parts in a sense of betrayal by the Arabs against the
Ottoman state, and the conviction that the Middle East could only cause
problems for Turkey. Instead, these elites concluded that Turkey was
now modern and European, and therefore focused its foreign policy on
its relationship with the western alliance.
The AKP, by contrast, saw the Middle East as a zone of opportunity,
one that constituted Turkey’s natural area of influence. In some
ways, this realignment was pragmatic, focusing on promoting economic
ties and increasing Turkey’s influence. In this sense, there were
parallels to Turkey’s efforts in the 1990s to develop ties with the
newly independent Turkic republics of the former Soviet Union. In
both cases, the ambition was to develop a new “vector” of Turkish
foreign policy to complement the main, western one.
Yet there are two major differences. First, the opening to the
east of the 1990s was grounded in Turkey’s linguistic and cultural
links with the newly independent states, and based on a strong
demand for partnership emanating from these countries. By contrast,
the opening to the south under Erdogan was based on religious, not
national identity. Moreover, it was not preceded by a particularly
burning interest on the part of Turkey’s Middle Eastern neighbors
in such engagement. The initiative, so to speak, was supply-side
foreign policy.
Secondly, the old opening to the east developed in full harmony
with Turkey’s western orientation. Turkey’s initiatives were
well-coordinated with the U.S., and rested on a commonly defined
interest in supporting the sovereignty and independence of the former
Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia. While Turkey and its
western partners differed on some issues, such as relations with
Armenia, such differences were never allowed to cause harm to the
U.S.-Turkish alliance.
By contrast, Turkey’s contemporary policies in the Middle East have
been dissociated from its western alliance, and often stand in
direct contradiction to U.S. interests. Initially, Ankara sought
to portray its activities as serving western interests as well,
emphasizing its potential to act as a mediator between the West
and rogue regimes in the Middle East such as Iran and Syria. But,
as time has passed, Turkey’s ambitions to mediate have been replaced
by an ever more apparent tendency to take sides, support favorites,
and undermine adversaries.
The most consistent and symptomatic example of this transformation is
Israel. While the Turkish-Israeli relationship did not collapse until
the 2008 war in Gaza, the AKP early on entertained ties with Hamas,
and welcomed its election in 2006. In fact, Fatah representatives
have long complained that Turkey has been biased in favor of Hamas
and against Fatah in intra-Palestinian politics. Anti-Israeli and
anti-Semitic themes also crept into the mainstream Turkish media,
particularly in television shows and in the reporting of the AKP’s
mouth- piece newspaper, Yeni Ã…~^afak. After the war in Gaza, Ankara
abandoned all efforts at balance, going much further even than most
Arab leaders in its condemnations of Israel. Ankara also helped launch
the Mavi Marmara flotilla to Gaza in 2009, which finally led the
relationship to collapse following the Israeli boarding of the ship.
Soon enough, Erdogan and other AKP leaders took to outright
anti-Semitic rhetoric. In 2011, he accused the Economist of being con-
trolled by Israel; and in 2013, following the Gezi Park controversy,
he blamed the widespread protests against his government on the global
“interest rate lobby.” If the shorthand was not clear enough, one
of his closest advisors spelled out that the global Jewish diaspora
was behind it. Erdogan’s anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic rhetoric has
proven a key sore point in the U.S.-Turkish relationship.
The Arab upheavals are another critical area of divergence. Early on,
Erdogan developed close relations with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and
sought an opening to Iran, in a pragmatic move to expand relations
with Middle Eastern countries. But Turkey’s calculus changed in 2011,
as the Arab upheavals provided a historic opportunity. Ankara soon
became the chief sponsor of the Muslim Brotherhood in the region,
supporting its various branches in their efforts to ascend to power.
In Egypt, Erdogan took the initiative among international leaders in
urging Hosni Mubarak to leave office, and once the Brotherhood gained
power in Cairo, the AKP became the chief sponsor of the short-lived
regime of Mohamed Morsi. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu explained at
the time that “Egypt would become the focus of Turkish efforts, as an
older American- backed order, buttressed by Israel, Saudi Arabia and,
to a lesser extent, pre-revolutionary Egypt, begins to crumble.”[1]
As part of this effort, Turkey pledged $2 billion in aid to Egypt in
2012, and endorsed the controversial constitution that Morsi pushed
through that December to strengthen his power–and did so at a time
when western powers were highly critical of this power grab.
Erdogan also endorsed the vision of a Brotherhood-ruled Syria, despite
the movement’s weakness in Syrian politics. As Turkish writer Kadri
Gursel has put it, Turkey aimed for “the Muslim Brother- hood to
fully and absolutely dominate the entirety of Syria.”[2] When that
strategy failed and the Free Syrian Army proved unable to make a
lasting impact on the battlefield, Turkish leaders came to facilitate
and support more forceful, and more radical, Islamist groups. Turkey
has been credibly tied to various domestic jihadi groups, as well as
the al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra front.[3] In spite of strong western
pressure, including a direct warning from President Obama in 2013,
Turkey continues to implement very lax policies on its border with
Syria. As a result, it continues to be the main transshipment point of
foreign fighters into Syria and Iraq, now mainly joining the Islamic
State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
The rise of ISIS, more than anything, has put the spotlight on
the troubling inconsistencies of Turkish foreign policy, and the
divergence between Turkish and American interests. As the U.S. sought
to assemble a coalition against ISIS, Turkey proved among the most
recalcitrant regional powers. To Ankara, the main problem in the
region was not ISIS but the Assad regime, which Turkey had battled
hard to overthrow. Erdogan demanded, as a precondition for Turkish
participation, that any military action against ISIS target Assad
as well. At minimum, Ankara demanded a no-fly zone that would deny
Damascus the advantage of controlling Syrian air- space. Matters came
to a head with the battle of Kobani, a Syrian Kurdish settlement on
the Turkish border. As the town was encircled on three sides by ISIS,
the Turkish border was the only source of help. Yet Turkey, weary of
the power of the Syrian Kurds, long refused to allow any assistance
through. The crisis over Kobani worsened as Turkey’s considerable
Kurdish population rioted against the government’s stance, leading to
close to 50 deaths. By late October, Ankara allowed a small contingent
of Kurdish fighters to transit into Kobani, defusing the crisis
somewhat. But Turkey’s Kurds appear convinced that Ankara has actually
supported ISIS, and even some ISIS fighters appear to share that view.
The implication of these developments is, as several observers have
already noted, that Turkey is increasingly coming to resemble Pakistan
of the 1990s. Having used and abetted jihadi groups across the border
for instrumental purposes, it is now beginning to see the blowback of
that strategy.[4] And in the process, the prospects of Turkey serving
as a reliable ally of the United States are dwindling. In the not
too distant future, Turkey could prove not just a troublesome ally,
but a problem in its own right.
Instrumentalism and ideology
How did it come to this? How is it that NATO ally Turkey has gained
notoriety for its condemnations of Israel, now supports jihadi
groups in Syria, and is even suspected of abetting ISIS forces across
its border?
Western observers have had a tendency of blaming each other for
Turkey’s alienation from the West under Erdogan. Americans like to
point to the French and German handling of Turkey’s EU membership
aspirations–not least the dam- aging statements by the likes of
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy and Germany’s Angela Merkel that Turkey is not
a European state. Europeans, meanwhile, prefer to point to the Bush
administration’s war in Iraq as a key milestone in the distancing of
Turkey from the West. There is some truth to both points of view, but
they miss one key aspect. Their validity rests upon an assumption that
Erdogan’s partnership with the West, and his intention to integrate
into the EU, was genuine to begin with. Yet the evolution of Turkey’s
domestic politics does not provide support for this thesis.
Western leaders have accepted at face value the transformation of
Turkey’s Islamist movement in a democratic direction in the early
2000s. The AKP emerged from the orthodox Islamist Milli GöruÅ~_
tradition, launched by Necmettin Erbakan in the 1960s. Erbakan’s
movement was heavily anti-Western, anti- Zionist, and anti-Semitic.
With an origin in the highly conservative Naqshbandi order, this
political movement essentially rested on two pillars: Ottoman nostalgia
and the modern global ideology of political Islam, especially that
of the Muslim Brotherhood. For starters, the movement considered
Ataturk’s abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 as a major disaster,
and denounced the Turkish Republic’s break with its religious and
civilizational identity in favor of seeking acceptance into the
European world. But whereas Turkish political Islam had traditionally
had what one scholar terms “nationalist-local leanings,” it was now
infused with “‘global’ currents of Islamic thought”–particularly via
its connection to the Egyptian Brotherhood.[5] These aspects formed the
main rift separating the movement from Turkey’s center-right parties,
which tended to respect religion, but also uphold secularism and argue
for a European orientation and commitment to the alliance with America.
The AKP’s founders split from the Milli GöruÃ…~_ movement in 2000,
pledging now to be a post-Islamist party. Gone was their aversion to
secularism, capitalism and Europe. Cloaking their policies in rhetoric
about human rights, they now pledged only to redefine secularism in
a manner more consistent with individual liberties. They accepted
globalized markets and pledged reforms to bring Turkey closer to the
EU. And in the AKP’s first term, the government indeed stuck largely
to this rhetoric, and implemented far-reaching reforms of European
harmonization–steps which were eagerly supported by Turkey’s liberals.
As is now patently obvious, however, Erdogan and the AKP have
abandoned those principles. Both their domestic and foreign policies
appear to hold much more in common with their ideological origin than
with the post-Islamist party of 2000- 2005. The reasons behind this
backtracking have only little to do with western policies. Rather,
they have much more to do with the fact that the party’s commitment to
western values served an immediate, instrumental purpose: subjugating
the old semi-authoritarian system of tutelage. From the introduction
of multi-party democracy in the 1950s, Turkish elected officials had
not been the masters of their realm. They had had to contend with
the supervisory structures set up by the top brass of the army and
the high courts, which served to keep elected power-holders in check.
Thus, over five decades, the Turkish army intervened to depose
governments four times, and the courts regularly banned political
parties and policed acceptable political speech. It was this system
that the Islamist movement, on its own, proved unable to take on.
The transformation of the AKP was not spontaneous. It was a direct
result of the 1997 military intervention, which removed Erbakan from
his position as leader of a coalition government. Up until that moment,
Erdogan–then Mayor of Istanbul–and his associates had viewed the EU
only as a Christian club. But in 1997, they realized that they could
actually turn European institutions to their advantage. Seeing western
outrage at the military intervention, they aligned themselves with EU
demands for the civilian control of the armed forces and cloaked their
demands in the rhetoric of human rights and democracy, appealing to
European institutions such as the European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg. Simply put, the younger guard of Islamists who created
the AKP realized that they could turn the west into a lever in their
struggle against the establishment. Meanwhile, the terrorist attacks
of September 11, 2001, were advantageous, making the U.S. now eager
for alliances with “moderate Muslims” around the world. Erdogan and
the AKP volunteered in this role, ensuring that they were now enjoying
the implicit backing of both the EU and the United States.
By 2008, the AKP had managed to stare down the military’s half-hearted
efforts to rein it in, and had its candidate elected to the
presidency. By 2010, Erdogan succeeded through a referendum to take
control over the judicial system. By that time, he had also confined
a great number of dissidents, including senior military officers,
to jail on largely trumped-up charges of coup plotting. It was also
at this point that Erdogan’s remaining inhibitions against displaying
his Islamist and authoritarian tendencies began to disappear. Once
the AKP had consolidated power, adherence to western norms and values
were no longer necessary as a lever against the establishment, and
the AKP reverted to ignoring them in practice while occasionally
paying lip service to them.
The Ikhwan worldview
How, then, should the United States deal with Turkey, and what could
American policymakers expect from their counterparts in Ankara on
pressing international issues?
A first imperative is to see through what is left of the AKP’s
smokescreen and view the party for what it is: a Turkish version of
the Muslim Brotherhood, strongly anchored in the Ikhwan worldview.
This has become all the more apparent since the appointment of
Ahmet Davutoglu as Turkish Prime Minister following Erdogan’s
election to the presidency. Davutoglu, who served first as Erdogan’s
foreign policy advisor and since 2009 as Foreign Minister, is the
intellectual architect of Turkey’s foreign policy. He is the only
member of Erdogan’s inner circle to be an accomplished intellectual,
and is–by all accounts–the only person in Erdogan’s entourage
for whom the President actually has a modicum of respect. Thus,
Davutoglu’s many writings, in which he expresses a well-defined
worldview, should be read very carefully. In these, he minces no words,
and implicitly concurs with Rudyard Kipling’s old adage that “east is
east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” Specifically,
Davutoglu emphasizes the differences between Islam and the West, and
squarely announces the former’s superiority over the latter. Because
the Enlightenment rejects divine revelation and instead emphasizes
reason and experience as sources of knowledge, he believes, the West
is experiencing an “acute civilizational crisis,” making the gulf
between Islamic countries and the West unbridgeable. And he concludes
that the failure of the Soviet system, rather than a victory for the
West, was only the first step in the collapse of European domination
of the world, to be followed by the collapse of Western capitalism.[6]
Based on this logic, Davutoglu developed his own foreign policy
doctrine for Turkey: that of “strategic depth,” predicated on the
notion that Turkey’s strength lies in its civilizational identity as a
key Muslim state. Davutoglu is therefore implementing what amounts to
a “Pan-Islamist” foreign policy, according to one leading expert.[7]
Indeed, Davutoglu decries the post-1918 divisions of the Middle East
into nation-states, supporting instead the unity of the Muslim ummah
as a potential, and in his view more natural, geopolitical structure.
His prescriptions borrow heavily from pre-1945 European geopolitical
theorists as well as anti-colonialist thought, and emphasize the need
for Turkey to build alternative alliances to the West, in effect to
counterbalance it. In the final analysis, as one American observer
noted after an interview with Davutoglu, he considers Turkey to be
the natural heir to the Ottoman Empire that once unified the Muslim
world and therefore has the potential to become a transregional
power that helps to once again unify and lead the Muslim world.[8]
Thus, it should come as no surprise that Turkey seized on the 2011
Arab uprisings as a historic opportunity. After all, they coincided
exactly with Davutoglu’s thinking, appearing to herald the end of
the western-imposed political order in the Middle East–one that
it was now up to Turkey to help remake. So far, however, things
have not gone as planned. Turkey has experienced numerous setbacks,
from its failure to oust Assad to the removal of the Brotherhood in
Egypt. Yet Erdogan and Davutoglu have seen no reason to change course:
Turkey’s regional isolation is explained as “precious loneliness,”
and the culprits increasingly identified as foreign conspirators,
primarily Jews and Americans, more often than not acting in cahoots.
Difficult way forward
But even if Turkey’s government is as ideologically motivated as
the foregoing suggests, it can nonetheless cooperate with the United
States. Ideology and pragmatism are not necessarily contradictory, and
the Turkish leadership knows that it is in a vulnerable geopolitical
position and is now to some extent dependent on American support
for its security. Bluntly put, Erdogan and Davutoglu want to have
their cake and eat it too. On the one hand, they want to pursue their
sectarian, ideologically- driven policy to remake the Middle East. On
the other, they want to benefit from membership in NATO, maintain
cordial relations with Washington, deter the U.S. from countering
their objectives, while remaining fearful of alienating the U.S. to
such an extent that America begins moving against Turkey.
For U.S. policymakers, this means that Turkey should be treated in
a transactional way rather than as an ally with which America shares
common values, and that Turkish leaders should be made to understand
they cannot have it both ways. There are no common values underpinning
the relationship. Any agreement with Turkey must be based on a cold
calculation of interests, in turn based on a thorough understanding
of what Turkey’s actual objectives are. It also means that American
policy makers would do well to reduce their dependence on Turkey, in
military as well as political terms–something that would, in turn,
help America put pressure on Turkish leaders.
Turkey’s geographic position will undoubtedly mean that Washington
will need a working relationship with Ankara in many crises yet
to come. But in Turkey, there is a strong sense that America needs
it more than the opposite is true. The U.S. should therefore begin
exploring options to every contingency in which it is dependent on
Turkish support, and review what possibilities exist to reduce or
replace that dependency through the strengthening of relations with
other regional allies–ranging from Romania in the west, Georgia and
Azerbaijan in the east, to the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq
and Jordan in the south.
Beyond that, the U.S. will need to develop a more muscular policy
dealing with Turkey itself. Erdogan’s regime is increasingly Islamist
and autocratic, and the President himself increasingly disrespectful in
public of the United States. So far, the U.S. has failed to consider
strategies to roll back these tendencies. Unless it does, America
may face a situation in which a key NATO ally is at best a “frenemy.”
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[1] Anthony Shadid, “Turkey Predicts Alliance with Egypt as Regional
Anchors,” New York Times, September 18, 2011.
[2] Kadri Gursel, “Turkey Will Pay a High Price After Assad,”
Al-Monitor, December 25, 2012.
[3] Halil Karaveli, “Turkey, the Unhelpful Ally,” New York Times,
February 27, 2013.
[4] Michael Tanchum and Halil Karaveli, “Pakistan’s Lessons for
Turkey,” New York Times, October 5, 2014.
[5] Ahmet Yıldız, “The Transformation of Islamic Thought in Turkey
since the 1950s,” in Ibrahim Abu-Rabi, ed., The Blackwell Companion
to Contemporary Islamic Thought (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).
[6] Ahmet Davutoglu, AlternativeParadigms:TheImpactofIslamicandWestern
Weltanschauungs on Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Univer- sity Press
of America, 1993); Ahmet Davutoglu CivilizationalTransformation
and the Muslim World (Kuala Lumpur: Mahir Publications, 1994). For
a detailed discussion, see Svante E. Cornell, “What Drives Turkish
Foreign Policy?” Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2012.
[7] For an excellent overview of Davutoglu’s political thought,
see Behlul Ozkan, “Turkey, Davutoglu and the Idea of Pan-Islamism,”
Survival 56, no. 4, 2014, 119-40.
[8] Joshua Walker, “Introduction: the Source of Turkish Grand
Strategy–‘Strategic Depth’ and ‘Zero Problems’ in Context,” in
Nicholas Kitchen ed., LSE IDEAS, SR007, London School of Economics
and Political Science, 7.
Svante E. Cornell is director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at
Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. He
is the author of Getting Georgia Right (W. Martens Center for European
Studies, 2013).
Editor’s note:
This article first appeared in the Journal of International Security
Affairs (No. 27, Fall/Winter 2014), published by the Jewish Institute
for National Security Affairs (JINSA).
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