Foreign Policy
[Why Washington and Ankara don’t get each other at all—and need each
other anyway.]
By Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, Jeremy Shapiro
January 6, 2021
A year ago, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden sat with the New
York Times editorial board and said “I am very concerned about
[Turkey],” according to a video that caused controversy in Turkey over
the summer a few months ago. Biden said the United States should take
a different approach from the Trump administration and engage with a
broad cross-section of Turkish society, promote the opposition and
“speak out about what we think is wrong.” Biden seemed to think it was
possible to bring Turkey back into the transatlantic community and
even improve its worrisome human rights record.
Biden’s tough words reflect the fact that Turkey has been a major
headache for U.S. policymakers over the last few years. Not
surprisingly, senior Biden foreign policy officials have already
started scratching their heads to formulate a policy towards this
difficult ally.
The United States and Turkey do have an odd sort of relationship. As
officials from both sides frequently aver, they deeply value their
decade-long alliance, recognize that they need each other for key
priorities, and cooperate on a wide variety of foreign-policy issues
stretching from Iraq to the Islamic State to the Balkans. But at the
same time, they deeply distrust each other, sanction and condemn each
other publicly, and fight bitterly over a range of issues from the
Kurds to NATO to Israel.
These contradictory facts demonstrate the profound illogic and deep
dysfunction of the U.S.-Turkish relationship. Despite a decades-long
history and the clear usefulness of the alliance for both sides in a
time of increasing geopolitical strife, both sides seem intent on
sabotaging it. At times, the relationship appears like a bad marriage
in which both partners, cheat, lie, and use their intimacy to hurt one
another. So, the United States gives shelter to Turkey’s most wanted
domestic figure, Fethullah Gulen, and provides arms to subsidiaries of
the Turkish’s state most feared militia threat, the PKK. Meanwhile,
Turkey buys anti-aircraft systems from America’s geopolitical foe,
Russia, plays footsie with Islamist forces in Syria and Libya, while
oppressing and imprisoning journalists, civil society actors, and even
U.S. consulate employees.
Biden’s incoming national security team has an intense familiarity
with this bad marriage from their time in Obama administration. Since
that experience, both incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken and
incoming national security advisor Jake Sullivan have penned articles
advocating tough love for Turkey and continued support of the Syrian
Kurds regardless of Turkey’s misgivings.
The diplomatic meetings between the two consist of a ritual list of
grievances, threats of sanctions and escalations, and
counterproductive assignments of blame to the other side for “starting
it.” If a psychotherapist were in the room for one of these meetings,
he would tap his pipe and say: “Clearly, we need to get to the root of
the problem.” The surface issues such as the S-400 missile system and
the fate of Fethullah Gulen matter greatly, of course, but from the
standpoint of the overall relationship even resolving them will simply
cause new disputes to appear.
The root of the problem lies in the two sides’ persistent fantasies
about each other. This was a marriage shaped by the Cold War. Both
America and Turkey have changed greatly since then, but their image of
one other have not. Turkey continues to see America as seeking to
control its domestic politics and play the role of kingmaker. America
continues to see Turkey as a tool in its larger geopolitical struggle
rather than an international actor in its own right. Correcting these
fantasies will not heal their relationship, but it is a prerequisite
for a more functional one.
From politicians to pundits, when Turks discuss their country’s
relationship with the United States, it is often with no sense of
proportion or comparative examination—with the notion of Ankara at the
center of the universe and U.S. officials waking up every morning
thinking, strategizing, or scheming about Turkey. Turkey is too
important, too strategic, and too consequential, according to Turkey’s
own historiography, for the United States to treat it as just one of a
dozen of key allies.
This belief in Turkey’s exceptionalism create the assumption of a
certain level of U.S. obsession with the country’s politics. Turkish
politicians and political commentators assume that American
decision-makers are busy picking victors or losers in Turkey’s
electoral races—and not the other way around, with Washington
gravitating towards whoever ends up winning the elections. For an
up-and-coming politician preparing for a national role, a trip to
Washington, D.C. is seen as a necessary seal of approval (“icazet”),
and when it happens, raises eyebrows, even though countless Turkish
politicians have passed through Washington, D.C., Brussels, or London
with no real impact on their political lives.
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battered economy, growing opposition, and now U.S. sanctions, it’s not
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This notion of the United States as the kingmaker in Turkish politics
is likely a residue from the Cold War, when Turkish military exerted
an oversized influence over politics, staged three coups between
1960-80, and all along continued to enjoy U.S. patronage. The Cold War
conditions led to Washington’s acquiescence on the behavior of
Turkey’s military, which often described its domestic repression as
fight against terrorism or communism. Today, a large cross section of
the Turkish society also believes that the failed coup attempt of July
2016 was supported, if not organized, by the United States—a view that
the present government has cultivated.
Turkey’s polarized political class agrees on little except the idea
that the United States is trying to control Turkish politics. Secular
Turks accuse the United States of bringing President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) into power, and
Islamists in power worry that it is trying to topple Erdogan. For
them, the long-awaited S-400 sanctions legislation from the U.S.
Congress or the criminal inquiry by New York prosecutors into a
state-owned Turkish bank, Halkbank, suspected of bypassing Iranian
sanctions are further proof that the American deep state is targeting
Erdogan. The notion that any one of the several power centers in the
Turkish body politics—whether it is nationalists, Gulenists,
Transatlanticists, or Kemalists—could seek a power grab without active
U.S. participation in their plot—defies the conventional wisdom in
Turkish politics. In several recent high-profile political
trials—including the imprisonment of civil society leader Osman
Kavala, U.S. consular employees, or Andrew Brunson, an American pastor
living in Turkey—prosecutors made explicit references to the contacts
with Americans as proof of attempts to overthrow the Turkish
government.
One of the reasons the fantasy of “Amerika” as the puppet master has
survived over time is the expediency of this argument in Turkish
domestic politics. For decades Turkey’s leaders have blamed Turkey’s
Kurdish insurgency on “outside powers” (dis gucler)—as opposed to the
sorry state of democratic standards and ethnic rights in Turkey. For
Turkey’s secularist opposition parties, it was easier to explain
Erdogan’s ascent to power as a U.S. design—ostensibly to create a
“green belt” of moderate Islamists in the Middle East—than admit
incompetence.
Since the secular urban uprising of 2013, the Gezi Park
demonstrations, Erdogan has also resorted to blaming outsiders as the
instigator of domestic dissent, economic downturn, and other ills. He
has often peppered his speeches with references to ust akil (a higher
mind) a nebulous global force—presumably the United States—which acts
as the puppet master for Gulenists, the PKK, and even the opposition
in its attempts to bring him down. In a documentary for A Haber, a
network controlled by the Erdogan family, experts interviewed ascribed
responsibility to ust akil for many of the dramatic episodes in
Turkey’s recent history. In the run up to the elections in 2015,
Erdogan explained the growing popularity of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’
Democratic Party (HDP) with the intervention of ust akil, erroneously
suggesting that former campaign managers of then President Barack
Obama were advising the Kurdish party. Returning from a NATO summit in
2015 where he met Obama, Erdogan was asked, “Is the U.S.
administration pressuring Turkey on freedom of expression?”—to which
he replied, “This is what I mean by ust akil. Ust akil plays games
with Turkey—wants to divide, carve up, if it can, devour Turkey.”
But Turkey is not alone in its fantasies. Even if U.S. leaders do not
spend their spare time organizing conspiracies in Ankara, Turkey does
play an important, arguably oversized, role in U.S. foreign policy.
For U.S. foreign-policy leaders, Turkey is forever poised at the
crossroads, constantly bridging gaps, and always its role as a sort of
geopolitical swing state that has the potential to move between Europe
and the Middle East or between the United States and Russia. By virtue
of its strategic location, its status as a (struggling) Muslim
democracy, and its willingness to flirt with U.S. competitors,
Turkey’s allegiance remains for many U.S. officials the ultimate prize
in the new great game in Eurasia and the Middle East.
Turkey certainly has played an important and sometimes troubling role
in a wide variety of foreign-policy issues that have preoccupied
Washington over the last several decades. Turkey held up NATO’s
southern flank during the Cold War, supported its factions in the
Balkan Wars of the 1990s, denied the prospect of a second front in the
2003 war against Iraq, and served as the front line in the campaign
launched in 2014 against the Islamic State. It has played key roles in
Afghanistan as a NATO partner, in the Cyprus and the East
Mediterranean as a protagonist, and even at times attempted to mediate
between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In recent years, it has
started to participate in proxy wars in Somalia, Syria, and Libya. In
all these efforts, from a Washington perspective, Turkey failed to
fully align with U.S. efforts and proved, at best, a troublesome ally.
These roles in key U.S. foreign-policy priorities justifies attention
to Turkey. But even with (or perhaps because of) all the attention,
U.S. officials tend to interpret Turkish actions through their impact
on U.S. foreign policy rather than as the policy of an actor in its
own right. U.S. officials show little regard for the idea that Turkey,
like nearly all countries, sees itself as a destination rather than a
bridge. As Turkey grows more self-confident, it sees itself not as a
geopolitical prize but as an independent actor, seeking to hedge
against dependence of all sorts and carve out a foreign policy that
speaks to its own domestic political needs rather than its role in
some American-defined global struggle.
Turkish leaders, for example, saw the struggle against the Islamic
State primarily through the lens of their struggle against the PKK.
U.S. frustration that they would not privilege the more “global”
struggle against the Islamic State showed little understanding that
Turkey could have other priorities. Similarly, the Turkish decision to
buy a Russian S-400 anti-aircraft system—a decision that inspired
sanctions from the U.S. Congress—reflected more Erdogan’s fears of
another coup by his own air force than an effort to align with Russia.
The system is not compatible with NATO hardware precisely because it
was intended as a shield against a NATO army.
The United States has a well-earned reputation for solipsism and a
lack of understanding foreign cultures. As a continent-straddling
superpower with few direct threats to its security, the United States
can afford ignorance of the world and geopolitical fantasies more than
most countries. But as America’s relative power wanes, these fantasies
become ever more expensive. The new Biden administration seems to be
recasting a new type of Cold War, a global struggle of democracies
against an authoritarian challenge led by China and Russia. And so, it
needs the fantasy that the America’s Cold War allies will once again
rally to its leadership (or the fear that they will go over to the
other side.) But Turkey, for one, no longer sees the world in such
bipolar terms. It is not interested in allying for or against the
United States in the next global struggle. It wants to be a pole of
its own.
Turkish and U.S. officials like to describe their relationship in
grandiose slogans. They regularly employ the mantra “staunch ally” to
describe the role Turkey plays for the United States and NATO. On his
memorable visit to Turkey in 1999, then President Bill Clinton
described Turkey as a “strategic ally”. President Bush talked about “a
strategic partnership” and so, year after year, Turkish officials
asked their U.S. counterparts to repeat the term at every opportunity.
When Obama visited Turkey on his first official tour abroad in 2009,
he switched to “model partnership”. The Turkish public debated whether
this slogan constituted an upgrade—and largely concluded that it did.
Grandiose slogans make good diplomatic summits. But the fantasies in
the Turkish-American relationship have created nothing but
disappointment and tension over the last few years. The reality is
that Turkey and the United States have divergent interests and do not
even seem to like one another. So, a good place to start addressing
bilateral problems would be doing away with the myths and paranoia.
Instead of paying lip service to the everlasting strategic alliance,
they can start with a sobering definition of their ties and accept its
transactional nature.
For Washington, this means a new understanding of Turkey as an
independent power with an interest in expanding its regional
influence—and often pursuing policies that are no longer coordinated
with NATO allies. Turkey’s military footprint now expands from the
Caucasus to Libya, Syria, and Iraq, and its focus on domestic defense
capabilities means that over time, it will be less reliant on U.S.
defense exports and security guarantees.
The incoming Biden administration should certainly attempt to
formulate a reset in relations with Turkey but not obsess over the
relationship as the ultimate prize in a geopolitical competition.
Turkey is not a bridge to the Middle East nor a model for the Muslim
world. Biden has committed to ending the forever wars and dramatically
reducing the U.S. footprint in the region. In this context, Turkey is
a country pursuing its own path in a region to which the United States
is less and less committed.
Biden, as is his wont, will seek to relate to Erdogan on an
interpersonal level. In the Obama administration, when Turkey and the
United States started falling out, Biden emerged as the
“Erdogan-whisperer” for Washington. He visited Turkey’s strongman in
his home in 2011 and flew to Ankara to mend relations with the Turkish
government after the failed coup attempt in 2016.
But as the furious anti-American reaction to the coup attempt showed,
such an approach has its limits. Biden will have to square this effort
with a call greater support for democracy in Turkey both from within
the administration and from the Congress. His administration will be
forced to seek a balance between pragmatic, personal relations with
Erdogan and efforts to save Turkey’s democracy. A renewed focus on
Turkey’s deteriorating record on human rights and democracy would
certainly be welcomed by a large cross section of Turkish society that
has regularly shown a preference for a return to rule of law. Over the
past four years, Trump administration policy has ignored human rights
and civil society in Turkey. Biden’s notion of engaging with the
opposition, as described to the New York Times editorial board,
represents a welcome return to conventional U.S. diplomacy.
But there are limits to what the US can accomplish. Other than
consistently stating its core democratic principles on preference for
reform, Washington should not expect to serve as a change agent inside
the country. It can make a difference on a limited number of symbolic
cases, such as the imprisonment of U.S. consular employees or civil
society leader Osman Kavala—neither of which was picked up by the
Trump administration. America cannot anoint the opposition or impact
Turkey’s elections. Nor does it have the magic wand to reverse the
authoritarian drift inside Turkey—or replace its ruling cadres. At
best, it can state its own principles of free elections so that
Turkey’s leaders do not try to “pull a Belarus” next time.
Ankara in turn needs to understand that by choosing a new and
independent path, it is inevitably signing on to a more distant and
transactional relationship with the United States. It’s not surprising
that president-elect Jor Biden has still not responded to Erdogan’s
demand for a congratulatory call. Turkish politicians must see the
limits in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and stop fantasizing
that the American “deep state” is trying to design, split and reshape
Turkey—or create a Kurdish state on its borders. More importantly,
Ankara needs to reach its own assessment about the value its
partnership with the United States. Historically, the Ottoman Empire
and the Republic of Turkey sought western support against its powerful
neighbor to the east—Russia—and Turkey, too, might seek U.S. support
to hedge against Russian expansion or its own regional isolation.
Fantasies have their roles—they sustain optimism through hard times,
and they express our fondest desires, if not always our starkest
reality. The Turkish-U.S. double fantasy once had its uses, but now it
only serves to delude and embitter both sides. It is time to introduce
a dose or realism—or find some updated fantasies—to bring stability
and predictability to the U.S.-Turkish relationship.
Aslı Aydıntaşbaş is a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
Jeremy Shapiro is the director of research at the European Council on
Foreign Relations and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings
Institution.