The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

Turkey
is an ally of the US, it is member of NATO; it has hosted American nuclear
weapons since 1957.

According
to Turkey Wonk, the US deploys as
many as 70 nuclear weapons in 24 underground vaults at the Incirlik air base.
We used our military presence in Turkey to signal to Russia at the time of the Cuban Missile
Crisis
in 1962 when we traded the removal of missiles in Cuba for the removal of
missiles in Turkey.

We
placed Patriot missile batteries on the ground in Turkey in January, ostensibly to
protect its cities on the Syrian border from missiles fired from Syria. The
Wrongologist visited Turkey in March, and wrote:

When Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, was returned to power in 2011 for his
third successive term, he soon ran into trouble with his increasingly illiberal
rule. The spark was Mr. Erdogan’s plans to remove Gezi Park near Istanbul’s Taksim
Square. Five protesters, most of them from the Alevi minority, died.

Mr.
Erdogan’s reputation had already been damaged by Turkey’s habit of jailing
journalists (more than in any other country). His ranting that the
“international interest-rate lobby” (Jews) and their Western media stooges had
orchestrated the protests supported claims that he might be losing his grip on power.
Mr. Erdogan even banned political slogans at football matches.  

Turkey’s
GDP has grown at a 5% average since the AKP took power in 2002. Per capita
income tripled during the same period, but the economy is not the shining star
it once was. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Turkey’s
total foreign debt has nearly tripled since 2002 to $350 billion, more than
half of which must be repaid or rolled over within one year. That puts
short-term liabilities at about a quarter of Turkey’s GDP, two to three times
more than Brazil and India.

A large
part of the AKP’s political appeal has come from its decade of economic
success, but the years of easy growth may be over, and that has political consequences.
MetroPoll, one of Turkey’s leading pollsters, said support for the AKP slipped
to 43% in July from a peak of 52% in December 2011. Still, Mr. Erdogan is
likely to hold on to power.

Time
for some regional perspective:

In
regional affairs, Mr. Erdogan has blamed Israel for the coup in Egypt which
ousted his ideological soul mate, Muhammad Morsi. Erdogan and the AKP see
themselves as a model for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and have engaged with the
regional MB parties to this end, principally in Egypt.

The
AKP’s idea that they are a role model is based on their own example: If they
could moderate and come to power through democratic elections, like-minded
Egyptian and Syrian MBs could do the same in Cairo and Damascus. This explains
why Ankara was unhappy with Washington’s response to the ouster of the
government of Mohamed Morsi, issuing a rare public rebuke of Washington, blaming
the US and the West for the bloodshed in Egypt.

There
are four dominant Muslim countries in the Middle East: Turkey, Iran, Saudi
Arabia and Egypt. In the pre-Arab Spring period, they challenged each other, promoting opposing values. The
Arab Spring expanded the scale and scope of these regional rivalries. First,
the uprisings weakened the authoritarian states in the region. The Syrian civil
war is a case in point.

Second,
Egypt’s paralysis took it out of the four-way regional game. Political
polarization and a weak economy has made Egypt just another theater for
regional competition among the three remaining Muslim powers.

Turkey
used to look at the Middle East from the West. It has been in negotiations to
join the European Union for decades, but
after Gezi Park, Germany froze the talks, and a January survey by the Centre
for Economy and Foreign Policy Research, an Istanbul-based think-tank, found
that 66% of Turks think the country should drop its request for full membership.

According
to a report from Trans Atlantic
Trends,
completed in June, 2013, 64% of Turks held an unfavorable opinion of the US, up
7 percentage points from their 2012 survey. Now, Turkey looks east, rather than
exclusively to the west, it has embraced a new stance towards the Middle East,
looking at it from the AKP’s largely pro-MB vantage point. From CNN:

This
tri-axial Middle East is vying to control the three weak states of Lebanon,
Syria, and Iraq, whose borders are increasingly bleeding together. This creates
new tactical alliances. Although Turkey and the Saudis support different camps
in the opposition in Syria, they are, nevertheless, united against Iran. At the
same time, Ankara and Riyadh challenge each other in Egypt with Turkey standing
with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood party and the Saudis with General Al-Sisi’s
government.

The
US is allied with two of these three players in the Middle East. Iran is the
outlier for America. For Iran, Syria is the linchpin of its effort to extend
beyond a Shia-governed Iraq. Turkey stands with the MB, the US, and as the
Economist reports, is attempting to build a permanent
relationship with the transnational Kurds:

Iraq’s
Kurds are wary of Baghdad, and have edged closer to Ankara, building on the energy
corridor already being developed between them. The Syrian Kurds, too, are
seeking Turkey’s protection. Turkey’s recent peace talks with its own Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK), which holds sway among not just Turkish Kurds but also
Syrian Kurds, will help this rapprochement.

So,
Ankara’s clout among the Kurds may make its success in the region larger, and more
permanent.

What do we really know about our long-time ally, Turkey? Their domestic and
regional strategies are in motion, like those of the other major players in the
Middle East. Both of our allies are majority Sunni Muslims. So is al-Qaeda. The
Sunni-Shia
Divide exists throughout the Middle East, and whenever we have followed a
sectarian-only strategy, it has bitten us badly.

But,
Americans always want to reduce problems to their simplest: For George W. Bush,
it was telling other countries that “you are either with us or with the terrorists”.
That was both simplistic and troubling, since few nations are ever really WITH
us. And Mr. Bush didn’t seem to understand the difference between Sunni and
Shia.

There
are pockets of anti-American/anti-Western sentiment everywhere and incidents
will happen. We can’t default to armed intervention every time if we aspire to
remain a great nation.

Wise
up, America! Learn something about the countries we depend upon.

Learn
to accept some ambiguity; learn to be a team player.