HOW DO YOU SAY “FRENEMY” IN TURKISH?
STEVEN A. COOK
JUNE 1, 2010
Meet America’s new rival in the Middle East.
Recently, my colleague and good friend, Charles Kupchan, published
a book called How Enemies Become Friends. In it, he argues that
diplomatic engagement is decisive in transforming relations between
adversaries. It is an interesting read, and the book has received
some terrific reviews. Charlie might want to follow up with a new
book called How Friends Become Frenemies. He can use the United States
and Turkey as his primary case study.
It is hard to admit, but after six decades of strategic cooperation,
Turkey and the United States are becoming strategic competitors —
especially in the Middle East. This is the logical result of profound
shifts in Turkish foreign and domestic politics and changes in the
international system.
This reality has been driven home by Turkey’s angry response to
Israel’s interdiction of the Istanbul-organized flotilla of ships that
tried Monday to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. After Israel’s
attempts to halt the vessels resulted in the deaths of at least
nine activists, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu referred
to Israel’s actions as “murder conducted by a state.” The Turkish
government also spearheaded efforts at the U.N. Security Council to
issue a harsh rebuke of Israel.
Monday’s events might prove a wake-up call for the U.S. foreign-policy
establishment. Among the small group of Turkey watchers inside the
Beltway, nostalgia rules the day. U.S. officialdom yearns to return
to a brief moment in history when Washington and Ankara’s security
interests were aligned, due to the shared threat posed by the Soviet
Union. Returning to the halcyon days of the U.S.-Turkish relationship,
however, is increasingly untenable.
This revelation comes despite the hopes of U.S. President Barack Obama,
whose inauguration was greeted with a sigh of relief along both the
Potomac and the Bosphorus. Officials in both countries hoped that
the Obama administration’s international approach, which emphasized
diplomatic engagement, multilateralism, and regional stability, would
mesh nicely with that of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development
Party. The White House made it clear from the beginning that Turkey
was a priority for Obama, who raised the idea of a “model partnership”
between the two countries. Turkey, the theory went, had a set of
attributes and assets that it could bring to bear to help the United
States achieve its interests in the Middle East, Central Asia, and
the Caucasus. Naturally, as a longtime U.S. ally, Turkey was thought
to share America’s interests in these regions. That was the thinking,
anyway.
A little more than a year after Obama addressed the Turkish Grand
National Assembly, Washington seems caught between its attempts to
advance this model partnership, and recognition of the reality that
Ankara has moved on. This desire to restore close relations with Turkey
is partially based on a rose-tinted view of the alliance’s glory days;
even then, the relationship was often quite difficult, buffeted by
Turkey’s troubled relations with Greece, Ankara’s invasion of Cyprus,
and the Armenian-American community’s calls for recognition of the
1915 massacres as genocide. Back then, Turkey was a fractious junior
partner in the global chess game with the Soviets. Today, Turkey is
all grown up, sporting the 16th largest economy in the world, and is
coming into its own diplomatically.
Nowhere is Turkey asserting itself more than in the Middle East,
where it has gone from a tepid observer to an influential player
in eight short years. In the abstract, Washington and Ankara do
share the same goals: peace between Israel and the Palestinians;
a stable, unified Iraq; an Iran without nuclear weapons; stability
in Afghanistan; and a Western-oriented Syria. When you get down to
details, however, Washington and Ankara are on the opposite ends of
virtually all these issues.
For the first time in its history, Ankara has chosen sides in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, demanding that Israel take steps to ease
the blockade of Gaza or risk unspecified “consequences.” Well before
the recent crisis, the Turks had positioned themselves as thinly
veiled advocates for Hamas, which has long been on the U.S. State
Department’s list of terrorist organizations. In public statements,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has compared Turkey’s
Islamists and Hamas. Implicit in these declarations is a parallel to
Erdogan’s own Justice and Development Party, whose predecessors were
repeatedly banned from politics.
This parallel is rather odd. Turkey’s Islamists always sought to
process their grievances peacefully, while the Islamic Resistance
Movement — Hamas’s actual name — has a history of violence. Ankara’s
warm embrace of Hamas has not only angered the Israelis, but other
U.S. regional allies including Egypt, the Palestinian Authority,
and Saudi Arabia.
Even in Afghanistan, there’s less to Turkey’s vaunted cooperation
than meets the eye. Turkey was the first ally to offer troops to U.S.
efforts there in 2001, and more recently, it has doubled its contingent
of soldiers to almost 1,700. However, Ankara has consistently — like
other NATO allies — refused to throw these forces into the fight,
even after the Obama administration’s entreaties to do more as part
of the Afghan “surge.”
Ankara also took a lot of heat from George W. Bush’s administration for
its good relations with the Syrian regime, though the United States
eventually reconciled itself to the logic of Turkey’s interests in
its southern neighbor. Turkey sees its ties with Syria as a hedge
against Kurdish nationalism, believing that brisk cross-border trade
will make everyone — Turks, Kurds, and Syrians — richer, happier,
and less suspicious of one another. The close diplomatic ties have
an added benefit for Washington: They give Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad someone to talk to other than Iranian President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad and Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah.
That’s the theory, anyway. But Ankara and Washington may well end
up on opposite sides when it comes to the Assad regime. The Turks
have been noticeably quiet about U.S. and Israeli allegations that
Syria has either transferred Scud missiles to Hezbollah or trained
Hezbollah fighters to use them in Syria. What will the Turks do
if Israel launches a preventive strike against those missiles,
now believed to be on the Syrian side of the border near the Bekaa
Valley — or if the Israel Defense Forces take the fight to Lebanon,
where there are 367 Turkish soldiers serving in the U.N. peacekeeping
force in South Lebanon? Whatever the exact scenario, conflict along
Israel’s northern border seems increasingly likely. In that event,
Washington will no doubt endorse Israel’s right to self-defense —
and Ankara will not.
Perhaps the biggest issue separating the United States and Turkey is
Iran. There is a full-blown controversy brewing over exactly what the
Obama administration communicated to Erdogan and Brazilian President
Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva before the two leaders traveled to Tehran
in May. There, Lula and Erdogan hammered out a deal that would shift
1,200 kilograms of Iran’s low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange
for fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). So far, Washington’s
explanation of what it did and did not tell Ankara and Brasilia is
rather weak — a perplexing lapse of communication and coordination
for an administration that puts a premium on these virtues.
Regardless of the Obama administration’s mistakes, the
Turkish-Brazilian deal demonstrates just how far apart Washington and
Ankara are on Iran. The Obama administration sees the TRR agreement
as yet another Iranian effort to split Washington, its allies in
Europe, the Chinese, and the Russians, thereby forestalling a new
round of U.N.-mandated sanctions, all while the Iranians continue
to enrich uranium. The Turks think the deal is a promising start to
the painstaking task of moving Washington and Tehran toward broader
negotiations.
The easy temptation is to blame creeping Islamization for Turkey’s
foreign-policy shift. There is no denying that there is an ideological
component to much of Erdogan’s rhetoric, especially when it comes to
Israel. However, the prime minister is not the architect of Ankara’s
foreign policy; Foreign Minister Davutoglu is the man responsible for
the country’s new international activism. Bookish, soft-spoken and
extremely smart, Davutoglu is not an Islamist. Rather, he correctly
perceived the role Turkey can play in a much-changed world. The
structural changes resulting from the end of the Cold War, Europe’s
continuing rebuff of Turkey, and the economic opportunities to the
country’s south, east, and north have driven Davutoglu’s thinking,
not the Quran. Moreover, despite the bitter political battle being
played out in Turkey over the country’s political trajectory, there
is general agreement across the political spectrum on the direction
of Turkish foreign policy. Other Turkish governments might have
been more cautious about the TRR deal, but they certainly would be
seeking to maintain good relations with Iran, Iraq, and Syria, not
to mention Russia.
The Obama administration has yet to grapple with the ways the
structural changes in the international system have affected
U.S.-Turkey relations. All the talk about strategic cooperation, model
partnership, and strategic importance cannot mask the fundamental
shift at hand. The stark reality is that while Turkey and the United
States are not enemies in the Middle East, they are fast becoming
competitors. Whereas the United States seeks to remain the predominant
power in the region and, as such, wants to maintain a political order
that makes it easier for Washington to achieve its goals, Turkey
clearly sees things differently. The Turks are willing to bend the
regional rules of the game to serve Ankara’s own interests. If the
resulting policies serve U.S. goals at the same time, good. If not,
so be it.
Moreover, Ankara’s approach has proved enormously popular in Turkey
and among average Arabs. This is why Erdogan seems all too willing
to discuss Turkey’s newly influential role in the Middle East at
even the most mundane ribbon-cutting events, from Istanbul to the
Armenian border. Indeed, it is abundantly clear that Erdogan and his
party believe they benefit domestically from the position Turkey has
staked out in the Middle East. Yet, it is lost on Washington that the
demands of domestic Turkish politics now trump the need to maintain
good relations with the United States.
Given the mythology that surrounds the relationship, the divergence
between Washington and Ankara has proved difficult to accept. Once
policymakers recognize what is really happening, Washington and Ankara
can get on with the job of managing the decline in ties with the
least possible damage. Obama’s goal should be to develop relations
with Turkey along the same lines the United States has with Brazil
or Thailand or Malaysia. Those relations are strong in some areas,
but fall short of strategic alliances. “Frenemy” might be too harsh
a term for such an arrangment, but surely “model partnership” is a
vast overstatement. It’s time to recognize reality.
ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images
Steven A. Cook is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle
Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/01/how_do_you_say_frenemy_in_Turkish?page=full