Modern Diplomacy
By Dr. James M. Dorsey
Oct. 25, 2021
The times they are a changin’. Iranian leaders may not be Bob Dylan
fans, but his words are likely to resonate as they contemplate their
next steps in Iraq, Iraqi Kurdistan, Lebanon, and Azerbaijan.
The same is true for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The
president’s shine as a fierce defender of Muslim causes, except for
when there is an economic price tag attached as is the case of China’s
brutal crackdown on Turkic Muslims, has been dented by allegations of
lax defences against money laundering and economic mismanagement.
The setbacks come at a time that Mr. Erdogan’s popularity is diving in
opinion polls.
Turkey this weekend expelled the ambassadors of the US, Canada,
France, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway,
and Sweden for calling for the release of philanthropist and civil
rights activist Osman Kavala in line with a European Court of Human
Rights decision.
Neither Turkey nor Iran can afford the setbacks that often are the
result of hubris. Both have bigger geopolitical, diplomatic, and
economic fish to fry and are competing with Saudi Arabia and the UAE
as well as Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama for religious soft power, if
not leadership of the Muslim world.
That competition takes on added significance in a world in which
Middle Eastern rivals seek to manage rather than resolve their
differences by focusing on economics and trade and soft, rather than
hard power and proxy battles.
In one recent incident Hidayat Nur Wahid, deputy speaker of the
Indonesian parliament, opposed naming a street in Jakarta after
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the general-turned-statemen who carved modern
Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire. Mr. Wahid suggested
that it would be more appropriate to commemorate Ottoman sultans
Mehmet the Conqueror or Suleiman the Magnificent or 14th-century
Islamic scholar, Sufi mystic, and poet Jalaludin Rumi.
Mr. Wahid is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Prosperous
Justice Party (PKS) and a board member of the Saudi-run Muslim World
League, one of the kingdom’s main promoters of religious soft power.
More importantly, Turkey’s integrity as a country that forcefully
combats funding of political violence and money laundering has been
called into question by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an
international watchdog, and a potential court case in the United
States that could further tarnish Mr. Erdogan’s image.
A US appeals court ruled on Friday that state-owned Turkish lender
Halkbank can be prosecuted over accusations it helped Iran evade
American sanctions.
Prosecutors have accused Halkbank of converting oil revenue into gold
and then cash to benefit Iranian interests and documenting fake food
shipments to justify transfers of oil proceeds. They also said
Halkbank helped Iran secretly transfer US$20 billion of restricted
funds, with at least $1 billion laundered through the US financial
system.
Halkbank has pleaded not guilty and argued that it is immune from
prosecution under the federal Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act because
it was “synonymous” with Turkey, which has immunity under that law.
The case has complicated US-Turkish relations, with Mr. Erdogan
backing Halkbank’s innocence in a 2018 memo to then US President
Donald Trump.
FATF placed Turkey on its grey list last week. It joins countries like
Pakistan, Syria, South Sudan, and Yemen that have failed to comply
with the group’s standards. The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
warned earlier this year that greylisting would affect a country’s
ability to borrow on international markets, and cost it an equivalent
of up to 3 per cent of gross domestic product as well as a drop in
foreign direct investment.
Mr. Erdogan’s management of the economy has been troubled by the
recent firing of three central bank policymakers, a
bigger-than-expected interest rate cut that sent the Turkish lira
tumbling, soaring prices, and an annual inflation rate that last month
ran just shy of 20 per cent. Mr. Erdogan has regularly blamed
high-interest rates for inflation.
A public opinion survey concluded in May that 56.9% of respondents
would not vote for Mr. Erdogan and that the president would lose in a
run-off against two of his rivals, Ankara Mayor Mansur Yavas and his
Istanbul counterpart Ekrem Imamoglu.
In further bad news for the president, polling company Metropoll said
its September survey showed that 69 per cent of respondents saw
secularism as a necessity while 85.1 per cent objected to religion
being used in election campaigning.
In Iran’s case, a combination of factors is changing the dynamics of
Iran’s relations with some of its allied Arab militias, calling into
question the domestic positioning of some of those militias, fueling
concern in Tehran that its detractors are encircling it, and putting a
dent in the way Iran would like to project itself.
A just-published report by the Combatting Terrorism Center at the US
Military Academy West Point concluded that Iran’s Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) faced “growing difficulties in
controlling local militant cells. Hardline anti-US militias struggle
with the contending needs to de-escalate US-Iran tensions, meet the
demands of their base for anti-US operations, and simultaneously
evolve non-kinetic political and social wings.”
Iranian de-escalation of tensions with the United States is a function
of efforts to revive the defunct 2015 international agreement to curb
Iran’s nuclear program and talks aimed at improving relations with
Saudi Arabia even if they have yet to produce concrete results.
In addition, like in Lebanon, Iranian soft power in Iraq has been
challenged by growing Iraqi public opposition to sectarianism and
Iranian-backed Shiite militias that are at best only nominally
controlled by the state.
Even worse, militias, including Hezbollah, the Arab world’s foremost
Iranian-supported armed group, have been identified with corrupt
elites in Lebanon and Iraq. Many in Lebanon oppose Hezbollah as part
of an elite that has allowed the Lebanese state to collapse to protect
its vested interests.
Hezbollah did little to counter those perceptions when the group’s
leader, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened Lebanese Christians after
fighting erupted this month between the militia and the Lebanese
Forces, a Maronite party, along the Green Line that separated
Christian East and Muslim West Beirut during the 1975-1990 civil war.
The two groups battled each other for hours as Hezbollah staged a
demonstration to pressure the government to stymie an investigation
into last year’s devastating explosion in the port of Beirut.
Hezbollah fears that the inquiry could lay bare pursuit of the group’s
interests at the expense of public safety.
“The biggest threat for the Christian presence in Lebanon is the
Lebanese Forces party and its head,” Mr. Nasrallah warned, fuelling
fears of a return to sectarian violence.
It’s a warning that puts a blot on Iran’s assertion that its Islam
respects minority rights, witness the reserved seats in the country’s
parliament for religious minorities. These include Jews, Armenians,
Assyrians and Zoroastrians.
Similarly, an alliance of Iranian-backed Shiite militias emerged as
the biggest loser in this month’s Iraqi elections. The Fateh
(Conquest) Alliance, previously the second-largest bloc in parliament,
saw its number of seats drop from 48 to 17.
Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi brought forward the vote from 2022
to appease a youth-led protest movement that erupted two years ago
against corruption, unemployment, crumbling public services,
sectarianism, and Iranian influence in politics.
One bright light from Iran’s perspective is the fact that an attempt
in September by activists in the United States to engineer support for
Iraqi recognition of Israel backfired.
Iran last month targeted facilities in northern Iraq operated by
Iranian opposition Kurdish groups. Teheran believes they are part of a
tightening US-Israeli noose around the Islamic republic that involves
proxies and covert operations on its Iraqi and Azerbaijani borders.
Efforts to reduce tension with Azerbaijan have failed. An end to a war
of words that duelling military manoeuvres on both sides of the border
proved short-lived. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, emboldened by
Israeli and Turkish support in last year’s war against Armenia,
appeared unwilling to dial down the rhetoric.
With a revival of the nuclear program in doubt, Iran fears that
Azerbaijan could become a staging pad for US and Israeli covert
operations. Those doubts were reinforced by calls for US backing of
Azerbaijan by scholars in conservative Washington think tanks,
including the Hudson Institute and the Heritage Foundation.
Eldar Mamedov, a political adviser for the social-democrats in the
Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, warned that “the
US government should resist calls from hawks to get embroiled in a
conflict where it has no vital interest at stake, and much less on
behalf of a regime that is so antithetical to US values and
interests.”
He noted that Mr. Aliyev has forced major US NGOs to leave Azerbaijan,
has trampled on human and political rights, and been anything but
tolerant of the country’s Armenian heritage.