Let’s Talk Turkey

A Turkish television news report Tuesday claimed that Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan will travel to Damascus Friday and offer prayer at that city’s ancient Great Mosque. His transportation minister on Tuesday announced plans to rebuild and integrate Syrian infrastructure into Turkish transportation systems. 

These announcements do not come in a vacuum. Erdogan and co. have been busy boys. Earlier this month, he visited Azerbaijan’s villainous Ilham Aliyev to tout Turkish cooperation with (one might reasonably say patronage of) Baku. He had a phone call with Aliyev reiterating the partnership Tuesday. He also entertained Walid Jumblatt, a Lebanese Druze grandee and former militia leader, in a closed-door meeting. He is set to visit Egypt’s Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at Cairo Thursday, and his ministers have been shuttling around the Gulf monarchies to chat up the despots’ lobby about the future of Syria. It seems that a regional bloc is being midwifed. 

Western observers, particularly the usual suspects, aren’t thrilled. Not entirely without reason: As a head of state and government, Erdogan certainly falls well short of Western preferences. His administration has degraded or diminished Turkish civil liberties, particularly of speech and the press. One might lament the resurgence of political Islam in Turkish life, although we have some skepticism of Christopher Hitchens’s fetish for secularism as a per se good. Those of conservative temperament may well dislike Erdogan’s massing of power in the presidency and the contentious and awkwardly executed change of constitutional system that went with it. His entourage’s behavior in America is bizarre and thuggish. Nor is his occasional support for American enemies in the area, memorably ISIS, particularly savory. 

Yet this last point underlines a fact about Erdogan’s statecraft: He is the consummate pragmatist. Now forgotten in the West are his early efforts to realign with Israel and with Armenia, to whose people he even offered to make an apology on behalf of the Turkish people. (Yerevan nixed the talks.) Similarly forgotten is early Turkish support for the Global War on Terror, which ran aground on the invasion of Iraq. After a long spell of bad blood between Damascus and Ankara, he began to patch things up with the Assad regime in the early ’teens, only to flip again at the outbreak the Syrian civil war, during which his government supported and made war by turns on a revolving door of rebel groups, including ISIS and now the ascendant HTS, lately Al Nusra Front. (If anything, this undersells the number and complexity of Turkish diplomatic permutations in Syria; not six months before the Assad regime’s final collapse, Ankara was reestablishing contact with it on the possibility it was here to stay.) Erdogan has changed his configuration on the Kurdish question a number of times, often adopting such a conciliatory tone that once upon a time the country’s hard nationalist wing (now his coalition-mates) accused him of wanting to give up Turkey’s Kurdish-majority territories and free the leader of the PKK. 

Although canny, Erdogan is not invincible. The 70-year-old has spent the past 30 years amassing power, yet he has no clear successor within his party (Justice and Development, or AKP) or broader coalition. The sclerotic Republican Party (CHP) will have a ready-made, popular, fresh-faced candidate in Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul. (The mayoralty is traditionally the springboard for higher office, as exemplified by Erdogan’s own career.) Persistent severe inflation has dogged the government; voters delivered a rebuke to AKP in the latest round of local elections. 

That all to say: While Erdogan is not without ideological principles, he is also ready to cut a deal when he thinks it is in Turkish national interest or his own political interest. So the question for us is, as always, What are the American interests in the Middle East? The prevention of Islamic terrorism and keeping the Red Sea and Persian Gulf shipping lanes open. (Access to oil has become a secondary concern and, if the incoming administration follows through on any of its pre-game posturing, it will remain so.) 

The Middle East is a tough neighborhood. Who are your potential major partners for building a peaceful, if not amicable, order? Iran, a nation of 90 million, which, while hardly the powerful bogeyman the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page would make it, does not generally have America’s best interests at heart; Egypt, a brittle military dictatorship of 113 million whose entire economy is propped up by Suez fees and aid shipments; Saudi Arabia, pop. 37 million, which, even in fresh neoliberal duds, is not a very nice place and remains the unpunished, unreformed silent partner in the most deadly attack on American soil; Iraq, a chronic basket case of 46 million. While there are other players in the region—Israel, Jordan, the Gulf monarchies—their small size limits their ability to enforce a stable order. Turkey has a population of 85 million, is a treaty ally, and has not merrily sponsored terrorist attacks against the United States (even as we fund and arm groups that make terrorist attacks against Turkey).

You wouldn’t be happy to have any of these countries as your own neighbor, but America’s luxury is that they aren’t. Given our options in the theater, maybe we should cool it with the suggestions that we should be preparing a war with Turkey.