Friday, November 30, 2018
A Turkey for Which We Have No Thanksgiving
You’d think that Donald Trump, who
seems never to have met an autocrat he did not like or admire, would be best
buddies with Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan, that nation’s strongman since 2003. First as prime minister and now as
president, under a new constitution he pushed through that gives the executive
branch significantly new power. You’d think that the United States would treat
Turkey even better since it is a member of NATO; its territory is an essential
military platform for American airstrikes into various Middle Eastern hot
spots, and it vehemently anti-Assad (the family that rules Syria).
Although Turkey is
slightly a part of Europe – 3% of its territory (across the Bosporus at
Istanbul) is in Europe (the rest is in Asia) – under Erdoğan, that strategic
nation has slowly pulled back from its traditional secularism into an
increasingly fundamentalist, Sunni-driven, Islamic state. Erdoğan has
consolidated his power based on this conservative mandate, chosen to declare
Kurds and Kurdish nationalist movements in Turkey as “terrorists,” and declared
journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder at a Saudi consulate in Istanbul to have
been ordered by the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman.
Those Kurds are the
same “terrorists” who, working closely with American forces and using
American-supplied arms, provided an effective ground war against ISIS. Trump
has chosen to ignore the plain facts provided by Turkish police (including an
audio recording) on Khashoggi’s death, clearly supported by his own C.I.A., to
exonerate that Crown Prince from that murder. Turkey is rapidly seeking to
improve relations with Russia and pulling back from anyone allied with the
United States. Trump’s need to cater to his evangelical base has also further
pushed Turkey away from any real working relationship with the United States.
U.S.-Turkish relations
had become particularly strained because of Turkey’s charging Andrew Brunson,
an American evangelical preacher,
with espionage in connection with a 2016 failed coup that attempted to topple
Erdoğan. Erdoğan began a campaign of arresting thousands of soldiers, government
officials and anyone associated with that coup attempt. Brunson was swept up in
that purge. Succumbing to pressure from evangelicals, Trump demanded that
Brunson be released. Erdoğan resisted, although
in July Brunson was moved to “house arrest” after two years in prison.
Trump began
pressuring Turkey by declaring sanctions against the country, including travel
bans and doubling down on tariffs against Turkish steel and aluminum. The
Turkish lira began a free fall, straining relations even more.
“On September
28, 2017, Erdoğan unsuccessfully proposed exchanging Brunson for Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic
preacher accused of supporting the coup attempt from his exile in the United
States…. In October 2018, the Trump administration successfully secured the
release of Brunson, after U.S. economic sanctions and tariffs were placed on
Turkey. On October 12, 2018, Brunson was convicted, by Turkish authorities, on
the charge of aiding terrorism, but sentenced to time served. He was
released from Turkish custody and immediately returned to the United States.”
Wikipedia. The strain continues.
It doesn’t take a
rocket scientist to see how important Turkey is in containing Russian
expansionism. Russian vessels desiring passage into the Aegean and
Mediterranean Seas must pass through that Turkish-controlled strait clearly
noted in the above map. As Ukraine and Russia seem to be duking it out over the
Kersh Strait at the top of the above map, Turkey’s strategic importance grows.
I cannot think of a worse time for our regional policy-making to be in the
hands of a highly inexperienced internationalist with no prior political
experience or education – Donald Trump – who has in turn handed over that
function to an even less experienced very young man – son-in-law Jared Kushner
– whose father had to buy the boy’s admission to Harvard with a $2.6 million
“donation.” Turkish policies are not moving in a direction that benefits the
U.S.
It is clear that Erdoğan
has presided over a country that, until recently, prospered from massive
governmental infrastructure expenditures, including a new grand mega-airport
designed to be a regional hub. Much of that construction was financed with very
significant international borrowing, mostly dollar or euro-denominated loans,
and as the lira continued to fall (blamed on Trump), Turkey faced austerity. Erdoğan
felt anger at what the U.S. had done to his hold on power.
Erdoğan has pushed his
country rapidly away from the post-WWI secularism that defined Turkey’s role in
the modern world: “Mustafa
Kemal, an Ottoman commander, became a national celebrity for winning a
multi-front war against European powers in the aftermath of World War I,
earning the title Ataturk, or ‘Father of the Turk.’
“In 1924, the Ottoman caliphate, the
successor to an institution stretching back to Islam’s founding in the 7th
century, was abolished. Schools were put under state control. In 1925, the
turban and fez were banned. In 1928, the Turkish alphabet, a modified version
of the Arabic alphabet, was prohibited and replaced with a system based on the
Latin alphabet. In 1934, the Surname Law required all citizens to choose a
fixed, hereditary surname that could not include foreign words.
“‘All these reforms were basically
meant to cut people off from the Islamic world, from their Islamic heritage,’ [journalist
and historian Mustafa] Armagan said… That Ataturk instituted these policies is
not disputed in Turkey today, but whether the public welcomed them is a
different matter.” Los Angeles Times, November 27th.
Erdoğan is attempting
to relegate Ataturk to merely an historical figure as he seeps Islam back into
Turkish daily life. But Erdoğan is also pushing his nation away from its once
powerful connection with the West, and particularly with the United States. I
am trying to figure out what in Trump’s Turkish policy has been good for the
United States. Coming up blank.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I guess I am already of
“winning” so much, over and over again, with Trump’s “winning” strategy.
Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Realignment in Taiwan
It’s one thing for leaders to
understand the balance of power, who’s in and who’s out or sliding out. Trade
agreements, military accords and regional grouping under the aegis of the top
cat in the area. It’s quite another reality when grassroots voting patterns
reflect such power shifts at a gut level that should make U.S. policy planners
take heed… if they even cared. A little background.
Even before Richard Nixon opened the
diplomatic door with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with his 1972
historic meeting with Chairman Mao in Beijing, there was a movement afoot to
replace the Republic of China (ROC - Taiwan) as one of the five founding
members of the United Nations (hence being one of the five permanent nations
with Security Council veto power) and admit the PRC in its place. Clearly, the
PRC prevailed.
It had long been Mao Zedong’s policy that any
nation wanting diplomatic relations with the PRC must first break off formal
with the ROC (informal relations were permitted). Nations could not trade with
the PRC until they made that switch. The PRC has always maintained that ROC was
an inseparable part of the PRC. Wikipedia explains:
“The
government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) opposes treating the
Republic of China (ROC) as a legitimate state and portrays Taiwan as a rogue
province of the PRC. The People's Republic of China government has consistently
opposed ‘two Chinas,’ instead espousing that all of ‘China’ is under one
single, indivisible sovereignty under its ‘One China
Principle,’
explicitly including Taiwan. Under this
principle, while the PRC has no de facto control over
territory administered by the ROC, the PRC nevertheless claims that the
territories controlled by both the PRC and ROC are part of the same,
indivisible sovereign entity ‘China.’ Furthermore, under the succession of states theory, the PRC claims that it has succeeded the
ROC as the government of ‘China,’ and thus the current ROC regime based in
Taiwan is illegitimate and has been superseded.”
The United States, recognizing the
size and rising power of the PRC, accommodated the PRC’s request, while
maintaining an informal diplomatic mission in Taipei (the ROC capital). Even
without a formal U.S. “embassy,” the U.S. also provided Taiwan with massive
military aid and a treaty pledge to protect Taiwan under an American military
umbrella. The United States
signed the initial Mutual Defense Treaty with the Nationalist government
on Taiwan in 1954, shortly after the Korean War where U.S. and PRC forces had been
directly engaged against each other in a brutal shooting war.
That treaty was
severely tested almost immediately with the PRC shelling several small ROC
islands off the PRC coast, as the U.S. began to rattle its nuclear saber. While
the military action and threats subsided, Sino-American relations were, to put
it mildly, strained. Nixon’s early 1970s diplomatic rapprochement with the PRC
shifted the political realities in that region forever.
Mao’s successor,
Deng Xiaoping, rapidly brought China into the modern world, reinventing the
moribund economy that had festered under Mao’s erratic rule. The economic
powerhouse you see today is a direct result of Chairman Deng’s architecture for
a new Chinese future.
The post-WWII
Republic of Korea had been ruled exclusively by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists
(the Kuomintang or KMT) with vehement opposition to becoming part of the PRC.
That one-party rule softened in the late 1980s, as additional parties began to
rise and win increasing number of seats in the legislature (Legislative Yuan)
and up to the top spot as well (Presidency). When Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975,
his dream of uniting all of China under his KMT party died with him.
Overtures between
the Chinas continued, and loose trading agreements eventually allowed direct
economic transactions and investments between the two Chinas. Relations warmed
and chilled as various PRC leaders loosened or tightened their pledge to bring
the ROC into the PRC, perhaps under a two-system structure as reflected in
China’s takeover of Hong Kong. Xi Jinping is clearly signaling that he is a
hardliner; Taiwan must become a formal part of the PRC.
“The Nationalist
Party, or KMT, advocates engaging China on Beijing’s condition. The 2008-2016
government of Nationalist ex-President Ma Ying-jeou signed more than 20
agreements with Chinese officials, covering mainly investment, trade and
transit.” Los Angeles Times, November 25th.
Among other recent
provocations, the PRC began building an island fortress in the Spratly Island
chain, letting the world know that she was the top dog in the region. Xi’s
demands that Taiwan take heel mounted. Reacting in fear, in 2016 the ROC’s
pro-independent Democratic Progressive Party took both the ROC legislature and
the Presidency. Defeated, the Nationalist’s efforts toward entente with the PRC
slipped off the table. Taiwan felt comfortable enough to challenge the PRC,
knowing it was safe under the American military umbrella.
Then, in 2017,
Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. By 2018, his
isolationist views and “America First” pullback from treaty commitments
suggested to most Taiwanese that they should no longer count on America’s
coming to their aid in the event of a takeover-by-force mounted by the PRC.
America’s power and influence were falling fast. Was becoming part of the PRC
now inevitable? Should Taiwan prepare for war… or try to accomplish the
inevitable non-violently? Was a middle ground possible?
The United States
was not the only country in the world with a November mid-term election. On
November 24th, the “China-friendly chief opposition party won most
major seats in midterm local elections… challenging the president’s two years
of cold relations with the more militarily powerful and increasingly angry
Beijing.
“Nationalist
Party candidates won 15 of Taiwan’s 22 mayoral and county magistrate seats,
reversing the ruling party’s lead that it took in 2014 on its way to the
presidency two years later. Hours after polls closed, [ROC] President Tsai
Ing-wen resigned as the party’s chairwoman and her premier offered to quit.
“While voters
picked candidates for a list of reasons, from colorful personalities to their
role in completing local infrastructure projects, analysts say the ruling
Democratic Progressive Party’s tense relations with China weighed on overall
sentiment.
“‘We know the
Democratic Progressive Party wasn’t going to do well but not to such an extent,’
said Raymond Wu, managing director of Taipei-based political risk consultancy
E-telligence… ‘You look at any number of polls, and no one wants unification
[with China] at this point, but we want a government that can manage
cross-strait relations,’ Wu said, referring to China-Taiwan ties. ‘It’s
business 101, meaning you use limited resources to create the best outcome.’
“Tsai does not
accept Beijing’s dialogue condition that both sides belong to a single China,
an extension of the Communist leadership’s claim to sovereignty over the island…
Her refusal reassures voters worried about a takeover by China, but it has
stopped any talks and led China to step up pressure against Tsai’s government.
Many Taiwanese still value economic relations and worry how far the pressure
will go.
“China
periodically flies military aircraft near Taiwan, for example, and persuades
Taipei’s diplomatic allies to switch allegiance. The two sides have been
separately ruled since the 1940s, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists based
their government in Taiwan after a civil war with Mao Tse-tung’s Communists… Tsai
said she stepped down as party chair, though not as president, to take “full
responsibility” for the election results.” LA Times.
While there is a
growing constituency in the United States, as reflected in the recent mid-term
election results, that believes the United States will return to “business as
normal” when Trump’s presidency ends. Yet even if that were the result, the
reactive realignment of the rest of the world will linger. Many say that the
U.S. is no longer a trustworthy treaty partner since a “rogue” president can
reverse just about any treat commitment the U.S. might ever make. Further, new
treaty alignments are built for a long-term global restructuring, one that
contemplates the United States as a self-imposed outsider. They do not expire
with Trump leaves office.
The consequences of such American isolation
range from the probability that the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s global
reserve currency will soon come to an end (with huge economic consequences) to
our inability to have other nations join us in protecting our global interests.
Whatever else is said and done, much of that global economic and political
damage, which will absolutely slam Americans in the wallet, will not be
reversed.
I’m Peter Dekom, and in the end nationalist
populism seldom accomplishes what the political sloganeering promises, but the
damage inflicted from such wildly impractical polices is equally seldom
reversed.
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