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 27^th.

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.

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 25^th.

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 24^th, 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.