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.