Carter II: Obama's Losing Turkey To Political Islam
The elegant thing about Turkey's slide from the West is how starkly it juxtaposes liberal pseudo-sophistication with conservative warnings. On one side you have Obama's ephemeral charisma, where Turkey was the first Muslim country he visited as part of his global Presidential apology tour. At a minimum that should have made Ankara more rather than less inclined to lean toward the US and NATO.
On the other side you have the hard geopolitical realities being created by Obama's supine foreign policy, where a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran is pushing back US allies and installing proxies across Asia and South America. If Obama's critics are right then the prospect of regional Shiite hegemony will force states to accommodate the Islamic Republic, cut whatever deals they can, and try to exist within the Iranian orbit.
Relations between Turkey and Iran appear to be getting closer and those ties are raising concerns among some of Turkey's Western allies... Turkish President Abdullah Gul said... his country is keen to bolster relations with neighboring Iran. Increasing closeness between Turkish leaders and Iran, and Turkey's quest for better ties in the broader Muslim world, have fueled concerns in the West that this key U.S. ally is... is turning its back on the West to embrace Islamist regimes to the East - a vast region that extends from the Middle East to the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Obama's obsequious engagement can't even provide diplomatic wiggle room, where both sides would put on a show of agreement for public consumption:
The growing number of disagreements over global and regional affairs between Turkey and the United States signals a "bumpy road" to Washington, D.C., for Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in early December. The deterioration in ties between the two allies was obvious during Philip Gordon's trip to Ankara last week. At a press conference held here, the assistant secretary for the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs hinted that "there were more points of disagreement than of agreement with Turkey."
This is after Turkey banned Israel from US/NATO air exercises as a way of nixing the drills completely, the immediate and predictable withdrawal of the US and Italy being a feature rather than a bug. If they had just been targeting Israel they wouldn't have followed up two days later with joint Turkish-Syrian military maneuvers. That stunt, plus the 10 Turkish ministers they sent to Damascus in the context of a formal cooperation deal, goes deeper than a Turkish/Israeli temporary spat.
Instead, Ankara is signaling a broad strategic realignment. Per Barry Rubin both during his Omri Ceren Show appearance and in print, that has little to do with Israel and everything to do with how "the Obama Administration is perceived as too weak and so bewitched by the AKP's narrative of... a liberal Islamist regime to do anything."
This is a realignment that's been going on since the beginning of the Obama administration. Later Erdogan personally traveled to Tehran to seal a new warm alliance. Since then - as befits a client toady - he's been carrying water for the regime by loudly insisting that Iran should get nukes as long as Israel has them. Turkish officials are also promising that Erdogan will keep up his "brave criticism" of Israel on the IDF's self-defense measures in Gaza. This coming from a country that brags about the scope and violence of its anti-Kurd campaigns and sits comfortably underneath a US nuclear umbrella.
The punchline: ElBaradei continues to insist that Turkey should take Iran's uranium in a nuclear compromise, a deal that's supposed to work because the Obama administration is "very comfortable with Turkey."
Which isn't to say that Turkey isn't also undergoing an ideological calibration with the Islamic world. But those shifts are politically driven by Islamists who have seized state institutions and taken control over the levers of power. The AKP has intensified its Islamist campaign over the last few years, specifically targeting secular bastions like schools, media outlets, and the military. Hundreds of anti-Islamist military officials are currently on trial for activities against the regime. The end of the 2008 saw a little-remarked Islamist purge of the state-run Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT). Subsequently the station ran a venomously antisemitic TV series complete with blood libels and baby murders. It even included an episode about how Palestinians only engage in honor rapes and murders because Israeli devils manipulate them, a trope that's become quite popular in anti-Israel film and television (still too much reality though - the show's content adviser resigned because the episode did "damage to Palestinians positive image," to "resistance forces," and to "the Palestinian nation").
It's also not to say that there aren't still secular forces in Turkey. They exist both on the political level and in the military, where they're working to maintain Turkey's traditional alliances. But in a Middle East where Iran dominates other countries either via Islamist Finlandization and through Hezbollah-style formal government integration, Turkish secularists - and all secularists - are guaranteed to lose. Regional states will have to accommodate the mullahs, and domestic politicians will have to work within those arrangements.
Within the next few years Turkey will reach a tipping point, where the country will formally turn its back on NATO and align itself with the IRG-controlled Islamic Republic. That's inevitable and totally predictable as long as Iran continues its ascent into a regional powerhouse. Carter's spinelessness left us with an Iran dominated by political Islam and seeking supremacy. Obama's dithering will let the mullahs succeed by giving Middle Eastern countries no choice but to fall into their orbit, with exactly the same radicalization to follow.
A quarter century from now we'll be dealing with an Islamist Turkey. Except by then the world will be much more dangerous than it was when Carter lost Iran, Islamists will be deeply entrenched, and Turkey will be starting off with significantly more military hardware.
Smart power.
References:
* Obama to visit Turkey, first trip to Muslim nation [Reuters]
* Turkey-Iran Ties Continue to Worry West [VOA]
* 'Disagreements outweigh agreements in US-Turkish ties,' says diplomat [Hurriyet Daily]
* Turkey drops joint drill because of IAF [JPost]
* Turkey and Syria forge closer ties [Al Jazeera]
* Ten Turkish ministers head to Syria [JPost]
* Turkey, Syria sign cooperation deal [YNet]
* Barry Rubin - Lebanon's Crisis And Ours [TOCS]
* The Middle East in Mid-October: Themes and Developments [Rubin Reports]
* Clenched With The Help Of Turkey's Warm Embrace [Is Iran's Fist Still Clenched?]
* Turkey's Turn From the West [WaPo]
* Turkey PM: If you don't want Iran to have nukes, give yours up [Ha'aretz]
* Turkish president: 'Brave criticism' of Israel to continue [YNet]
* Turkey: Israel Should Be Kicked Out Of The UN (Plus: Turkey Kills 700 Kurds In 2008) [MR]
* ElBaradei Suggests Turkey as Compromise on Iran Nuclear Impasse [Bloomberg]
* Turkey: Heading for a showdown [FP]
* TRT shaken with internal appointments [Burakerkman]
* Israel: Turkish TV paints troops as child-killers [MSNBC]
* Mere Rhetoric Sees Suicide Bomber Buddy Movie, Leaves Surprisingly Not Pissed Off [MR]
* Turkish TV show consultant resigns over Palestinian protest [YNet]
* TURKEY: CAN TURKEY'S MAIN SECULARIST PARTY MAKE A COMEBACK? [Eurasianet]
* Turkey and Israel hold joint drill, in apparent ease of tensions [Ha'aretz]
* The Case for Bombing Iran [Podhoretz / Commentary]
* Lebanon announces unity government with Hezbollah members [Times Online]
Related Mere Rhetoric Categories:
* Arab And Muslim World Coverage
* Turkey Coverage
* Diplomacy Coverage
