Turkey this week broke sig nificantly with Israel and the West — a strong sign that President Obama’s outreach to the Muslim world is achieving nothing.
On Monday, NATO scrapped “Anatolian Eagle,” a regularly scheduled military exercise with various allies along the Turkish border — drills meant to assure coordination in case of war in the region. At the last minute, Turkey had announced its refusal to let the Israeli Defense Force participate. Standing by its ally, America dropped out as well — killing the whole thing.
A day later, Turkish and Syrian officials disclosed that their armies had just concluded their own joint military exercise. The same day, the two countries went even further, signing a strategic cooperation pact.
“We congratulate ourselves by this historical achievement,” Syria’s UN ambassador, Bashar Jaafari, told me Wednesday.
Historical indeed. A mere decade ago, Syrian and Turkish armies were amassed on the border, ready to battle each other. The strategic and military ties between Ankara and Jerusalem were tight, and the Turkish government saw its NATO membership as the country’s most prized strategic asset.
There are many reasons for Turkey’s shift.
The country feels rejected by the West. Its bid to join the European Union was for too long stifled by racist establishment politicians in the continent, who refuse to see a non-white, non-Christian country as an equal. And the late 20th century saw a turn toward religion in all Muslim societies, Turkey included.
Plus, a society growing more economically comfortable increasingly wants to get along with neighbors. Its people sympathize with the Palestinians and others — even Syria’s Alawites and Iran’s Shiites — who are on the “outs” with the Sunni Arab world. In recent years, Turkey has even signed a pact with Armenia — a nation that’s been hostile dating back to Turkey’s (still denied) massacre of its Armenian citizens early last century.
In Turkey, the moderately Islamic ruling party is slowly growing dominant — reducing the power of the army, which sees itself as the guarantor of Kemal Ataturk’s legacy of secularism, and gradually muzzling the press.
Now, despite decades of Western concern for Turkish sensitivities, especially over the Armenian “genocide,” Turkey has taken to condemning others’ alleged brutality. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounces America’s acts in Iraq and Afghanistan and talks about Israeli crimes in Gaza. A new drama series on Turkish TV depicts Israeli soldiers as cold-blooded killers who enjoy shooting at defenseless Palestinian children.
On Wednesday, Erdogan cited public anger over Israel’s actions in Gaza for his last-minute action killing the military exercise. But a story in the Turkish press cited government leaks that the real issue was Ankara’s pique at a delay in delivery of Israeli-made drones to the Turkish air force.
In any case, for all the official efforts to minimize the damage, it’s clear that Turkey is no longer the staunch Western ally it used to be.
All this predates Obama. Most obviously, the Turks slapped America back in 2003, when they refused to allow US troops to invade Iraq from Turkish soil.
But Obama supposedly was going to change things with his doctrine of engagement, based on sensitivity to the concerns of “the world.” His efforts to reverse Muslim alienation from the West included a trip to Ankara to launch a series of speeches in which he vowed to Turks and other Muslims that the West will be friendlier from now on.
This week’s lesson is that Turkey’s policy of hedging its bets between the West and its nasty neighbors isn’t America’s fault after all. It’s based on Ankara’s shifting view of its interests and on regional and global trends. George W. Bush didn’t cause it,and Obama’s touchy-feely pitch won’t reverse it.
America’s best bet is to make clear to Ankara (and to ourselves) what our regional interests are.
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