Turkey Basting

[Jefferson23]

By Scott Horton


June 8, 7:03 PM, 2010


In a piece up at the American Interest, “Terrible Twins: Turkey, Brazil and the Future of American Foreign Policy,” Walter Russell Mead takes aim at the government of Recep Erdoğan in Turkey. Here’s a key passage:

the strong reaction in Turkey to the Israeli interception of a convoy organized by Turkish groups with aid for Gaza underlines the possibility that Turkey is moving decisively away from its longtime partnership with the United States.

As it happens, I was in Turkey the day of the flotilla events and was able to take some measure of the local reaction, discussing it with a number of local observers whose opinions I value. There is good reason to be concerned about relations between Turkey and the United States. At one point, Turkey was the essential NATO ally of the United States for Middle East issues. The U.S. Air Force base at İncerlik has been a key national-security asset, and there are few armed forces in the world with which the U.S. has had deeper and more stable relations than those of Turkey—though that very fact may be an irritant in the current environment. There is a problem in U.S.-Turkish relations; it requires serious study and consideration. But Mead’s analysis is simply obtuse. Successful military alliances are built on the basis of shared interests and generally shared perceptions of threat. During the Cold War, those interests and threats could be easily defined. After the Cold War, the United States has looked to a number of different ties for a redefinition of the relationship, none of them particularly successful.

I still remember being in Istanbul during the OSCE summit in 1999. Bill Clinton was in town, mobbed everywhere and viewed as a rock star. I walked through bazaars and found stalls in which his picture was displayed. He was, a friend assured me, far more popular with the people than any senior Turkish politician. In the commercial world, American icons were everywhere. This was a golden era in U.S.-Turkish relations. Then George W. Bush arrived on the scene, touting policies uncritically embraced by Mead, with Kriegslust directed against Iraq at the top of the agenda. Turkish leaders counseled aggressively against this war and warned about negative consequences sure to flow from it. Turkey also expressed deeply held reservations about the creation of a Kurdish state and the empowerment of Kurdish nationalist groups that had long presented a painful terrorist threat to Turkey. These concerns fell on deaf ears with the Bush team. So the pushback started with U.S. indifference towards Turkey’s own perceived national-security interests. Looking back on the situation now, Turkey’s warnings were largely well taken, and their concern about a revitalization of Kurdish terrorism also proved to be well founded. So which partner bears primary responsibility for damage to the relationship?

Mead’s writing reveals his chronic inability to differentiate between United States and Israeli security concerns. Writing in the American Conservative, the ever astute Daniel Larison calls Mead on his intellectual sloppiness:

remainder in full: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/06/hbc-90007187