OPINION:
Once the eastern anchor of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (geography has little to do with how governments title treaties), Turkey has become a problem, and a large one, for NATO policymakers. The problem contributes to the chaos in the Middle East.
This is all the more remarkable because at the beginning of his administration, President Obama regarded Recep Tayyip Erdogan, then the Turkish prime minister, as one of his closest friends. Mr. Obama couldn’t wait to get to Ankara and Cairo to apologize to the Muslims for what he, and they, regard as American offenses against Islam.
But last month Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter urged Mr. Erdogan, now the president of Turkey, “to control the border, the long border that they have with both Syria and Iraq . It’s overdue, because it’s a year into the campaign [against the Islamic State, or ISIS], but they’re indicating some considerable effort now, including allowing us to use their airfields. That’s important, but it’s not enough.”
Permission to use the bases required nine months of intense negotiations, all to aid the feeble American bombing campaign against ISIS, which is now regarded by nearly everyone as a threat to stability in the region. ISIS is rapidly becoming the nexus of Islamic terrorism throughout the world.
Traffic across the Turkish-Syrian border includes volunteers for ISIS forces and a flood of Muslim refugees crossing into Greece, and from there to the other countries of the European Union.
Since Mr. Obama’s apology tour of the Middle East, Mr. Erdogan has broken Turkey’s long-standing military alliance with Israel. He has permitted Hamas, recognized as a terrorist organization, to operate out of Turkey. Mr. Erdogan himself has contributed ugly anti-Semitic remarks, picked up by sympathetic newspapers.
Mr. Erdogan — who once described democracy as “a train that you get off once you reach your destination” — has pushed creeping Islamization, eroding the secularist heritage of modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Attaturk. He moved to the presidency, hoping to create an authoritarian presidential system. But in the June elections, his Justice and Development Party [AKP] failed to get the necessary majority to change the constitution. After refusing to negotiate in good faith with other parties to organize a coalition government, he has now called another election. He abandoned an effort to reach an agreement with Turkey’s huge Kurdish minority. Public-opinion polls indicate he may fail again to win an election. A sagging economy won’t help his chances, either.
His whirling dervish foreign policy is in tatters. He has become a major deterrent to American goals in the region, and the most effective fighters against ISIS have been the battle-hardened Kurds. Mr. Erdogan, like the leaders of some other countries with a large Kurdish minority, fear that Kurdish military successes could produce a united independent Kurdistan. The Iraqi Kurdish regional government, pumping oil out through Turkey, some of it to Israel, is relatively prosperous and semi-independent. Barring increased American ground forces deployed against ISIS, the Kurds are the only realistic hope of successfully “degrading and eventually destroying” ISIS. Despite the optimism of the Obama administration, the military situation is deteriorating.
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