OPINION:
Vice President Joe Biden’s visit to Turkey next week is likely to be critical, if not conclusive. Whether he can establish a new relationship with this important NATO ally, the ally with military resources exceeded in the alliance only by those of the United States, is crucial to just about everything in the Middle East.
Mr. Biden must forge a new bargain with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has accelerated an accumulation of power with the machinations of a popular leader with a strong authoritarian streak who has trashed a secular constitution. The failed military coup against him by the last remnants of the secularists who, through military dominance, have been the guardians of a secular state in the region where the secular is often no match for militant Islam, has given Mr. Erdogan the excuse to indulge resentment.
What the West fears is that Turkey will turn its back on a hundred years of trying to make Turkey a modern state. The liberalization of the economy has delivered unprecedented growth and prosperity, but the boom is over. Turkey had been a model for other Muslim governments trying to break away from militant Islam and join the 21st century, and the Turks were thought to have made the transition. That now appears dubious at best.
Once more the rest of the world confronts militant Muslims who are determined to conquer by forced conversion to the most primitive elements of the creed. That many Muslims, perhaps most, want no part of this kind of Islam is not enough to block a fanatical minority from jihad — the duty of a Muslim to spread his religion by whatever means necessary.
Mr. Erdogan has played a clever game. He has managed, despite the bitter rejection by many outspoken European Union officials, to continue the campaign to fashion Turkey as a faithful member of the alliance. His flirtation with the Islamists has now diminished that prospect.
He intimidated German Chancellor Angela Merkel to get free movement of Turks within the EU in return for Turkey’s stemming the flow of Syrian and other Middle East refugees into Western Europe. But Frau Merkel’s welcome to a million migrants who arrived last year has produced a bitter backlash. Integrating newcomers with vastly different and fiercely held cultural values has failed and failed utterly. A spike in murder, robbery and rape arrived with the refugee tide.
Unlike the Europeans, Joe Biden has the luxury of negotiating with a stronger hand, with no proximity to newcomers who have neither assimilated nor want to assimilate, and their numbers are growing. The vice president can exploit Mr. Erdogan’s erratic policies which failed to re-establish a neo-Ottoman regime that was once an imperial presence in the region. Turkey’s flirtation with Russia — which supplies half the country’s energy, imposing a huge trade deficit in Russian favor — is a feint aimed at the United States and its European allies.
Mr. Biden has to come home with something. One trophy would be a Turkish promise to tighten its borders, shutting off the flow of Muslim terrorists, and a promise of effective Turkish collaboration in eliminating ISIS. President Obama must persuade Mr. Erdogan that refreshing his Islamic faith will not protect him from the rising tide of terrorism. Actually restoring Turkey firmly in the Western alliance will require stronger leadership than Barack Obama has to offer. Being the deputy of a weak leader is the cross that Joe Biden will take to Turkey.
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