CourcyInt

Senior American diplomats are describing the relationship between the US and Turkey  as “the best since the one between George Bush [Snr] and Turgut Ozal” in the late 1980s and early 1990s.  This assessment is no doubt correct, and it is a reflection of the degree to which the Obama administration has bought into the proposition that it should rebase its Mideast policy in response to the Arab Spring and the seemingly inevitable ascendancy of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Turkey’s Islamist-based democracy is seen in Washington as the best available role model for the region.

This service has expressed considerable concern about Turkey under its Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.  Our worry has been the extent of Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions – clearly expressed in his June election victory speech – and his lack of judgement.  In June, Erdogan’s Islam-based Justice and Development Party (AKP) won its third consecutive mandate.  Saluting the AKP’s victory, Erdogan proclaimed from the balcony of his party’s headquarters that “Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul; Beirut won as much as Izmir; Damascus won as much as Ankara; Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakir.”  In other words, Turkey under Erdogan intended to be an active supporter of the Bosnian Muslims, the Sunni opposition in Lebanon and Syria, and, above all, the Palestinians.

The advantage of close American engagement with Turkey (in addition to securing Turkish agreement to station elements of Nato’s anti-missile shield on its soil) is that it might be able to moderate Erdogan’s wilder enthusiasms and lack of judgement, and this is no doubt the message that Washington is trying to convey to Israel, which is the country most affected by Turkey’s lurch away from its pro-Western secularist tradition.  But Israel will take some persuading.

As we reported in our 12 October issue, Erdogan continues to step up his anti-Israel rhetoric, and his remarks in Pretoria on 5 October were amongst his strongest so far.  He said that Israel imposes “state terrorism” in the region; that it has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians with “bombs that have rained down on them from Israel”, including phosphorus bombs; and that he saw Israel as “a threat for its region because it has the atomic bomb”.  He also said that the West applied double standards (by pursuing Iran over its nuclear programme and not Israel) and that the United Nations had failed to implement its resolutions against Israel (“89 from the UN Security Council and 247 resolutions of the General Assembly”).

Then there is the wider context.  The Muslim Brotherhood has won the first post-revolutionary elections in Tunisia and will almost certainly emerge as the most powerful political grouping in Egypt if and when the election process is completed.  After Egypt, it is beginning to eye the prospects of power in Jordan.  The fall of Assad, now actively sought by Turkey, would also open the way to an MB ascendancy in Syria.  And in the Palestinian territories, Hamas is looking to extend its influence from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank through a rapprochement with Fateh and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

These are the forces that the US is seeking to control through courting the Erdogan government in Turkey.  We are not suggesting this is a wrong policy, just that in all likelihood these forces will prove too powerful to control, and that Turkey will only modify its policies at the margins in response to US pressure.  The end result is likely to be an enhanced feeling in Israel that not only has it lost Egypt and Turkey, but that it may be losing the US as well.  This, in turn, can only fuel Israel’s determination to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat and to avoid any territorial compromise.  A sense of how concerned Israel is about developments in general and Turkey in particular can be taken from a commentary by the influential academic Barry Rubin in the 21 November Jerusalem Post.  He wrote: “The Islamist regime in Ankara isn’t opposing the Syrian regime out of its love for democracy.  Erdogan’s government wants to have a fellow Sunni Islamist dictatorship in Damascus, preferably under its influence.  In this situation, Turkey is just as bad as Iran.”