Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plans to tread lightly during his upcoming trip to Turkey around a constitutional referendum that has turned into a domestic and international lightning rod.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is trying to pass a constitutional referendum that would allow him to stay in power until 2029 and enjoy more autocratic authority. When European leaders refused to let his allies seek votes for the proposal among expatriate Turkish citizens, Erdogan replied by comparing them to Nazis and threatening to allow tens of thousands of refugees to travel to Europe. U.S.-Turkey relations have been strained over the last year as well, however, and Tillerson plans to focus on easing those tensions in order to prepare for the final stages of defeating ISIS in Syria.
“He is quite aware of the context in which he is arriving and his exchanges will be conducted with respect for that process in mind,” a State Department official told reporters during a background call on the secretary’s trip.
Tillerson doesn’t intend to mediate between Erdogan and European leaders, although he’s not ruling it out, either. “Our position has been and remains that our NATO allies need to find ways to work together to deescalate tensions when they surface,” an official said. “The purpose of this trip is not specifically to have the secretary of state engage in that, but obviously anything that he can do to help move things in that direction would be something that would rise to his agenda.”
He also won’t meet with Erdogan’s political opponents, although other U.S. diplomats in Turkey will do so over the next several weeks Instead, the secretary will focus on counterterrorism issues, with special focus on how to drive ISIS out of their capital city of Raqqa, Syria.
“We have to get ISIS out of Raqqa because it remains a hub of their external plotting and it remains their administrative headquarters,” a State Department official said on the call.
That’s a difficult question, and one that has contributed to tension between the United States and Erdogan’s, because the American-led coalition in Syria depends heavily on a local fighting force that Turkey regards as a terrorist group. “The operational plan to seize Raqqa is going to be a very difficult military endeavor,” the official said. “The force make-up has to be locally-rooted so that the gains are sustainable and also has to be militarily-viable so that we can actually know that the operations will succeed . . . We’ll be discussing the next steps here with or close ally Turkey in the coming days.”
