President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has a pathetic op-ed in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.
Titled “The World Must Stop Assad,” Erdogan’s article calls for action to prevent Syrian President Bashar Assad from the slaughter he is about to commit in Syria’s Idlib province. But while Erdogan is right to be alarmed about the tragedy that Assad’s action will create, he has only himself to blame for it. Because Erdogan has been instrumental in putting Assad, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Iran’s Qassem Soleimani in position to effect this atrocity.
Scared of Putin’s wrath and aggravated at U.S. support for Kurdish interests in northern Syria and U.S. protection of Turkish citizens with whom he has political vendettas, Erdogan has spent the past two years realigning his foreign policy within Putin’s orbit. And in Idlib, Putin is about to show Erdogan who is boss.
Still, it’s pathetic that Erdogan is only now recognizing that Putin has played him. After all, there was never any evidence that Putin sought a shared partnership with his Turkish opposite. But there was always a great deal of evidence that Putin saw Erdogan as a useful tool to weaken Syrian rebel groups and to weaken the NATO alliance. On both counts, Erdogan has danced to Putin’s tune perfectly. Witnessing Putin’s fictional Astana peace talks and his enabling and concealing of Assad’s relentless slaughter, Erdogan should have woken up long ago.
Why is Erdogan choosing now to speak out? Because he knows that the coming annihilation in Idlib will shred his defining narrative as a leader. The narrative that he is the Imam Ataturk, or patron-defender for Sunni Muslims across the Middle East, will be in tatters. Erdogan knows that in the images of newly bombed and gassed children, he will be shown for what he is: Putin’s useful idiot. Even for a man possessing of outsize arrogance, that reality is one Erdogan will not be able to spin.
Still, one good thing may come of all this: Erdogan might finally realize that a difficult friendship with America is preferable to being the devil’s toady.
