Turkey “will not lose the economic war” with the United States, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Friday amid escalating tensions with the Trump administration over the fate of an imprisoned American pastor.
“Those who have dollars, euros, or gold under their pillows [savings at home] should go and exchange them with the [Turkish] lira,” Erdogan said, per the Hurriyet Daily News. “This is a national struggle. This will be my nation’s response to those who have declared an economic war.”
Turkey’s currency has depreciated due to the market’s distrust of Erdogan’s influence over the central bank and looming fears of U.S. sanctions in response to the authoritarian leader’s detention of an American missionary. President Trump slapped the stumbling Turkish economy Friday by tweeting a plan to double aluminum and steel tariffs for Turkey, a new point of contention between the United States and its most troublesome NATO ally.
Erdogan responded by calling Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Of course these relations, these contacts make us stronger,” the Daily Sabah quoted him as saying.
Trump’s team has elevated the case of Pastor Andrew Brunson to a top priority in U.S.-Turkey relations in recent weeks, notably imposing sanctions on two senior Turkish officials over his ongoing detention. Brunson was detained in 2016 and accused of complicity in a 2015 failed coup attempt, an attempt to overthrow the government that Erdogan blames on a cleric living in Pennsylvania.
“Pastor Brunson’s unjust detention and continued prosecution by Turkish officials is simply unacceptable,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in an Aug. 1 rebuke.
Erdogan has, at times, linked Brunson’s fate to that of Fetullah Gulen, the cleric he accuses of orchestrating the 2015 coup attempt.
“‘Give us the pastor back’, they say,” Erdogan said last year. “You have one pastor as well. Give him [Gulen] to us. Then we will try him [Brunson] and give him to you. … The [pastor] we have is on trial. Yours is not — he is living in Pennsylvania. You can give him easily. You can give him right away.”
The Brunson controversy is just one example of a decline in U.S.-Turkey relations in recent years, driven by a number of factors. Erdogan’s authoritarian drift has alienated American lawmakers, while Turkey bristles at U.S. cooperation with Syrian Kurds to dislodge the Islamic State from Iraq and Syria. Erdogan’s stated determination to purchase Russian air defense systems could also provoke U.S. sanctions while driving a wedge into NATO military cooperation.
“They have been an important NATO partner,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said of Turkey during a recent congressional hearing. “We need their behavior to reflect the objectives of NATO, and that’s what we’re diligently working to do: to get them to rejoin NATO, in a way, with their actions, consistent with what we’re trying to achieve in NATO. And not take actions that undermine its efforts.”
