It’s hard to regain trust when your partner cheats on you with your longtime rival — but sometimes you do it for the sake of the children.
While Iran, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Venezuela dominated President Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly, the United States is quietly trying to repair its relationship with NATO ally Turkey, whose tilt toward Moscow and away from the West has been a source of constant friction over the past two years.
This month, after more than a year of military-to-military negotiations led by outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, the United States and Turkey have begun to implement a plan to create a buffer zone, where some Kurdish fighters are being cleared from the area in northeast Syria that borders Turkey.
If you had to pick a point where U.S.-Turkish relations went into a tailspin, it would be in 2016, when the U.S. began arming and advising the Syrian Democratic Forces, a loose coalition of Kurdish, Arab, and Turkmen fighters who agreed to take on the Islamic State in Syria on behalf of the U.S.
Among the SDF are members of the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey considers a terrorist militia linked to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party.
With the fall of ISIS’ last bastion in Syria to the U.S.-backed SDF in March, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been itching to send his troops south to wipe out the YPG, which he sees as a threat to establish an anti-Turkey Kurdish area of control right on his doorstep.
In August, the U.S. and Turkey reached an agreement on a “security mechanism” (the Pentagon won’t call it a “safe zone”) under which U.S. and Turkish troops are conducting joint aerial and ground patrols of a narrow strip of land along the border and gradually demolishing YPG fortifications that the Kurdish group built to protect not only against ISIS but a threatened Turkish assault.
“We’re doing this in conjunction with the Syrian Democratic Forces on the Syrian side of the border,” said Chris Maier, director of the Pentagon’s Defeat-ISIS Task Force, in a September briefing. “The destruction of these fortifications addresses Turkish security concerns and, we believe, demonstrates SDF commitment to the implementation.”
U.S. commanders were rattled last December when Trump abruptly announced, without consulting anyone at the Pentagon, that he was pulling all U.S. troops out of Syria.
The order stoked fears that absent U.S. troops, Erdoğan would undertake a wholesale slaughter of the Kurdish militia groups that he considered terrorists but were the most combat-capable force battling ISIS.
Blindsided, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis submitted his resignation, and Trump eventually was persuaded to allow some of the nearly 2,000 troops to stay.
The Pentagon no longer reveals how many American special operations forces remain in Syria, but without them, the diplomatic fence-mending would not be possible and the SDF would be more concerned with defending against Turkey than defeating ISIS, which the Pentagon says has morphed into a clandestine insurgency with maybe 6,000 fighters who’ve gone to ground.
“We need Turkey to stabilize Syria, to help us stabilize Syria,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham this month.
Graham, who planned to meet with Erdoğan on the sidelines of the UNGA, said he will do everything he can “to make sure that we can salvage this relationship. It’s very important.”
The biggest obstacle remains Erdoğan’s stubborn insistence on buying and operating the Russian S-400 air defense system, which the Pentagon says is incompatible with America’s premier new F-35 fighter jet. The delivery of the system earlier this year prompted the Pentagon to boot Turkey from the F-35 program and cancel its planned purchase of 100 of the $89-million-apiece jets.
“I’d like to get them back in the F-35 program,” said Graham, who is pressing Erdoğan not to turn on the Russian anti-aircraft system that is being assembled at a Turkish airbase.
“If they activate the S-400 that they bought from the Russians, it will sever our relationship,” he told Fox News host Maria Bartiromo. “I hope we can find an alternative to the S-400.”
If Graham succeeds where all others, including Trump, have failed, it will be a diplomatic coup.
For now, Erdoğan seems more interested in currying favor with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he hosted along with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at a recent summit in Turkey to determine the future of Syria, notably without any U.S. involvement.
Still, the Pentagon is not ready to give up on the longtime NATO ally, and the joint patrols in Syria are seen as baby steps in getting the relationship back on track.
“We have 70-plus years of experience operating with them all over the world,” says Maier. “We’re falling in on an ally that’s long-standing and we know how to work with.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner‘s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
