April Glaspie was an accomplished diplomat and U.S. ambassador to Iraq when, on July 25, 1990, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein summoned her to his office. President George H.W. Bush sought rapprochement with Iraq, with whom diplomatic relations were long fraught. In response to Saddam’s complaints about Kuwait, Iraq’s neighbor to the south, Glaspie famously quipped, “We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” The Iraqi leader took Glaspie’s quip to mean that the United States would sit on the sidelines if he resolved to military action to solve his dispute with Kuwait.
Fast forward almost three decades, and the United States might have just experienced another April Glaspie moment, this time with regard to Turkey and Syria. Speaking to reporters after a U.S.-Turkey Working Group on Dec. 7, James Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy to Syria, reportedly said that U.S. cooperation with the Kurds was tactical and temporary, but that it was bilateral ties with Turkey that mattered. “We want to have cooperation with Turkey across the board on all Syrian issues,” he said.
Jeffrey is a capable and accomplished diplomat. He was ambassador to Albania, Turkey, and Iraq, and had a nice sinecure at a Washington think tank and as an advisor to ExxonMobil when he got the call to return to service.
But if he believes that throwing the Kurds under the bus to please Turkey is sophisticated, he is wrong.
He and others in the Trump administration may justify such sentiment in diplomatic realism but, if so, they misjudge the reputational damage to the United States of both betraying allies and forgiving treachery. After all, the only reason U.S. forces cooperated with the Syrian Kurds in the first place was because of their willingness to fight al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Turkey may have talked a good game, but there is broad policy and intelligence consensus that Turkey both passively and actively supported ISIS and the flow of foreign fighters to it. Leaked emails show that Erdogan’s son-in-law (and current finance minister) Berat Albayrak sought to profit off the terrorist group.
Turkey accuses the Democratic Union Party, or PYD, the northern Syria’s dominant Kurdish political group, and its affiliated People’s Protection Unit, or YPG, militias as being linked to the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, a group which waged an insurgency in Turkey that has killed upwards of 30,000 since 1984. There is merit to Turkey’s complaint. The State Department might conduct intellectual somersaults to say that the PYD/YPG and PKK are not linked, but any visitor to northern Syria can readily see they are. But, that should not be the United States’ problem. What the PYD and YPG have accomplished, both militarily against ISIS and in terms of governance, is impressive. Turkey’s equation that Washington must equate the YPG with terrorists groups like al Qaeda is nonsense. After all, Erdogan embraced Hamas because he said it had popular support, controlled territory, and won elections. By these criteria, PKK affiliates are also legitimate. Erdogan further legitimized the group when his administration secretly reached out to negotiate with the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, by default bestowing upon him the role of indispensable Kurdish leader, and then agreed to a deal which encouraged PKK fighters to go to Syria and Iraq.
Back to the Glaspie analogy: Just as Saddam saw cover in Glaspie’s obsequiousness, so now does Erdogan see advantage in Jeffrey’s willingness to ignore Turkey’s worst excesses and embrace the Turkish regime’s psychoses as America’s own. By even suggesting the United States views the Kurds as expendable, Jeffrey and the Trump administration have effectively given the Turks a green light to invade Syrian Kurdistan. And, indeed, that is a signal which Erdogan has been seeking. “It is time to realize our decision to wipe out terror groups east of the Euphrates,” Erdogan declared on Wednesday, sidestepping the reality that he often conflates Kurdish fighters, villagers, intellectuals, women, and children so as to excuse wholesale ethnic cleansing.
Glaspie has long denied she meant to give a green light to Saddam Hussein; rather, she was just indulging in normal diplomatic rhetoric. That did not change the consequence, however: a series of wars that devastated Iraq, Kuwait, and ultimately emboldened Iran.
The lesson should have been clear: Humoring dictators has consequences. Alas, that seems to be a lesson lost, as Turkey moves to ramp up its incitement and involvement in Syria.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
