The U.S. may have a new problem in the Middle East, and it’s not the Islamic State.
With the Nov. 1 election of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the U.S. must now rely on an emboldened leader who is expected to push the country toward a more authoritarian state dominated by his Islamist AK Party.
Washington sees Ankara as not only an essential ally in the fight against the Islamic State, but due to its geostrategic location, is also a necessary partner when it comes to countering a resurgent Russia. Both points give Erdogan leverage over President Obama and his foreign policy.
That leverage is most evident in the delicate dance by U.S. officials between providing support for Kurdish groups on the front lines of that fight in both Syria and Iraq and accommodating Ankara’s insistence in preventing Kurdish independence by any means necessary. Further complicating things, one expert said, is the fact that the country just handed Erdogan a mandate.
“I think Erdogan has little reason to care about what the world thinks of him,” said Merve Tahiroglu, a research associate at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington.
In fact, analysts see Erdogan’s Turkey heading down the same road as Pakistan, another key U.S. ally with authoritarian tendencies whose own interests diverge from Washington’s enough to be as much a part of the problem of Islamist terrorism as they are part of the solution.
“I have been deeply concerned about the state of Turkish politics,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said after the Nov. 1 vote. “Governmental restrictions and pressure on media freedom, state interference in anticorruption investigations, and politically motivated violence against opposition parties have been blows to Turkey’s democratic traditions.”
In the Islamic State fight, the most recent tweak to U.S. policy in Syria takes advantage of Ankara’s recent opening of the NATO airbase at Incirlik to coalition aircraft, including U.S. A-10 attack jets helping to seal the Syrian-Turkish border, through which many of the foreign fighters reinforcing the extremist group and much of its illicit trade flows. But Erdogan’s government is also widely suspected of at least tolerating the Islamic State’s activities within Turkey, and has been accused of not doing enough to stem the flow of support to the group.
Meanwhile, U.S. efforts in Syria depend on the use of Turkish bases and territory to help Syrian rebel groups, including the most effective, the Kurdish YPG. But there’s a huge problem: The Marxist-leaning YPG is allied with Turkey’s Kurdish PKK, which both Ankara and Washington consider a terrorist group. Erdogan has signaled that he will intensify his war against the PKK after his government’s victory, following the breakdown of peace talks this year.
In a Nov. 9 interview with CNN, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that while Ankara supported the U.S. policy of arming the forces of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish government, it opposes any aid to the YPG.
“We cannot and we will not tolerate any help to PKK-related groups in Syria or Iraq,” he told CNN.
But U.S. officials cannot ignore that the YPG remains the most effective force in Syria against the Islamic State. As a result, Washington’s recent decision to expand support for existing rebel groups in Syria was the object of delicate negotiations with Ankara, and U.S. officials still carefully choose how they describe it.
In an Oct. 30 news conference a day after the announcement that U.S. special operations forces would be sent to Syria to work with rebel groups, Defense Secretary Ash Carter danced around the question of whether the U.S. was providing direct support to the YPG, noting that U.S. supplies of ammunition were going to the Syrian Arab Coalition, but then saying: “the Kurdish YPG and the Syrian Arab Coalition are essentially working together” to fight the Islamic State.
“For evidence of how this dynamic has made U.S.-Turkish cooperation more difficult with devastating effect for the region, one need look no further than the year that Washington spent seeking greater Turkish support in the fight against the Islamic State only to have its agreement with Ankara be exploited by Erdogan to restart the conflict with the PKK,” the Bipartisan Policy Center said in a report late last month on how the AK Party was transforming Turkey. Among the authors of the report was Eric Edelman, a former U.S. ambassador to Ankara.
The AK Party’s win also is expected to make Turkey a more authoritarian state, which is a problem for NATO’s image as an alliance of democracies. Other alliance members, committed to Ankara’s defense, are likely to overlook human rights abuses as part of a broader strategic calculation of Turkey’s worth. The Pentagon last week dispatched six F-15C fighters to Incirlik, part of a planned deployment of 12. The fighters, designed for air-to-air combat, are intended to reassure Ankara in the face of incursions by Russian aircraft aiding the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
“Under four years of single-party rule by the AKP, Turkey could drift further from the European Union and NATO, strengthening the rise of illiberalism and authoritarianism within the transatlantic alliance,” said Aykan Erdemir, a former member of Turkey’s parliament from the center-left Republican People’s Party who’s now a senior fellow at FDD.
