By Eric Mandel, JPost—
Turkish antagonism to America, Israel, and the EU, and the Islamization of this once proudly secular nation must be seen in historical context. Relations between the US and Turkey today are, as they have been over the last 70 years, primarily based on shared national security interests, which often shift and have been unpredictable.
Modern American Turkish relations began at the dawn of the Cold War with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 guaranteeing the security of Turkey and Greece. Turkey remained a linchpin of American military strategy in the Middle East through the Cold War, a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. But times have changed in the 21st century with the ascendancy of the neo-Ottoman authoritarian strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
In light of the most recent Turkish election, Congress, American security experts, Turkey’s neighbors, and Israel must now ask if the newly empowered authoritarian Erdogan has irreversibly transformed Turkey into an anti-western, anti-Semitic, malevolent state that is to be no less radical than the Iranian Islamic republic, where we have learned that no amount of accommodation can temper their nationalistic expansionist Islamist vision.
Unlike Iran, where it is reputed that the Iranian population, especially it’s urban middle class, leans toward the West, and would welcome the chance to be freed of the repressive Mullahs, a recent PEW survey of Turkish citizens revealed that an astounding 79% of the populace harbor a negative view of America, no doubt fostered by years of anti-American propaganda.
Many pro-Western Turks have left or worse, have been fired from their jobs, imprisoned, or tortured in the aftermath of the 2016 failed coup. Erdogan’s monopoly on power has been consolidated since that time, tightening his control over the military, judiciary, academia, business, and media. Turkey has the infamous distinction of imprisoning more journalists than any nation in the world.
America, for strategic reasons, gets into bed with many unsavory nations, but few states may threaten our safety net more than Turkey, since it is intertwined in our security through NATO. Turkey has the second largest military in NATO, houses a vital US air base in Incirlik, and is located in an absolutely critical position in the Middle East next to Syria, Iraq, Russia, and the Black Sea.
In the coming decades, is Turkey to be friend or foe? Turkey believes the US cannot live without its Incirlik airbase, and that we need Turkey as the eastern flank of NATO. So Erdogan calculates that he can take liberties against American interests in the region, while advancing his own distasteful agenda – undermining the Kurds in Iraq and Syria who have been loyal American allies, supporting Hamas, which is designated a terrorist enemy by the US State Department, and its parent the Muslim Brotherhood, and working with American nemesis Iran, which is making every effort to destabilize the region. Continue Reading…
