Metin Gurcan of AL-Monitor details the dance of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now that his supine ally Donald Trump has been decisively rejected by the American electorate:
In a TV interview June 1, Erdogan conceded that his dialogue with Biden “has not been easy” thus far, unlike his “very peaceful and easy-going” phone diplomacy with Trump. Referring also to the terms of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, he said he “had never experienced such tension” with the White House, putting the blame on Biden for recognizing the Ottoman-era killings of Armenians as genocide.
Nevertheless, the row over the S-400s remains the most pressing, with Ankara still scrambling to find a solution that would satisfy Washington. It has floated several options, including the so-called Crete model – a reference to the Greek Cypriots’ controversial purchase of S-300 missiles from Russia in the 1990s, which ended up in storage on Greece’s island of Crete.
There are signs that Erdogan might propose a new formula to Biden — to deploy the S-400s under US control at the Incirlik air base in southern Turkey, without any Russian involvement in their operation and maintenance. Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu stressed this week that Ankara would have “100% control” over the systems and no Russian military experts would be present in Turkey.
Ankara’s approach to the issue continues to strike many as superficial. With all that chatter on how Turkey would be the only one pressing the on-and-off button, Ankara has sounded as if it is a vacuum cleaner at stake and not a sophisticated missile system and, no wonder, failed to convince Washington.
I remain fascinated with the backsliding Turkey, which had achieved secular nationhood in the early 20th century, only to return to autocracy in the Islamist Erdogan. He appears to be a fixture in Turkey now, and Turkey is suffering for it – I have not commented on it, as I’m no expert on Turkish affairs, but I cannot help but notice the parallels between autocracies, including the foul-ups attributable to leaders with more ambition that competency – and who think they’ve been touched by the Divine.
And what of the future?
Mehmet Kocak, a columnist for the pro-government Islamist daily Yeni Akit, for instance, argues that bilateral ties are doomed to deteriorate further, recalling that Biden, in an interview before his election, advocated support for Turkey’s opposition to defeat Erdogan. Despite those remarks, “President Erdogan congratulated Joe Biden on his election and offered to open a new chapter in bilateral ties, but that, too, has remained unreciprocated,” he writes. According to such isolationist Islamists, any dialogue with Washington would be futile.
Biden’s clear-eyed view of the importance of democracy will leave Turkey in the cold so long as the leaders of America emerge from Biden’s camp – unless the citizens of Turkey kick out the Islamists who hated Mustafa Kemal for nearly a century. I don’t see that happening, as the Islamist’s advantage over the advocates of a secular government – namely, “In Allah’s name!” – seem insurmountable until those uttering that phrase are shown to be irredeemably corrupt.
That won’t be happening. Kemal only successfully instituted secular power because the Islamic Ottomans, who ruled Turkey until then, had failed utterly in World War I. A disaster of comparable proportions would be necessary in Turkey today to convince the populace of mistake of permitting the religious to institute religious governmental power.
