Opinion

An Increasingly Islamist Turkey Will Not Help Obama Combat ISIS, Or Anything Else

Robert G. Kaufman Professor of Public Policy, Pepperdine University
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Add an increasingly hostile Turkey to the list of the Obama administration’s serial failures in the Middle East. Turkey continues to prevaricate about whether to allow the United States to use it bases in the fight against the Islamic State (ISIS). Turkish President Recip Tayyip Ergodan had demanded that toppling the government of President Bashir al-Assad trump the Obama administration’s priority of defeating ISIS.

The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has threatened to resume its insurgency against Turkey because of Turkish inaction while ISIS lays siege to the Kurdish town of Kobani in Syria. Ergodan considers the PKK a danger equivalent to ISIS.

The current fractious state of Turkish-American relations is at the end of a long downward spiral that the Obama administration obtusely denies because of the president’s ideological blinders about the implications of Turkey’s Islamist trajectory. In 2012, with Fareed Zakaria, editor at large of Time magazine, Obama hailed Ergodan as one of the few international leaders with whom he “forged close personal bonds of trust.” Since becoming President, Obama has courted Turkey assiduously.

Yet President Obama’s rosy belief in the harmony of Turkish-American interests bears no resemblance to reality. Under Ergodan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey has become increasingly anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute rightly calls Ergodan’s Turkey “an Islamic Republic in all but name.” Ergodan has mounted a sustained assault against secularism in government, education, and in civil society. He has eviscerated the independence of the Turkish judiciary, curtailed freedom of the press, and demonized his secular political opposition. According to the annual report of the Committee of Journalists, Turkey incarcerates more journalists than any other country. The widely respected Freedom House has downgraded Turkey’s record of respecting civil liberties from three to four on a scale of one to seven because of the thousands held in detention without trial.

Correspondingly, Ergodan has reoriented Turkish foreign policy away from cooperation with the West toward a more assertive, neo-Ottoman meets Islamist direction – the wellspring of extravagant ambitions redolent Putin’s quest to reconstitute a Russian empire. Ergodan has sabotaged the Obama administration’s interminable efforts to achieve peace between democratic Israel and its neighbors, repudiating Turkey’s previous policy of maintaining cooperative relations with the Jewish state. Instead, Ergodan has courted the most radical virulently anti-American elements in the region.

As his anti-Semitic diatribes have multiplied and intensified, Ergodan has facilitated the rise of Islamist radical entities such as ISIS through an insidious combination of actively supporting the most radical factions of the Syrian rebels fighting Assad, only loosely enforcing security athwart the 900 mile Turkish-Syrian border, and woefully underestimating the malevolence of ISIS. Ergodan has belatedly acknowledged but done little concrete to combat the threat of ISIS despite the Obama administration’s entreaties.

Likewise, Ergodan championed the short lived, implactably anti-American, brutally repressive Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt under Mohamed Morsi, and decried the popularly supported military coup that supplanted it. Analyst Mohamed Abdel Kader of the Al Arabiya Institute for Studies calls Ergodan’s Turkey the regional hub for the Muslim Brotherhood’s international organization, including the Brotherhood’s Palestinian wing, the execrable Hamas in Gaza. In 2010, the Ergodan government conspired with Hamas to provoke Israel’s raid on the Gaza flotilla, running a blockade that even the virulently anti-Israeli UN deemed legal. In 2014, Ergodan equated Israel’s war in Gaza that Hamas initiated to the Holocaust.

Ergodan’s increasingly Islamist Turkey has become a more difficult problem not just for Israel, but for the United States. Although Turkish leaders have stated frequently that Turkey will not accept Iran possessing nuclear weapons, Turkish state banks and other Turkish enterprises have evaded and undermined the sanctions regime on Iran, with the complicity of the government. On October 12, 2012, David Ignatius reported in the Washington Post that Turkey disclosed the identity of 10 Iranians who had been meeting agents of the Mossad.

The Administration confirmed this Turkish betrayal of American interest, delivering a serious blow to our ability to monitor Iran’s clandestine nuclear program. Non-partisan  experts Blaise Miztal, Svante Cornell, and Halik Karaveli predict that no pro-American foreign policy reset in Turkey is likely now that Ergodan has become Turkey’s first popularly elected president in August 2014, extending his dominance of Turkish politics for at least another five years. As Daniel Pipes has observed, Ergodan’s choice of Amet Davutoglu to replace him as foreign minister bodes ill for Turkey and its foreign policy. Turkey will likely continue to gravitate away from the NATO alliance of democracies and toward flirting with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose leaders Russia and China envisage as a counterweight to NATO. Davutoglu’s enthusiasm for the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas will continue to antagonize more moderate Sunni regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, traditionally less hostile to the United States than Islamists. Bezel Ozkan, a Turkish political scientist and former student of Davutoglu finds the Islamist worldview revealed in more than 300 articles published during the 1990s especially troubling. Ozkan grimly concludes that Davutoglu is an “Islamist ideologue whose grandiose ambitions clash with reality and whose vision of Pan-Islamic lebensraum is underpinned more by power than by ethics.”

No wonder Turkey continues to subvert the U.S  fight against ISIS and American interests across the Middle East. As with the failure his reset toward Russia and his conciliation of China,  the president has ignored the insidious linkage between increasing repression at home and expansion abroad. The beginning of wisdom is to identify an Islamist Turkey as a foe rather than a friend of the United States.