The Rise of Turkey

By BJ Bjornson

An interesting article about one of the other unintended consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq; the coming out of Turkey from behind America�s shadow and its rise as major player in the Middle East and beyond.

Turkey is extending its influence by diplomacy rather than force. It is also forging economic ties with its neighbors, and has offered to mediate in several persistent regional conflicts. It has, however, not hesitated to use force to quell the guerrillas of the PKK, a rebel movement fighting for Kurdish independence.

But even here, Turkey is now using a softer approach. The rebels have been offered an amnesty and Turkey�s influential foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has this past week paid a visit � the first of its kind � to the Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq. There is even talk of Turkey opening a consulate in Erbil.

In recent years, Turkey�s diplomacy has scored many successes, winning great popularity in the Arab world and strengthening Turkey�s hand in its bid to join the European Union. Some people would go so far as to argue that there is no future for Turkey without the E.U., and no future for the E.U. without Turkey.

The last about the E.U. seems a bit overblown to me, but the rest appears to be on target.

Riffing off of the article, Chuck Spinney notes that the Turkish revival goes far beyond what is in the article.

But there is more. Not mentioned are Turkey's bilateral overtures to Russia, Georgia, the Ukraine, and the various Turkic countries in great swath of Central Asia (including the Uighurs in NW China), as well as a bewildering variety of multilateral environmental and economic initiatives in the Black Sea region (involving Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Greece, and Turkey). On a personal level, when talking to individual Turks, I have sensed occasionally some faint echoes of a revival of the kinship links which once connected the cosmopolitan inhabitants around the Black Sea littoral (Turks marrying Ukranians and Russians, Turkish Tatars reconnecting with distant relatives in the Crimea or Kuban, Turkish Las east of Trabzon connecting to Georgians, etc.)

Much of this dynamism is definitely due to the proactive leadership of Prime Minister Edogan and Foreign Minister Davutoglu in the sense described by Seale, but part of the impetus, I think, also comes from Turkey being sucked willy-nilly into the power vacuum that arose suddenly with collapse of the Soviet Union, and then was deepened more recently by the escalation of US bungling in the Middle East and Central Asia (especially wrt Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan,and Syria). The interplay of chance and necessity is now shaping unfolding events in an unpredictable way.

There is one area where Turkey�s new-found development on the international front has a large number of people concerned, the cooling of its relationship with Israel.

From the Arab point of view, the most dramatic development has undoubtedly been the cooling of Turkey�s relations with Israel. The relationship has been damaged by the outrage felt by many Turks at Israel�s cruel oppression of the Palestinians, which reached its peak with the Gaza War.

Even before the assault on Gaza, Prime Minister Erdogan � a strong supporter of the Palestine cause � did not hesitate to describe some of Israel�s brutal actions as �state terrorism.� A total breach between the two countries is unlikely, but relations are unlikely to recover their earlier warmth so long as Israel�s hard-line prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, remain in power.

And from Spinney:

One this is clear, however: The Neocon dream of Turko-Israeli regional military-economic cooperation sphere is now in tatters. How Israel adapts to these changes and how Israel attempts to use its pernicious lobbying influence in the US to shape our response to these changes is likely to be one the great strategic headaches for President Obama and his successors for the foreseeable future.

Given the spin present in a recent column at the Jerusalem Post, where Caroline Glick used Turkey�s refusal to allow Bush to use their territory to invade Iraq, and their recent overtures to Syria as proof that the country is lost to the West and has entered Iran�s sphere of influence (a ridiculous point, as Steven Taylor demonstrates), one guesses that Spinney is right to be concerned.

In many ways, I think this sort of realignment was an inevitable byproduct of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Without opposition to that great power to convince the Western powers to subsume their individual interests into a greater common (and nominally American) approach to the world, it was only a matter of time before the individual interests of each nation started to reassert themselves.

For a time after the Soviet Union collapsed, things did carry on much as they had before thanks to both inertia and the diplomatic chops of the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations, but the Bush administration managed to accelerate the disintegration process by making demands on their traditional allies that clearly didn�t serve any common purpose and was, particularly in the case of Turkey, detrimental to those countries own interests.

The real question going forward is whether or not the U.S. and Israel deal with this realignment intelligently or instead take the belligerent route, screaming of betrayal when allies disagree, and wind up accelerating their isolation from the rest of the world.