In his visit to the United States Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was received with top honors by the Obama administration; this shows that the United States takes very seriously its strategic relationship with Turkey. The main agenda for Prime Minister Erdogan’s visit was to seek reinforcement from the Obama administration for NATO’s intervention in Syria to prevent a political solution to the Syrian crisis. Erdogan thought the crisis in Syria would be like the one in Libya. In his view with the intervention of NATO, the Assad regime will be gone; however, the international community admits that the situation in Syria is more complex than Libya was and that the overthrow of Assad will not be easy. The US and Russia have worked to implement their agreed plan in Syria calling other countries into a joint meeting to discuss the Syrian crisis. At the joint press conference on May 16th, the White House reaffirmed their shared agreement that Syrian President Bashar Assad must go. But how he should go is unspoken.
The relationship between the United States and Turkey has often been misleadingly described as strategic and unique in that Turkey is perceived as its only close ally in the Middle East. It is true that since Obama took office, the relationship between Turkey and the United States is the best that it has been for a long time. Because of strong new lobbyists from the Turkish Muslim Missionaries group, called the Gülen Movement, the US has endorsed this nationalistic ideology as a new brand of Islam in the Islamic world. President Obama thinks that the more he has the Turkish strength behind him in dealing with the Middle East, the easier his foreign policy will be. He thinks America will benefit from that possibility of the hegemonic leadership of Turkey in the region, but he does not realize that Turkey will pose the greatest challenge to American national interests in the region as it seeks to fill the power vacuum left by the secular governments there. It is a fact that Turkish foreign minister Davutoglu is one of Gülen’s followers, and his policy was to get rid of a major powerful alliance in their backyard– Israel and the US.
Turkeys’ foreign minister argued that Turkey will never discuss Syria’s future with Israel, because Turkey is the main actor in the Middle East and will not let Israel meddle in any Muslim countries’ affairs. Syria is a problem of our Muslim world in the Middle East, and it is our brothers’ problem that they would like to solve without any majors powers’ being involved. Thus, it can claim that Turkey is the main actor in the region, but why then when they need help, do they knock at the US’s door?
Turkey is moving steadily to exploit the void in regional leadership and spread its new brand of Islam with the help of the US. Turkey is ready to do anything to escalate the crisis, even if it kills its owns citizens to realize its hegemonic power in the region. Ankara is trying to start a sectarian war in the Middle East by supporting the Sunni religious group over the Shia group. Ankara is not happy with the majority’s Shia rule in Iraq and is, therefore, directly confronting Iraq. For a long time Turkey has not wanted the Kurds in Iraq to have independence, but now Turkey wants the Kurdish Regional Government to have its independence from Iraq and is even encouraging the PKK, the Kurdish rebels, to enter the KRG and cause a war between the Kurds and the Iraqis.
Turkey is overtly supporting the Syrian rebels and wants to end the Assad regime as soon as possible, so that Turkey can replace him with someone who is pro-Turkish national interests in Syria, and then Turkey would have more influence on the Syria government in a post-Assad regime. The Arab Spring has shifted the balance of power in the region. Turkey wants to be on the right side in the Arab Spring and turn the rejuvenation to its advantage. Ankara probably knows that if it resisted, the antagonistic forces might hunt Turkey as well, so Turkey has turned its relations with its neighbors from a “zero problem” policy to a policy of creating problems with its neighbors, such as Iran and Syria. Therefore, Turkey’s jockeying is not called a value-based foreign policy, as it touts. Instead, if Turkey did not ally itself with the United States, it could not avoid a Kurdish and Turkish Spring.
History repeats itself. I am not sure if the Americans have forgotten when the Turkish government refused to let the US use its territory to move troops to remove Saddam Hussein, but if we compare Saddam and Assad in terms of human rights violations, Saddam was worse than Assad, and the international community already knew that Saddam had used chemical weapons against the Kurdish people in 1988, and killed more than 100 thousands Kurds, even 5000 in one day at Halabjah. What happened to Turkey’s values-based policy? Because of this principled policy that values the union of the Muslims in the past, Erodgan was the hero in the Arab streets and the Middle East. Thus, Turkey only cares about its image, but did not care about more than thousands of Kurds who were gased by Saddam Hussein.
Today Turkey is lying to America hoping that the US will take military action against Syria to impose a “no fly zone” in Syria. Back in 2003, when the Bush administration asked Turkey to help by letting America use its air base, Turkey did not trust America nor did it see Saddam as a threat. Now Turkey is asking America to get dragged into the war in Syria that is a threat to Turkish national interests, not to American national interests.
Turkey has long harbored ambitions to be the region’s most powerful and leading country. But the influence of Iran and the Kurdish issues have complicated Turkey’s endeavors to become a hegemonic power. That’s why recently Turkey made peace with the Kurdish rebels to make sure they would not unite with the Kurds in Syria, and so that Syrian Kurds will not have the same autonomous territory as in Iraq.
I do not believe Turkey is a US ally in the region, but instead I believe Turkey is a strategic competitor to the US’s national interest. While it may not be at present, in the future Turkey will be the biggest competitor with the US national policies. If anything happens to Turkey or to the Middle East, people will assume that either America or Israel did it. If a pollster were to conduct a survey in Turkey to see what percentage of Turks have a favorable view of the US, I would be surprised if the results showed more than 15 percent do. The reason the Prime Minister was the hero on the Arab streets before the Syrian crisis began was because of his hostility toward Israel and because he did not let the US government use its territory to attack Saddam Hussein If today Erdogan’s ratings have fallen in the Arab Spring, it is because Erdogan took the side of the US. The United States underestimated the growing Gulenist missionary group’s influence in Turkish politics and society and the danger that they pose because they want to become the principle leader in the region and replace the other secular regimes with ones resembling their own. We have seen that Turkey tried to bully Israel into a position where Turkey would look good to the Arab Muslims. If Turkey is willing to work with Hamas, and Hamas does not recognize the state of Israel but considers it a terrorist organization, that alliance says a lot about who they are. President Obama and his advisors should ask themselves, since the AKP party came to power in Turkey more than ten years ago, what policies strategically promoted American interests? If someone is an enemy of your good friends and also a friend of anti-Americans, is that the basis for a strategic alliance? The United States should prepare for the day when Turkey will become the main obstacle to promoting American national interests in the Middle East and even in Central Asia.
Dr. Aland Mizell is with the University of Mindanao School of Social Science, President of the MCI and a regular contributor to The Kurdistan Tribune, Kurdishaspect.com, Mindanao Times and Kurdish Media.You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com.