138 - Turkey is the Big Problem: Enabling Putin
Turkey (or Türkiye, its new official spelling) is not doing what it could to end Putin’s war in Ukraine. It is allowing Putin to employ the Turkish banking system to evade the West’s financial sanctions. It purchases Russian natural gas. It actively abets Putin’s sourcing of war materiel and embargoed commodity purchases and facilitates their easy transfer by road through Georgia. It welcomes Russian airline landings. It allows massive yachts owned by Putin-friendly oligarchs to dock and tarry for long periods along its Mediterranean littoral. Fortunately, Washington now has significant leverage. Ankara wants our updated F-16 fighter aircraft to upgrade its capabilities.
For an original NATO member to hinder if not cripple the West’s effort to make Putin pay a lasting financial penalty for invading Ukraine is both a disgrace and a major impediment to Ukraine’s successful sovereign defense. Disgraceful, too, is Turkey’s endless refusal to admit Sweden and Finland into NATO, largely because both countries are historically friendly to the Kurds and the idea of Kurdish autonomy. Sweden’s current right-wing government has buckled to several Turkish demands regarding the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden but, so far, has refused to repatriate Kurdish dissidents wanted in Ankara.
Attacking Kurds
Turkey relentlessly attacks its Kurdish minority, bombs supposed Kurdish insurgent bases across the border in Iraq, seriously interferes with allies in Syria upon whom the U. S. depends – the Kurdish forces of the Kurdish People’s Liberation Army – and generally obstructs the Pentagon’s attempt to carve out a sustainable arc of freedom in northeastern Syria to suppress what is left there of the Islamic State and its army. Of Turkey’s 85 million people, 15 million are Kurds living mostly in eastern Turkey separated by international borders from Kurdish inhabitants of Syria and Iraq. Kurds also live in northern Iran.
In so many ways, Turkey’s problem is its newly honed authoritarian character under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. No longer more than nominally democratic, Turkey has mostly curtailed free speech and its press (locking up dozens of journalists in 2022 alone); arresting the mayor of Istanbul, a key opponent, and barring him from elective office; and harrying Kurds throughout the republic. Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Index rates Turkey as “Not Free,” and Reporters without Borders ranks Turkey 149 of 180 countries on its press freedom scale.
Within the confines of Turkey, Erdogan’s government has peremptorily removed a slew of elected Kurdish mayors from cities in the eastern reaches of the country, denying the mostly Kurdish inhabitants of that region their own local leaders. The head of the nation’s biggest Kurdish political party (the People’s Democratic Party -- PDP) was jailed in 2016; his party has been barred from spending its own funds to campaign. Its members in parliament may shortly be expelled, and their party banned, on the eve of the national election in June.
June’s Election
Turks will vote then for parliament’s members and for president. If the vote is free and fair, and if the press were free, Erdogan would have little chance of emerging victorious. But voters may have no one other than Erdogan for whom to vote
In 2015, the PDP was the first Kurdish party to win more than 10 percent of the parliamentary poll – enough to overcome the barrier that had kept Kurdish parties from gaining legislative seats before. To do so, the PDP was able to reach beyond its ethnic base to gain votes from ethnic Turks, presumably liberal-minded ones. That the PDP did so erased Erdogan’s political party’s ability to rule alone, infuriating him.
Erdogan has always tried to undermine the PDP by accusing it of being an illicit front for the long-banned Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK). The state prosecutor is now trying PDP’s members as supporters of the terroristic PKK.
NATO can no longer rely on Turkey, its largest constituent army (260,000) after the U. S. (485,000). Indeed, Turkey under Erdogan is determined to hew to a singular course that magnifies Erdogan’s Putin-like pretensions and makes pleasing his (and Turkey’s) whims the central object of what in better times would have been a policy set by a consensus of NATO’s members. Instead, Erdogan is maneuvering primarily in his own, and secondarily in Turkey’s, interest.
Financial Disaster
Economically and financially, Turkey has fallen on very hard times. Erdogan’s effective takeover of the nation’s once independent reserve bank and his dictating of mad policies regarding interest rates has plunged Turkey deeply into recession, with stratospheric inflation rates and a massive devaluation of the lira. Against the dollar, Turkey’s currency has depreciated by 150 percent since 2020, from 7 lira to 1 dollar to 19 lira to 1 dollar.
Admittedly, Turkey has helped to facilitate some Ukrainian grain shipments and brokered their inspection (supposedly satisfying Russia) near Istanbul. Turkey has supplied (slow-moving) drones to Ukraine (as well as Ethiopia and other war-torn countries), and has helped Ukraine in that particular to defend itself against the Russians.
Erdogan wants to have it both ways, maintaining a formidable international role as someone who can talk to Putin, just as, simultaneously, he assists Ukraine while also facilitating Russian commerce.
US Fighter Jets
Now Erdogan wants 40 new F-16 fighter jets and 79 upgrade kits for the rest of his air force. Whereas Erdogan has hitherto frequently rebuffed Biden administration entreaties, Washington should now be able to trade those hardware requests for greater assistance in pushing Putin’s legions out of Ukraine. The Biden administration could trade some jets for closing the vital trucking road through Georgia, for ending Aeroflot landing rights in Istanbul and Ankara, and for closing sanctions’ escape routes.
Given Turkey’s terrible human rights’ record, Democrat Senator Robert Menendez (NJ) and other legislators are against sending Turkey any aircraft until Erdogan stops harassing Kurds and others – very unlikely before the election. The Senate’s opposition to arms transfers to Turkey may thus give the Biden administration even more leverage than it has had as Turkey’s NATO partner and presumed ally. Additionally, Erdogan wants to be admired and praised by the West, accolades that he is not going to receive from Congress.
A Biden Initiative
President Biden may be clever enough to stroke Erdogan’s vanity sufficiently to gain some assistance against Putin – even though the probability of doing so is very low. Nevertheless, let us hope that Washington can somehow gain some measure of cooperation from Erdogan over Ukraine in exchange for some praise and a few aircraft. Putin’s war machine depends in good measure on Erdogan’s willingness to look away. Washington must now make him peer more closely at meaningful alternatives.