41 - The Wages of Expediency: Turkey and Russia
First, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – a Putin-like compatriot -- exposes Saudi Arabia’s assassination of Saudi journalist and critic Jamal Khashoggi inside its own consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Erdogan very cleverly had his security services place cameras and recording instruments inside the consulate well before Khashoggi was lured there to finalize documents necessary to marry Hatice Cengiz, his Turkish fiancée. She waited outside the consulate building.
Second, Erdogan lets what happen to Khashoggi leak out day after day, keeping the dastardly dismembering in the public eye. (Khashoggi’s body, or even parts thereof, has never been located.) The Saudis used a special saw to cut his bones. And carried sacks out of the consulate, all captured by Turkish cameras.
Third, Erdogan blamed Khashoggi’s disappearance on orders given by Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi Arabian reigning king’s favorite and powerful son, Mohammed bin Salman is the heir apparent to the Saudi throne -- whenever his 86 year old father dies.
Fourth, Erdogan puts a number of Saudis on trial, in absentia.
Erdogan, having carefully and presumably appropriately shaped world opinion regarding the assassination, shares some or all of his intelligence with U. S. agencies. Despite Trump’s liking for despots and heavy handed rulers like King Salman and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s affinity for Prince bin Salman (the latter has just invested $2 billion in a venture capital fund that Kushner created this year), the US intelligence community also let it be known that Prince bin Salman likely ordered the elimination of Khashoggi for writing Washington Post columns critical of Saudi Arabia’s policies and of Prince bin Salman’s many misdeeds.
Because of Erdogan’s refusal to take the advice of bankers, including a son-in-law, and of economists inside and outside Turkey, the Turkish lira has now depreciated since 2020 by 51 percent or more. Inflation, again a result of Erdogan’s unwillingness to tighten the national economic screws, is running at 43 percent per annum. The onset of Covid-19 hit Turkey hard, too, and many of its export markets were shuttered. Battles for control of Syria against Kurds and Russian-backed Syrians also sapped the Turkish economy.
Erdogan, authoritarian that he is, has driven Turkish entrepreneurial talent away because of his madcap micromanagement of the nation’s economic prospects. Additionally, because of an attempted military coup in 2016, Erdogan either believes genuinely in conspiracy theories or is using both paranoia and the ghost of the coup to pursue Turks who oppose his leadership. Critics are labled “Gulenists,” after Fethullah Gulen, an Islamist preacher who lives in Pennsylvania and certainly opposes Erdogan and may have done much more than just wish the despot gone.
Erdogan has managed to keep tight control over Turkey in recent years without elevating his country’s economic growth. (There are 86 million Turks, GDP per capita was just under $10,000 in 2021.) But it is the economic decay, massive inflation, and almost worthless lira that has now turned Erdogan to expediency. The war in Ukraine hardly helps because both warring nations are customers, and also suppliers of wheat, barley, and natural gas.
Fifth, since Turkey holds an election next year and Erdogan’s position, power, and wealth are all in jeopardy, Erdogan realized this year that he had to do something to try to restore Turkey’s economic health. He needed investors.
So, sixth, last month Erdogan agreed to end the Turkish trial of Khashoggi’s killers.
And, seventh, he took himself, hat in hand, to Jeddah to beg for investments from the wealthy kingdom that had slaughtered Khashoggi. There are times to replenish and strengthen “brotherly ties,” he said.
Doubtless, Erdogan argues that there are times to stick with principle, and times to be expedient. Certainly, few can fault Erdogan for humbling himself before money. But must principles always be cast aside? Should what the Saudis did to Khashoggi be a heinous act now excused for cash?
Erdogan tried earlier to mediate between Putin and President Volodymyr Zelensky, but failed. He also sold drones to Ukraine. But now that he has bowed before the wealth of Saudia Arabia, his legitimacy must suffer, as well as his attempt to retain the electoral support of his far-flung Euro-Asian nation.
We can contrast Erdogan’s expediency with that of Zelensky and innumerable Ukrainians fighting in trenches or refusing to surrender in Mariupol and elsewhere. We can salute, too, the Ukrainian women who are renouncing their usual pursuits, and safety away from combat, to train as bomb de-miners—hardly an expedient, safe, occupation amid a deadly war.
We might also want to commiserate with a once extremely wealthy Russian oligarch who criticized Putin last week and promptly lost control of billions of dollars worth of shares in a bank he created. His life is now in danger for decrying Putin’s warmongering. He has hired bodyguards. But he ought to employ a food taster as well.
On April 19, Oleg Y. Tinkov called the invasion of Ukraine “crazy.” “I am not prepared to associate my brand and my name with a country that attacks its neighbors without any reason at all.” He told the New York Times that “members of the elite” were “in shock” about the war and had called him to express support. Tinkov obviously was no longer comfortable being as expedient as he had had to be to make a fortune in Putin’s Russia. Breaking with Putin has now cost him immense wealth, and any chance to make more – or even to remain in Russia.
Expediency is a comfortable default. It works -- until it doesn’t. Eventually, expediency becomes too costly -- at least for a few politicians, national leaders, toadying businessmen, and – conceivably in time – for wealthy television commentators. But it is among the curses of our angry age.