Let’s talk Turkey

The emergence of a deep Turco-Israeli partnership under Turgat Özal, extending from serious military cooperation to a rich vein of cultural and economic exchange, was one of the more hopeful developments in the strategic landscape. Because of its enduring “Sèvres paranoia,” the fear that powerful external actors (the leading European states, in the main) had designs on the Anatolian heartland, Turkey was reluctant to really engage with potential allies, with the United States (friendlier and further away than the covetous Reds) as an exception. The paranoia fed Turkish authoritarianism. The secular elite particularly resented European condemnations of the Kemalist dirty war against Kurdish separatists—yet another attempt, in the historical imagination of said elite, to split the country. Israel, as a “pariah state” in the same region, didn’t have the same baggage; having endured abusive language and worse in its struggle to survive, the Israelis had a certain baseline sympathy for the Turks. And for a while, they worked hand in glove, with friends of Israel in the US (AIPAC in particular) lobbying hard for Turkish interests, e.g., in acquiring sophisticated military hardware. Advanced materiel that was not forthcoming from the West, generally on grounds of human rights abuses, could be provided by Israel’s advanced defense industry, and the same is more broadly true of investment capital and technical expertise. Both states had an interest in containing hostile Arab states, with Syria at the top of the list (strangely, Syria continues to hold irredentist designs on a patch of Turkey, just the thing to get the Sèvres juices flowing). But according to Michael Rubin (one of my favorites—an amazingly erudite cat, but with a disappointing recent penchant for echoing views I find unpersuasive) in National Review Online, that relationship is drawing to a close. The culprit is Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the golden boy we’ve all learned to love because he’s able to reconcile a soft Islamist politics with a pro-Western orientation. “The West,” alas, is a many-splendored thing, and a many-tentacled-many-splendored thing at that, with the European division, exactly the one that Erdogan has every incentive (money, mon-, mon-, mo-ney, money) to cozy up to, having a visceral distrust of Israeli motives. Rubin sees this as part of a broader repositioning (rebranding?), a post-Kemalist “neo-Ottomanism” in which Turkey with bolster ties with the Islamic world, including a dramatic (and paralleledly lucrative) softening towards the Iranian mullahs, the world’s number-one bad guys. [UPDATE: Uh, let's say "top five."] I hope Rubin’s rendering is “clearer than the truth” and that Erdogan isn’t heading down a dark, dangerous path, but he’s laid out a convincing case. My strong inclination is to root for Erdogan. We need a “soft Islamism,” comfortable with liberal values and serious about interethnic tolerance, to combat the hard-edged, venomous variety, just as the social-democratic parties of the Second International were the most dogged, determined enemies of Bolshevism during the last great war of ideas (and bullets). Erdogan has characterized his politics as a Muslim version of Christian Democracy, and that sounds like the right medicine. He’s demonstrated a clear-eyed commitment to democracy, and eliminating the last vestiges of military authoritarianism. That’s good news. And yet one wonders, is it unambiguously good news? Well, yes, but as Christopher Caldwell (I would tattoo his Weekly Standard caricature on my forehead if I had time for the pain, but, as a wise man once said, “I ain’t got time to bleed”) pointed out in a typically insightful piece, Erdogan’s moves to democratize the country, pursued with vigor as part of his government’s quest for inclusion in “Europe,” is making the country less secular in a weighty, consequential way that’s likely to be directional, i.e., once you start moving, it’ll be hard to go back. As Drezner always says, “read the whole thing.” P.S.- I understand that Caldwell was in this obscure, and awesome, club called the Signet Society around ’83-84’, and that the same is true of the great Andrew Sullivan. Sounds like a gathering of brainpower eighty times as excellent as Thomas Jefferson dining with a throbbing megabrain encased in a large glass dome. Suffice to say, the membership’s illustriousness and general excellence precipitously declined by the turn of the century when they admitted thick-headed South Asian men with aliases including “Hash Brown,” “Phlapjaxx,” and “Sausage Linx.”