Turkey.

When I served in Turkey, decades ago, the Turkish government was dominated by the Turkish military and Turkey was a very reliable member of NATO.  The United States had several important military bases in Turkey and most of the Turkish military leadership had received extensive training in America.  We regarded Turkey as a reliable anti-Soviet anchor at the southern corner of NATO.  Pretty much all of that has changed.  Today, Erdogan has successfully purged the military out of all civil leadership, subordinated the Turkish military to his control, and has fundamentally changed Ankara’s relationship with Moscow, moving it from one of animosity to one of friendship.  I believe that Erdogan and Putin have a close personal relationship stemming from Putin’s having warned Erdogan of the military effort to arrest him years ago.  (Putin’s telephone call probably saved Erdogan’s life and Obama didn’t call.)  As this change progressed over the years, our own relationship with Turkey continued to deteriorate.

Erdogan correctly sees Turkey as a crossroads connecting Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, modernity and tradition.  He aspires to be a peacemaker, but few of the regional players agree with the parameters of his peace plans.  His regional critics see his machinations as being an effort to re-establish the Ottoman Empire.  He is able to craft a succession of political initiatives designed to deal with specific political issues, but he is unable to achieve any lasting solutions to any of the regional issues that plague the region.  He is bent on reversing the Europeanization of Turkey that the Ataturk Revolution initiated and he is succeeding at the same time that Europe is tiring of Turkish involvement in Europe - domestically and internationally. 

 

We tend to focus on Turkey in connection with whatever Middle Eastern political situation has our attention at the moment and we lose sight of the long term deleterious change that is taking place in our relationship.  Were I sufficiently influential, I would establish a goal of changing our relationship with Turkey to take advantage of its geopolitical position at the intellectual cross roads of Islam and Christianity.  This kind of thinking is what we will need when and if we ever attempt to deal with the challenge of Radical Islam.  Our blindness to this kind of thinking ensures that we will go to war instead, and that is way too bad, because it will eventually be nuclear war.