DEBORCHGRAVE: Talking Turkey

Geopolitical tectonic plates began grinding menacingly five years ago when Turkey embarked on negotiations for membership in the European Union. But it didn’t take long for Ankara to conclude that the EU was playacting. There was little appetite for adding 70 million Turkish Muslims (80 million by the end of a projected 10-year negotiation) to EU’s 20 million Muslims (Pakistani Brits, North African French, Turkish Germans). Church attendance in Europe is in steep decline while thousands of mosques are filled to overflowing. It was time for Turkey to move on.

In 2003, Turkey already had demonstrated that its close alliance with the United States in particular and the NATO alliance in general could not be taken for granted. As the U.S. 4th Infantry Division was about to disembark in Turkey and transit to Iraq to be part of a pincer movement on Saddam Hussein’s regime, Ankara said no, and the pincer collapsed. Adding much expense and replanning, the 4th ID was rerouted around the Arabian Peninsula to Kuwait. Then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, in a preparatory conference with Turkish leaders, had misread the signals.

Turkish leaders, like many others around the world, had a hard time understanding the motives behind President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. Saddam, stripped of diplomatic gobbledygook, was the West’s best defense against the Iran of the mullahs. They had fought an eight-year war (1980-1988) to a Mexican standoff that had cost one million casualties on both sides.

In 1949, Turkey was the first Muslim country to recognize Israel. A close military alliance was part of the relationship. The Israeli air force could use Turkish airspace for training. It also was valuable space for an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.

But all that changed overnight. In short order, Israel and Turkey went from being close friends to antagonists heading for the brink of enmity. The detonator was the Israeli invasion of Gaza in January 2009, which killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis. The break in Turkish-Israeli relations came when Israeli commandos boarded a flotilla of Turkish vessels bound for Gaza with relief supplies. Israel branded the civilians aboard as activists in the Islamic group Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), on par with al Qaeda. But IHH is also a key supporter of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party.

Mr. Erdogan’s warm embrace of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Istanbul as “a dear friend” and his opposition to further sanctions against Iran (voted June 9 by the U.N. Security Council) mark Turkey’s new “BlackBerry diplomacy,” a break with conventional diplomacy – when major shifts take place in real time above the heads of foreign-policy officials and the diplomats with whom they normally deal.

Mr. Erdogan declines to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and he no longer sees Turkey’s role in NATO as a priority. And to make sure there was no possibility of the country’s military staging what might have been a fifth coup since 1960 to oust a civilian government, Mr. Erdogan ordered the arrest of 52 military commanders in February. Code-named Operation Sledgehammer, the purported plan was to blow up mosques and museums as a signal for the military to overthrow the Islamic-oriented government.

Government denials notwithstanding, prosecutors have jailed about 400 people, including soldiers, academics, politicians and journalists. This explains why no one is willing to criticize Mr. Erdogan for the record.

Ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, an army officer in World War I, abolished the Ottoman Empire’s caliphate in 1924, introduced the Roman alphabet to replace Arabic script, gave women the vote and permission to dress in Western clothes, and created modern Turkey, the military have considered themselves guardians of the secular state against Islamist encroachment.

The bottom line, as explained off the record by politicians, academics and journalists in Istanbul this week, is that Mr. Erdogan and his cronies have convinced themselves this will not be America’s century as was the 20th, that the geopolitical balance of forces is shifting east, and that it is Turkey’s role to assume a leadership position in the Middle East that would be designed to bridge the gap between Sunni and Shia Islam. (Turkey is 80 percent Sunni.)

Mr. Erdogan also believes he can persuade Iran to suspend its secret nuclear-weapons program just shy of making a bomb or missile warhead. Instead, Iran would follow the examples of Japan and Brazil, countries that have the wherewithal to produce such a weapon in six months.

Mr. Erdogan, like most world leaders, had high hopes for President Obama. But now they see he is unable to master a dysfunctional system of government; that he may lose one or even both houses of Congress in November; and that Afghanistan appears to be headed for another debacle comparable to Vietnam circa 1975 (when Congress stripped South Vietnam of military aid, in effect inviting North Vietnam to administer the coup de grace). Turkey still maintains 1,750 soldiers in Afghanistan, albeit in a noncombat role to train Afghan soldiers.

One cynical Turkish ex-foreign minister, speculating about the Afghan war, confided, “The way things are going, your Congress will have made Afghanistan secure for China to make a deal with a new Taliban regime to exploit the $3 trillion worth of minerals verified by U.S. intelligence.”

Turkish officials who see the global balance of power trending eastward also can see over the horizon a great Turkic nation that spans most of Central Asia. For them, this is a more exciting vista than a slow NATO retreat from Afghanistan. Or a European Union, where Turkey’s nemesis, Greece, the sick man of Europe, almost collapsed the painfully erected House of Europe.

Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor-at-large of The Washington Times and of United Press International.

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