Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Sunday it was “out of the question” for Turkey to oppose security measures the North Atlantic Treaty Organization considers necessary, apparently ruling out any move to block a missile shield the U.S. is proposing for the military alliance.
Mr. Davutoglu laid out three principles on which he said NATO member Turkey would base its approach to the missile shield. But in the Turkish government’s most detailed comments to date on the proposal, he gave no indication of whether Ankara would agree to host the system’s radar sensors.
“NATO can develop defense systems by taking into consideration security risks,” and Turkey’s opposition to such NATO measures “is out of the question,” Mr. Davutoglu told reporters while in Shanghai on a trip to China, according to Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish state news agency.
Leaders of the 28 NATO member states, including Turkey, are expected to decide at a summit in Portugal on Nov. 19 whether the organization should build the shield. Because all NATO decisions are made by consensus, any alliance member could veto the missile shield plan.
Mr. Davutoglu’s remaining principles, however, appeared to amount to conditions that Turkey wants to set for the plan. “NATO is obliged to take into account the security of all allied countries. Accordingly, a system excluding some parts of Turkey is unacceptable,” he said, according to Anadolu, confirming that Turkey is demanding the shield cover the entire country. Diplomats say Turkey is the preferred, but not the only, choice to locate the missile shield’s radar sensors, because of its border with Iran.
The third and final principle, Mr. Davutoglu said, was that Turkey wouldn’t allow itself to become a frontline state for NATO, as it was during the Cold War. “We do not have a perception of threat in our adjacent areas, including Iran, Russia, Syria and the other adjacent countries,” Anadolu quoted him as saying. “NATO should exclude any formula that confronts Turkey with a group of countries in its threat definitions and planning. … We do not want a Cold War zone or psychology around us.”
The planned missile shield has put Turkey’s government in a tough position, according to diplomats and analysts. If Ankara were to refuse to take part in the shield, or block it, Turkey would risk angering the U.S. and NATO allies, these people say. If it joins the shield, however, the government risks angering Iran, a neighbor and major energy supplier.
A White House fact sheet outlining the U.S. administration’s missile-defense-shield plan specifically names Iran as the threat the proposed shield is designed to counter. Diplomats familiar with talks between Ankara and Washington over the planned shield say Turkey is asking that any document produced at the NATO summit not mention Iran. Turkey also is concerned that the shield doesn’t damage its relations with Moscow—which opposed a previous version of the plan put forward by the administration of former U.S. President George W. Bush—these people say.
Turkey has sought to position itself as a neutral party in the U.S.-led effort to pressure Iran into abandoning its nuclear-fuel program, which the major powers suspect is designed to develop nuclear weapons. Iran says the program, which is legal but remained hidden for nearly two decades before it was exposed and confirmed by international inspectors in 2003, is designed purely to make fuel for civilian reactors.
But the shield has come as a test for Mr. Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbors” foreign policy. That policy is predicated on the idea that Turkey—which for decades had either closed borders or hostile or cold relations with all its neighbors—now faces no such hostility, and should instead open up its borders as widely as possible for trade and travel.
Turkey’s decision, along with Brazil, to vote against a new round of sanctions on Iran at the United Nations Security Council in June was poorly received in Washington. Some policy makers already had begun to ask whether Turkey was turning away from the West under the ruling Justice and Development, or AK, party, which as its roots in political Islam. The Turkish Security Council “no” vote against a U.S. foreign-policy priority added to those concerns.
Mr. Davutoglu and other Turkish leaders have fiercely denied any such shift, saying that their country’s top foreign-policy priority remains joining the European Union, and that they are merely pursuing their country’s national interests in a way any nation in its geographical location would do.
The NATO missile-defense shield has triggered a lively debate in Turkey’s media, however. Religious-conservative newspapers and commentators oppose the plan, describing it as a “trap” set by the U.S. to reverse Turkey’s improvement in relations with countries such as Iran and Syria. They also have speculated that the true purpose of the shield is to protect Israel, rather than Europe, Turkey or the U.S. More-secular media and commentators, meanwhile, have warned that refusing to take part in the shield could isolate Turkey within NATO, undermining its most important security relationships.
Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com
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