What can the US learn from Turkey in the Middle East?

Tony Karon is currently a senior editor at Time magazine and an accomplished journalist who has been focusing on the Middle East for many years. I interviewed Karon about the so-called shift in Turkish foreign policy and how Turkey was portrayed in the US documents.

How do you think the political shifts in Turkey that you have mentioned in your own writings are portrayed in these documents that were released?

To begin with, I think that what we see in the WikiLeaks documents is a lot of what I call nostalgia — nostalgia for an era that is long past and gone. So you have President Hosni Mubarak suggesting to US diplomats that the United States might actually overthrow the current Iraqi government and restore a dictatorship because that is what the country needs.

You have the Israelis saying perhaps it might be better if Gen. Musharraf was back in power in Pakistan and also obviously expressing all this alarm about Turkey — that Turkey has gone over to the Islamists’ side, the Iranian side and so on. You have Saudi Arabia’s king supposedly asking the US to attack Iran. What is remarkable about all these things, though, is that if you read the subtext, they are not happening. They are not happening.

The Saudis are complaining, supposedly, “When are you going to do this?” And of course, the answer is probably they are not going to do it. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made it very clear, the reason the US is not going to bomb Iran is because there is not a military option that makes sense. Gates has said this very explicitly, and I think very courageously. This is not a point of view that is very well exercised in Washington discussion.

Politicians who might be seeking re-election don’t really say this sort of thing and of course Gates is not seeking re-election, and he says very clearly that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities — at best — will set back Iran’s nuclear program by two or three years. But it will unleash all manner of unpredictable consequences across the region. It will strengthen the regime behind the hard-liners, and most importantly it will make sure that Iran does go ahead and build nuclear weapons — which right now, according the US intelligence assessments and most others, Iran has not yet taken the critical decision to do. It’s putting the means to make that decision within reach. Assembling, under the rubric of a civilian nuclear energy program, the means to create a “break-out” option, as it’s called (like Japan has) whereby assembling a weapon becomes something that can be done in a number of months rather than 10 years. Gates’ argument is a very pragmatic realist point of view, but it’s not what some US allies in the region want to hear.

What do you think the WikiLeaks documents reflect?

What I think WikiLeaks is reflecting, both from the questions that are coming to the US and their response to these questions, is that this is not the US of 2001 and certainly not the US of the Cold War, when changing a government in Baghdad at a whim might have been a conceivable option. It might be what is wanted, but in these times it is not a conceivable option, and that is what I think people are reacting to.

So within that schema you think: Where was Turkey in that Cold War schema for the United States? It was a good soldier. Turkey was there in the Korean War and there in the Afghan War and has been pretty much marching lock step with the US for most of the last half century. Yet suddenly, you see these events where a more democratic Turkey, where popular opinion is a lot stronger in shaping what the government is doing, and it is actually breaking with the US strategy.

In 2003, we have the Turkish Parliament voting that Turkish territory cannot be used to attack Iraq. And we see Turkey breaking with the US on the question of Iran and what’s the best way to approach Iran’s nuclear development. On the question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Hamas, the US remains committed to a view of the region in terms of moderates versus radicals. It’s a prism of dividing the region according to those who are on our side and those who are on the other side — which President Bush put as “those who are not with us are against us.”

Plainly, that policy is not working.

Turkey is advocating something different. Turkey is looking to build bridges between Iran and Western parties. Turkey is looking to build bridges between Hamas and Fatah. Turkey is looking to reconcile Syria and Israel, Syria and the Saudis, and so on. But it is acting independently. In fact one of the cables very explicitly complains that US has “lost control” in this relationship.

That is a source of anxiety in a lot of the cables.

But also in some ways you can see that it is a positive thing. Even some of the US diplomats are recognizing that there is a lot of value in what Turkey is doing, even the break that Turkey is making. Frankly, it is departing from policies that haven’t worked. That, for me, is the take-away. It’s all very well to say, “Oh, you are being disloyal,” but sometimes a friend has to say, is this working? Are we getting where we want to get with Iran or the Palestinians, with Israel, with the rest of the region? If not, the question is, are these policies going to change?

I think that Turkey in some ways is creating and presenting a different set of options. That is a source of anxiety but also, I think, if you look at one of the key cables from Ambassador Philip Gordon, he concludes that this (break) is Turkish democracy in action. Turkey’s government’s decisions are being shaped by its population. This is what a democratic Middle East actually looks like, and this is not a bad thing. Turkey is offering a model of economic prosperity and development, a government based on Islamic values rooted in the region, integrating its neighbors from the European side from the Asian and Middle Eastern side, and it’s a source of stability. And is that really a bad thing? Should that be a source of anxiety? Not if we are relinquishing the Bush administration’s disastrous policies of trying to remake the region through revolutionary means.

When Turkey refers to its historical background, particularly its Ottoman Empire background, we see that the US is a little bit anxious about this. What are your thoughts on this?

I think in the US probably there is a reaction to the idea that Turkey has ambitions to govern all of its former Ottoman possessions. Obviously, that would be a source of anxiety in the United States and probably in a lot of those countries. But if we take the idea that Turkey has a certain history of managing a very complicated set of relationships across a very wide territory and maintaining hundreds of years of stability, then perhaps that appears in a different light.

When the US was setting up the Coalition Provisional Authority to run Iraq after the ouster of Saddam, there was an anecdote from Noah Feldman at NYU, who was one of the professors who was going to help the US as a constitutional advisor to set things up in Baghdad. He was on the US plane with the first group of experts flying there and he was reading a book on Iraqi history. He said everybody else on the plane was reading a book either about Japan or Germany in 1945.

So, what the US was bringing to Iraq, the expertise it was bringing to managing this very complicated place, was its own distinct history — America’s own success stories in Berlin and Tokyo of 1945. And actually some of the reporting suggested that J. Paul Bremer, the viceroy who was in charge of the coalition provisional authority, had a chart on his wall where he had benchmarks of progress based on the occupation of Germany in 1945, and he was checking things off as those benchmarks were achieved. In fact, one of the journalists saw an economic document in which the currency hadn’t been changed. So this document about Iraq still had reference to the Reichsmark.

In one of the cables, the Turkish side is claiming that actually what they aim to do in the Middle East is also to reduce the Iranian influence in the Arab street. Do you think this is rational or understandable?

Yes, I think that that is very important. It’s only if you view the region as a zero-sum game, either you’re on our side or you’re on the Iranian side, that it is a problem. It’s only if you see the region in those binary terms that that it becomes a win for Iran. In fact, I think the foreign minister, Davutoğlu, makes the point in that the regimes the US works with in the Arab world are very discredited by and large by their own populations. They carry very little credibility, which is why the combination of that, with their failure to challenge Israel, and to challenge the US on enabling policies, makes them very unpopular in the Arab world. These all combine to be a primary reason why Ahmadinejad actually became so popular on the Arab street.

But you can see by the opinion surveys a year after Prime Minister Erdoğan challenged the Israelis on Gaza that Erdoğan had eclipsed Ahmadinejad in terms of popularity on the Arab street as the most popular leader amongst the public. You think to yourself, if the goal is stability, integration, development and so on in that part of the world, who is a better role model? Who do we want those on the Arab street looking up to for a role model? I think it’s no contest, obviously.

Turkey has interests that differ from the US in terms of how the Iranian nuclear standoff issue should be resolved, but Turkey’s interests are hardly identical to those of Iran.

There is obviously potential geopolitical competition; the Turkish side is clearly aware of it. If the US is basing a strategy for stabilizing the Middle East on the likes of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and so on, they are not regimes that seem to have much vitality in them. They are not regimes that have much popular legitimacy, that have much momentum. It is hard to imagine Saudi Arabia as a source of stability in troubled parts of the region over many years, so I think that the point that is made in the cables is correct.

And actually maybe we should think about why Iran’s influence in the region has grown so exponentially over the past decade. It is really not that hard to see that the key components of it are: a war in Afghanistan that takes the Taliban enemy away from Iran and a war in Iraq that eliminates its primary enemy in Saddam Hussein and an unpopular occupational policy in both countries and an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 that fails to actually achieve its designed goal.

It’s plain to see that this massive investment in force in the region as a means of transforming things in a positive direction has absolutely failed. It has achieved the opposite result. Militarily the US is unrivaled in its means to use force and will be for decades to come, but politically it’s in a lot of trouble. So, again, Turkey is an example, and it seems like those cables are saying to the US that you need to spend time thinking about what is working and what is not. You need to deal with the reality of what can be achieved in the region.

If the peace talks do not work, what do you think the next step of the Obama administration is going to be?

The peace talks are not going to work. You heard it here first. I think that what we are seeing really is that the current run of peace talks are in some ways mimicking the rituals of Oslo. The Oslo agreement, though, is long gone, that moment in history has long gone. In fact, it was rendered a little absurdly in the photographs. There is one of Obama leading Netanyahu, President Mahmoud Abbas, King Abdullah and President Mubarak, and there was almost an identical photo on the same White House carpet in 1995, with President Bill Clinton with Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, King Hussein and Hosni Mubarak. There is a moment of comedy in this. The premise of Oslo has been that Israelis and Palestinians in bilateral talks will be able to agree on how to partition Palestine, how to complete that which the United Nations began in 1947. The partition plan which was accepted by the Israelis but not accepted by the Palestinians. The Israelis remade the map very deliberately. In the original partition they were awarded 55 percent of the territory. They ended up in 1948 with 78 percent of the territory.

On the Palestinian side, Yasser Arafat had very cleverly managed to reinvent the attainment of statehood in the remaining 22 percent of what had been British Mandate Palestine, as a revolutionary goal. In other words, there was a bit of sophistry in that the Palestinian national movement had been formed on the basis of recovering that which was lost in 1948, he very cleverly reinvented the national goal as the attainment of statehood. This was around 1988 when the PLO adopted statehood (on the basis of the 1967 borders) as a goal. At some point in his Cairo speech, in talking about the Palestinians, President Obama says they have been struggling for 60 years for a state of their own. Well that’s not quite how it’s been. That is a bit of fudge of the narrative, but nonetheless that’s now in place.

The United States, I think accepts the proposition of using the ‘67 borders, but the question becomes whether it actually becomes part of diplomatic strategy. Frankly, in my opinion, domestic politics here is such that I would doubt that the Obama administration, looking to secure its re-election two years from now, is going to risk it because it would be extremely risky to do.