A Three-level Analysis of Turkey's Crisis with the U.S.-led Order.

• Author: Balci, Ali
• Position: COMMENTARY

Starting in 2013, Turkey experienced its deepest and most alarming crisis with the U.S.-led order, leading The New York Times' editorial board to issue an open warning: "Turkey has prospered as a NATO member. That means it is likely to be the big loser if it forsakes the West for, say, closer ties with Russia." (2) In June 2018, 44 members of the House of Representatives warned U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis in a letter saying that Turkey, "in addition to its threats against the United States, ... has made a common practice of aggressively targeting U.S. allies, while aiding and abetting our adversaries." (3) Although many pundits and policymakers embraced Turkey's shift of axis as an explanation for the recent crisis, (4) the prophetic, exit-oriented debate that surrounds this explanation is misleading for three simple reasons. First, history proves that such debates have poor predictability power. For example, Turkey's crisis with the U.S. in the 1970s triggered a similar debate, (5) but Turkey remained within the U.S.-led order. Second, the exit-oriented debate overshadows Turkey's search for greater autonomy within the U.S.-led order. Finally, such a conceptualization of Turkey's crisis with the U.S. is value-laden, simply because it constructs Turkey as inferior against the superior West. (6) Unlike shift-focused analyses, this paper primarily asks the following question: why does Turkey, as a subordinate actor in the U.S.-led order, pursue policies that are incongruent with U.S. interests? To provide a comprehensive answer to this crisis-focused question, the paper is divided into two main sections. The first section will attempt to explain why Turkey's current crisis with the U.S.-led order is unique and worthy of study. The second section will debate potential reasons behind Turkey's challenging behaviors toward the rules and dictates of the U.S.-led order. Finally, the concluding part focuses on the 'shift of axis' debates and elucidates why Turkey is likely to remain within the U.S.-led order.

A Short Story of the Crisis

In its almost 70-year history, the initial contract establishing a hierarchical

relation between Turkey and the U.S. has survived many crises, ranging from the U.S. arms embargo on Turkey in 1975, to Turkey's rejection of the March 1, 2003 motion which would have given the U.S. the right to use Turkish territories for the invasion of Iraq. (7) Both Turkey and the U.S. took some appeasing steps after these crises in order to save the initial contract, mostly because both sides continued to gain from the hierarchical relation. While the U.S.-led order provided numerous benefits to Turkey, such as cheaper security, continuing economic/military aid, the delivery of bail-outs in harsh economic conditions, a respected status in the West, and political advantages in its relations with the neighboring countries, the U.S. in return gained a great deal from Turkey, anchoring the U.S.-led order's eastern flank and hosting military airbases central to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

The sustainability of the hierarchical relation between the U.S. and Turkey, however, has faced grave and mounting challenges since the early 2010s. Although Ankara disrupted the U.S. sanctions over Iran by being the major buyer of Iranian oil and gas, and paying for these purchases through the export of gold to Iran, Turkey continued to be a strategic ally of the U.S. in the Syrian crisis until late 2013. However, the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was a turning point. On the one hand, the Western media and American policymakers implicitly accused the Turkish government of supporting radical groups in Syria, including ISIS. On the other, the U.S. declared the YPG (the People's Protection Units) as its tactical ally in the war against ISIS and started to generously arm the group with high-tech weapons. (8) Given the fact that the YPG is the Syrian branch of the PKK, a terrorist organization targeting Turkey's unity, Ankara perceived the U.S.-YPG collaboration as an existential threat to its own security. (9)

The 2016 July coup attempt, which left more than 250 dead, represents the tipping point in Turkey's relations with its NATO partners. (10) The Turkish government implicitly accused the U.S. of being behind the coup (11) and demanded the immediate extradition to Turkey of Fetullah Gulen, the main culprit of the coup, from his mansion in Pennsylvania. Washington, however, did not choose appeasement; it rather criticized the measures taken against Gulen's followers who had established themselves within Turkey's state bureaucracy, and condemned Turkey's "authoritarian slide." (12)

Although the Turkish government waited for Donald Trump's presidency with a hope for change, the U.S. both continued its policy of not extraditing Gulen, and resumed an inflammatory court case centered on Iranian-born Turkish citizen Reza Zarrab. Zarrab is charged with being engaged in trade with Iran in a scheme to avoid U.S. sanctions, allegedly assisted by the Turkish state. The Turkish government perceived the case as a political operation aimed at punishing the top leaders of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AK Party), including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As the court case unfolded in New York, Turkish courts, in October 2017, arrested two members of the U.S. consular staff on suspicion of links to the 2016 coup attempt. Washington immediately suspended visa services in Turkey, and the latter responded in kind. Although both countries resumed full visa services after a three-month standoff, relations further soured when Turkey started its Olive Branch Operation against the YPG in January 2018. Given the U.S.' tactical alliance with the YPG, the Olive Branch Operation in Afrin, Syria, turned into a sort of proxy war between Turkey and the U.S.

While the crisis between Turkey and the U.S. has grown deeper, Ankara's relations with Russia have dramatically improved, despite a one-year break after the downing of a Russian jet by a Turkish warplane on November 24, 2015 in the Syrian war theater. Growing economic relations between Ankara and Moscow had already risen to the level of 'strategic partnership' in 2010 with the signing of a pact to build Turkey's first nuclear power plant. (13) However, this partnership was overshadowed by diverging policies in the Syrian crisis for a long time. After the 2016 July bloody coup attempt, Turkey not only started to work together with Russia in the Syrian crisis, it also signed an accord for Moscow to supply Ankara with S-400 surface-to-air missile batteries. The last step alarmed Turkey's NATO partners, hitting the headline in the West as "the clearest sign of Turkey's pivot toward Russia and away from NATO and the West." (14) In short, Turkey is challenging the U.S. position in many areas: in its prominent role in the resolution of the Syrian crisis, its purchase of high-technology weapons from a rival hierarchy, its relations with Iran, its recognition of the YPG as a terrorist movement, its contestation of the future of Fetullah Gulen, and so forth. Despite...