Israel Matzav

What the Wikileaks documents tell us about Turkey

Turkey is a member of NATO, a host of U.S. military bases vital to operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a major purchaser of American weapons. But is it still really an ally? As some of the more interesting of the WikiLeaked State Department documents show, that is a question that two consecutive U.S. administrations have struggled with. During eight years of rule by the mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party, Turkey has become something of a model of the tricky 21st-century relationships the United States will have to manage.

Turkey used to be an authoritarian state that reliably lined up with the West. Now it is a democracy with a booming economy - and big geopolitical ambitions. The power of popular support has given Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan the confidence to undercut U.S. policy in Iran, cultivate anti-American Muslim dictators in Sudan and Syria, and make Israel a near-enemy - all while deploying Turkish troops in Kabul and counting on the United States to help his army fight Kurdish insurgents.

The Middle East still has rulers such as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, a sullen strongman who quietly supports U.S. strategic interests but refuses to modernize his rotting autocracy. Erdogan sees that as an opportunity to become the region's power broker. "Turkey, building on the alleged admiration among Middle Eastern populations for its economic success and power and willing to stand up for the interests of the people, reaches over the [undemocratic] regimes to the 'Arab street,' " explains one cable dispatched by the U.S. Embassy in Ankara this year. Thus the overheated rhetoric about Israel, delivered with calculation as well as passion.

Davutoglu is something of an antihero of the WikiLeaks cables, described as "exceptionally dangerous" and "lost in neo-Ottoman Islamist fantasies." Having arrived in Washington a few hours after those descriptions were released, he accepted an apology from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, played down the damage - and embraced at least part of the embassy's analysis. "Britain has a commonwealth" with its former colonies, he reminded me. Why shouldn't Turkey rebuild its leadership in former Ottoman lands in the Balkans, Middle East and Central Asia?

It's fascinating to follow the emotional swings in U.S. analysis of this rapidly changing partner. Erdogan is acidly described by former ambassador Eric Edelman as having "an authoritarian loner streak"; Edelman's successor, James F. Jeffrey, concludes that Erdogan "simply hates Israel" and that his drive for regional authority "has not achieved any single success of note." Yet the dispatches also include admiration for Erdogan's political skills and for Turkey's role in Lebanon, Pakistan and even Syria.

Labels: Ahmet Davutoglu, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey, Wikileaks

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:22 AM