In his latest Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead is concerned about Erdogan’s Turkey’s leaving the Western orbit, such as it is:
The potential defection of a major ally like Turkey poses a significant challenge to NATO, not least because the alliance has no legal means to expel members that default on their obligations. While Mr. Erdogan’s purchase of the Russian system requires a serious response, and the delivery of F-35s must be put on hold, Washington should move cautiously.
Turkey and the West do best when they work together. The Ottoman alliance with the Central Powers ended with dismemberment of the empire in World War I. But the rift was also costly for Winston Churchill; the Allied defeat at Gallipoli damaged his reputation and haunted him for years. The Istanbul election demonstrates that opposition to Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly erratic leadership is deepening. A century after the Great War, Washington should remember that Turkey is bigger than one man and focus on the long term.
What he fails to do is make any case whatever that the West should want to retain an irredentist, neo-Ottoman non-Kemalist Turkey which is precisely what Mr. Erdogan has been constructing. That is not the Turkey that was admitted to NATO and I do not believe it is a Turkey we should wish to defend. It is not so much that the West has abandoned Turkey, as Dr. Mead asserts as that our interests have diverged.
I can’t tell if mentioning that the alliance has no legal means to expel members is meaningful or just a suggestive hand wave. NATO has bases in Turkey, and I assume that if Turkish membership is rejected by a majority of the countries, then a lot of the material will be removed, but some will end up in Turkish hands. That seems like a contingency to plan for, but I’m not sure if it would matter if there were formal procedures in place if the divorce is one-sided.
The case to keep Turkey is geographic and strategic. If Turkey allies with Russia, then Russia controls the Black Sea, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Aegean. Along with Iran, the trio controls the Persian Gulf and the Gulf’s oil.
NATO’s position in Eastern Europe becomes untenable. A realignment of European states becomes likely. Some states might come crawling back to the Russian Federation. Estonia? Ukraine?
This has been the strategic situation for centuries. Constantine built a capital at Constantinople, because it was the very center of the civilized world and the center of its economy.
Hanson says we should wait out Erdogan, and that is probably the best course of action. The F-35 should be a carrot. Come back and all is forgiven.
The problem is that Erdogan is the leader of a party, not an isolated individual. There are millions who agree with him. When he leaves (20 years?), he may well be replaced by someone who is like-minded, anti-American, and pro-Russian.
From link: “Worried about signs of an Ottoman-German alliance . . .” is misleading. They had already entered into a secret alliance on August 2, 1914. Churchill didn’t know this for certain, but Mead is leaving the impression that the Allied’s lack of trust in the Ottomans made the alliance a self-fulfilling prophecy. A better approach would be to consider why the Ottomans agreed to the alliance, which I think were (1) Ottoman desire to recapture at least some of the lands lost over the last hundred years; and (2) fear of Russia.
The analogy makes me wonder if the Turks are no longer afraid of Russia, which seems to be the shared interest at the root of their membership in NATO.
The problem is the Montreux Convention. We need to come to the realization that the country with which it was negotiated no longer exists. The same is true of the Turkey’s NATO membership. The country that was admitted to NATO no longer exists and the one that replaced it is intolerable.
The Germans certainly aren’t.
The US was not a party to the Montreux Convention, and didn’t sign it. It was mostly a European negotiation. The convention recognized Turkish ownership and control of the Bosporus and Dardanelles, let Turkey fortify the Dardanelles, and limited the size (15,000 tons) and number of warships that could transit the Bosporus and Dardanelles. Commercial shipping is unrestricted, except during wartime. Warships can be denied passage under some circumstances, including war with Turkey.
If we claim that Turkey is not the same country as the one that negotiated the Convention in 1936, we have a major problem. There would be no treaty regulating transit, and Turkey could arbitrarily impose whatever rules it was capable of enforcing. E.g., no transit for any NATO warship. Special transit fees for all EU vessels. Whatever.
The US has a nasty habit of cancelling treaties whenever it is inconvenienced: ABM, JCPOA. The US is now threatening to cancel the INF treaty (signed with the USSR), because it claims Russia is cheating. But in reality, the US wants to build intermediate range nuclear missiles and station them in the Pacific to defend against China. Russia is merely in the way.
SALT (which included ABM) and START II are surely inconvenient, and SALT II was never ratified, although both the US and USSR (and Russia) abided by it. Then there are the Russia-specific treaties: START I (ratified), START II (not ratified by US), and NEW START (ratified). If the neocons have their way the entire apparatus for regulating nuclear weapons will be set aside, returning us to the worst of the Cold War.
Our problem is that 25 years of terrible, anti-Russian foreign policy has consequences. The situation between the U. S. and Russia didn’t need to be as bad as it is and it’s our fault that it is.
Is there a reason Russians almost always play the villains in Hollywood? Who exactly owns Ten Cent Pictures?
Isn’t Tencent Pictures Chinese?
You know it is.