A former colleague of mine from Turkey, Oya Dursun-Özkanca, has just published an informative monograph on "Turkey-West Relations."  The author examines Turkish foreign policy since the ascendancy of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as Turkish prime minister in 2003 and as Turkish president (presumably for life) since 2014. Clearly Erdogan has become an object of irritation for the American State Department and for Congress because of his fondness for “boundary-breaking.” The Turkish leader increasingly acts in a way to spite the U.S. and other members of NATO. This may be partly related to Turkey’s failure to enter the EU, most recently in 2014. Turks were rebuffed for varied reasons, from charges of “human rights violations” to the fear of increasing Turkish immigration into Europe, to Turkey’s historic antagonism to Christian Europe.  In 2012 Erdogan pulled Turkey into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a group dominated by Russia and China, which shares intelligence information as well as economic markets. The Turkish government gave assurances that nothing in this relation would interfere with Turkey’s continued membership in NATO, a connection that the country had had since the beginnings of the Cold War.

Erdogan stirred the pot even more when in 2019 he purchased an S-500 missile defense system from Russia. Presumably the necessary parts for its maintenance would come from the same country; and although the system seems to be top-of-the-line, presumably more than military protection is at stake here. Erdogan has been teasing the “West” by dealing with its designated adversary, even to the point of being willing to suffer the predictable consequences. Turkey has been removed from an international program to build stealth missiles (pending the cancellation of its arrangements to have the Russians install the ordered defense missile system, a process that’s already begun). Dursun-Özkanca considers the “rekindled relationship between Turkey and Russia,” two countries that historically have been at loggerheads, as part of the “costly signaling” that the Turkish government has been sending to the “West.” In April 2019 Vice President Mike Pence reacted by stating emphatically that Turkey was risking its membership in “the most successful military alliance in history.”

“Turkey-West Relations” throws light on certain issues, which the now customary moralizing of our foreign policy establishment may not do justice to. However unpleasant Erdogan’s semi-dictatorial rule may be, his political behavior is totally rational, in the sense that it is systematically oriented toward a power-enhancing goal. He is pursuing his own nationalist ends and therefore performing a balancing act, between Russia and NATO, just as the Turkish head of state has played off secularist and Muslim Fundamentalists at home. Erdogan doesn’t quake in reverence when he hears the word “West,” although the term may sometimes conjure up for him some long-ago European Christian foe of the Ottoman Empire. But like Putin, he probably views the Western world as culturally and morally decadent and currently representing such ideals as gay marriage for all members of the Western democratic community. We may also assume that he regards “Western foreign policy” as a product of the American state department, not exactly a distillation of the combined opinions of equally important members of an alliance system. A student of German affairs, I would certainly never view the government of Angela Merkel as an independent nationalist one.  And I doubt Erdogan would. European NATO members are not, from his perspective, independent political actors whom he can play off against the American hegemon. But they did do something that deeply annoys him: they kept his country from becoming part of the EU. When Erdogan joined SCO, he presented it as a path that Turkey had chosen after being denied membership in that European fraternity.

Lastly, we are not facing unprecedented Turkish conduct when we see Erdogan triangulate. The founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938) deftly played off Western countries against each other in pursuing his own country’s advantage. Mustafa Kemal (later named Ataturk, Father of the Turkish nation) saved his people from extinction after they had lost the First World War, as allies of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. After war’s end, the Turkish mainland was scheduled to be partitioned under the Treaty of Sèvres, which the Sultan’s Grand Vizier meekly signed in a Paris suburb in 1919. Mustafa Kemal, a brilliant general as well as a negotiator, saved his homeland by defeating Greek, French, and Armenian armies in a war for Turkish survival that dragged on until 1923. But what was almost as important as Kemal’s military skill was his ability to divide the Allied side that was occupying Turkish soil. He drove a wedge between the British and French and exploited any difference between countries that had once been united in their resolve to partition Turkey between Greeks, Armenians, and other once-subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire. Although unlike Kemal Mustafa, Erdogan is neither a brilliant commander nor state builder, his attempt to play off foreign powers is an already long-established Turkish practice. It certainly did not start with Erdogan. And it was a Turkish practice even before the Turks were kept out of the EU.