US Policy on Turkey by James F. Jeffrey and Soner Çağaptay

 U.S. Policy on Turkey

JAMES F. JEFFREY

SONER CAGAPTAY

 

TURKEY, a NATO member, sits on prime real estate. Whether leveraged as a partner to fight the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq or Syria, end the war in Syria, stymie refugee flows from Syria into Europe, or, last but not least, address Russian influence in Eastern Europe, Ankara is a crucial ally for the United States. If the U.S.-Turkey relationship faces problems, Washington will be hard-pressed to implement its policies in Turkey’s neighborhood. Turkey is one of the most important countries for the United States overall, and of central importance for U.S. policy in southern Europe and the Middle East. But Washington’s mishandling of the Syrian civil war, along with its tilt toward the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the fight against IS in eastern Syria, risks forcing Turkey ever more into the Russian camp out of pure self-defense. In this regard, the new administration should under­stand the motives and objectives of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the most powerful Turkish leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk established the Turkish republic in 1923.

Since 2002, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has tried to make Turkey a standalone Middle East power, so far without success. More­over, Turkish foreign policy looks now, ironically, as it did under former Turkish president Suleyman Demirel in 1995: uncertain relations with Russia, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, with its only reliable allies the United States and thus NATO; (recently normalized) ties with Israel; and a relationship with the Euro­pean Union characterized by one step forward, one step back. An opening therefore exists for the next president to improve ties with Erdogan and enlist Ankara more securely in regional initiatives, if only in a transactional and inevitably frequently contentious way.

Why does the United States need a new policy on Turkey? The risks posed by a failed relationship with Turkey are immense, ranging from a setback for U.S. efforts to fight IS to a weakening of NATO’s ability to stem refugee flows into Europe, a development that would destabilize America’s allies. Furthermore, with or without Erdogan, Turkey is one of the most successful economic powers in the region, with a longstanding role as an important U.S. ally. Managing relations with Turkey well or badly will have ramifications throughout the world.

Flawed Traditional Approach

The next president, however, cannot bring Turkey more securely into America’s fold by using the traditional U.S. approach, whereby the United States assumes that it holds most of the cards with its foreign interlocutors, that given America’s championing of universal values it knows better than other states themselves what is good for them, and that the other countries both value relations with the United States above most other interests and feel they have few alternatives. Washington thus is often tempted to treat its friends and allies as a parent handling “misbehaving children,” with endless talk, persuasion, and, if necessary, threats to withdraw love. Not only does this approach often fail to elicit Washington’s desired outcome, but with President Erdogan and to some degree Turkey as a “system,” it has been, repeatedly, disastrously, counterproductive.

A Way Forward

Given these failings, the United States should adopt a transactional approach to Turkey focused on common security interests, while emphasizing, and to some degree negotiating to make progress on, democratic liberal values.

It is important in this transactional arrangement that the United States has tools with which to “trade.” The Obama administration has challenged the efficacy of many of these tools, but if the next U.S. president were to offer them, this would generate greater interest than usual. Washington can respond to Turkey’s needs with more vigor, effort, and resources if Ankara were more helpful on the U.S. agenda. This will vary specifically depending on the new administration’s priorities and global events, but would likely include more sensitivity to America’s legitimate concerns about Turkey’s domestic trends under Erdogan.

Erdogan’s Agenda

Step one to any “transactional reordering” is to understand Erdogan. His ultimate goal by 2023, the one hundredth anniversary of the Turkish republic’s establishment, is to steward the creation of an internationally and economically stronger, politically stable Turkey that would eclipse the epochal achievement of Ataturk himself. That goal does not include a greater anchoring of Turkey in Western values, although Erdogan appears supportive of at least formal democratic procedure, nor does it include loyal sacrifice for an American global security system. However, if convinced that such a system can advance his international and economic agenda, he can be persuaded to support it.

To achieve his goals, he needs Ataturk-like power. In 2014, Erdogan stepped down from his post as prime minister to become the country’s president. Despite his growing formal and informal powers, including continued de facto control over his party, the AKP, almost continuously running the government without coalition since 2002, the country remains a parliamentary system. Therefore, he has focused on transforming Turkey into an executive system ever since becoming president. Such a change would require a constitutional amendment to overturn the presidency’s constitutionally mandated nonpartisan status, thus allowing him to officially lead his AKP. Here, the fate that befell two past leaders, Turgut Ozal and Suleyman Demirel, is instructive. Both saw their movements wither after they became head of state. Erdogan, as seen in his recent sidelining of former prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu, is determined to avoid this outcome by retaining direct control of the party. In this arrangement, he would be Turkey’s head of state, head of its ruling party, and de facto head of government all at the same time.

Turkish law offers two ways to amend the constitution to eliminate the restraints on the presidency: through a two-thirds majority in parliament (i.e., 367 of the 550 deputies voting in favor) or a three-fifths majority (330 votes). In the latter case, the amendment would also need to pass a popular referendum. Currently, the AKP has 317 deputies in the legislature. Yet voting tallies and poll results indicate that the party may have maxed out its electoral support, so Erdogan will have to shift his approach to reach either of the thresholds for amending the constitution.

Enter the right-wing opposition Nationalist Action Party (MHP). By courting this party, its forty seats, and its base in the event of a referendum, Erdogan can garner at least enough votes to create an executive-style presidency. In order to win over MHP deputies and voters, he has threatened legal action against the ultra-Turkish-nationalist MHP’s bitter foe, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Such motives also partly explain the president’s ferocious campaign against the insurgency conducted by the country’s Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), considered a terrorist entity by Washington, as well as its opposition to the PYD, the PKK’s franchise inside Syria. By thus widening the AKP’s own popular support, Erdogan could help his party gain the majority it needs—whether in the current parliament, through early elections, or in a public referendum. Such an outcome would also effectively sideline Turkey’s main opposition faction, the secular-leftist Republican People’s Party (CHP), which currently holds 133 seats.

A second concern for Erdogan, besides the Kurdish nationalists, is the Gulen movement. Erdogan is convinced that this movement and its founder, Fethullah Gulen, a U.S. permanent resident in Pennsylvania, are behind the failed July 15, 2016, coup plot in which 244 Turks died and the Turkish president himself almost lost his life. Given his suspicions, Erdogan will likely never give up his quest to have Washington extradite Gulen. Many people in Turkey share Erdogan’s deep animosity toward the Gulen movement, including, most obviously, pro-AKP Turks (about half the country’s population) but also opposition Turks, among them secular Turks who deeply distrust the Gulen movement as a cult that has tried to take over the Turkish state. Secular liberal Turks see the AKP as openly Islamist and therefore dangerous, but view the Gulenists as secretly Islamist, insidious, and hence even more dangerous. Even the Kurdish nationalists despise the Gulenists. And the Gulenists, as staunch Turkish nationalists themselves, have long opposed both the PKK and cultural and political concessions to the Kurds.

What Can the United States Give?

For any relationship with Erdogan to succeed, it will, as noted, have to be transactional—that is, based on mutual interests and trade-offs rather than deep friendship and shared values. Thus, the incoming U.S. administration must know what its toolbox contains, and what it can “trade” with in such a relationship with Turkey. These trade items fall into three categories: bilateral issues, general foreign policy cooperation, and Syria/Iran.

BILATERAL ISSUES

For starters, with the Gulen issue uniquely uniting many Turks, including Turkish Kurds, around Erdogan, Washington must convince Turkey that it is swiftly and thoroughly reviewing Ankara’s request for Gulen’s extradition. If extradition is delayed or denied by the courts, the administration must rapidly deploy measures, such as limits on movement and investigation of funding, to constrain the ability of both Gulen and his organization to influence Turkish domestic affairs.

Separately, the United States can quietly guarantee Turkey that the Armenian Genocide resolution in Congress will not pass. This has always been critical in the relationship, and most Turks care deeply about the issue.

On arms sales, the United States can make a serious effort to deal with Turkey’s longstanding complaints about delay-in-delivering, detuning, and resistance to offsets in the U.S. Foreign Military Sales program for Turkey. Washington should commit to an early trip by the secretary of defense that focuses not only on geopolitics but also on adopting a model like the U.S.-Israel arms sales relationship to ensure a smoother and better-managed program. The flagship F-35 program should be given special attention. More broadly, the next president and defense secretary should repair U.S.- Turkey military ties, which have been damaged in part by Defense Department perceptions of Erdogan’s negative role in the 2003 Iraq war, break with Israel, Syria policy—including, until recently, an open-door policy toward radicals there—and opposition to the Syrian Kurdish PYD’s alliance with Washington against the Islamic State.

SYRIA/IRAN

The greatest strain on the U.S.-Turkey relationship apart from Gulen has been Syria policy, a scenario with three related threats to Turkey’s south—namely, (1) the Assad regime, allied with Russia and Iran; (2) an anti-Turkish leftist Kurdish nationalist movement, the PKK, located in southeastern Turkey and in northern Iraq, and its sister organization, the PYD, in northern Syria; and (3) the Islamic State. The first is potentially existential. The second is a serious long-term threat to Turkish territorial integrity as well as a critically important domestic political football. The third is one danger among many to Turkey but not perceived as existential. The Obama administration, by contrast, saw its primary policy in Syria and Iraq as destroying IS. Officially, the administration wanted President Bashar al-Assad to leave and saw his regime as fueling Sunni Islamic terrorism and, as noted, considered the PKK a terrorist organization. In practice, however, the dangers of confronting Assad and the Russians, and the administration’s diplomatic ambitions with Iran, severely limited interest in confronting Assad and his allies. Furthermore, Washington needed the PKK-associated PYD in the fight against the Islamic State. Both such policies placed it at loggerheads with Ankara.

In this regard, the Turkish incursion into Syria in late summer 2016 offered an opportunity. The Jarabulus operation provided Turkey with a bridgehead in Syria that increased Ankara’s value to the United States as a partner in fighting the Islamic State. But U.S. and Turkish perceptions of how to fight IS in northern Syria are strongly divergent, with these differences coming to a head in early January 2017. After suffering significant casualties fighting IS in the al-Bab region, Turkish forces were unable, for technical reasons, to obtain U.S. air support and turned to the Russians for airstrikes. This led to a flurry of Turkish threats to close down the U.S. anti-IS operations out of Turkish bases. Setting aside technical issues, the underlying problem is the U.S. reliance on the PYD and its Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)

Arab allies for the assault on the IS capital, Raqqa, in eastern Syria. The Turks, for their part, fear that the PYD is using its U.S. alliance to eventually create a large, contiguous Kurdish-controlled enclave that would provide a new front for PKK activities against Turkey and possibly a corridor for Iran to reach western Syria and Lebanon.

These concerns are legitimate. If Washington could reach an agreement with Turkey on its northern Syrian safe zone that would support the Turks and their Syrian opposition allies with advisory teams and airpower, limit PYD activity in non-Kurdish areas, and refuse to recognize PYD autonomy, much of the rancor in the current relationship would dissipate. Such joint effort would also afford leverage to the United States against Iranian and Russian efforts to push for a total victory against the Syrian opposition despite the current ceasefire. Shared U.S.- Turkey efforts, including a possibly separate front to the west of the PYD forces against Raqqa, could expedite the destruction of the Islamic State. In any case, the United States can hardly prosecute a serious campaign against IS in northern Syria without Turkish bases, entailing a cost in cooperation.

 

The PKK provides another basis for cooperation. The United States could contribute more intelligence support in Turkey’s fight against the PKK, asking in return for additional insight into Turkish plans for combating the group. Washington also needs to manage the Turkey-PYD relationship in Syria beyond the Islamic State campaign. In the long term, managing this relationship should culminate in renewed peace talks between Ankara and the PKK (Ankara and the PYD both view each other through the lens of Turkey- PKK ties), a development that would almost immedi­ately change the tenor of Turkey-PYD ties. Erdogan, who wants to become an executive-style president, knows that if he can deliver a military victory against the PKK, this development would make him massively popular in the eyes of many voters. He could thus be rewarded with more than 50 percent of the vote, opening the path for an executive and partisan presidency and fulfilling his long-awaited dream.

Indeed, Turkey is unlikely to enter into peace talks with the PKK until Erdogan has forced the group into some sort of military defeat, which means Turkey- PYD ties will be fraught with tensions until Erdogan has registered such a victory. The United States might consider delivering enhanced military assistance to Turkey to help bring forth this outcome. In this regard, Erdogan’s greatest asset is Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s founder, who is now in a Turkish jail serving a life term. Ocalan has charismatic pull over the PKK—and also the PYD, with Ocalan posters in PYD offices and Ocalan badges on uniforms of the People’s Defense Units (YPG), as the PYD militia is known, signaling the group’s affiliation with the PKK. So far, Erdogan has kept Ocalan incommunicado. When he feels that he has inflicted enough military damage on the PKK, he will allow Ocalan to speak, at which point the PKK leader will likely call on the organization to lay down its weapons. Ocalan wants to get out of jail as part of a compromise with Erdogan, and to this end, he will deliver a ceasefire message to the PKK when Erdogan is ready for it. Both the PKK and the PYD will likely listen to Ocalan, their honorary and, more important, ideological leader. At this point, Turkey-PYD ties would seemingly shift back to the post-2013 period, with tensions falling significantly and Ankara and the PYD reestablishing contacts active in 2014–15.

Peace talks between Turkey and the PKK would help normalize Turkish ties to the PYD in Rojava, its Syrian homeland. In the long term, assuming an accommodation with Ocalan and the PKK, Turkey might even conceivably build a relationship with Rojava akin to its ties with the KRG. In 2007, the KRG leadership, realizing that it was surrounded by hostile states—Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey— and needed at least one friend to survive over time, picked Turkey. In the ensuing years, Erbil offered Ankara economic and financial incentives, such as access to KRG markets, as well as natural gas and oil deals. Economic ties became the building blocks of the relationship, establishing confidence, and soon closer political and even security cooperation ensued between Ankara and the Iraqi Kurds.

Although Rojava does not have nearly as much oil as does the KRG, Turkish access to its markets and construction sectors would be a definite sweetener in any pursuit of rapprochement between Ankara and the Syrian Kurds. More important for Ankara, Rojava could offer Turkey a cordon sanitaire protecting Turkey from instability, sectarian warfare, conflict, and jihadist threats coming from the rest of Syria, in the same way the KRG acts as a very effective buffer between Iraq’s unstable center and Turkey.

The budding of a close relationship between Turkey and Rojava can only be envisioned against the backdrop of peace talks and good ties between Ankara and the PKK, and by extension good ties between Turkey and the PYD. For their own part, the Syrian Kurds might eventually decide, following the KRG example, that they cannot survive in a hostile neighborhood surrounded only by enemies, and that they will need at least one friend—Turkey—in order to survive in the long term. U.S. policy should help Ankara weaken the PKK militarily in order to usher in Turkey-PKK talks, a definite precursor to Turkey- Rojava normalization. Even if Turkey-Rojava ties never reach the level of Turkey-KRG ties, the KRG is a much larger entity than Rojava and offers Turkey many more economic benefits, Turkey and the Syrian Kurds could still come to a modus vivendi.

GENERAL FOREIGN POLICY ISSUES

Most important beyond the Syria/Iran conundrum is Russia. Highest-level discussions are needed to assess where Ankara and Washington stand on the issue of both Russia in general and Russia as an informal ally of Iran in Syria and perhaps elsewhere in the region. Turkey needs to know whether the United States will contain Russia or whether Turkey will be left on its own, as was recently the case in the al-Bab battle. For their part, U.S. officials need more clarity on the Turkish vision for the Turkish Stream pipeline project announced by Erdogan earlier this year in Saint Petersburg. If the intent is truly to substitute for the 60 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas now flowing annually through Ukraine (one-quarter to Turkey, the rest to EU states), it would have serious geostrategic and energy security implications requiring in-depth discussion. If the informal Russia-Iran alliance on Syria continues, particularly if the Russian deployments to Syria remain, Washington should also demonstrate a willingness to keep NATO’s Patriot presence, including redeployment of U.S. Patriot batteries in Turkey, until a final Geneva agreement on Syria or pullout of Russian reinforcements is enacted. The United States could also periodically deploy F-22 or F-35 fifth-generation fighters to Turkey’s Incirlik Air Base to signal the seriousness of U.S. efforts to contain Russia. This U.S. commitment could also include more frequent Black Sea operations as part of NATO naval deployments, both by the United States unilaterally and with Turkey cooperatively.

 

On the Cyprus dispute as well as Turkey-Israel relations, Washington should increase engagement. This would be done in conjunction with U.S. efforts on eastern Mediterranean gas exports to a Turkish “Eurasian gas hub” and U.S. support of the Baku (Azerbaijan) pipelines to Turkey. Likewise, the United States could give concrete support with the EU on the Trans-Anatolian Natural Gas Pipeline (TANAP) and Trans Adriatic Pipeline (TAP) to bring Azeri and possibly other Caspian or even Iraqi gas to Europe through Turkey.

On Iraq, Washington and Ankara should continue their cooperation on security for the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The United States should be careful, within the limits of its own relations with Baghdad, not to discourage Turkey-KRG hydrocarbons cooperation. Given the possibilities for both direct trade with and transit shipments through an ever more oil-rich Iraq, the United States should support reconciliation between Baghdad and Ankara. Real progress on this front, however, will depend on U.S.-Turkey success coordinating effective policy toward Syria and Iran.

Finally, Washington could find ways inside or outside the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) to deepen bilateral trade and investment. Going forward, building economic leverage in Turkey is the best way of ensuring U.S. political leverage in the relationship.

What Can Turkey Give in Return?

In return for the proposed U.S. steps, the five main issues on which Turkey can be helpful involve

                a stronger commitment to the fight against the Islamic State;

                a return to peace talks with the PKK;

                more flexibility on Cyprus and Israel;

                closer cooperation with Washington on military moves, especially in Syria and against Russian provocations all around Turkey; and

                more emphasis on democratic values, rule of law, and domestic freedoms.

 

Unfortunately, the Islamic State has targeted and, as seen with the New Year’s Eve Istanbul attack, will increasingly target Turkey; thus, cooperating with Turkey against the jihadist group provides an opportunity for building ties. Furthermore, even in the aftermath of Turkish-Russian normalization, the broader resurgence of Russia—now Turkey’s neighbor in Crimea and on the southern border— will undoubtedly remind Erdogan of NATO’s value and could help improve U.S.-Turkey military ties during the new administration. Relatedly, Russia’s aggression toward Turkey following the November 2015 downing of a Russian military plane demonstrated clearly how vengeful Moscow can be. Nevertheless, in agreeing to the Russia-brokered Syrian ceasefire in December, and then calling on Russia to provide (apparently ineffective) airstrikes around al-Bab in early January 2017, Turkey signaled to Washington that absent U.S. engagement and support for Turkish objectives, Turkey will make deals with Putin.

Ultimately, though, what the United States and Turkey can do against the Islamic State together, with potential peace between Turkey and Kurds in mind, will dictate the success of this transactional relationship. If Turkey makes peace with Kurds at home, something enhanced U.S. assistance to Turkey against the PKK can usher in, it can even more easily make peace with Kurds in Syria, facilitating a Turkish- Kurdish bond in the Middle East similar to Ankara’s with the KRG—and one in the U.S. interest.

Washington’s ability to deliver on Turkish issues is affected by Turkey’s behavior on human rights and democracy, and how Turkey is viewed from the outside. Therefore, it is important that U.S. policy on Turkey be guided by an emphasis on rule of law, which has been damaged considerably by a decade and a half of AKP rule. The next president must raise rule of law in his dealings with Turkey as a means not only of limiting the AKP’s authoritarianism but also of reminding Erdogan that he, too, will need this norm should the AKP and Erdogan fall from power.

In the last decade, under Erdogan, Turkey went from being a country of mostly poor to a country of mostly middle-income people. Now, Turkey has a chance to move up the ladder and become a high-income economy, despite slumping economic per­formance in 2016. The country, though, cannot do so simply by making cars, as it does now, but instead by becoming a hub for the “Googles” of the world and other value-added and information-based industries. This is where unfettered freedoms come into play. In order to be a hub for “Googles,” Turkey needs to become an open society, able to attract creative professionals from around the globe and to keep its creative people at home. Only a society that provides unlimited rights and freedoms, that is seen as having a respected and independent judicial system, will achieve such a result, one in the interests of all Turks. The United States is uniquely positioned to make this argument, but then only if both transactional cooperation and leader-to-leader personal relations function better than they do today.

It is possible that Erdogan’s impetuous actions, frequent disdain for the West, and penchant for ever more authority will render any cooperative policy with the United States moot. But that is a possibility, not a certainty. The United States can tip the scales toward a different outcome with the right policies and personal relations. The latter include reining in the understandable ire of many U.S. government and military officials who chafe under Turkish criticism, a characteristic of the relationship that predates, and goes beyond, Erdogan. Finally, Washington has little to lose with a more-carrots-than-sticks approach. Sticks are in short supply: the United States and the West need Turkey; Turkey and Erdogan, in return, need the United States.

THE AUTHORS

James F. Jeffrey, the Philip Solondz distinguished fellow at The Washington Institute , is a former deputy national security advisor and U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq. Soner Cagaptay is the Beyer Family fellow and director of the Turkish Research Program at The Washington Institute.

Reassessing the reasons for the failed Turkish coup attempt

Reassessing The Reasons For The Failed Turkish Coup Attempt

Fri, Oct 21, 2016

Chaosistan, Hybrid Wars, Turkey

By Andrew KORYBKO (USA)

                                                                                                         

It’s been a little over 3 months since some rogue members of the Turkish military failed to oust President Erdogan in their spectacular coup attempt last July, and the passage of time has allowed many analysts to more calmly assess what happened during this dramatic time and fully investigate its origins. This review aims to reevaluate the motivations for the regime change attempt and argues that the US exploited sharp preexisting differences within Turkey’s military, elite, and society in order to instigate the coup for envisioned zero-sum geostrategic ends against Russia.

Reconceptualizing The Socio-Political Situation

There was a long-standing illusion that Turkey was a Western-modelled liberal-democracy before the coup attempt and subsequent crackdown, but that presumption doesn’t accurately capture the transformational processes that have occurred since Erdogan first rose to power in 2003. Outside observers that don’t closely follow Turkish domestic politics might naïvely have assumed that Turkey’s prior form of governance would be unchanging due to its NATO membership, EU aspirations, and US partnership, but none of these three are necessary prerequisites for an enduring liberal democracy. What’s been happening in Turkey over the past 13 years is that the country has been transitioning from a secular western liberal democracy to an Islamist “national democracy”, with the former only remaining as a shell of its older self in order to barely disguise the core of the latter.
The only other famously regarded Islamic Democracy is Iran’s, though that one is formally a republic and is relatively more open than Turkey’s. Erdogan is known as an admirer of the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, so it’s likely that the comparatively more centralized characteristics of his evolving model are due to the influence that this organization has had on him. The Turkish President formally hosted the group after its 2014 expulsion from Qatar, and prior to that, his 2011 “Arab Spring” “victory tour” to Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia showed that he has long held a desire to lead the countries where he expected the Muslim Brotherhood to usurp power after their successful regime change operations. As part of his Islamist mission, Erdogan wants to change the secular constitution that Turkey’s modern-day founder Kemal Mustafa Ataturk implemented, which critics fear will result in the imposition of a Salafist-style state on all Turks that would then pressure them to accept a religious socio-political system through various means of coercion.
In all fairness, however, the 20^th-century secular state of Turkey is an historical anomaly for its people considering that they had lived for centuries under the caliphate, yet Ataturk’s reforms were so successful that secularity became a defining feature of Turkey’s national identity and came to symbolize its rapid modernization in socio-political terms. Turkey maintained this system until after the Cold War, when rural society began to progressively Islamify much to the dismay of the secular urbanites. The eventual outcome of this process was that the majority of the country came to embrace the outward expression of religion, particularly in the socio-political form, and they were the reason why Erdogan’s AK Party came to power in the first place in 2003. Erdogan represented the formal politicization of this trend, but he knew that he had to proceed incrementally with his vision so as not to scare the remaining members of the secular society, his country’s international (Western) partners, and the military.

“Deep State” Wars

At the same time, though, Erdogan didn’t hide his Islamization intentions, and this spurred a predictable reaction from some members of Turkey’s “deep state”, or its permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies. The military has a long tradition of coups, especially those that were meant to safeguard the country’s constitutional secularity, which is why Erdogan didn’t move as fast as he wanted to with his plans and instead spent the past 13 years steadily dismantling this “deep state” infrastructure. The series of domestic scandals during this time were symptomatic of just how fierce the “deep state” war had become, since these sorts of conflicts are never meant to spill out into the public domain unless they absolutely have to.
The reason that such scandals as these happened is because Erdogan wasn’t just confronting the formal “deep state”, but also the informal one as represented by non-state actors such as the Gulenists that are ideologically opposed to his rule. Sometimes these individuals and sympathizers would infiltrate into “deep state” institutions, but other times they’d be embedded in the media and academic spheres. Erdogan’s quest to rid the country of all formidable regime change opposition to his rule defined his time in power thus far. For as power-hungry and radically transformational as Erdogan and the AK Party might be, one shouldn’t lose sight of the ‘inconvenient’ fact that they’re still the democratically elected and legitimate government of the country that represents the electoral desires of the Turkish majority.
Even so, Erdogan’s polices were indeed polarizing, and he came to symbolize what the opposition saw as an existential threat to the Turkish Republic. The crux of the problem is that the Islamifying AK Party stands against the secularization enshrined in the Turkish Constitution, which thus puts them at immeasurable odds with all secularists, some of the military, and the Gulenists who conspired to exploit these preexisting socio-political tensions for their own regime change ends. This was the domestic climate in Turkey on the eve of the coup attempt, but nothing would have happened had it not been for the geopolitical trigger that Erdogan himself unwittingly pulled and which prompted the US to encourage the coup plotters to make a decisive move against his government.

Great Power Politics

None of Erdogan’s centralizing Islamization policies would have mattered to the West, NATO, and the US on a high-level strategic plane so long a Turkey still continued to support their Mideast policies. In fact, the case can even be made that an Islamifying Turkey is beneficial to the US if one understands the “Arab Spring” as a theater-wide Salafist Color Revolution and Turkey as the envisioned “Lead From Behind” hegemon of a constellation of Muslim Brotherhood governments. This didn’t pan out as expected because the historically secular Syrian people stoutly refused to fall for this foreign-concocted regime change plot and stood firmly behind their government, though the US and Turkey obviously didn’t take their refusal for an answer and thus commenced the ongoing War on Syria that continues to this day.
The nature of that conflict has changed, however, because Turkey rapidly restored its strained relations with Russia after the tense freeze that followed the shooting down of the Russian anti-terrorist jet over Syria, and this has served as a major game-changer in the US’ Mideast calculations. Erdogan’s initiative didn’t occur in a vacuum, but played out in response to the US-Turkish strategic divergence that eventually widened over the War on Syria, particularly as it relates to the Kurds. Turkey had been fighting a long-running war against the PKK since the 1970s, with only a brief intermission over the past couple of years, but the conflict was reignited because of two driving factors. The first is that the Turkish Kurds were encouraged by the anti-Daesh gains of their Syrian and Iraqi brethren and the international sympathy and support that followed, while the second is that Erdogan decided to “rough up” the Kurds a bit as an electioneering tactic before the second round of voting in order to attract the MHP nationalist vote (which he succeeded in winning).
All the while this was happening and even beforehand, the US was providing the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds with weapons, training, supplies, airstrikes, and special forces assistance. What predictably followed was a classic security dilemma between the US and Turkey. Ankara truly believed that the US wasn’t just trying to defeat Daesh, but also had ulterior motives in in helping the Kurds craft a sub-state transnational “Kurdistan” between Syria and Iraq. This prospective polity would allow the US to powerfully pressure Turkey. Ankara views the YPG Syrian Kurdish militia as a terrorist group inseparable from the PKK, so Turkey understandably identifies the creation of this entity as a terrorist state along its southern borderland and thus lost its erstwhile blind trust in the US. “Kurdistan” is an existential threat to the Turkish Republic, but it also endangers the grand strategic designs of Syria, Russia, and Iran, which quietly agree that this pro-American proxy state would be nothing less than a “second geopolitical ‘Israel’” in the heart of the Mideast. It’s the convergence of Turkey and Russia’s threat assessments vis-a-vis “Kurdistan” that spurred the lightning-fast political reset between both sides.

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

The Russian-Turkish rapprochement is a fundamental game-changer for undermining the US’ Mideast strategy because of the potential that it has to morph into a quadrilateral coordination platform between Russia, Turkey, Iran, and Syria. Moreover, the restoration of positive Russian-Turkish relations also allows for Iranian-Turkish ties to become strengthened too, given the shared interest that Moscow and Tehran have in fighting terrorism in Syria. The linking of the Russian, Iranian, and Turkish Great Powers is referred to by the author as the Tripartite, and an earlier article series for Katehon explored the broad geopolitical potential that this new power grouping has to reverse the destabilization that the US has wreaked all across the “Eurasian Balkans”. Additionally, it shouldn’t be forgotten that each member of the Tripartite has their own New Silk Road relationship with China, so one can expect for Beijing to use this renewed period of multilateral Great Power pragmatism to its world-changing advantage by seeking to advance the transnational multipolar connective infrastructure projects that are collectively referred to as the One Belt One Road (OBOR) vision.
All of this is a nightmare for US strategists, which is why they felt immediately compelled to act against the catalyst of this profound scenario forecast by stopping Erdogan in his tracks before he could take Turkey further down the path of multipolarity. US intelligence agencies, by the very nature of doing the job that they’re tasked to perform, obviously have influence within and access to the Turkish “deep state”, which was made even easier to acquire in this case because of the country’s NATO membership and its “Lead From  Behind” position in the War on Syria. They accordingly took advantage of the antecedent cleavages in Turkey’s socio-political systems in order to encourage the coup plotters to prematurely execute their plans before they were even ready, assuring them that they’d succeed because the CIA would direct the entire operation from an island in the Sea of Marmara and even provide them with Erdogan’s coordinates so that he could be assassinated.
The domestic differences that the US sought to exploit in ‘justifying’ the coup were as follows:
* Turkey’s gradual progression away from constitutional secularity and towards an intensifying de-facto Islamist system;
* the affiliated transition from a Western-modelled liberal democratic system to one of national democracy;
* the deep unease that some members of the military felt because of the systemic efforts that Erdogan undertook to weaken their institution and centralize his own power;
* and the growing international suspicion surrounding Turkey for its centralized Islamization, its support of Daesh, and its role in facilitating the Immigrant Crisis, all of which were ironically brought to global attention by the efforts of Russia’s international media outlets.
These four factors alone wouldn’t have been enough for the US to throw its backing behind the coup preparations that certain actors were already undertaking against Erdogan so long as Washington thought that it could still control Ankara, but the rapid renewal of Russian-Turkish relations made the US second guess the submissive loyalty of its Mideast underling and thus served as the geopolitical impetus for abruptly setting the regime change events into motion. The coup ultimately failed though because Erdogan was tipped off about it at the last minute, dramatically escaping death to iconically rally his people through a nationally televised iPhone Facetime message to take to the streets in his support. Whether he recognized it or not, this was an implementation of Reverse Color Revolution technology, in which traditional Color Revolution tactics such as street protests are used not for the purpose of regime change, but for ‘regime reinforcement’.

Information Trickery

Despite victoriously regaining power shortly thereafter, Erdogan had a much tougher time deflecting the fallback damage control narrative that the US began to spin in the aftermath of its failed operation. Washington and its affiliated international mainstream media outlets began to promote the conspiracy theory that Erdogan had staged the coup himself in order to gain more power, and this clever suggestion quickly caught on even among many alternative media supporters, commentators, and outlets. People fell for this ruse because it took perfect advantage of the information backdrop that Russian international broadcasters themselves had previously promoted during the times of Russian-Turkish tensions, chiefly that Erdogan is a dangerous Islamifying ‘dictator’ who will stop at nothing in his lust for power, including supporting Daesh terrorists in Syria. All of this is factually true, but the problem with media and policy is that the former doesn’t predict nor can elegantly accommodate for pivotal changes in the latter, which is why many people were suddenly left scratching their heads and wondering why Russia would all of a sudden team up with the same ‘tyrant’ that it had previously despised.
To simply explain it, Russia does not have a “state-controlled media” in the same sense as the West does, as surprising as this may seem to many. Although RT and Sputnik are publicly funded, they are not directly controlled by the Kremlin or any other Russian decision-making “deep state” organs. In contrast, Western “private” media companies such as CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times are paradoxically under an even more intense degree of state influence that they accuse their Russian counterparts of being exposed to. This is why, for example, there were differing narratives about the origins of the coup plot and its normative legitimacy in both of these aforementioned Russian outlets, because plainly enough, they allow for a diversity of viewpoints and are not “state-controlled”. If they were, then they would have been able to more flexibly adapt their messaging before, during, and after the US-backed coup in order to account for the rapid Russian-Turkish rapprochement and clearly explain the geopolitical underpinnings of this to their audience so that they wouldn’t be as confused as many of them still are. The West has no such problems in this regard because they don’t have “free speech”, no matter how much they claim the contrary, and this is proven beyond a doubt by the consensual narrative that they all spewed in unison about how Erdogan purportedly faked his own coup in order to seize more power.
The author thoroughly debunked this claim in a previous article about “Why The Failed Turkish Coup Attempt Wasn’t A “False Flag” Power Grab By Erdogan”, and the reader is welcomed to read it in full if they’re interested in a more comprehensive explanation about this, but there are a very relevant details pertaining to it which should be mentioned at this time. The first is that Erdogan’s power centralization had already been occurring for a long time before this happened, and that he was already doing it in such a systematic way that it should have been obvious to all that he had previously identified his targets well in advance. The failed coup attempt just gave Erdogan a mandate to accelerate this process and to carry it out more publicly without fear of significant protests against him (which he could use the state of emergency to quell). On top of that, the enthusiastically supportive reaction of Russia and especially Iran to Erdogan’s successful victory over the coup plotter speaks volumes about these state’s analyses of the situation. Quite clearly, both of them calculated that it’s much better for their own respective and collective interests (especially in regards to Syria) for Erdogan to remain in power than if he were replaced in a US-orchestrated coup. Even more convincing was the very mild reaction that each of them gave to Turkey’s military involvement in northern Syria, which could logically be taken to mean that they had previous knowledge about it and tacitly supported (if not coordinated) this move in order to disrupt the creation of the US’ “second geopolitical ‘Israel’” of “Kurdistan”.

The Path Ahead

Having come to a clearer understanding about the origins of the US-backed coup attempt against Erdogan, it’s now possible to forecast the path that Turkey will tread in the future. Ankara won’t totally ditch the US, EU, West, and NATO, but it knows that it is impossible for it to join the European integrational bloc in the post-Brexit reality, especially given Turkey’s complicity in engineering the same Immigrant Crisis that contributed to London’s voluntary removal from the organization. What it will do, however, is move closer to the multipolar world in response, and this could take the form of strengthened multidimensional cooperation with the Tripartite and/or broader multilateral engagement with the SCO and BRICS.
The most dramatic expression of the Tripartite would be if Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Syria were to openly coordinate their anti-Daesh activity in the Arab Republic. Each of the Great Powers already have their own separate type of military forces presently active in the country which could effectively supplement one another if deployed in coordination. For example, Russia’s airpower would greatly augment the combat viability of Iran’s special forces, Turkey’s tanks, and Syria’s conventional troops, but the problem is that none of these actors are multilaterally working together for these ends. Syria is bilaterally coordinating its liberation offensives with Russia and Iran, but it doesn’t appear as though Moscow and Tehran are directly working together with one another. Damascus doesn’t seem to have any influence over what Ankara is doing in northern Syria, whereas Russia and Iran look to be dealing with their Turkish Great Power peer and handling this on Syria’s behalf. What’s needed is for all four countries to get together, pool the available military resources that they have the political will to commit, and push aside the US’ “anti-terrorist” coalition in beating Washington in the “Race for Raqqa”.
Even if Erdogan doesn’t team up with Putin, Rouhani/Ayatollah, and Assad in taking out Daesh, he’s still committed an unpardonable sin in the eyes of the US by surviving the coup and normalizing relations with Moscow and Tehran. It’s now clear to all that since the US fatefully chose Gulen and the Kurds over Erdogan, the Turkish strongman is rightly convinced that Washington will continue to use these two non-state actors against him in the coming future. The most obvious way that this can happen is through an emboldened Kurdish insurgency in southeastern Turkey, fought by American-trained “Peshmerga” and YPG forces which were directly supplied by the Pentagon ostensibly under the pretenses of “fighting Daesh”. Related to this, the leftist terrorism that plagued the country during the 1970s might return as well, to say nothing of Daesh itself turning more fiercely against its former patron. It also can’t be ruled out that Erdogan’s plans to revise the constitution in order to strengthen the presidency and formally Islamify the state could serve as a trigger for another Color Revolution attempt against him. Whether all of these scenarios are ‘naturally occurring’ or predetermined processes encouraged and/or orchestrated by the US for geopolitical purposes, they all have the likelihood to individually or collectively become self-perpetuating and enter into a state of auto-synchronization that fulfills the neoconservative weaponization of chaos theory.
The Hybrid Wars that could break out against Turkey would be predicted on the theoretical law that determines the course of these conflicts, which is to disrupt, control, or influence multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects through the exploitation of identity conflicts. Turkey is pivotally situated at the Eurasian crossroads that invaluably connect Asian energy resources and commercial trade to Europe, thus giving it a heightened position in both Iran and China’s grand strategies, respectively. Turkey needs to retain stability within its borders and pacify the southeast so that the New Silk Road could travel into the country from Iran and fortify Beijing’s globally transformational plans to re-engineer Eurasian geopolitics. Even if Erdogan achieves his goal of controlling the Turkish Kurds, he might never be able to fully keep a lid on the domestic dissent that’s bound to incessantly sizzle so long as he pursues his constitutional plans to formalize the Islamization of his society. The Color Revolution plots that will undoubtedly spring up in reaction to this might be put down by the Turkish security services, but they’ll at least accomplish the mission of painting Erdogan out to be an “Islamic dictator” who in the eyes of the Western audience is long overdue for removal.
The chief irony of the Turkish story over the past five years looks to be that the unipolar country bit off much more than it could chew in the War on Syria, and now its “deep state” has recanted and begun to veer in the direction of multipolarity out of the self-interested desire to preserve its own strategic security. Turkey’s American patron turned on it by choosing the Kurds over Erdogan, and Ankara’s gambit in promoting its Neo-Ottoman interests at Damascus’ expense paradoxically ended up diminishing its own internal security and socio-political stability, made even worse by Erdogan’s polarizing drive towards centralized Islamization. Although weaker than it ever has been in its recent history, Turkey interestingly has more potential than anyone would have previously thought possible due to the advantages that it stands to reap from its pragmatic partnerships with the multipolar Great Powers of Russia, China, and Iran, though it remains to be seen whether the US will allow its former subordinate to taste the ‘forbidden fruit’ that Washington had forcibly withheld from it for generations.
Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for Sputnik agency. He is the author of “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change” (2015).

DAVID POLLOCK

ENDING A CENTURY OF SUBJUGATION: SYKES-PICOT’S KURDISH LEGACY

THE KURDS, straddling the contemporary borders of Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and numbering some 35 million, are sometimes described as the largest ethnic group in the world without its own country. In truth, that dubious honor probably belongs to India’s (and Sri Lanka’s) Tamils, Pakistan’s various provincial populations, and many others in the subcontinent; but never mind. Kurdish aspirations to overturn or at least dilute the century-old Sykes-Picot lines are certainly among the most important contemporary international ethnic issues.

For the Kurds are indeed very numerous; they are often very attached to their own distinctive language, culture, history, and overall ethnic identity; and many of them remain self-consciously bereft of the independence more or less promised to them by the Western victors of World War I a century ago. Today, their resulting predicament lies at the center of some of the region’s most acute conflicts. Its resolution one way or another is necessarily a key ingredient in any long-term plan to pacify and stabilize the entire “northern tier” of the broader Middle East.

The promise of Kurdish independence was not technically part of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided most Kurdish-populated territory between Britain and France while offering independence to no one. Rather, as part of U.S. president Woodrow Wilson’s push for “self-determination” at the Versailles Peace Conference and then in the 1920 Treaty of Sevres, the Kurds obtained a commitment to the possibility of sovereign nationhood. Within a few short years, however, that commitment was forcibly crushed.

The Kurds first rose up in rebellion against Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s new Turkish government, which claimed much of their homeland and about half of their total numbers, but they were soon defeated. Meanwhile, the British annexed the old Ottoman Vilayet (province) of Mosul and vicinity, along with a considerable Kurdish population, to their own new League of Nations mandate over Iraq. The French, also in line with Sykes-Picot, took over the mandate in Syria, on the southern edge of historic Kurdistan. In addition, the new government and armies of Reza Shah in Iran retained that country’s largely Kurdish far northwestern provinces firmly under Tehran’s autocratic control.

By the time of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which roughly codified the new national borders of these areas, there was no further mention of Kurdish independence; however, from then until now—increasingly in recent decades—many Kurds have kept that dream alive. The forces of this movement took entirely different forms, however, at very different times, in the various countries into which the Kurds have been divided.

And the Kurds have also been famously internally divided, not only among but also within each of those new international boundaries. Rival clans, factions, parties, personalities, dialects, ideologies, regional alignments, and other cleavages have all taken a heavy toll. Moreover, many Kurds became loyal citizens of their respective new central governments, while others resumed the fight for self-government.

In Iran, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, some of them briefly collaborated with the Soviet Union in setting up a new Kurdish “Republic of Gilan” based in Mahabad. Tehran quickly squelched that prospect, with strong support from Britain and the United States. In Turkey, after more than half a century of enforced assimilation and relative quiescence, some Kurds started a guerrilla insurgency against Ankara in southeast Turkey in 1984 under the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) banner. That futile uprising has continued, in fits and starts, until this day.

In Iraq, the Kurds in the north also rose up against their central government, first in the 1970s and again in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, after Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal campaign against them in 1988. Their resistance was compromised by internal divisions

into the archrival Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and their associated militias, culminating in a fratricidal mini–civil war in 1996. However, under U.S. protection from the air, Iraq’s Kurds have now successfully carved out a self-governing, relatively stable region that has endured for the past quarter century, despite many internal and external security and economic challenges.

This Kurdistan Autonomous Region, with a native population

of five million—plus nearly two million mostly Arab refugees and internally displaced persons—boasts its own Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), with its own president, parliament, and army (the Peshmerga). Its oil-based economy is struggling, however, and

remains dependent on pipelines and other support from neighboring Turkey, Iraq, or both. Most strikingly, after two decades of very uneasy and occasionally hostile relations, the KRG and Turkey have in the past five years become the closest of friends, in political, military,

and economic terms.

In Syria, with the smallest Kurdish population in both absolute and relative terms, the roughly three million Kurds concentrated in northern enclaves along the Turkish border remained comparatively quiescent until quite recently. They managed a brief campaign of

protest and civil disobedience in 2004–5, only to fall back under Bashar al-Assad’s harsh repression. Nevertheless, soon after the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011, Assad’s forces largely withdrew from those Kurdish areas, leaving them with a sort of de facto autonomy

that continues today.

Ironically, since mid-2014, the Kurds in both Iraq and Syria have on balance benefited from the rise of a new common enemy: the    Islamic State (IS). In August 2014, IS very nearly overran the KRG capital of Erbil, but was pushed back by the Peshmerga—with both

U.S. and Iranian backing. Ever since, the United States (and other coalition countries) has provided Iraq’s Kurdish forces with direct military aid, both in the air and on the ground, and relaxed its earlier insistence that the KRG subordinate its economy to Baghdad. In Syria, the United States has likewise provided direct military support to the main local Kurdish party and militia fighting against IS: the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and People’s Defense Units (YPG). The result, intended or not, is to strengthen Kurdish autonomy in each country.

But not Kurdish independence. The United States and most other countries, particularly Turkey and Iran but also far beyond, plus the weak central governments in Baghdad and Damascus, all remain firmly opposed to that. So, when KRG president Masoud Barzani repeatedly warns of a coming referendum on independence, the most knowledgeable observers are inclined to write that off as a bluff or a bargaining chip cleverly designed to maintain his internal position while extracting the best possible deal from his neighbors and other interlocutors.

Similarly, when the PYD this month announced formal plans for an autonomous “federal” Kurdish region in Syria, it managed the remarkable feat of uniting in opposition every one of its neighbors and more: the Assad regime, the Syrian opposition, Turkey, the United States, and even the rival KRG just across the river in Iraq. Only Russia announced that this might be a reasonable approach to resolving the Syrian civil war. At the same time, both the PYD and Turkey have for the most part avoided direct confrontations across their common border—even though Ankara officially considers the PYD part of the “terrorist” PKK. That leaves Syria’s Kurds with de facto but not de jure autonomy within their own slivers of the country.

Inside Turkey, meanwhile, both the central government and the PKK have for now tragically abandoned their halting rapprochement of 2013–2015 and resumed outright low-intensity war. The PKK demands Kurdish autonomy; the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara has contemplated at least offering its Kurdish citizens more cultural and local political freedoms. The gap between the two seemed to be narrowing just a year ago; it now seems very wide, but might well one day be bridged—if not perhaps with the PKK, then with other authentic Kurdish parties, such as the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). This is one instance where the cliché “no military solution” probably really does apply.

Least and least promising on this list, from the standpoint of Kurdish rights, is Iran. With Iran never part of Sykes-Picot, that imperialist legacy cannot be blamed for the plight of Iran’s seven to ten million Kurds. Although they participate in what passes for Iranian national politics, they are denied any real local autonomy or even identity. Their governors are appointed by Tehran, and are often not Kurds. Their language is barely tolerated; only in the past year has the first Kurdish-language institution of higher education inIran been permitted to open. Any open dissent is brutally repressed, as in the Mahabad riot last year. Executions of Kurdish and many other alleged miscreants are up substantially under President Hassan

Rouhani, at ten times the rate per capita of Saudi Arabia across the Gulf. And Iran as usual stoops to playing the sectarian card: many of its favored Kurdish citizens are from the minority Shiite portion of that population, centered in the provincial city of Sanandaj. Some

anti-regime Kurds, of either sect, derisively call those collaborators jash (donkey), as they once did with the coterie of pro-Saddam Kurds in Iraq.

For the Kurds, in conclusion then, where does Sykes-Picot go from here? Several quick points are in order, all based on the preceding analysis.

First, the old borders are still surprisingly durable.

A pan-Kurdish project is simply not in the cards, for reasons not only of state sovereignty but also of  intra-Kurdish divisions.

Second, relatedly, the full independence or secession even of one national piece of ethnic Kurdistan, including from Iraq or Syria, is probably also not on the medium-term horizon.

But third, Kurdish local autonomy or “federalism” of some kind is an increasingly plausible—and likely constructive—option, not just in Iraq but also in Syria, and maybe eventually in Turkey as well.

And fourth, again relatedly, the recent exceptionally warm ties between Ankara

and Erbil strongly suggest that this particular “age-old ethnic conflict” need not be an insurmountable obstacle to political expedience. Someday, believe it or not, Turkey may find an autonomous Kurdish region on its Syrian border every bit as amenable to its interests as the one on its Iraqi border.

For U.S. policy in the region, the implications are equally clear.

Washington can usefully support not Kurdish independence, let alone pan-Kurdish aspirations, but real Kurdish autonomy within three of the four countries in question: in Iraq, in Syria, and in the longer term, subject to agreement with Ankara, even in Turkey. Call it “Sykes-Picot light.” As for the fourth country in this mixture, Iran, the nuclear deal and other realities unfortunately make its Kurdish question utterly unanswerable for the United States, or any other interested parties. Least and least promising on this list, from the standpoint of Kurdish rights, is Iran. With Iran never part of Sykes-Picot, that imperialist legacy cannot be blamed for the plight of Iran’s seven to ten million Kurds. Although they participate in what passes for Iranian national politics, they are denied any real local autonomy or even identity. Their governors are appointed by Tehran, and are often not Kurds. Their language is barely tolerated; only in the past year has the first Kurdish-language institution of higher education in Iran been permitted to open. Any open dissent is brutally repressed, as in the Mahabad riot last year. Executions of Kurdish and many other alleged miscreants are up substantially under President Hassan Rouhani, at ten times the rate per capita of Saudi Arabia across the Gulf. And Iran as usual stoops to playing the sectarian card: many of its favored Kurdish citizens are from the minority Shiite portion of that population, centered in the provincial city of Sanandaj. Some anti-regime Kurds, of either sect, derisively call those collabora­tors jash (donkey), as they once did with the coterie of pro-Saddam Kurds in Iraq.

For U.S. policy in the region, the implications are equally clear. Washington can usefully support not Kurdish independence, let  alone pan-Kurdish aspirations, but real Kurdish autonomy within three of the four countries in question: in Iraq, in Syria, and in the longer term, subject to agreement with Ankara, even in Turkey. Call it “Sykes-Picot light.” As for the fourth country in this mixture, Iran, the nuclear deal and other realities unfortunately make its Kurdish question utterly unanswerable for the United States, or any other interested parties.

The defeat of England at Lausanne by Dr. Pat Walsh

Written by drpatwalsh2016-10-04

On The Defeat of England At Lausanne by Ataturk

The current Turkish President recently made a comment on the Treaty of Lausanne.
The present writer makes a point of not intervening in Turkish politics. But since this is a historical matter some comment should be made, particularly as it is of interest how the Treaty of Lausanne was seen at the other end of Europe – by the other party who signed it – Britain – and by the people it still ruled in its Empire in Ireland.
The Irish had experience of 8 centuries of British rule and many failed attempts to shake it off. They therefore realised the world-historic thing that Ataturk had achieved and saw in it something that was not only important for the new Turkish nation but something that was a turning point in history.
Having seen its Greek catspaw lose the military confrontation with Ataturk in Anatolia and having backed down at Chanak England determined to recover with a Treaty what it had lost on the battlefield – as it had done in Ireland in 1921.
On the Monday before Lord Curzon, the British Foreign Secretary, left England to win through his diplomacy what had been lost on the battlefield, he made the following speech to businessmen in the City of London “where his declaration that the Government would stand firm against Kemalist aggression was received with loud cheers.”:
“The developments in Turkey he characterised as ‘the most definite menace to the peace of the world… The Nationalists, flushed with victory over the Greeks, have run riot during the past few days. They have deposed the Sultan and abolished the temporal power of the Caliph. I wonder what the Moslems of the world will think of this… The Nationalist Party has assumed the Government of Constantinople and has called upon the Allied Powers to withdraw – the fleet of Great Britain, if you please – to withdraw at their bidding from the Bosporus, the Sea of Marmora and the Dardanelles. They have abolished the capitulations and mixed courts, abolished the national debt, and repudiated the national obligations. These pretensions cannot be tolerated. They have no conceivable justification. They are an affront to the Allies and a challenge to Europe… Turkey must learn that there is a limit even to the concessions which we can make to her, and that we cannot purchase peace at the cost of humiliation or disgrace. Turkey must realise that the strength of Britain and the might of Europe are a rock against which she will hurl herself in vain.” (Irish Independent, 9^th November 1922)
And yet Lord Curzon returned empty-handed having himself purchased “peace at the cost of humiliation or disgrace”.
The Lausanne Treaty, unlike the Anglo-Irish Treaty, was negotiated with long and hard deliberation spread over an eight-month period (the Turkish delegation withdrew for a three-month interruption in the middle of the proceedings when it was not happy with what was happening). Turkey refused to have terms imposed upon her that would dilute her sovereignty, even though Britain fought tooth and nail to maximize her Imperial influence over the region. The Turkish delegation also refused to be railroaded into a take it or leave it deal imposed by an arbitrary deadline. When Curzon said his train was standing at the station and it was “now or never” the treaty remained unsigned by the Turks. Curzon, after delaying his train in the expectation they would submit, left empty handed on his train. The British returned a few months later and the Treaty was signed on July 24th 1923.
Lloyd-George recognized, in a debate in the House of Commons on 6^th June 1924, what a turnabout Lausanne had been for the British Empire compared with Sèvres and the previous objectives:
“I believe it is a complete reversal of the decisions taken at Paris… In three important parts it is a complete departure from the decisions taken… First of all, with regard to Smyrna and South Eastern Anatolia, that was a reversal. The Straits is another. You… had a demilitarised zone, to be occupied and garrisoned by the Allies. Now, you have a demilitarised zone depending entirely upon Turkish Declarations. What were their declarations worth in the late war? Then there is a guarantee of Turkish neutrality by the British Empire. Surely that is a vital distinction. If there is any attack upon their zone, upon Constantinople, upon the Straits, the British Empire by this Treaty is bound to come in—horse, foot and artillery, with all its resources —to defend them from whatever quarter the attack comes. Is not that a vital difference? What is the third departure? The surrender of the capitulations. You surrendered there British rights which had been enjoyed by the traders of this country for centuries. That was not in the Paris arrangement. That was not in the Treaty of Sevres… It is a, perfect farce… These are three serious departures.” (Irish Independent, 7 June 1924)
The Treaty of Sèvres was a treaty dictated by the victors to the vanquished – or so the victors thought. The Treaty of Lausanne was a treaty negotiated between comparative equals. As Curzon, later remarked – when his bluster to the businessmen of the City had been shown to be without substance – Sèvres was “dictation of terms at the point of the Bayonet … Only when the terms had been drawn up was the beaten enemy admitted, to be told his sentence. … Far otherwise was it at Lausanne. There the Turks sat at the table on a footing of equality with all the other powers.” And he admitted: “Hitherto we have dictated our peace treaties. Now we are negotiating one with the enemy who has an army in being while we have none, an unheard of position.”
Curzon had demanded and threatened and the Turks had said: “You and whose army?” And that was that.
There was still a great potential disparity of power between the two parties to the Treaty (which Britain used to good effect) and there was still the British military occupation, which restricted what it was possible for Turkey to retain of its Ottoman possessions. (The major victory Britain secured in the Treaty was the holding on to the oil-rich Mosul region to the north of Mesopotamia that their forces occupied. This meant that they pushed the local inhabitants, the Kurds and local Turkomen, into the new state of Iraq. And many have paid for that momentous ‘victory’ ever since.)
On the question of the Straits the British Admiralty had desired the ability to “hammer at the gates of Constantinople and force the Turks to open the door into the Black Sea.” (A.L. Macfie, The Straits Question, Middle Eastern Studies, May 1979, p.235) Presumably this was to get at Russia, if the need arose.
Turkey was prepared to agree to the free passage of commercial vessels and a more limited passage of warships. The Turks won back the right to close the Straits to its enemies in the event of war and to stop and search neutral vessels suspected of supplying them. However, Turkey was forced to agree to demilitarise a 15 mile wide zone with an international commission to oversee traffic through the Straits – although the Turkish Army could cross the demilitarized zone as it desired and station forces in Eastern Thrace.
These provisions were superseded by another Treaty signed at Montreux on July 20th 1936, which conceded full sovereignty to Turkey over the area, as the Turks availed of the decline in British power (just before DeValera did).
The Treaty of Lausanne was an immensely successful Treaty compared to the other post-War, dictated, Treaties. It brought stability that has lasted near on a century whilst the others, imposed at Versailles, produced another World War within a generation. The Treaty marked the birth of a new State, created by the struggle of its own citizens rather than the gift of the Imperialists. It set the Turks and the new Turkish State apart from all others in the region by being independent of the Imperial powers. It stood the test of time as a result.
The Catholic Bulletin devoted an enormous amount of coverage to the negotiations at Lausanne and the Treaty that followed (it should be remembered that the Bulletin was primarily a religious periodical). Its reporting amounted to about twenty pages in twelve editions, over a period of a year, in which the Treaty and its significance were commented upon.
In April 1923, to keep its readers well informed, the Catholic Bulletin took the unusual step of publishing the official (British) record of the proceedings at Lausanne. It did so without comment, believing, presumably that no comment was necessary. And the Bulletin, being of an Anti-Treaty mind that went into the making of Fianna Fail, contrasted the performance of the Turkish and Irish plenipotentiaries in their respective settlements with the British.
What The Catholic Bulletin did was very important in establishing independent Ireland when many thought the mere signing of a Treaty would accomplish it. Independent Ireland was not a fact in 1921 – it had to be fought for in various ways for another quarter of a century before it was begun to be achieved.
I think we owe some gratitude to Ataturk because Turkey’s example provided some of the inspiration and will to carry on the struggle that was necessary for such an achievement.
The Catholic Bulletin clearly saw what happened at Chanak and then Lausanne as a turning point that had important implications in world affairs – and for Ireland in its future relations with the Empire. It saw these events as “a great defeat for England” at the hands of a small nation fighting for its freedom. That understanding was acted upon over the coming two decades by DeValera to achieve for Ireland what Ataturk had done for Turkey.
Below are some extracts:
FAR AND NEAR
“Looking round the world for an instance of brilliant achievement during the year, we see ‘Turkey head of the class.’ After centuries of rule by Mahomedan Caliphs, Mahomedan Kings, Sultans and Princes it was proclaimed in 1923 that Sovereignty belonged absolutely to the Turkish people, while Mustapha Kemal Pasha was then elevated to a dignity never before enjoyed by a ruler in Islam—President of the Republic of Turkey.” (January 1924)
ENGLAND’S SURRENDER
“Readers of the BULLETIN will remember the Supplement published last year describing Lord Curzon’s final interview with Ismet Pasha and others. The very superior person proved on that occasion the most inferior. Threats and blandishments failed to induce the Turkish plenipotentiaries to agree to Curzon’s terms. It was Curzon’s second failure. His first, if we remember rightly, was the partition of Turkey by the Treaty of Sèvres. If this was not Curzon’s personal failure it was, at any rate, England’s failure. The Treaty, which was eventually signed and agreed to by Turkish patriots, has been described as ‘deplorable’ from the British point of view. This fact, we must grasp, if we are to get to the bottom of all the misunderstandings with regard to the alleged responsibilities and liabilities of his Britannic Majesty’s Dominions. It should be remembered that the Lausanne Treaty was written and signed in the French language—the English was merely a translation. Therefore, the official document of a treaty, as the honourable Lloyd George pointed out, had been in both languages. The change, said the Welsh liberator of twenty—six counties of Ireland, was more than a mistake; it was significant of the fact that ‘we had gone back in authority and prestige in our dealings with foreign powers.’
 “It had, indeed, been a grave surrender on the part of British representatives.
 “The whole Treaty was a stupendous British surrender. British politicians and the British Press thundered that it was a treaty which might have been signed by a vanquished Power so far as British interests were concerned. Privileges, like Capitulations, which the mighty British had treasured for generations vanished like smoke. These, the only constant protection for the precious life, the honest liberty; the valuable property of every British trader in Turkey was ignominiously surrendered. Then the poor Christian minorities, for whose welfare England’s great heart ever beats, particularly those in Belfast, were thrown to the Turkish dogs. Finally, above all things, England who had incited the Greeks to war against Turkey, finding it opportune, suddenly somersaults and guarantees the defence of the nation she relentlessly sought to destroy. This policy has been excellently described by the author of ‘The Lost Dominion’—a sensational book recently published on India. He says:
“It is an old policy of England to sacrifice her friends to her enemies. The idea is that your friend is your friend, and will support you anyhow. Your enemy will be so pleased at being allowed to punish your friend that he will forget his old grudge against you, and perhaps himself become friendly. And the policy is often successful enough, especially when the friend is helpless and the enemy placable.”
 “If there he a god of nations how he must despise this treachery, not less treacherous when euphemistically styled opportunism!
 “This policy has failed with the Turks who refused to budge until an essential clause of the Lausanne Treaty had been complied with. Ramsay MacDonald has told part of the story, and when reading Ramsay MacDonald bear in mind his motto. He expressed it quite recently at an insignificant meeting in London: ‘Never,’ advised the Prime Minister of England, ‘say you will do anything, but within reason, always keep people expecting that you are going to do it.” (May 1924)