Thr U.S. is Playing With Fire on Iran

The U.S. Is Playing With Fire on Iran

Posted on Feb 7, 2017

By Scott Ritter

  National security adviser Michael Flynn “putting Iran on notice” last week. (Screen shot via Politico)

Last Wednesday, national security adviser Michael Flynn appeared in the White House briefing room to issue a statement. He singled out what he characterized as Iran’s “destabilizing behavior across the Middle East,” including “a provocative ballistic missile launch” that was, in his opinion, done “in defiance of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231,” which was passed July 20, 2015. UNSCR 2231 endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA), as the nuclear deal among Iran, the United States, Russia, China and the European Union is officially known. “As of today,” Flynn darkly declared, “we are officially putting Iran on notice.”
The Iranian test, which involved a Khorramshahr medium-range missile, took place three days earlier, on Jan. 29. After flying roughly 630 miles, the missile exploded in midair in what appeared to be a failed test of a re-entry vehicle. As Flynn noted in his statement, the Security Council had, in its Resolution 2231, “called upon” Iran “not to undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons, including launches using ballistic missile technology.”
Iran maintains that its missile test was not in violation of any Security Council resolution, saying that it has no nuclear weapons program, its missiles are designed as conventional weapons only and it has a legitimate interest in self-defense, inclusive of the right to test and deploy ballistic missiles. Ali Akbar Velayati, a former foreign minister and current policy adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, dismissed Flynn’s statement as “baseless ranting.”
Legally, Iran has the stronger position. Although a previous U.N. resolution, UNSCR 1929, passed in 2010, directed “that Iran shall not undertake any activity related to ballistic missiles,” that resolution was terminated as a result of the ground-breaking nuclear deal. It was replaced by the resolution cited by Flynn. The later resolution, UNSCR 2231, only calls upon Iran not to test missiles, a far less stringent standard that falls short of an outright prohibition on missile testing. While the Obama administration, when negotiating the JCPOA, had opposed watering down of the language, Russia, China and Europe disagreed, and the new verbiage was approved.
But neither legality nor reality seems to be a defining feature in the worldview of the Trump administration. “Iran is playing with fire,” President Trump tweeted after the Iranian test. “They don’t appreciate how kind President Obama was to them. Not me!” Shortly after the newly inaugurated president’s tweet, the Treasury Department announced new sanctions against Iran for its “continued support for terrorism and development of its ballistic missile program.” After the sanctions were announced, Flynn issued a follow-on statement: “The days of turning a blind eye to Iran’s hostile and belligerent actions toward the United States and the world community are over.”
The charges supporting the Trump administration’s justification for sanctioning Iran, however, are factually and intellectually unsustainable. While there is no arguing that Iran’s behavior during the early years of the Islamic Republic’s existence justified it being labeled as a sponsor of state terrorism, the same cannot be said of its policies since 2001. Iran was quick to condemn the 9/11 terror attack on the United States and played a role in supporting American actions against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Iran’s overt and covert actions in opposing what it viewed as an unjust and illegal occupation of Iraq by the United States are often cited by those opposed to the theocracy in Tehran as proof of the ongoing legitimacy of the “terrorist” label. Viewed broadly, however, the Iranian policies toward Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 are part and parcel of a coherent approach to opposing the very Sunni-based Islamic fundamentalism that motivated the 9/11 terror attacks and continue to drive al-Qaida, Islamic State and other Islamic extremist elements around the world today, a fundamentalism against which the United States wages its “global war on terror.” Iran is helping lead the fight against Islamic State in both Iraq and Syria and is a sworn enemy of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Yemen. Seen in this context, Iran is more ally than foe, and the label “state sponsor of terror” appears trivial and inappropriate—especially when viewed beside the policies of erstwhile America allies such as Saudi Arabia, whose citizens constituted the majority of the 9/11 attackers and which is responsible for underwriting the financial and material support of Islamic extremists around the world, including Islamic State and al-Qaida.
When asked about the range of responses his administration might consider in dealing with a recalcitrant Iran, Trump replied, “Nothing is off the table,” implying a military option. Any military action against Iran, however, void of just cause and proper preparation and planning, would be foolish and counterproductive to U.S. national security objectives in the Middle East and around the world. It would also be near suicidal for U.S. forces deployed in the region.
An American military strike against Iran based upon continued testing of ballistic missiles would most likely trigger a response from Tehran that would neither be limited nor readily containable. American forces in Syria and Iraq that are currently focused on defeating Islamic State could be put at genuine risk from the thousands of Iranian troops and pro-Iranian proxies operating in their vicinity. Moreover, any military action against Iran could draw both Israel and Russia into the fight (and not necessarily on the same side) while alienating European allies and creating levels of uncertainty that neither the American military nor foreign service is prepared to deal with.
Trump committed to a strong anti-Iranian stance during his campaign, promising to do away with the “bad deal” that was the JCPOA. While more pragmatic minds seem to have convinced the new president that it would not be in America’s best interests to unilaterally withdraw from the nuclear deal with Iran, the words and actions of the Trump administration seem to indicate a willingness to foment a crisis with the theocracy in Tehran. This is not sound policy.
In May of this year, Iran will hold elections for the office of president. The incumbent, Hassan Rouhani, has proved to be a moderating influence on the more conservative elements inside Iran—he was singularly responsible for Iran’s willingness to negotiate a nuclear deal that many inside Iran opposed. Rouhani’s re-election is not a foregone conclusion; indeed, the recent death of his long-time mentor and ally, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has substantially weakened the position of the Iranian president in the face of strong conservative opposition to his policies, further complicating any re-election bid by the incumbent.
Iran under Rouhani has shown itself more than capable of navigating difficult diplomatic waters made even more treacherous by inconsistent and often hostile American policy. A conservative Iranian president would not necessarily be able, or willing, to do the same. If the goal of the Trump administration is to do away with the Iranian nuclear deal, there is no more certain path to that outcome than the election of a conservative successor to President Rouhani. Such an outcome would be disastrous for Iran, the United States and the rest of the world. While the decision as to who will govern as president of Iran is ultimately one that the people of Iran, through their constitutionally mandated processes, will decide, there seems to be a lack of recognition within the Trump team as to the ramifications of the administration’s words and actions when it comes to shaping events involving Iran and other countries.
The Trump administration’s foray into Iran policy—courtesy of Michael Flynn’s statement—seemed to have been driven by a national security adviser flying solo; Secretary of Defense James Mattis was in Asia and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was not yet confirmed. One can only hope that Trump will, in the future, rely more on the advice of such senior Cabinet officials when it comes to issues with the complexity and magnitude of Iran, and less on the inflammatory words of Flynn. Military conflict with Iran is not desirable policy. Playing with fire is one thing, getting burned another—especially when it is the United States holding the match.

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.

Turkey's Charm Offensive

Friday, January 27, 2017
Turkey's Charm Offensive
Erdogan Makes Nice
Nussaibah Younis
NUSSAIBAH YOUNIS is Senior Resident Fellow at the Atlantic Council, where she directs the Task Force on the Future of Iraq.


On January 7, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim visited Baghdad, marking a milestone in its warming relations with Iraq. Four months ago, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi had warned that Turkey's deployment of troops to the Iraqi town of Bashiqa [1] threatened to trigger a regional war [2]. Turkey, which claimed for its troops the consent of the Kurdistan Regional Government, shot back that Iraq's sudden concern with Bashiqa had malicious [3 intent. An escalating war of words led to the mutual summoning of ambassadors and an Iraqi call, in October, for an emergency meeting [4] of the UN Security Council. But during the January visit, the prime ministers of Iraq and Turkey stood together and declared that they would solve the issue [5]of Bashiqa, in addition to strengthening bilateral trade, security, and economic cooperation.
Ankara's about-face follows a dramatic year for the country, in which an attempted military coup [6], escalating attacks by the Islamic State (or ISIS) on Turkish soil, and a deepening war with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) brought about a fundamental reexamination of the country's foreign policy priorities. (Turkey maintains good relations with the government of Iraqi Kurdistan, but considers the PKK a terrorist group.) As a result of the multiple domestic crises [7] that buffeted the Turkish state in 2016, Ankara is in the process of overhauling its foreign policy, increasingly pursuing stable neighborly relations and reigning in its impulse to project power regionally.

DO UNTO THY NEIGHBOR
Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), in power since 2002 [8], initially pursued a policy of zero problems with neighbors [9], which sought to establish the country as the economic heart of an increasingly interconnected Middle East. But the developments of the Arab Spring led Turkey toward a more assertive foreign policy. The AKP decried the removal of Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi in a 2013 coup, threatened to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over his campaign of mass slaughter against Syrian rebels, and railed against former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for mistreating Iraq's Sunni population. Although these moves had a certain moral strength, especially among the region’s Sunnis, they led Turkey into the midst of regional turmoil, which the government is now attempting to back away from.
The first signs of Turkey's changing approach came in June 2016 when it normalized relations [10] with Russia, apologizing for the 2015 downing of a Russian fighter jet that had strayed into Turkish airspace from northern Syria. That same month, Turkey reached a settlement [11] with Israel resuming diplomatic ties [12] after a six-year freeze in relations, following Israel's 2010 attack on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla that resulted in the deaths of several Turkish activists.
Turkey also moved away [13] from its staunch opposition to the Assad regime in Syria. Recently, its policy in the country has focused on preventing an autonomous and unified Kurdish region from forming in northern Syria rather than, as before, helping anti-Assad rebels to maintain a foothold in Aleppo [14]. In its recent effort to retake the Syrian town of al-Bab [15] from ISIS, moreover, Turkey has accepted air support from key Assad ally Russia, while publicly excoriating its traditional ally in Syria, the United States, for its lack of assistance.
Most dramatically of all, Turkey, along with Russian and Iran, helped forge a ceasefire in Syria without U.S. involvement in the final days of 2016, and brokered talks between opposition fighters and the Syrian government in the Kazakh capital, Astana. Although the ceasefire has collapsed [16] in numerous areas, and the talks made little substantive progress [17], the moves represent a new Turkish acceptance of Russia's authority in the Syrian conflict.

GETTING IT TOGETHER
The timing of this new strategy is no coincidence. As Turkey faces growing violence, instability, and economic turmoil at home, Erdogan has come to the conclusion that now is the time to revert to the policy of zero problems with neighbors [18]. Today, with a plummeting lira [19] and a contracting economy [20], there is little support among Turks for such adventurism. Even before economic woes began to take their toll, a 2012 poll found that two-thirds [21] of Turks did not support Turkish intervention in Syria.
Erdogan can little afford to face any popular unrest: he is currently locked in a tense political battle to transfer substantial power to his office by changing the Turkish constitution [22]. In foreign policy, he has therefore sought to prioritize efforts to undermine Turkey's substantial Kurdish minority, enabling him to tap into deep anti-Kurdish sentiment among the Turkish majority. For instance, after the Kurdish HDP party threatened the AKP's grip on power with a shock election result in June 2016 [23], the AKP escalated its war against the PKK [24], while seeking to conflate the terrorist group with the non-violent parliamentary party. Since then, focusing the Turkish public’s attention on the supposed threat of Kurdish violence has been a crucial part of the AKP's electoral strategy.
Yildirim's visit to Iraq last week was a reflection of this new logic. The Turks main goal is to convince Baghdad to drive the PKK out of Iraqi territory. [25] The PKK has been present in Sinjar, a Yezidi town in northern Iraq, since the expulsion of ISIS in late 2015. Indeed, local Yezidis have developed a close relationship with the PKK after the Kurds helped them escape from Mount Sinjar, where they had been trapped after other Iraqi Kurdish forces retreated in the face of ISIS onslaught. Since then, PKK forces have helped to train Yezidi militias and have received support from Baghdad.
Yet now it seems that Turkey has persuaded Baghdad to stop supporting the PKK, through diplomatic overtures and with the help of repeated mediation efforts by U.S. counter-ISIS envoy Brett McGurk. Ankara has also hinted that it may discuss withdrawing its troops from Bashiqa in exchange for the Iraqis ejecting the PKK from Sinjar. Turkey has, furthermore, co-operated with Baghdad in enabling a Turkish-trained Iraqi paramilitary force, known as the Hashd al-Watany, to merge [26] with the Baghdad-backed popular mobilization units. Ankara's strategy may be working: in the joint press conference on January 7, Abadi announced that [27] no force beyond the frame of the security forces or the formal Iraqi security forces will be allowed to work in Sinjar a clear condemnation of the PKK presence. Yildirim in turn thanked Abadi for Baghdad's seriousness in expelling terrorist organizations from the region.
The rapprochement with Baghdad also demonstrates a new willingness on the part of Ankara to move beyond its traditional partnerships in Iraq. In recent years, Turkey has invested heavily in its relationship with Iraqi Kurdistan's governing Kurdish Democratic Party, with which it has forged independent economic and energy agreements, but these have damaged Turkish relations with Baghdad. Any rapprochement between Iraq and Turkey would thus be nerve-racking for the Iraqi Kurds, who are economically dependent on the Turks and remain embroiled in disputes with the federal government over energy exports, revenue sharing, and the status of disputed territories. But there is tremendous scope for Turkey to expand its diplomatic and economic ties with the rest of Iraq growth that has thus far been stymied by poor political relations.
It remains to be seen whether recent positive steps will develop into a new era of Iraq-Turkish cooperation. Turkey will remain wary of withdrawing from Bashiqa before the PKK has withdrawn from Iraq, and it still expresses concern about the presence of Iraqi Shiite paramilitary forces to the west of Mosul and around the Turkmen town of Tel Afar. It must be emphasized, moreover, that Turkey's outreach stems from a growing domestic authoritarianism and a hyper-hostility to Turkish and Syrian Kurds that is ultimately damaging to Turkey's stability. A rapprochement with Baghdad would nonetheless herald a new era of economic and diplomatic co-operation that would likely prove a financial and strategic boon to two of the most vulnerable states in today's Middle East.

Suriye'de iç savaşın tarihsel arka planı ve militan islamın yükselişi

Syrian Civil War

Updated on June 27, 2016

Introduction: The Historical Inevitability of The Syrian Civil War and the Rise of Militant Islam

The ongoing Syrian Civil War (2011-present) is significant to the region and world for a plethora of reasons. More specifically of the many past and current events of this unstable crisis, the Syrian Civil War arose from and later began the counter-revolution against the same turbulent social and political instability of most Arab states within the Middle East that started in 2011 otherwise known as the Arab Spring, and from this counter-revolution emerged the Islamic State and other militant groups to oppose the Syrian regime’s reassertion of control. However very few politicians, pundits and policymakers look at the history of the Syrian state and its role in the region to realize that a dangerous interregional and localized conflict was likely going to occur at some point in time, and due to the overbearing actions taken by the Assad dynasty’s brutal and systemic authoritarian Presidential Dictatorship it was almost guaranteed that the Islamic State or something like it would rise to power in the region.

 

How Syria Came to Be

Syria from its very conception as state was originally created without consideration for the historical make-up of the diverse regional population incorporated within it (Cleveland, 187). Due to this lack of legitimacy, the rulers of these nations were from the start forced to initiate a balancing act between the wishes of their population and with powerful Western forces externally influencing events in the region, such as with the role of the Syrian National Bloc, an organization of influential families in Syria originating from the Ottoman era, in serving as an intermediary between the Syrian public and the French rulers in the 1920s (Cleveland 189-190, 213). When the Mandate system put in place by the victories British and French in World War I to indirectly control Iraq and Syria decayed and Western control over their puppet states gradually collapsed, Syria was finally able to wrestle its independence from France in 1946 after victory in elections for pro-independence factions in the newly re-established parliament (Cleveland 195). Despite the elections the oppressive, divisive colonial political institutions that were created upon these state’s birth were not abolished and instead were restructured to cement the control of the new local ruling elite to take the place of the former French overlords (Cleveland 197, 200). The current state political ideology known as Ba’athism, was initially embraced by the new dictators who called themselves presidents such as Syria’s Hafez al-Assad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein who had overthrown the civilian led governments there shortly after their formation (Cleveland 205-208). Ba’athism’s founder Michel Aflaq (1910-1989) originally created the ideology to emphasize Arab unity, liberation, democracy, nationalism and socialism, but when the ideology was officially adopted by the Syrian and Iraqi states it was used selectively as a political tool to accomplish regional and domestic goals and its principles were distorted and stretched to accomplish these goals, such as Hafez al-Assad’s use of its ideological concepts of equality and democracy to create a rubber stamp parliament and ensure his minority Shi’a offshoot Alawite faction attained many prominent positions of power within the government (Cleveland 303, 308, 383-384). The overall policy of Syria during this era represented a devotion to pragmatism, calculation, and realism that ended up using the Ba’athist ideology as a political tool for indoctrination and whose principles were not needed to be followed strictly and were not based on Islamic morals which is exemplified by Assad’s educational reforms that dramatically increased educational opportunities of the population but were subject to Ba’athist ideological indoctrination, and also with the secular reforms in both nations that gave historically unprecedented rights to women despite domestic conservative Islamic backlash from the population (Cleveland 314-315). Despite the fact that the regime in Syria and (as well as the one in Iraq) were founded as artificial, non-representative, and colonial states that later adopted secular, nationalist, and socialist policies, there was always a varying degree of grassroots Islamic movements within these nations that were continually oppressed (Cleveland 217, 226). Many examples of this oppression and subversion took place throughout Syria’s modern history, for example al-Assad’s brutal destruction of the Islamic popular revolt centered on the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 that resulted in the death of at least 10,000 people (Cleveland 412-414). Despite these politically convenient gestures made to the domestic populations of Syria, Assad never fully committed himself to their own principles of their Ba’athist ideology, let alone that of political Islam, and even though the domestic populations of Syria holds significant Islamic influences, the very structures of the political institutions in these nations were created with the intention of controlling and influencing their populations and the departure of the French colonial masters did not result in local aspirations of the citizens of these nations being realized and instead resulted in the perpetuation of this cycle of repression being carried out by the new domestic political elite in place of the former colonial rulers (Cleveland 312-319). This reality explains why the ideals prevalent after the independence of the Arab states in the region such as pan-Arabism, secularism, socialism, and nationalism may have created some positive benefits to the domestic population through social and economic reforms, but these concepts failed to achieve greater political liberation for the Arabs and other ethnicities of the region and were instead used pragmatically and conveniently by the Ba’athist regimes as a political tool to perpetuate their political dominance and ensure the stability of what essentially amounted to a pair of mafia-states in Syria and Iraq, which effectively suppressed the simmering discontent within their domestic populations and left the greater political questions of the region to be unresolved (Cleveland 314-320, 412).

Current Issues and Possible Future Outcomes

The long debated greater political questions include examples such as what is Syria and Iraq exactly? How can Syria’s ethnic and religious minorities as well as the Sunni Arab majority gain more equality and representation in the Shia Alawite ruled government? And what role should Islam play in Syria’s secular government? The answer to these questions are not apparent now, but following the conclusion of the Civil War we will have bigger understanding of how to tackle these questions in the new paradigm that emerges. Questions such as was an Arab Spring type uprising inevitable in Syria, and did Hafez al-Assad’s successor son current President Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive policies contribute to the rise of ISIS, are much newer and can be argued much more conclusively. The artificially drawn borders in Iraq and Syria that do not in any way reflect any useful demographic division between the people living there resulted in many communities being separated and distinct ethnic and religious groups clumped together. The French built this state on this unstable foundation, and added to the instability to give political power to the small Shia Alawite group and politically powerful and wealthy Sunni Arabs, creating a government enforced inequality, divisiveness, and oppression that carried on through the local political elites once the French left (Cleveland 189-190). The result is this mafia state keeps its population at a slight simmer an occasionally has to issue a bloody crackdown to brutally stamp out any opposition such in Hama in 1982 (Cleveland 412-414). However, in essentially all Arab states in the region, there exists a large amount young adults with or without college degrees and searching for work in stagnant economies leading to poverty, dissatisfaction, and discontent which is commonly believed led to the Arab Spring protests. Due to all of these underlying repressed issues and since the Syrian Regime already had past problems with revolt before the Arab Spring, once the initial wave of demands for bread, jobs, and dignity began, it was only a matter of time that the equivalent protests that emerged would evolve towards advocating reform and elections. Assad could never accept true reforms because it would result in his Ba’athist minority elite group losing complete control over the state, and after seeing how quickly the protests in Egypt and Tunisia escalated and later removed their dictators there was no way Assad could propose meager skeleton reforms and listen to the growing crowds of protestors to try to wait it out like the abolished dictators did. So he chose to answer with complete and total force and pushed the peaceful protestors out and began instigating an armed conflict with the opponents of the regime who eventually took up arms to defend themselves. Brutalizing your own people is not an acceptable action to international powers and Assad knew that he would not be able to simply suppress the civil uprising for long. So he labeled all people opposing his regime as terrorists of the same quality the West was fighting all around the world. The narrative sounded purely propagandist initially, but as Syria’s civilian population fled and militants from all around the world flooded in, and soon enough Muslim extremist groups such as Islamic State and al-Nusra Front have solidified and also began attacking the original opposition group the Free Syrian Army. After the Islamic State seized most of western Iraq and began trading oil and resources secretly with Assad at the expense of the moderate opposition, Assad managed to elicited the help of Russia in the form of a thinly veiled military intervention justified under the politically loaded goal of “fighting terrorism” to turn the tide of the war from near defeat to likely victory. Regardless if Assad completely wins his Civil War, he has already won enough international political legitimacy to claim he is fighting a civil war against terrorists. Since the international community and particular the United States now feels that the threat from Islamic militants in the region is a bigger threat then to spend previously considered resources on a humanitarian or military intervention to stop Assad’s brutal crackdown, Assad’s narrative has become a self-fulfilling prophecy of his own contribution. Because the international threat of Islamic militants subsiding any time soon is very unlikely, for now there are even debates ongoing between the involved parties about whether Assad should be included as an alliance of convenience in a future military coalition, giving him even more undeserved international legitimacy to quietly continue his brutal systemic crackdown of his people indefinitely.

Works Cited

Cleveland, William L., and Martin Bunton. A History of the Modern Middle East. 6th ed. Boulder: Westview, 2016. Print.

Ankara can no longer afford to ignore how the region has changed

Ankara can no longer afford to ignore how the region has changed

Sharif Nashashibi

January 6, 2017 Updated: January 6, 2017 07:04 PM

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One-page article

Turkey has made great strides in implementing a comprehensive foreign-policy shift outlined by prime minister Binali Yildirim in May 2016. "Turkey has a lot of problems. We have regional problems," he said at the time. "So what will we do? Very simple: We’ll increase the number of our friends and we’ll decrease the number of our enemies."

He elaborated further in July: "It is our greatest and irrevocable goal: developing good relations with Syria and Iraq, and all our neighbours that surround the Mediterranean and the Black Sea."

Turkey has since patched things up with Israel, improved ties with Iran, expressed an interest in mending fences with Egypt, softened its rhetoric against the Syrian regime, and normalised relations with Russia at lightning speed, resulting in Ankara and Moscow now taking ownership of diplomacy over Syria. Meanwhile, ties with the United States, which became increasingly strained under president Barack Obama, will probably be reset when Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20.

This process is widely seen as a reincarnation of Turkey’s regional policy in the 2000s, described by Ahmet Davutoglu – a former prime minister, foreign minister and chief adviser to president Recep Tayyip Erdogan – as "zero problems with neighbours".

This policy is interpreted as having been undone by Ankara’s strident positions after the Arab Spring, particularly its vehement opposition to the Syrian regime and to the toppling of former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi.

However, this widely accepted narrative of Turkey’s regional status – past and present – is overly simplistic and mischaracterises its position and the dynamics of the Middle East. It is woefully naive to think that Turkey could have maintained, let alone achieved, "zero problems with neighbours" in such a turbulent and polarised region. This does not even exist in stable regions. Lest we forget, the Middle East was no oasis of peace, stability and unity before the Arab Spring. The wide-ranging and devastating fallout from the invasion and occupation of Iraq is the most obvious example, but not the only one. The Arab Spring did not create problems – it brought long-festering ones out into the open.

It is not "very simple" – on the contrary, in fact – to have "good" relations with "all" countries surrounding the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, which cover such vast and complex regions as the Middle East, North Africa, southern and Eastern Europe, and the Caucuses.

These foreign-policy goals are as utopian as they are unrealistic. Yes, Ankara has done much in the past several months to mend fences, but this is not without risks and costs. In the Middle East, making a friend often entails losing another.

Rapprochement with Israel risks undermining Turkey’s support of the Palestinian cause. Closer ties with Iran risks angering Saudi Arabia. Rapprochement with Russia risks upsetting the Syrian opposition. Mending fences with Egypt would risk alienating Qatar. Because these various overtures are recent, there has been insufficient time for the repercussions to fully develop, let alone be assessed.

For example, while the governments of Turkey’s Gulf allies have been muted about its shifting positions vis-à-vis Russia, Iran and the Syrian regime, considerable unease is being expressed by Gulf commentators who echo, or are privy to, official sentiment. More broadly, there is alarm about what many in the region and beyond see as Ankara’s abandonment of the Syrian revolution.

Similarly, while neither the Palestinian Authority nor its main domestic rival Hamas have criticised Turkey’s rapprochement with Israel, Palestinians across the political spectrum view it as a betrayal. They are particularly mindful of Mr Erdogan’s repeated insistence that there would be no such rapprochement unless Israel lifted its blockade of Gaza. Ankara and Tel Aviv have normalised ties, yet Gaza remains under siege.

The widely accepted basis for Turkey’s foreign-policy shifts – its desire to end its regional isolation – is oversimplified and exaggerated. No country in the Middle East has managed to achieve what Ankara aspires to: good relations with everyone. When looking at the region’s deep fissures, other countries are also experiencing varying degrees of isolation – this is typical of divided regions, so Turkey is no exception.

Take, for example, the intra-regional standing of the governments of four of the countries with which Ankara has said it wants better relations: Israel, Iran, Syria and Iraq. Israel has full diplomatic relations with only three countries: Egypt, Jordan and now Turkey again.

The governments of Iran, Syria and Iraq only have each other as state allies (besides non-state allies such as Lebanon’s Hizbollah and Yemen’s Houthis), though Cairo has recently warmed to Damascus and ­Tehran.

Also, Turkey’s relations with various countries in the region have been overly simplified as bad or good. For instance, despite strains with Tehran over Syria, Ankara played an important role in the nuclear deal that resulted in the lifting of crippling sanctions on Iran.

Amid the war of words with Israel following its killing of Turkish citizens on a flotilla heading to Gaza in 2010, it was actually business as usual in bilateral relations in some respects. Trade increased during their spat. And despite Ankara’s close ties with Riyadh, the two stood on opposite sides of Morsi’s overthrow.

Furthermore, opinion polls have shown that Ankara’s positions vis-à-vis the Arab Spring were popular among Arabs. "Turkey is the biggest winner of the Arab Spring", according to a 2011 Brookings Institute poll. "Turkey is seen to have played the ‘most constructive’ role in the Arab events. Erdogan is the most admired among world leaders."

Positive sentiment did not dissipate as the Arab Spring went on. According to the 2014 Arab Opinion Index, 57 per cent of respondents held views of Turkish foreign policy that were "positive" or "positive to some extent", while only 25 per cent held views that were "negative" or "negative to some extent".

As such, if Turkey’s current foreign-policy shifts are based on ending regional isolation, they actually risk undermining its popularity. In this respect, Ankara seems confused. "We have always been on the side of the oppressed all along our history," said Yildirim, while announcing his country’s foreign-policy shifts.

However, these shifts indicate an emphasis on good relations with governments rather than peoples – in many cases in the Middle East, this means good relations with the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

One can argue that this is necessary realpolitik in the pursuit of Turkish national interests in a turbulent and fast-changing region. However, Ankara often couched its positions – particularly vis-à-vis Palestine, Syria and Egypt – in terms of principle rather than political expediency. That was what made Turkey popular among Arabs. Ankara risks undoing that.

In a region with so many fierce divisions, trying to please everyone may end up having the opposite effect – a balancing act that, in the current climate, seems almost impossible in the long run.

Sharif Nashashibi is a journalist and analyst on Arab affairs

Uncertainties require a new Mideast security structure

2017 Uncertainties Require a New Mideast Security Structure

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by Adnan Tabatabai Published on December 23rd, 2016 | by Adnan Tabatabai

 

2016 certainly bore no good news for the Middle East. Wars are being waged with greater intensity, and the humanitarian catastrophes in Syria and Yemen are reaching unprecedented levels. Instability remains the key defining character of the region as it moves into the new year. But that is hardly news for the regional stakeholders who have been living with instability for decades now.

What is new, however, is the heightened level of uncertainty that plagues the region. Multiple developments in 2016 have unleashed unpredicted and unpredictable new dynamics.

For observers to make better sense of why the stakeholders in the region are adopting seemingly irreconcilable policies, it is important to acknowledge the level of uncertainty sensed in those capitals.

Key developments with unknown consequences can be seen on the national, regional, and global level as 2016 comes to an end. All bear implications for the Middle East. A quick look at some of the most pressing questions arising from these developments may explain why anxiety in the region is reaching new heights.

Turmoil All Around

We can start by looking at the national contexts of the major players. In doing so it’s clear each one faces extraordinary short- and long-term challenges.

Iran is in the run-up to its presidential election in May, a contest that may lead to a re-adjustment of President Rouhani’s Western-leaning foreign policy. Potentially more important, the issue of ‘succession’ to the current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, already is emerging as a key factor in domestic politics. It underlies a multi-dimensional power struggle that is defined not only by the various factions competing for influence, but also along bigger systemic cleavages—i.e., between those who want to stress the republican nature of the Islamic Republic and those who seek to bolster its theocratic basis. While tendencies can be observed, no one can predict how this tug-of-war will play out. Whatever the outcome, however, the repercussions are sure to be felt far and wide.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, finds itself in a state of uncertain transition in virtually every respect—politically, economically, and socially. A young and well-educated youth is challenging the kingdom’s fundamental structures. An overly ambitious deputy crown prince is making every effort to position himself as the successor to the 81-year old King Salman. No one knows how far Mohammad Bin Salman can go. No one knows how implementable his Vision 2030 will be and whether it will embrace or alienate the old elites and the population alike. As Iran’s principal rival, and the de facto leader of the Arab world since the misnamed “Arab Spring” in 2011, what happens in Riyadh will no doubt have an outsized influence on the rest of the region and beyond.

Turkey has been leaving observers dumb-struck throughout the past year, and particularly since the July 15 aborted coup d’etat. There seems to be no limit to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ambitions to create his Turkey, marginalize and criminalize any political or media opposition, and change the constitution in ways that will super-empower his office. It is impossible to profoundly assess where this is leading and what further consequences the process itself will bear. With outright armed conflict with the Kurds ongoing in Turkey’s east and deadly terrorist attacks striking the rest of the country, it is difficult to foresee how much more destabilization the country will face or be able to bear.

At the same time, Egypt is facing severe security threats, with ISIS attacks in Sinai and terrorist assaults elsewhere, including the recent fatal bombing of a Coptic Church in the heart of Cairo. Add to this the worsening socioeconomic plight of its population—with record and rising unemployment and 25% of households living below the poverty line—and the unrelenting crackdown against the country’s strongest political party, the Muslim Brotherhood. Some observers believe another uprising is imminent, while others say there is no such appetite among the people. That said, popular discontent with the repressive al-Sisi government must be regarded as a ticking time-bomb that could blow up the Arab world’s most populous country.

When looking at the Israel-Palestine conflict, meanwhile, 2016 made clear that the two-state solution has moved further away than ever before. While it is debatable whether this conflict is indeed the mother of all tensions in the region, as many officials in the region like to argue, its ongoing impasse certainly does harm beyond the plight of the Palestinian people—especially in Gaza—and the constant state of insecurity in Israel and the West Bank.

If all the above were not enough, the region is also facing key questions about the future of war-torn countries like Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen, each of whose conflicts—and the vacuums they have created—ripple far beyond their national borders and invite the intervention of both regional and extra-regional actors. In the absence of a clear vision for containing and reducing the violence of these conflicts, key regional players, from Ankara to Riyadh, and from Tel Aviv to Tehran, will make every effort to minimize potential harm to their own security interests.

Moreover, “security interests” are not confined to territorial integrity. The above-mentioned stakeholders share economic, cultural, political and social ties with each other. If there is one thing regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia undoubtedly have in common, for example, it is that both want stability and intact borders—not only for the sake of their own territorial integrity, but also to maintain and expand their regional ties and influence. And yet, finding a formula to reconcile Iranian and Saudi regional interests seems more challenging now than ever.

President Trump and a Chaotic Europe

And this is when yet another major uncertainty comes in: the Donald Trump factor.

It is impossible at this point to tell whether Trump’s Middle East policy will be driven by his explicit rejection of interventionism or by the far too explicit belief in interventionism for which people like leading Deputy Secretary of State candidate John Bolton are very well known. It is also difficult to predict at this point whether the nomination of Russia-friendly Rex W. Tillerson as Secretary of State is good or bad news for Tehran and/or Riyadh. And how will both countries be affected by Trump’s National Security Advisor Mike Flynn, for whom Islam is a political ideology and “a cancer?”

Moreover, with the current state of the European Union, amid Brexit and upcoming elections in the Netherlands, France, and Germany, it is even difficult to envisage how Europe, as a coherent political force in the world, will look one year from now. Events in 2016 have shown that anything is possible.

All of the above leave regional stakeholders in the Middle East no choice but to increasingly “nationalize” their security policies. The need for a new regional security architecture is stressed by many, but a tangible roadmap that can lead to it has yet to be charted.

Mistrust is rife. Accusations are sharpening by the day. All sides demand confidence-building measures from the other side. And yet, due to the prevalence of perceptions, as opposed to actual realities on the ground, things that are demanded as confidence-building measures are often things that the other side might actually be unable to deliver. Is Iran, for example, in a position to disarm the Houthis, as Riyadh demands? Are the Saudi and Qatari governments really capable of cutting financial support for jihadi groups in Syria and Iraq, as Tehran expects? Such demands are on the table, but it appears impossible to assess whether either side has the actual control and leverage to deliver.

Needed: More, and Better, Dialogue

At this point, however, it is of utmost importance for regional actors to take a few steps back and talk with each other about how they talk about each other. This is how misperceptions can be deconstructed. Tehran should know how it is perceived in Riyadh and vice versa.

Allegations and accusations must be replaced with insights and knowledge derived from actual dialogue. Additionally, the national security interests of every regional stakeholder must be taken seriously, by regional and extra-regional actors. But there is a need for many more platforms for such dialogue to permit the parties to better understand those security interests in order to begin developing formulas to reconcile them. Such a process may not start at the official level; indeed, Track 2 efforts involving well-connected yet independent analysts and think tankers may be better at preparing the ground for actual diplomacy. This requires, however, that pundits in this field show more discipline in keeping an eye on the bigger picture, instead of diving into the jungle of micro-level discussions.

The horrors of Aleppo, Sanaa, and Mosul certainly need profound attention. But even more so, debates on these complicated multi-layered conflicts demand sober, in-depth analysis about the logic behind the behavior of the various stakeholders (state and non-state) involved. Only then can constructive avenues toward detente be explored and developed.

In times of uncertainty, it is even more important to fully understand the motivations of actors like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, or Russia, and spend time making sense of their respective security calculations. Glorifying or demonizing their actions, as some overly dogmatic, partisan or ideological pundits do, will not help in addressing the uncertainties, let alone changing their behavior. And instead of mainly focusing on the current state of play in the region, analysts from the U.S., Europe, and within the region itself should devote more attention to more long-term scenarios that offer mutually acceptable ways out of the ongoing uncertainties and the fears they generate.

In this way, key decision-makers—both in the region and from outside—can be guided towards what the Middle East desperately needs: a functional regional security architecture that all parties are committed to sustaining. That goal should be the North Star that guides the parties through these perilous and uncertain times.

About the Author

 

Adnan Tabatabai is co-founder and CEO of the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient (CARPO). As a Berlin-based political analyst on Iranian affairs, he is consulted by the German Federal Foreign Office, members of the German Bundestag, political foundations as well as journalists and authors. He writes analyses and commentaries on Iran for German and English media outlets. Tabatabai holds an assigned lectureship at the Heinrich Heine University of Duesseldorf and is an associated researcher for the INEF project “Peaceful Change and Violent Conflict—the Transformation of the Middle East and Western-Muslim relations.” He is a PhD candidate at the University Duisburg-Essen.