US
urged to forge new Turkey
partnership By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Major changes that have swept
both Turkey and its neighborhood since the Cold
War require Washington to forge a "new
partnership" with Ankara, according to a new
report released on Tuesday by the influential
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Among
other steps, United States President Barack Obama
and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
should use their close relationship to create a
government-wide forum for regular, cabinet-level
bilateral consultations like Washington's
Strategic and Economic Dialogue (SED) with China
or its strategic-level exchanges with Israel,
according to the report by a blue-ribbon task
force of 23 members.
Co-chaired by former
secretary of state Madeleine Albright and former
national security adviser Stephen Hadley, who served
under presidents Bill
Clinton and George W Bush, respectively, the task
force also called for building much stronger
economic ties between the two countries by
possibly negotiating a bilateral free trade
agreement and taking other measures.
While
conceding that Washington will disagree with
Ankara on a number of important issues, including
the pace and direction of political reform inside
Turkey and Ankara's relations with Israel, the
report concludes that "it is incumbent upon
policymakers to make every effort to develop
US-Turkey ties in order to make a strategic
relationship a reality".
"To do otherwise
would be to miss a historic opportunity to set
ties between Washington on a cooperative
trajectory in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean,
Middle East and Africa, for a generation,"
according to the 90-page report, "US-Turkey
Relations: A New Partnership".
The report
comes amid a growing - albeit slow - appreciation
here for Turkey's emergence over the past decade
as a global economic powerhouse, evidenced by its
membership in the Group of 20 (G-20), and as a
regional superpower with significant influence on
not just the evolution of the past year's "Arab
Spring" but also the ongoing crisis between Iran
and the West, and the future supply of oil and gas
from the Caspian and Central Asia to Europe.
Shifting trajectory During the
Cold War, Turkey was largely taken for granted as
a loyal - if poor, inward-looking and sometimes
repressive - member of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) whose territory occupied a
particularly strategic position vis-a-vis
"containing" the Soviet Union.
In the past
20 years, but especially since the accession to
power of Erdogan's Justice and Development Party
(AKP) in 2002, however, Turkey's position has
changed dramatically.
Economically, its
growth rate has been sustained at close to Chinese
levels over the past decade; politically, the AKP
has significantly weakened the once-dominant
military and instituted other democratic reforms;
and internationally, Ankara has emerged as a
confident and independent actor, even as its
loyalty to NATO, as shown by its continuing troop
commitment in Afghanistan and its agreement to
station an anti-missile radar system on its soil,
appears undiminished.
Just last week, one
of the most influential US geostrategic thinkers,
former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski, compared Turkey's importance to those
of Washington's most powerful NATO allies.
"I would view Turkey personally today as
one of the four most important members of the
NATO, certainly right there with Britain, France,
and Germany," he said in a lecture at the
Brookings Institution. He also argued that
Turkey's political and economic evolution could
serve as a model not only for newly democratic
Arab states, but also for Iran and Russia.
As both he and the CFR report noted,
however, the United States has been slow to
recognize its significance.
Standing up
to Washington "The new Turkey is not well
understood by US administration officials, members
of congress or the public," the report notes,
adding that one of the aims of the task force,
which included prominent figures representing a
broad range of expertise and political views from
center right to center left, is precisely to build
a better understanding of Turkey's importance.
Indeed, much of the news coverage of
Turkey here over the past decade has been
negative.
Parliament's rejection of
Washington's use of Turkish bases as a launching
pad for the 2003 Iraq invasion came as a shock to
many in the US.
More recently, Erdogan's
outspoken denunciation of Israel's 2008-2009
military campaign in Gaza, followed by the Mavi
Marmara incident in which nine Turks were
killed by Israeli commandos in international
waters, sparked a wave of anti-Turkish acrimony
promoted, in particular, by neo-conservatives, who
had long been hostile to the AKP due to its
anti-military positions and Islamist roots.
The major institutions of the powerful
Israel lobby have also since quietly retaliated by
supporting the Greek and Armenian lobbies against
Turkish interests in congress.
At the same
time, human-rights and press-freedom groups here
have grown increasingly critical of internal
developments in Turkey, particularly the detention
and prosecution of dozens of journalists and
others in connection with the "Ergenekon" and
Sledgehammer" conspiracy investigations of the
military-dominated "deep state", and of scores of
activists, politicians, reporters and academics
accused of supporting the Kurdistan Workers' Party
(PKK).
The new report echoes many of these
rights- and democracy-related complaints, noting,
for example, that the AKP's constitutional reform
program has slowed unnecessarily and that the
government has sometimes resorted to the "same
non-democratic tools" as its predecessors.
Washington, it says, should encourage
Turkish leaders to "follow through with their
commitment to writing a new constitution that
better protects minority rights and basic
freedoms". The Kurdish issue, according to the
report, "is among the biggest obstacles to
Turkey's democratic ambitions and the root of many
of its illiberal practices", and Obama should
encourage Erdogan to pursue "a new Kurdish
opening".
At the same time, the report
insists that some of the fears about the AKP's
direction are exaggerated or unfounded. "In
particular, the decline in the role of the
military in Turkish political life does not mean
that Turkey is inexorably headed toward theocracy
or movement away from NATO," it insists, adding
that "the United States must not view the sum of
US-Turkey relations through the narrow prism of
particular issues, whether they be Armenia,
Israel, or ties to NATO".
"The US-Turkey
relationship is much broader than the Armenian
tragedy, the parlous state of Turkey-Israel
relations, or the false debates about Turkey's
place in the West," it declares.
Washington "needs to see Turkey as a
potential strategic partner with which it has a
relationship not only with newer partners, such as
India and Brazil, but ultimately with its closest
allies, such as Japan and South Korea", the report
adds.
On more specific recommendations,
the report suggests that domestic politics in both
Israel and Turkey are unlikely to favor any
rapprochement in the near future, so Washington
should encourage the two countries to maintain
what it calls the "one bright spot" in bilateral
relations - trade.
It also calls, among
other things, for greater US efforts to advance
the normalization of ties between Turkey and
Armenia and to contain Ankara's long-standing
territorial disputes with Greece and potential
disputes with Israel over gas deposits in the
eastern Mediterranean.
While the two
countries have differed on a number of fronts and
popular distrust of the United States is
especially high in Turkey, those differences
"should not preclude the development of a
partnership, in particular as Ankara has moved
closer to Washington's position on Syria and
Iran", according to the report, which also
stressed Turkey's "constructive" role in Iraq
despite its opposition to the invasion.
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