Misstep in Turkey's neighborly ties
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
ISTANBUL - As Turkey's principal energy partners, Russia and Iran provide
roughly 70% of Turkey's energy imports, yet both Tehran and Moscow are about to
send Ankara the chills of negative reactions if Turkey goes ahead with its
threat of sanctions on Syria.
Already, Turkey's embrace of the bid by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) to station an anti-missile radar on its territory has angered both
Russia and Iran.
Further, its talk of sanctions on Syria over an ongoing bloody crackdown on
protests has potentially widened a notch or two the cracks in Ankara's good
neighborly approach toward two important neighbors who do not subscribe to
Turkey's complete
loss of confidence in the embattled Bashar al-Assad regime. Henceforth, some
backlashes in the form of contractions in Turkey's relations with both Russia
and Iran may be inevitable.
Clearly, this puts Turkey's much-cherished foreign policy doctrine of "zero
problems" with neighbors in serious jeopardy, in light of brewing problems in
Eastern Mediterranean, where Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
threatened military action in response to Cyprus' off-shore oil exploration
activities - that have proceeded with United States backing irrespective of
Turkey's warning.
In his recent meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in New York,
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was told that the US supported Cyprus
right to off-shore energy exploration, led by a US company, and naturally one
wonders what this will mean for Ankara's repeated sermons on the
"compatibility" of US and Turkish approaches to regional issues.
Perhaps a main problem with Davutoglu's foreign policy doctrine has been an
undifferentiated notion of "problems", lumping together the minor and major
(ie, strategic or geopolitical), short- and long-term problems, as a result of
which on the surface today's multiplication of Turkey's problems with its
neighbors, as well as near neighbors such as Israel, appear to have effectively
nullified that doctrine.
It is given that foreign policy is too complicated and complex an affair to
ever completely fit theoretical parameters and the gaps between theory and
practice are too often unavoidable. Still, it is by virtue of Turkey's often
self-congratulatory over-conceptualization of its foreign policy behavior that
today a certain measure of cognitive dissonance in the foreign policy realm has
emerged that is partly-self inflicted, bound to damage Turkey's external image.
After all, it is rather difficult to see how Turkey's rhetoric of gunboat
diplomacy and coercive sanctions fit in with the soft power approach championed
by Davutoglu. Turkey for some time, relying on its multi-regional identity,
tried to be everything to everyone and, instead, today finds itself in a
potentially precarious situation of not satisfying anyone, including the
Europeans who have for all practical purposes put Turkey's bid for membership
in the European Union on indefinite hold.
Still, despite the blunt rebuff by the EU, Turkey continues to cling to its
membership in the "Western club" that is NATO, while simultaneously trying to
further integrate itself in Middle Eastern affairs and even harboring the
ambition of leading the volatile region.
But, bypassing the attention of Turkey's leadership is the simple yet delicate
point that a bulk of the Middle East does not subscribe to the Western security
approach toward the region and, therefore, as long as Turkey is regarded as
part of a Western alliance there will be structural limits to how far it can
succeed in shaping the "new Middle East".
Overcoming those limits call for the adoption by Turkey of an independent
security outlook that does not echo NATO's stance for instance, hardly in the
cards, or one might say, foreign policy tool kits in today's Turkey.
Consequently, there are signs of incoherence accumulating all over the
substance of Turkish foreign policy, such as the coincidence of economic
interdependence with Iran coupled with a Turkey-Iran falling out on regional
issues. Instead of "strategic depth", a favorite catch-word of Davutoglu and
his foreign policy team, what Turkey may soon achieve is its exact opposite -
deep strategic insecurity caused by the mushrooming of its problems with
various neighbors, some of which are attributable to Turkey's rather hasty
diplomacy on such issues as the proper response to the ongoing Syrian crisis.
Turkey is bound to lose a great deal of its appeal as conflict mediator in the
region if it continues to alienate neighbors like Iran and Syria by pursuit of
regime change in Damascus. This is in light of its willingness to host Syrian
opposition groups which are now setting up shop in Turkey for a Libya-style
transitional government, thus overlooking the major differences between Libya
and Syria. (See Does
Gaddafi's fate await Assad? Asia Times Online, August 25, 2011).
The idea of new "strategic depth" for a NATO country in the increasingly
assertive Middle East should be regarded as an anachronism that simply serves
the growing well of suspicion toward Turkey.
Iran in particular, a bastion of counter-Western hegemony for decades, will
never consent to Turkey's expansion of its influence to the Persian Gulf as
long as Turkey lacks a non-Western-centric security approach. In retrospect, it
appears that Davutoglu in his book Strategic Depth has underestimated
the severity of forces opposed to Turkey's quest for gaining a new strategic
foothold in the Middle East.
Despite his shortcomings, Davutoglu remains one of the most dynamic diplomats
from the developing world today.
Thus, while it is premature to conclude that Davutoglu's design of a new
foreign policy orientation has failed, it is on the other hand relatively
obvious that it is in a state of semi-crisis that could conceivably worsen in
the coming weeks and months, depending on developments in the Middle East and
the Mediterranean. The bottom line is that Davutoglu's conceptualization has
proved insufficiently sophisticated and theoretically ill-nourished, its
taxonomy and theoretical framework in dire need of rethinking.
To elaborate, since becoming foreign minister in 2009, Davutoglu has repeatedly
expressed optimism that Turkey could soon jump the ladder of success among
nations by elevating its status from the 17th largest economy in the world to
the 10th, an optimism born and bred by Turkey's vibrant economy, nodal point as
a transit hub, etc.
This puts too much emphasis on "going it alone" as a national economy, without
sufficient infusion of a truly regionalist approach, exemplified by the minimal
attention accorded to the regional organization, the Economic Cooperation
Organization (ECO), by Davutoglu. ECO comprises Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Iran,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan.
And yet, the ECO, if integrated further and if it succeeded to act as a
meaningful economic bloc, could overnight realize Davutoglu's dream, still
infected as it is by a 19th century obsession with purely national power.
In turn, this calls for a more vigorous devotion of attention and resources to
the building blocs of an ECO region sadly lacking in today's Turkey, that never
tires of pushing for EU membership, even though the advantages of
non-membership may be actually increasing, given the various, and serious,
economic woes gripping the eurozone today.
One reason this may never happen however is that Turkey's multiple regional
identities implicate it in a limited regional engagement in Asia and the Middle
East. If Erdogan really wishes to see Turkey come out as first in the Middle
East rather than the last in Europe, then a proper course of action would be to
jettison altogether the rhetoric on Turkey's primacy that actually serves no
purpose other than to raise red flags in the region regarding Turkey's
ambitions, often portrayed as "neo-Ottomanism".
A new "tanzimat" or restructuring in Turkey's foreign policy is
definitely called for, that in turn depends on a cognitive re-mapping away from
the restrictive present framework that harbors vacuous elements, as well as the
above-mentioned signs of incoherence.
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