Co-opting Turkey and Iran--in tandem

Fascinating Stephen Kinzer piece in The American Prospect, by way of WPR's Media Roundup.

The subtitle makes the statement boldly:

Why America's future partners in the Middle East should be Turkey and Iran -- yes, Iran.

Underlying argument:  two countries in the region have a long history of struggling with democracy--Turkey and Iran.  Both currently sport the Islamist veneer, but beneath lies a restive and vibrant civic culture.

In the future, it is not Turkey alone where "they come together." Improbable as it may seem right now, given the current regime in Iran, a partnership that unites Turkey, Iran, and the United States is the future and makes sense for two reasons: The three countries share strategic interests, and their people share values. Our evolving relationship with a changing Turkey offers a model for the kind of relationship we might one day--not necessarily tomorrow--have with a changing Iran. This is the tantalizing possibility of a new way for the U.S. to engage with the Middle East in the 21st century.

Why explore?  Because our Cold War stalwarts aren't working out:

Today we work in the region primarily through two bilateral relationships--with Israel and with Saudi Arabia. These pairings served Washington well during the Cold War. They have not, however, produced a stable Middle East. 

I like this piece very much.  Very intelligent, unemotional, and strategic in vision.

Also adapted from a new book (Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America's Future).

Turkey steps into the breach left by our lack of strategic imagination

World Bulletin piece via Our Man in Kabul.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Monday the tripartite mechanism between Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan would make efforts to hold the Istanbul Forum meeting, one that involves businesspeople of the three countries, in Kabul, Afghanistan. 

Davutoglu held a tripartite meeting with Afghan Foreign Minister Zalmay Rassoul and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi at Ciragan Palace in Istanbul as part of the Third Summit of Heads of State and Government of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-building Measures in Asia (CICA). 

Speaking at a press conference following the tripartite meeting, Davutoglu said that they wanted to contribute to the "normalization process" in Afghanistan by showing that Kabul was not a city in which only security meetings took place but also a city in which economic meetings could take place. 

Turkey will indeed try our patience in its regional ambitions, but there is far more positive force than negative friction created by this push, so I say, bring it on in spades!

Regional powers stepping in to let Afghanistan know it's not on its own once NATO leaves is a very good thing. The more those signals are sent, especially from nations with established reputations of defending their regional interests vigorously, the faster we move the Taliban to a sense of inevitability--as in, the world is coming and it's never leaving, so get used to it.

The New Core not doing what they're told!

I want you to frickin' behave!Pair of NYT articles about "pliable ally" Turkey now playing "thorn" and China's PLA types being all blunt in their criticism of U.S. foreign policy and perceived meddling (always, the Taiwan thing!).

Naturally, the NYT frets: these are signs of America's diminished power.

Boo hoo! say I.  Integrating rising great powers into a stable system ain't for sissies or whiners or the self-doubting types.

The fear and the reality:

Turkey is seen increasingly in Washington as “running around the region doing things that are at cross-purposes to what the big powers in the region want,” said Steven A. Cook, a scholar with the Council on Foreign Relations. The question being asked, he said, is “How do we keep the Turks in their lane?”

From Turkey’s perspective, however, it is simply finding its footing in its own backyard, a troubled region that has been in turmoil for years, in part as a result of American policy making. Turkey has also been frustrated in its longstanding desire to join the European Union.

“The Americans, no matter what they say, cannot get used to a new world where regional powers want to have a say in regional and global politics,” said Soli Ozel, a professor of international relations at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “This is our neighborhood, and we don’t want trouble. The Americans create havoc, and we are left holding the bag.”

Turkey’s rise as a regional power may seem sudden, but it has been evolving for years, since the end of the cold war, when the world was a simple alignment of black and white and Turkey, a Muslim democracy founded in 1923, was a junior partner in the American camp.

Twenty years later, the map has been redrawn.

Washington does want everybody in their lane all right; it's a very old habit born of a superpower rivalry.  And now, there are so many types in DC who are desperate to recast China's rise in the same manner.  So when China doesn't start being more American right quick, we get nervous.  And those fears expand that much more when previous strategic employees like Turkey start acting like they think they're actual partners--as in people who balance each other's interests instead of just obeying!

Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu seems to have a head on his shoulders:

“Economic interdependence is the best way to achieve peace,” he said at his home in Ankara last weekend. “In the 1990s we had severe tension all around us, and Turkey paid a huge bill because of that. Now we want to establish a peaceful order around us.”

Nations sharing economic interdependencies do get meddlesome in their neighbors's affairs.  For a long time, the biggest dependencies for most nations were bilateral ones with the US or a former colonial power. Nowadays, these interlocking relationships are all over the place, so rising powers are taking all sort of cues from all sorts of players, meaning America's voice, while awfully important, no longer drowns out everybody else's.

And so we better get used to being lectured to by powers who expect to do their sharing of lecturing--in addition to the usual receiving of lectures from us.

As for Chinese flag officers getting more forceful in public and closed-door sessions with US officials, understand two things (and no, I don't direct the following rant particularly at the general who made the forceful comments in front of Gates at the recent Asian security gathering, because his comments struck me as pretty routine in their grievance airing):

First, way too many of these guys are political and economic retrogrades, like they are most everywhere else on the planet (yes, there's been huge, beyond-evolutionary improvement in our ranks these past two decades but I do remember the Cold War dinosaurs well). Yes, they know their own business well enough, but almost to a man, these guys have no normal-world experience outside a life lived exclusively in the military. Put a mike in front of them and they will make some of the stupidest economic and political statements you've ever heard.  We've gotten used to a whole new generation of flag officers in the West who are so smooth in these circumstances that they sound like PR machines (minus any ideological DNA), but these skills don't yet exist in places like China, where they will utter the most foolishly bold comments with little sense as to how they are perceived (or what bullshit they're spouting).  And even when they speak in more military terms, their lack of awareness of any connectivity between their dreams of warfare and that big old world of economics out there is just stunning.  They will brag on all sorts of capabilities with almost no understanding of the real-world limits of those capabilities. They're blowhards--pure and simple.

And yeah, our experts and our media tend to lap it up big-time: "Oh my God! Did that Chinese general just say/write that!"). Why? The usual self-serving reasons.

Second, also understand that Chinese general have almost no experience in international or bilateral venues. Most of these guys have been kept under wraps for their entire careers. When I've spoken at military conferences in recent years, it's not unusual to find out that such-and-such an event was only the first or second time the PLA has ever participated, so the experience base just isn't there. These guys therefore tend to be a strange combo of loose cannons and overly-scripted.  The more we interact with them and the more they interact with the world, this experience gap will fade, and I've met plenty of mid-level PLA officers (my age) who impress the hell out of me for their superbly sophisticated minds and better skills at expressing themselves, so we won't be waiting for long.

Per the embedded link above to the WAPO story about a Chinese navy admiral voicing the opinion that all that's good in US-Chinese relations is due to them and all that's bad is due to America, I have no doubt that this sort of blunt one-sided is truly thrilling for Chinese officials to witness.  They do feel like they're doing all they can and they do harbor significant--and hardly irrational--fears that America will inevitable make them its primary enemy--just out of habit.  We will witness plenty such, getting-it-off-their-chest bravado in coming years, and we should take it stride--just like the Brits did with us a century ago.  The Chinese have--quite frankly--no idea what they're getting themselves into with assuming more of a global leadership role.  So let their arrogance lead them into situations that their wisdom will eventually rescue them from.  You can't force socialization on this scale; the Chinese will be who they imagine themselves to be for as long as possible, refusing to change--again, just like we acted for a very long time (arguably, the Chinese will have no such luxury in this rapidly evolving globalization era). 

Primary point of this admittedly snotty rant: don't get wrapped around the hype.  Countries, just like people, grow into roles. Whether they're "ancient civilizations" or not, their current rise puts them in unfamiliar territory, and no, there ain't no ancient Chinese secrets for what lies ahead.  Everybody is making it up as they go along, because a global landscape with multiple rising, prosperous, and strangely peaceful great powers is completely unprecedented.

But it was bought with your US tax dollars, so show some pride and act--as they say in the NFL--like you've been in the great-powers' endzone before.  As always: play up to potential and not down to the competition, but respect the competition.

Greece learning from Turkey? Have pigs started flying?

Bloomberg BusinessWeek piece stating that when PM Recep Erdogan and the AKP took over Turkey in 2001, the "Turks were worse off than Greeks--and the IMF cure worked."

The logic?

Erdogan and Babacan [finance minister] used the IMF's tough regimen as an excuse for doing things that previous Turkish governments had avoided for decades.

A biggie?  The gov stepped up tax collection from under-reporters, something you just know is a huge problem in Greece.

Point being, the Turks could have defaulted then, just like Greece considers now.  But that would have been dealing only with the most painful symptom of the moment.

Israel sinks into its siege mentality, meanwhile, Turkey got what it wanted

Couple of FT articles.

Per my post in Esquire’s The Politics Blog, Turkey seems to be moving with all premeditated speed to neck down its ties with Israel—all the better for the nuclear moves down the road.  This is classic “chosen trauma,” in that it’s a BIG DEAL because it suits Ankara’s strategy to make it so.

Meanwhile, Israelis seem, as usual, to be of many minds on the subject.  Few like the blockade but most see it as defensible, given Hamas’ behavior since taking power.  Everybody seems to think the raid was poorly conducted, but likewise that Turkey set them up, so botched or not, Ankara wanted its bloody shirt.

As for the actual events, everybody sees what they want to remember, says the FT piece.  Israelis see their forces under clear attack (please, no professional soldiers kill 9 people in such an operation unless they feel like they’ve got no choice regarding survival) and don’t much care about the cost borne by the instigators of the provocation.   The West only sees its martyrs, thus a natural feeling of solidarity with ordinary Palestinians that most definitely benefits the criminally cynical—and by my measure inept—Hamas government.

To date, outside great powers have done nothing to alter this dynamic, meaning the upshot of the blood events is that Turkey executed—pun intended—the concluding act in their comprehensive de-alignment with Tel Aviv—nothing more and nothing less.

Esquire's The Politics Blog: The Real Israeli Raid Fallout: Turkey with a Bomb?

If you look beyond the international shouting match that began on Monday after Israel botched its handling of a Turkey-sponsored aid flotilla bound for Gaza, well, things look pretty shocking. Just because at least nine people are dead — Western casualties included — doesn't mean the boat raid itself is what "has the makings of a huge international fracas." And just because the Turkish foreign minister says "this attack is like 9/11" — which it isn't — doesn't mean Tel Aviv will take its eyes off what the Israelis actually perceive to be the larger threat: Iran's nuclear weapons.

Read the full post at Esquire.com's The Politics Blog.

Ankara's simple rule-set: fix your own problems first if you want larger influence

The guts of an FT column by Philip Stephens:

For Mr Erdogan's government the attempt to broker a deal is a natural extension of Ankara's active regional diplomacy. The last few years have seen a marked rise in both Turkey's economic prosperity and its political confidence. As France, Germany and others have found reasons to exclude it from the European Union, Turkey has turned eastwards.

Ankara's rising stature in the region has been based on the brilliantly simple proposition that nations that want to project influence should start by fixing their own disputes. Mr Erdogan has settled long-running arguments with Syria and Iraq and sought to lower tensions in the Caucasus.

The neighbourhood problem-solving has not been universally successful but it has been sufficiently so to turn Turkey into a big regional player. Mr Erdogan's government now shows the political confidence that comes with understanding that it has opened up options for itself beyond frustrating and fruitless negotiations in Brussels about the terms under which it might at some point qualify as a "European" power. Here, I think, lies a source of the irritation in Washington and elsewhere about the latest initiative.

The off-stated ambition of western governments is that the world's rising powers should bear some of the burden of safeguarding international security and prosperity. The likes of China, India and, dare one say, Turkey and Brazil, are beneficiaries of a rules-based global order and, as such, should be prepared to contribute. They should, in a phrase coined some years ago by Robert Zoellick, act as stakeholders in the system.

Seen from Ankara or Brasilia, or indeed from Beijing or New Delhi, there is an important snag in this argument. They are not being invited to craft a new international order but rather to abide by the old (western) rules. As I heard one Chinese scholar remark this week, it is as if the rising nations have been offered seats at a roulette table only on the strict understanding that the west retains ownership of the casino.

Ownership in the system comes with the ability to alter the existing rules or propose new ones.  If that's not allowed, no ownership can be had.

We are getting exactly what we asked for re: "stakeholders."  The challenge for us is not to referee, but to compete with even better ideas, more innovative rules, and more imaginative diplomacy.

More on "assertive Turkey" being a good thing

map here

David Gardner in the FT (column "Global Insight").

The EU ambivalently delays any serious negotiations on Turkey's admission, and meanwhile, the Turk's, with their "zero problems with neighbors" foreign policy, seem to be outshining everyone in the region in terms of diplomatic zing.  So Gardner asks, does Turkey care about the EU any more?

Is Turkey playing "hard to get" with this "neo-Ottomanism" under foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu and prime minister Erdogan?

A local academic says, "AKP people feel more comfortable in Damascus than Rome.  The new elites want the best of both worlds."

Good for them, I say, and good for the Core as a whole for Turkey to come into its own as a frontier integrator and globalization networker.  Even if it means we don't always get out way on things.

Gardner's point is apt here:  no longer the Western bulwark against the hordes, now Turkey is the prime bridge, whether the EU rewards it or not.  Turkey has opening 30 new embassies in Africa and Latin America. Bravo!  I say.

Gardner:

This is not the return of the Ottomans but a commercial comeback--timed to pickup the slack from the recession in the EU.

Turkey ses itself as a regional power as well, and is determined to show the EU two things: that it has options; and that, unlike the EU, it knows how to deploy "soft power" in Europe's Middle Eastern backyard.  In short, that is is an asset.  "Turkey is using the transformative power of the European Union, which the EU itself appears to have lost," says Ayhan Kaya of Istanbul's Bilgi University.

Germany and France have told too-big, too-Muslim and too-poor Turkey to f--k off.  And Turkey took that advice to heart.

We are all better off for that ambition unleashed.

Another sign of Turkey's diplomatic ambitions?

The nature of the problem is familiar enough:

With the backing of 7,000 African Union peacekeepers, a mission known as Amisom, the transitional government controls only an area around the presidential palace in the capital, Mogadishu, the airport and the seaport. 

Lawlessness across much of the rest of the country allows pirates to launch raids on shipping passing through the Gulf of Aden and far out into the Indian Ocean. In 2009, 47 vessels with 837 crew members were taken, despite the presence of an international naval force. 

Violence, poverty and drought have spawned a humanitarian crisis that has seen almost two million Somalis displaced within the country. There are overcrowded Somali refugee camps in nearby Kenya, Yemen, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

What interested me was Turkey's recent hosting of a 3-day conference designed to inject new thinking into possible solutions:

The Turkish hosts of a conference to be held in Istanbul this week on conflict, piracy and the deepening humanitarian crisis in Somalia say the event will offer policymakers an opportunity to “rethink” solutions for the war-torn nation.

But even the UN officials helping Turkey arrange the three-day summit that begins on Friday have reminded delegates not to expect any “magical negotiation” that will resolve Somalia’s long-running problems.

I mean, this is beyond Turkey's recent activity in its neighborhood (the zero-problems-with-neighbors policy). This shows some genuine great power ambition.

I say, the more, the merrier.  We're talking another New Core player with growing economic networks and a sizeable military force willing and able to go places and do things.

Very good sign, whatever the short-term outcome.

There has never been any mystery to me why I have immediately sold the foreign rights to all my books to a Turkish publisher.  Like China, where this has also happened, Turkey is naturally a rising power on the make. It is in the zone where thinking about grand strategy holds great appeal, like a rising America in the late 19th C.

Turkey, on the march!

You can almost hear Ed Herlihy narrating a 1940s newsreel WRT Turkey's busy diplomacy, deal-making, etc. This is a rising great power on the make.

Several energy agreements inked in latest Erdogan-Medvedev meet, where the Russian president lauds the "full-scale strategic partnership."

Hmm.  Be nice to have one of those with Turkey.

Results include visa-free travel, Turkey's first nuclear power plant (take note) and an oil pipeline construction-boosting accord. Trade is pledged to increase 3-fold to $100B.

Seems possible enough, given recent growth.

The pipeline deal is a tricky one:  Turkey wants fewer-to-no oil tankers in the Bosphorus (which I got to cruise last year with the head of the Turkish navy), and it's easy to see why--just too narrow and too winding.

Yes, the two are competitive over who gets to become the bigger natural gas hub (Russia has a competing pipeline--South Stream to Turkey's Nabucco), but they also share a lot of frustration with the EU.

So it seems that Russia relented some on oil pipelines in order to get the nuclear power plant deal signed.

New Core Turkey, Brazil engineer nuclear fuel enrichment deal with Iran

This is both quite impressive in terms of non-superpower nuclear diplomacy but likewise self-serving--especially to Turkey.

What New Core powers like Turkey and Brazil say with this deal:  We ourselves can and will decide, under what circumstances we'll collectively self-engineer ourselves--and other rising regional powers like us--into nuclear status.

In other words, the Old Core, old-boy nuclear powers club no longer decides.

Bold, slick moves by both Lula and Erdogan that will provide Ahmadinejad just enough cover to claim victory--and keep us guessing--while effectively killing any movement toward tougher sanctions.  The Chinese have to like it, as will Moscow--I imagine.

Have to give it up to Iran on this one, as well as Turkey and Brazil.  This deal constitutes a real rule-set reset when it comes to issues of proliferation--both real and stealthy.  The West simply no longer dictates on this issue.

End of the world to some, but just another aspect of rising great powers incorporating themselves into the venues of international power and influence instead of waiting for the established powers to invite them in--on the West's preferred terms.

Whether or not Iran will truly be satisfied with a Japan-like outcome (obviously capable and close to weaponization but not taking the final step) is yet to be seen, but this deal is an effective short-term defusing of any logic of attack.  Now, Israel is pre-approved to be widely condemned for any kinetics by the bulk of the world's rising great powers.

Assuming it holds, it looks like the latest "check" to me, meaning a move that keeps Tehran close to its endgame win and essentially determining our next, checkmate-avoiding move.  Iran's declaration that it will continue to enrich some fuel on its own?  That's just an in-your-face reminder.

Will it be enough for the West?  Absolutely not.  But it gives China and India the out they need.

The big point:  Iran keeps coming up with these clever ways to buy time, and in doing so, it's attracting a lot of implicit support from rising New Core powers who aren't exactly in favor of Iran's nuclear status but will defend its right to do so--however quietly and cleverly.