Turkey Tilts Toward Iran

Claudia Rosett, 03.26.10, 12:01 AM EDT

ANKARA–Drinking tea with the President of Turkey has charms enough so that I wish there were no need to report the disturbing talk that went with it–of Iranian rulers and nuclear bombs.

But the occasion was a policy interview, not a social call. President Abdullah Gul, with his mustache, swept back hair and a mischievous glint in his eye, recently received a visiting group of Americans, including a handful of reporters, of which I was one. He spoke with us at Turkey’s presidential palace, a splendid place of jasmine-scented halls, maritime oil paintings and a waiting room furnished with cozy armchairs, a sofa of palest gold leather and a big flat-screen TV showing scenes of his recent activities. From there we were seated around a polished wood table, sipping our tea, while Gul sat at the head, speaking through an interpreter (though he speaks English). At the request of our group he focused on two issues: disputes arising from the Armenian genocide of 1915, and policies for dealing with Iran’s regime and its nuclear and potentially genocidal ambitions today. 

Despite the hospitality, I came away with the uneasy sense that there is trouble brewing in Ankara. A secular, Muslim-majority state, long allied with the West, Turkey in 2002 voted into power an Islamic party, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP. The AKP’s leaders have been fashioning a new role for their government–a role embraced by President Barack Obama–in which Turkey behaves less as a firm ally of the West than as a multilateral mediator and regional center of “soft power.” 

Our visit may well have been intended as a small piece of that effort. The interview with President Gul capped a whirlwind of foreign policy meetings in Ankara late last week arranged by a private Turkish think tank, the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey, or TEPAV. (In joining this group, I turned down their offer to pay for airfare and hotels but did accept the chance to enjoy access to a number of high-level officials. 

From one government official after another we heard that Turkey’s current foreign policy, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is to seek “zero problems” with its neighbors. But Turkey has some of the world’s roughest neighbors, including Iran. Aspiring to zero problems with Iran, while its rulers murder dissidents, threaten democracies and build the bomb, requires compromises that are inevitably at odds with an array of Western interests, including the democratic values that Turkey’s AKP trumpets as being part of its program.

Already Turkey has tilted away from Israel, with which it had solid ties in the 1990s. Today Turkey’s AKP leaders talk with everyone but sympathize with the Iranian-backed Palestinian terrorist organization, Hamas, as “brothers.” Since early 2009 they have had a series of highly visible spats with Israel. Currently Turkey is also berating the U.S. over congressional calls for Ankara to apologize for the 1915 Armenian genocide. In early March, Turkey recalled its ambassador to Washington, Namik Tan. He turned up at two of the meetings organized for our group in Ankara, including the interview with the president. Tan is a genial man, but his presence was a pointed reminder that while Turkey is America’s ally–a NATO member, sending troops to Afghanistan and hosting U.S. forces at Incirlik Air Base–Turkey’s leaders don’t mind flaunting their disagreements with Washington.

This matters, not least, because Turkey, long a hapless petitioner to join the European Union, has been campaigning with great success to join or even preside over some of the world’s other prominent diplomatic clubs. In 1999 Turkey became a founding member of the Group of 20 industrialized and emerging economies. Since Erdogan took office in 2003, his government has been shunting aside Turkey’s secular military, the second-largest standing armed forces in NATO after the U.S. Reaching out on other fronts, Erdogan over the past seven years has made 234 visits to 81 countries on five continents, according to a Turkish pro-government newspaper, Today’s Zaman. Gul, who served as Erdogan’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister before becoming president in 2007, maintains a similar globe-trotting schedule. So does Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, a prime strategist of Turkey’s current approach, on which he has written a book titled Strategic Depth.

Diplomatically, it’s paid off. Since 2005 a Turk has headed the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference–headquartered in Saudi Arabia and one of the most powerful lobbying blocs in the U.N. In 2009, for the first time in almost four decades, Turkey took one of the 10 rotating seats on the U.N. Security Council. Currently, Turkey also sits on the governing board of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (where it abstained last fall from a vote to censure Iran for building a secret uranium enrichment facility near Qom).

With all this, Turkey has become an influential player in diplomatic efforts to corral Iran’s nuclear bomb program. But with a “zero problems” approach to Iran, where does that lead?

Gul says he has no doubts that Iran wants the nuclear bomb: “This is an Iranian aspiration dating back to the previous regime, the days of the Shah.” For Iran’s current regime, says Gul, “I do believe it is their final aspiration to have a nuclear weapon in the end,” as a matter of ” ‘national pride.’ ”

He says Turkey is against an Iranian bomb. He believes it would trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East: “A major competition will start in the region.”

So far, so good. But how does he propose Iran be stopped? Turkey is against further sanctions. Gul argues that “It is not possible to isolate such a major country.” Turkey is also opposed to any military action. Instead, Turkey’s government favors trying to talking Iran’s rulers into giving up on nuclear weapons.

For that, says Gul, the Turks are excellent negotiators, aware of the nuances of Iran’s multipolar politics. “We’re talking to Iranians with mutual respect, and most of the time we have very sincere and open remarks with them.” He is sure that Iranian religious leaders have heard blunt realities from him which “they have not heard from anyone else.” 

What kind of advice does Turkey give? When Obama last year extended a hand to Iran’s rulers, Gul says he advised Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that “This needs to be reciprocated … This is a major opportunity, and the language of President Obama doesn’t have any threats within it, and this is an opportunity that should not be missed.”

That advice failed completely. Iran snubbed Obama, insulted America and went on threatening Israel, arming and training terrorists and enriching uranium.

But Gul says not to worry. He is sure that even if Iran gets the bomb, “they will not use it.” He says he has warned Iran’s leaders that the real danger they face, should they acquire nuclear weapons, is that they “will start acting in an irrational manner, which will create problems for themselves.”

One might suppose it would also create problems for others, such as Israel. But Gul says Israel need not worry. However irrational Iran’s leaders might become, he is sure they will remain rational enough to refrain from devastating Israel–lest, by doing so, they should harm the Palestinians or the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem (which he says would then create problems for Iran “with all the Muslims of the Gulf and the surrounding regions”).

Gul reaches the sweeping conclusion that the real solution to Iran’s bomb program is “to eliminate nuclear weapons throughout the Middle East.” This, he suggests, is the way to “guarantee the security of Israel.” But neither he nor any of the other Turkish government officials we spoke with in Ankara were able to provide a plan for ensuring that Iran–undeterred by years of European, American, U.N. and Turkish diplomatic talks–would genuinely abandon its bomb program.

Such is the realpolitik of Turkey today. The real game in Ankara seems to be not to stop the Iranian bomb but to get along with neighboring, nuclear-arming Iran. That’s not soft power. It’s appeasement. That may be understandable, given Obama’s hesitation to set a lead for definitive action against Iran. But it is a perilous guide, and all the tea and talk in Turkey, no matter how gracious the setting, will not make up for the horrors this kind of “zero problems” policy is likely to help bring down on the Middle East.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes.

Source: Forbes