Turkey and the West

The uncoupling of Turkey from the West that began when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took office is starting to look irreversible. For decades after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the pro-western policy of Kemal Ataturk held sway. Turkey abandoned Arabic script in favour of Latin letters, emphasised the secular against the religious, joined Nato and sought admission to the EU. But President Erdogan has Islamified Turkey once more, suppressed dissent and engineered a series of constitutional changes to give himself untrammelled power.

The consequence has been a cooling of relations with Turkey’s erstwhile Western allies which has suddenly reached crisis point. The immediate cause is Turkey’s imprisonment of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor. Ankara’s continued refusal to release him led the US last week to double tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. The lira plummeted as investors took fright, threatening Turkey with economic calamity.

But the imprisoned pastor is just one of many disagreements driving a wedge between Turkey and the West. Mr Erdogan’s interference in Syria, his treatment of the Kurds and his efforts to forge closer ties with Russia are causing serious doubts among Nato countries about whether Turkey can be trusted any more to defend the alliance’s eastern boundary. Given that a key part of that defence is a nuclear base at Incirlik, which has also been used to mount operations against Isil, this is more than a run-of-the-mill diplomatic spat. It has significant geopolitical implications which Mr Erdogan spelled out: “Unless the United States starts respecting Turkey’s sovereignty... our partnership could be in jeopardy.” It is getting close to the point of no return.