Tussle with Turkey

U.S. relations with NATO ally are perilously bad

It is a striking failure of U.S. foreign policy that we have somehow managed to fall out with Turkey, a very important country to us, after seven decades of useful cooperation.

Turkey has coasts on the Mediterranean and Black seas and borders with Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Greece, Iran, Iraq and Syria. It is a member of NATO and first put troops alongside ours in the Korean War. It is a predominantly Sunni Muslim country, but with Western ambitions in terms of its economy and society. It is considered to be a physical and cultural bridge between the European and Asian worlds.

In other words, Turkey could and should be considered an important partner of the United States in its relations with the Middle East, Europe and most of the rest of the Muslim world. But now it isn’t. Instead, at the recent conference of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan led the verbal assault on the United States, not only for the position America has taken on the status of Jerusalem but on U.S. foreign policy in general.

Some of it was Mr. Erdogan posturing in front of an audience of majority Islamic state leaders, but some of it also was a deeper-based position of anger at the United States over a number of issues, important to Turkey, less important or at least potentially more flexible on the U.S. side.

One of these was and is the military support the United States has provided to the Kurds in the Iraq conflict, running from 1990 to the present. Kurdish irredentism is pure poison to the Turks, whose governments consistently have had to deal with Kurdish aspirations in Turkey, whose population includes between 20 and 25 percent Kurds. Most recently the United States used Iraqi and Syrian Kurdish militias as one of the instruments with which to reduce the Islamic State capital Raqqah, in Syria, which fell this year. The Kurds were left with both U.S. weaponry and trainers. The White House has promised to withdraw them; time will tell.

There is also the continuing issue of the presence in Pennsylvania of Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam and politician whom Mr. Erdogan considers to be his political arch-enemy, the architect of the 2016 military coup attempt against his democratically elected government. Mr. Erdogan wants the United States to extradite Mr. Gulen to Turkey, to face trial. The United States refuses to do so, arguing that Mr. Erdogan’s government has not yet submitted a convincing enough case against Mr. Gulen. Whether money has changed hands, and whether Mr. Gulen has enough political friends for the United States to continue to resist correctly Turkey’s request is not clear, but the Turkish government and Mr. Erdogan are staying furious.

How much Turkish anger at President Donald Trump’s statement of position on Jerusalem will remain will only become clear as time passes and the Muslim world’s long-term reaction to it becomes clearer.

In the meantime, something needs to be done on the American side to mend fences with Turkey. It is a country that has been and remains strategically important to us as an ally. Air bases there were a cornerstone of U.S. successes in the war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. There is no good reason why the issues between the two countries that remain painful cannot be worked through successfully, restoring the long-standing positive cooperation that has characterized the past 70 years. This is a wound to U.S. strategic foreign policy that needs attention urgently.