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Sunday, October 18, 2024
By Steven L. Taylor

Via Memeorandum yesterday, I noted an odd piece by Caroline Glick at Real Clear Politics entitled “How Turkey Was Lost to the West” wherein she claims that “this week Turkey officially left the Western alliance and became a full member of the Iranian axis.”

The short and simple response: 

Until Turkey quits NATO, rescinds its request to join the EU, and makes a public statement about joining Iran, any talk about the Turkey being “lost to the West” is absurd on its face.

The longer, more involved, response:

This all appears to be based on current tensions between Israel and Turkey1 as well as improving relations between Turkey and Syria2.

However, given that Turkey hasn’t renounced its NATO membership, it is hyperbole in the extreme to characterize Turkey as having made a massive anti-Western, pro-Iranian shift.

Glick’s piece is really more of an assertion-fest than anything else and it also contains rather curious “arguments” that rather clearly indicate that Glick doesn’t know what she is talking about in regards to Turkish politics.

For example, she writes (all emphasis below is mine):

Then there is the EU. For years Brussels has been stringing Turkey along, promising that if it enacts sufficient human rights reforms, the 80-million strong Muslim country will be permitted to join Europe. But far from inducing more liberal behavior on the part of Turkey, those supposedly enlightened reforms have paved the way for the Islamist ascendance in the country. By forcing Turkey to curb its military’s role as the guarantor of Turkish secularism, the EU took away the secularists’ last line of defense against the rising tide of the AKP. By forcing Turkey to treat its political prisoners humanely and cancel the death penalty, the EU eroded the secularists’ moral claim to leadership and weakened their ability to effectively combat both Kurdish and Islamist terror.

At the same time, by consistently refusing to permit Turkey to join the EU, despite Ankara’s moves to placate its political correctness, Brussels discredited still further Turkey’s secularists. When after all their self-defeating and self-abasing reforms, Europe still rejected them, the Turks needed to find a way to restore their wounded honor. The most natural means of doing so was for the Turks writ large to simply turn their backs on Europe and move toward their Muslim brethren.

There are two rather glaring problems with these two paragraphs. 

First, the tensions within Turkey between the nationalists/hardcore secularists and the religiously oriented AKP is not the results of the EU doing anything.  This is a real and legitimate cleavage within Turkey itself. 

Beyond that, it is a rather strange (to put  it politely) assertion that “By forcing Turkey to treat its political prisoners humanely and cancel the death penalty, the EU eroded the secularists’ moral claim to leadership and weakened their ability to effectively combat both Kurdish and Islamist terror.”  So in a piece that is ostensibly about why the AKP is making Turkey less democratic, more anti-West, and more pro-radical Islam is the claim that the nationalists lost moral authority because they had to “treat its political prisoners humanely and cancel the death penalty”?  Is she arguing that treating prisoners inhumanely is pro-Western?  Is she saying that the only way that Turkey can be a pro-western democracy is if it is allowed to treat its political prisoners inhumanely?  The logic, shall we say, simply doesn’t follow.  If anything, it says a lot about Glick’s ideological predilections and that she equates the need to treat prisoners (especially Islamic terrorists) inhumanely with being pro-Western.

By the way:  any chance that said inhumane treatment might have caused some political backlash against the pro-military nationalists?

The second problem with the above, and the one that is especially telling about her lack of understanding of Turkey is that the AKP that she accuses of wishing to move Turkey away from the West and into the arms of Iran is the party in Turkey most in favor of Turkey’s entry into the EU.

Indeed, the recent move to normalize relations with Armenia was motivated in large measure by the EU question. 3

See, for example, the following from a July piece in  Hürriyet: AKP’s constituency ranks first to support the EU bid.   It should be noted that Turkey’s negotiations with the EU continue, with a review of the latest Turk proposal slated for an EU summit in December.4  Indeed, the AKP’ government’s ongoing negotiations with the EU underscore that no matter what might be currently going on with Turkish-Israeli relations that the AKP is hardly taking Turkey out of its western orientation.

As such, I would suggest that no one take Glick’s position seriously.

Some background material:

Sphere: Related Content

  1. see, for more information, here and here []
  2. See here.  Also, it is worth noting that the current government’s goal in terms of foreign policy is the reduction of tensions with its immediate neighbors and Turkey shares a rather large land border with Syria.  For a map, click here. []
  3. For more on this, see the following BBC piece:  How Turks and Armenians see new ties. []
  4. See Hürriyet: Bağış welcomes EC report and urges opposition to contribute more and   EU report rebalances negative mood on Turkish accession, say experts.  Both pieces are from the past week (that of 10/12/09. []
Filed under: Europe, Middle East, World Politics | |
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5 Responses to “Turkey “Lost to the West”?”

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    1. Dave Schuler Says:

      My reaction to Ms. Glick’s piece was sufficiently harsh that I held back from commenting on it. I thought it was shrill, paternalistic claptrap.

      Turkey was never the West’s to lose. For the last century the country has followed its own path for its own reasons. It has internal politics. Not everything is about us.

    2. Steven L. Taylor Says:

      Turkey was never the West’s to lose. For the last century the country has followed its own path for its own reasons. It has internal politics. Not everything is about us.

      Indeed.

    3. Has Turkey Been Lost To The West II: An Answer | The Moderate Voice Says:

      [...] Steven Taylor, aka, Poliblogger has his own response. Here is a small part of it: Until Turkey quits NATO, rescinds its request to join the EU, and makes [...]

    4. Links of the Day - 10/19/2009 | Heretical Ideas Blog Says:

      [...] * Don’t worry–Turkey is still part of the West. [...]

    5. Danny Hershtal Says:

      As I stated on my blog (see http://electme.blogspot.com/2009/10/talking-turkey.html), I don’t think that Turkey is “lost” just yet, and taht Glick is somewhat overreacting. However, I feel the west is certainly under-reacting to the repression of secularism and freedoms inside Turkey under the AKP. As I explained, Turkey is being propelled to Islamism not by its leaders but by its voters and the traditional “divide” in Turkish society is closing both by demographic and government intervention. Turkey will probably not under go an Iranian style revolution, but may quietly creep toward Sharia-statehood while continuing to feign interest in the EU and and NATO to continue to derive the benefits of the West while changing there basic ethos to that of an Islamic country. I think that Glick is right in that we should be more careful in examining Turkey’s future powerbase (it’s current 20-year olds) and take careful note of AKP decisions such as those we’ve seen recently.


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