Chapter 2: Turkish Revisionism Today and the Threat to US Interests

The AKP’s rise to power in Turkey coincided with significant changes to global security. The end of the Cold War led to debates amongst Turkish national security elites about Ankara’s place in a unipolar world, absent a peer competitor to the United States. From the outset of the founding of the Turkish republic, Turkish elites viewed regional states as the main threat to the country’s security. Specifically, for the entirety of the Cold War, Ankara viewed the Soviet Union as its main threat. This concern dated back Russian irredentist claims to Kars, Ardahan, and Artvin, and Jospeh Stalin’s efforts to control the Turkish straits. The American decision to include Turkey in the NATO alliance was not without controversy in Washington, but by 1952 the United States had extended its security umbrella to Ankara. As part of this move, Turkey eagerly took advantage of American military assistance, hosted a slew of intelligence and military assets at military facilities across the country, and eagerly agreed to host US nuclear weapons in 1959. The collapse of the Soviet Union left Turkey without a regional peer capable of threatening the country’s borders.

The rise of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in the 1980s, however, meant that Ankara now faced an internal, ethnic nationalist separative movement that many in the capital feared could divide the country in two.51 The PKK enjoyed safe-have in Syria up until Ankara’s threatened invasion in 1998. The Turkish pressure eventually led Syrian leader Hafez al Assad to kick Abdullah Öcalan out of the country, which then led to the PKK leader's eventual capture in Kenya. The United States assisted Turkey, as Öcalan hopped from one European capital to the next, and was critical for his eventual apprehension.52 In retrospect, this close cooperation on the PKK threat was the high-point in US-Turkish, post-Cold War security relations. In the half decade that followed, the two countries would diverge over how they conceptualized the threats posed by non-state actors. The 1991 invasion in Iraq upended Turkish security. Özal was eager to work with the United States, but Turkish elite concern that the war could empower Iraqi Kurdish nationalists proved prophetic. The end of Gulf War led to the creation of two American and British enforced no-fly-zones. The northern no-fly-zone extended across the entirety of the Iraqi Kurdistan, allowing for the Iraqi Kurds to form an autonomous governing structure, protected by the United States.

The American decision to protect the Iraqi Kurds in 1991 was not intended to create a proto-Kurdish state, but the outcome of the use of force

Turned Out To Be A Net Negative For

Turkish national security. The American relationship with the Iraqi Kurds is complicated and, for much of the Cold War, a relatively minor point of contention with the Soviet Union for influence in the Middle East.53 Yet this relationship represented the first warning signs that the United States and Turkey had divergent interests in the Middle East. For much of the 1990s, this divergence was of little consequence for the two countries. The United States had little to lose from providing support to Turkey in its war against the PKK. This support included intelligence sharing and political and military support for Ankara. Washington declared the PKK a terrorist group in 1997 and would later provide intelligence assistance to Turkey to support airstrikes in Iraq.

The al-Qaeda attacks on September 11 set in motion a series of changes that would exacerbate the divergences in Turkish and American regional policy. The American decision to expand its war from Afghanistan to Iraq challenged the US-Turkish relationship and forced uncomfortable shifts in Turkey’s regional policies. The management of the American war was left to Erdoğan and the recently elected Justice and Development Party. The AKP came to power on a platform of deepening Turkish democracy, strengthening Ankara’s relationship with Brussels, and joining the European Union. This project had widespread support in Turkey, even if Turkish elites and society viewed the party’s overt and incontrovertible links to Turkish Islamists as unwelcome and a threat to Turkish secularism.

The evolution of the AKP from pro-European and relatively liberal party to an authoritarian vehicle for Erdoğan to retain absolute control over Turkish policymaking has led to remarkable shifts in the country’s foreign policy. This evolution began with the American invasion of Iraq, a war that Ankara did not support and the party’s leadership tried to stop. However, in a nod to the party’s deference to the country’s historical deference to the United States, Erdoğan’s criticism was restrained. This deference would not last and, by 2019, the Turkish leader was willing to order his troops into Syria, in close proximity to US forces and with no coordination. As Erdoğan and the AKP settled into power, the country’s foreign policy began to reflect the party’s Islamist past, and in response to regional upheavals

Turkey found itself supporting political Islamist groups the national elites viewed as critical to advancing Turkish interests.

The War on Terror: America’s Use of Power in the Middle East

Turkey’s relationships with its traditional Western allies has crumbled over the past decade, with grievances and animosity now dominating any bilateral or multilateral meeting Ankara now attends with Brussels or Washington. This deterioration in ties stems from a stark divergence in how each side views broader security challenges and, when faced with crisis, chooses to respond. Turkey’s actions have also inspired animosity in the Arab world, leading states to bandwagon against Ankara, and at times joining with Eastern Mediterranean states to project power to signal to Turkey that irredentist action will not be tolerated. The stalemate has not precluded times of rapprochement and reset, but the broader Middle East and Mediterranean regions now view Turkey as a threat—and this hostility about Turkey’s broader foreign policy is shared in many western capitals. Ankara, too, has its share of irritation with its traditional allies, underscoring how tensions now plague what has always been a tension-filled relationship between Turkey and its allies, but without much hope that these tensions can be put aside in favor of a common enemy or set of shared interests.

The Turkish-American relationship was founded on a shared interest in containing Soviet military power. The United States and Turkey reached agreement on the use of Incirlik Force Base shortly after Ankara joined NATO. The Turkish position on Cyprus, however, was the first concrete example of divergent interests over niche, nationalist issues important to Ankara and how they impacted broader American concerns about global security. The Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 was a decade in the making. Ankara had sought to invade the island in 1964, but President Lyndon Johnson warned that any Turkish action would lead to sanctions on American-origin military equipment Ankara was completely dependent on.

The United States was legitimately concerned about the Soviet reaction and took seriously Russian threats to escalate the situation on the island. From Ankara’s perspective, the ethnic violence on the island and the nationalist ambitions to reunite the island with Greece fueled deep concerns for the Turkish minority. In 1974, those concerns boiled over, and Turkish leaders ignored warnings from both the United States and the Soviet Union about an invasion and landed troops on Cyprus, moving quickly west across the island, and taking control over approximately half of its territory. In response to the invasion, the US Congress imposed an arms embargo on Turkey, which went against the wishes of the Nixon administration. The embargo was not complete and Ankara was able to source spare parts from European sources, but it nevertheless still had a deleterious effect on Turkish operational readiness.

The American decision spurred Turkish investment in its own defense industry and pushed the country to embrace a nationalist model of domestic replacement for Western defense equipment.

This policy began with the terms of rapprochement with the United States. In 1980, after the arms embargo was lifted, Turkey and the United States agreed to a new bilateral defense agreement. This agreement, which Ankara insisted be called a Defense Economic Cooperation Agreement, in reference to demands that the United States increase the use of offsets in future military sales and help to build-up private industry. The arrangement reset US-Turkish relationship, but still anchored ties to a shared security concerns.54

The United States has had access to bases in Turkey since 1952. The Defense Economic Cooperation Agreement, however, formalized a new arrangement, wherein bases in Turkey would be under Turkish command, and reiterated that for non-NATO military missions, the Turkish parliament has to approve any use of Turkish bases. Ankara has historically shied away from supporting non-NATO American military operations in the Middle East.55 The Özal government’s policy in 1990 was an exception and was very controversial in Turkey and emerged from the government’s decision to remain neutral during the Iran-Iraq war.56 In response to Özal’s push to allow the United States to fly from Incirlik Air Force and have access to other Turkish bases, three of Turkey’s most senior military officers resigned.57 After the war, the American presence in Turkey shifted from one of offensive combat operations to the continued enforcement of a no-fly-zone over northern Iraq. The American decision to protect the Kurdish areas of Iraq, at first, had Turkish support because it created a safe haven for refugees that had fled to Turkey to return to home. However, as the Kurds began to establish a quasi-independent proto-state within Iraq, Ankara’s views hardened and concerns about potential Kurdish nationalist spill over into

Turkey grew.

The 1990s was a particularly bloody decade in the now forty-yearold Kurdish-led insurgency inside Turkey. The PKK emerged, for Ankara, as the country’s primary threat and many in Ankara viewed American actions in the Middle East as a primary factor in helping to sustain the insurgency. Ankara’s support for non-NATO operations in the Middle East diminished and Ankara was unwilling to sanction US action in Iraq during Operation Desert Fox in 1998.58 In contrast, Ankara supported the collective NATO response after the al-Qaeda-planned attacks on September 11, 2001. The Turkish government supported NATO’s triggering of Article 5, which obligates each member of the alliance to assist in the defense of the others, and opened airbases and airspace to America overflight, and deployed troops to Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban.59 This response differed considerably from the Turkish handling of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, again, following American requests to use Turkish territory to support the war against Islamic State.

The Justice and Development Party is rooted in Turkey’s political Islamist movement. The party broke away from Necmettin Erbakan’s Welfare Party following the Turkish military’s intervention in Turkish politics in 1997. The military’s threat to launch a coup led to the resignation of Turkey’s coalition government, which included the center-right True Path Party and the Islamist Welfare Party. The military’s intervention forced the government to resign, leading to the appointment of a new governing coalition, and a crackdown on Turkish Islamists. The post-modern coup had a considerable impact on the evolution of the Turkish Islamist movement, as well as on the outlook of its most popular leader, Erdoğan. In 1999, just two years after the 1997 coup, Erdoğan was imprisoned after reciting an Islamist poem, amidst increased concerns inside Turkey about the growing potency of the political Islam. The AKP emerged from this tumultuous period, with Erdoğan and a small cadre of younger Welfare Party elites breaking away from Erbakan and softening the party’s platform and signaling that the main focus of the party’s foreign policy will be on hastening Turkey’s accession to the European Union.60

Turkish Islamists focused much of their political efforts on domestic services and improving life for the country’s lower classes. Erbakan’s foreign policy platform was of secondary concern, but tended to revolve around the need for greater intra-Muslim solidarity, the creation of Muslim-majority institutions similar to those in Europe, and extreme suspicion—and outright hostility—towards the West and its role in global affairs. The AKP, in contrast, at first sought to distance itself from these types of ideas, and instead linked its domestic messaging to its foreign policy. This approach made the case that Turkish democratization and liberalization would increase freedoms for all Turkish citizens, including Turkish women that wore the headscarf and religiously conservative members of society that had typically been oppressed by the secular state. This focus on democratization, in turn, could help Turkey more closely integrate with Europe and improve its global standing with the Western democracies.

As the United States began its preparation to invade Iraq in 2003, then Prime Minister Abdullah Gül—who soon vacated the position for Erdoğan—sought to ameliorate American concerns about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and thereby prevent the invasion. The Bush administration was intent on invading Iraq from the south and opening a second front from the north. This war plan required parliamentary permission to stage US forces on Turkish territory for air, ground, and naval forces needed to sustain the second front of the war. Ankara was hesitant to support the war from the outset, but did acquiesce to US intelligence agencies entering Iraqi Kurdistan from Turkish territory.61 The American-Turkish-Kurdish dynamics during this period before the invasion were fraught and Ankara used many of the same tactics that it did during the American enforcement of the northern no-fly-zone to hamper these initial activities in Iraq.62 For the overt war request, the AKP was left to balance between its own, internal factions that were hostile to the United States, a cross-partisan consensus in Turkey that Ankara’s security situation deteriorated considerably after the Gulf War, and that the Turkish economy would suffer from the war’s fall out (just as it did during the 1991 Gulf War).

The United States sought to offset these Turkish concerns with the promise of a $26 billion aid package, comprised of $20 billion in loan guarantees and $6 billion in direct grants. Ankara, in turn, demanded $32 billion in aid, just one month before the invasion began.63 The Turkish public was adamantly opposed to the war, with opinion polls showing that 80 percent of the country opposed Ankara’s involvement in the conflict.64 The AKP chose to hide behind the parliament, leaving the fate of the US demand to Bülent

Arınç, the then speaker of the parliament, and core member of this initial iteration of the party. The AKP did not whip its members for the vote and, as a result, the vote fell three shy of passage (with 19 abstentions). The vote against the invasion made perfect sense for Turkish interests. However, it completely upended American war plans and forced American Special Forces, based temporarily in Romania, to fly a dangerous flight path to insert US forces at airbases in Iraqi Kurdistan. The flight, dubbed Operation Ugly Baby, required flying for an extended period of time over Iraq, exposing the crews to ground fire. One aircraft was badly damaged and had to divert to Turkey, while the others landed at pre-prepared airstrips in northern Iraq.65 These initial cadre of Special Forces would later lead the fight against a numerically superior force of Iraqi troops, in coordination with different factions of the Kurdish Peshmerga.

“Turkey really screwed up all of the logistical planning,” according to a US Special Forces member interviewed by an author, “and the guys who were going in wanted to make it right after leaving in 1996.”66 Nevertheless, the American invasion proceeded, prompting Turkey to make its own calculations about how to hedge against is broader concerns about Kurdish nationalism. Three weeks after the parliament rejected the US request to use Turkish territory for strikes in Iraq, it voted to approve American overflight of Turkey. During that same vote, the Turkish parliament also voted to allow cross-border Turkish military operations and signaled that the military would be used to establish a buffer zone in northern Iraq, as a hedge against expected refugee flows and to wall off PKK infiltration routes into southeastern Turkey.67 Ankara demanded that the United States limit its materiel and weapons support for the Peshmerga and ensure that the Kurds did not occupy Mosul and Kirkuk. After the invasion ended and the American occupation began, Ankara did offer to deploy troops to Anbar.68 However, both the Kurdish and Shia factions within Iraq objected to any Turkish deployments and the proposal was deemed a “non-starter.”

Ankara did, however, almost immediately begin to use military force in Iraq following the invasion. In the Kurdistan Region, the Turkish military threatened a large-scale invasion to build out a buffer against the PKK and to protect the Turkmen minority based in Tel Afar. As one soldier recounts, “there was one event where the Turks threatened to cross the border en masse and they had all these tanks poised on the border. It was classic Turkish theater with an armored division on the border and claiming instances of Turkmen cleansing and saying ‘fix it or we are going across the border.’”69 While Ankara threatened large-scale action, its initial forays into Iraq were limited to special forces. As James Dobbins writes, “US military forces came across ‘Turkish flying roadblocks inside Iraq aimed at interdicting PKK movements,’ and received reports that ‘Turkish [Special Forces] have worn US Army uniforms when ambushing PKK units, apparently to try to provoke PKK attacks on Coalition Forces.’”70

For Ankara, the use of military coercion served two purposes. First, it put pressure on the United States to take its concerns about the Kurds seriously. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Turkish military was able to increase its presence in Iraqi Kurdistan. This allowed for Turkish security forces to take preventive measures against any PKK infiltration from certain places inside Iraq.

The Turkish government’s presence in Iraq also led to bilateral problems, linked to divergences over how to manage the PKK issue after the US invasion. In July 2003, for example, the US Army detained and placed hoods over the heads of Turkish soldiers at a Turkish facility in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya. The details of the arrest remain murky, with Kurdish officials claiming that the Turkish team was tasked with assassinating the Kurdish governor of Kirkuk, Abdulrahman Mustafa.71 But, for Turkey, the images of hooded soldiers in US custody stirred a nationalist backlash. Months earlier, the US military had intercepted a Turkish arms shipment, purportedly en route to allied Sunni Turkmen groups in Kirkuk. The two sides remained at odds for three more years over the “green line” separating Arab Iraq from the Kurdish region in the north and the extent of Kurdish control, before the United States appointed a special envoy for countering PKK, Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general.72

The United States and Turkey never did resolve the asymmetry of interests over the PKK during the occupation. Ankara demanded that the United States treat the PKK as a threat on par with al-Qaeda in Iraq, the insurgent group that would later morph into the Islamic State, and which was destabilizing Iraq with its attacks on Shia and coalition forces. The United States, in contrast, believed that the PKK was a terrorist group, but argued that a Turkish intervention would further destabilizing Iraq. This critical divergence would later haunt the United States and Turkey in 2014, after Islamic State rampaged through Iraq and took over eastern Syria.