Limiting US influence in the Middle East is not the only shared interest of Russia and Turkey’s autocratic leaders
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/11/turkey-ever-closer-ties-with-russia-leave-us-lacking-key-ally-on-syria
As the prospect grows of military confrontation with Russia in the skies over Syria, the US is counting on support from European partners such as France and the UK. But help from a key regional ally – Turkey – is less certain, despite its position on Syria’s northern border and opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
There are echoes of 2003, when Turkey refused to back the US-led invasion of Iraq. Whose side
Turkey is on is a question increasingly exercising Washington policymakers as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president, builds closer ties with Russia.
Although Turkey is a Nato member, its growing defence cooperation with Moscow includes a recent
$2bn deal to buy state-of-the-art S-400 surface-to-air missile systems. At the same time, military collaboration with the US has been scaled back.
Faced with Turkish restrictions, US air force combat operations at the Incirlik base, close to Syria’s border, have been run down. In January a squadron of A-10 “Warthog” ground-attack jets was
redeployed to Afghanistan, reportedly leaving only refuelling aircraft at the base. Last year Germany, another Nato member, was obliged to withdraw its forces from Incirlik amid a fierce row with Erdoğan over human rights and legal issues. The German aircraft, which like their American counterparts were engaged in attacking Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq, were
moved to Jordan.
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It’s time to drum increasingly authoritarian Turkey out of NATO
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-its-time-to-drum-increasingly-authoritarian-turkey-out-of-nato/
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization – better known as NATO – was originally founded in 1949, as founding secretary-general Lord Ismay famously put it, “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Since then, it has grown from 12 to 29 members and is universally considered the most successful military alliance in history.
What makes NATO so successful is that it is much more than a military alliance. It is a club of like-minded states, as the preamble to the North Atlantic Treaty puts it, “determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” These shared commitments have socialized its members profoundly over the years to identify with each other, cementing bonds of solidarity and reinforcing what are, historically speaking, unusually robust norms of peaceful dispute resolution.
Together with the European Union (EU), NATO must get credit for solving “the Franco-German problem,” eliminating war in most of Europe, and creating what political scientists call a “security community” – a region in which the threat or use of force has truly become unthinkable.
But there is an odd man out – Turkey.
In its latest
Freedom in the World report, Freedom House dropped Turkey from the “partly free” to the “not free” category, citing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s “growing contempt for political rights and civil liberties in recent years” and “serious abuses in areas including minority rights, free expression, associational rights, corruption, and the rule of law.” With an aggregate score of 32/100, Turkey is a stark outlier in NATO, well behind second-last Montenegro (67) and the overall NATO average (87). Moreover, the trend is bad. Turkey dropped six points from 2017, more than any other NATO member, only three of which dropped three points or more (Hungary, Poland and the United States).
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