Türkiye is no longer the country your grandfather used to know. Walter Russell Mead, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and a columnist for The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), declared on June 7, 2021, in his WSJ column that Türkiye was not “Your Grandfather’s Turkey.” He said it was still an important ally, but Ankara was not “staunchly pro-Western as in the Cold War.”
I, on the hand, wrote last week – unknowingly but still somewhat plagiarizingly – Türkiye was not your father’s Türkiye. I swear to God that I was not aware of professor Mead’s column until my longtime correspondent (and critique-at-large) Tamer Ceylan pointed it out to me after my Milliyet piece was published.
But please note the difference: I said Türkiye was not your daddy’s Türkiye, I did not say it was not your grandpa’s. Both of us, professor Mead and I, were referring to the speed of technical, economic and developmental transformation Türkiye has been going through under Erdoğan administrations for the last two decades. Tamer Ceylan was quipping in his message that if Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AK Party) keep transforming Türkiye at this pace, not only will we soon have to declare that it is not only your grandpa’s or daddy’s Türkiye, but even your elder brother is not going to recognize the country!
Yet, professor Mead was voicing the challenges the “New Turkey” under Erdoğan’s leadership was presenting to the U.S. more than any other members of NATO. “The secular, Westernizing, staunchly anti-Soviet Turkey of the Cold War years” was gone, according to him, “because it is now led by a populist Islamist,” President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who “was recently rebuked by the Biden administration for anti-Semitic remarks” and “engages in military interventions from Libya and Syria to Azerbaijan, appears to be drifting from many democratic and European values, and buys weapons from Russia in defiance of American sanctions.”
Well, of course, if your grandfather, who had visited the pre-millennial Türkiye, reads this paragraph of Mead’s article, he would think that the country must have left NATO and joined the Warsaw Pact becoming a member of COMECON, the organization established by the Eastern European countries belonging to the Soviet bloc. Even worse, he would think that Türkiye was entrapping the U.S. in its fight with Daesh. Maed, trying to be fair and balanced, lists Türkiye’s grievances against the U.S. But the wording of those issues purports that Turks are on the wrong side of the ledger:
“Turks bitterly resent U.S. support for the Syrian Kurdish forces that broke the back of Daesh while building a semi-independent Kurdish zone in northeastern and north-central Syria. Turks regard the Syrian Kurds as allies of the terrorist PKK organization.”
Professor Mead, true to his membership in the Hudson and Aspen Institutes and the Council on Foreign Relations, does not beat around the bush and tells it directly that what his grandpa would not recognize about Türkiye is the U.S.-Turkish relations:
“The real challenges to the alliance are structural. Türkiye and its neighborhood have changed in ways that make U.S.-Turkish relations both more important and more complex, but Washington has yet to develop a vision for how a new partnership can work.”
For Mr. Mead, the U.S.-Turkish relationship would not work unless Washington finds a way to work with this country because it “will not necessarily become more Western.” Why? “Mr. Erdogan and the Islamist movement he leads” will make Türkiye “more independent and less predictable.”
Not with these words, and not from Mr. Mead’s perspective, I reached in my Milliyet piece almost the same conclusion: Your father’s Türkiye was open to manhandling. The U.S. had created a “push and pull strategy”: "Hey Turks! Adopt a multiparty system so that you can join NATO;” “Well, send your boys to Korea to fight against the communists so that you can really join NATO!” Later, the Europeans started to play the carrot and stick game in 1963. Sixty years later, they rammed it down Türkiye’s throat: "Harmonize all your legal, commercial and administrative systems with European countries." We thought they were serious; so, we adopted everything. Even our license plates look like Europe’s, but we are still waiting at the garden gate! The Economist magazine called two years ago Türkiye’s candidacy “a fiction.”
I concluded that Türkiye said, “Enough is enough” and changed the rules of these games: No more prodding. In professor Mead’s words, Türkiye had “less need to stick closely to America” and would not obediently wait for Trumps or Bidens on the other side of the ocean to develop a vision to make a new partnership work! Mind you: It was not a “Hell with you” approach. What Mr. Mead calls “Erdoğan and his Islamists” was actually an accumulated knowledge and experience of a cadre that was mostly domestic and national, and that cadre was well aware of what the 600 years of history have been teaching us about our neighbors on our borders and beyond.
I summarized the behavior distilled from the technical, economic and developmental transformation Türkiye has been going through for the last two decades in one word in Turkish: "Müstakil." It could be translated as “self-contained,” which implies, as professor Mead mentioned, to be “more independent,” but definitely not “less predictable.”
Erdoğan, his former and current foreign ministers, and members of his security and defense teams keep laying out open, sincere and honest road maps about all major policy issues. About all the countries that professor Mead mentions as thorny issues the U.S. has to be aware of when it is developing a new vision in its relations with Türkiye – i.e., Russia, Libya, Iraq and Syria, Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia, the EU and several members of it, Greece and Greek Cyprus – Türkiye does not have one single ambition that the world community does not know.
Mr. Mead’s or any other U.S. and EU leader’s father, mother, grandfather and grandmother would still recognize Türkiye as the country he or she knew. It is still the same country oriented toward the West, 300 years ago. But it is not (as Mr. Mead said) “staunchly pro-Western as in the Cold War” because (a) the Cold War is over and (b) “staunchness,” in international relations and especially in the parlance of diplomacy games the institutes professor Mead belongs to, means loyalty, faithfulness devotedness and obedience.
Our new and Young Türkiye is – I am trying to say it in a humorous way without being unkind – is not your fathers’ or grandfathers’ "Turkey." We even changed the name!
