The-american-interest.com - Henri J. Barkey

This Sunday brought a set of dramatic diplomatic tit-for-tat gestures between the United States and Turkey, two NATO allies. Citing the imprisonment of a second Turkish employee at one of its consulates, the U.S. Mission in Turkey declared that it would stop processing non-immigrant visa requests. Within a few hours, the Turkish Embassy in Washington announced similarly that it too would stop processing visa requests.

The moves amount to an escalation of what until now had been a one-sided set of attacks by Turkey against the United States, whom it blames for everything from the attempted overthrow of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to supporting terrorists and even, according to the Mayor of Ankara, causing earthquakes. The U.S. approach has been to ignore the daily invectives, which regularly make the front page of virtually every major newspaper in Turkey.

Relations between the two allies have been on a downward slide for some time. Turks have been upset at the fact that the United States has allied itself with Syrian Kurds against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria; the most effective fighters among the Syrian Kurds have been those affiliated with the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. Moreover, Ankara has been at odds with the United States over the detention of a Turkish-Iranian businessman and a deputy president of a Turkish bank, accused, along with others, of using the American banking system in a scheme to skirt international sanctions against Iran. Erdoğan wants them returned, fearing that, if they were to spill the beans, he or his government could be implicated in a racket worth billions of dollars. There is also the case of the exiled Turkish cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom Erdoğan accused of masterminding the failed July 2016 coup attempt. Erdoğan has purged more than 150,000 from government rolls, imprisoned 50,000, including 170 journalists, and eliminated half of the military’s senior officer corps in an effort consolidate power once and for all.

Erdoğan raised the stakes when he made it clear that imprisoned Americans and dual citizens, mostly held based on false charges, would only be released when the United States released or extradited the folks he wanted. He first had a Turkish employee of the U.S. consulate in Adana, Hamza Uluçay, arrested back in February on “terrorism” charges. This past week, another Turkish employee, Metin Topuz, was arrested on terrorism charges in Istanbul, after a campaign the government mounted by means of its proxies in the press (that is, most dailies). To arrest two U.S. employees in an overt attempt to influence Washington to do a “hostage” exchange put American officials in a difficult position; hundreds of Turkish nationals working for the United States are now at risk of being arrested on frivolous charges. One can only imagine the fear that these employees must now live with.

Why is Erdoğan taking such risks in alienating what had heretofore been Turkey’s most reliable ally (notwithstanding occasional differences over the years)? One explanation is that the confrontation with the United States has more to do with his own domestic political calculations, and that foreign policy is just a convenient tool. He may also be taking such risks because successive U.S. administrations have indulged him, deeming Turkey too important to U.S. interests. After all, the mammoth İncirlik Air Base in southern Turkey is the most active location in the fight against the Islamic State. Moreover, it was less than two weeks ago that President Trump in a meeting in New York with Erdoğan loudly boasted that Turkish-American relations had never been better.

Trump’s comments were detached from reality, and so Erdoğan may have been misled by them. Then again, the Obama Administration also never criticized Erdoğan for engineering Turkey’s rapid descent into authoritarianism. Surrounded by yes men, the Turkish leader has no one against whom to check his policy choices.

The U.S. visa announcement provided an off-ramp for the crisis; the United States clearly wants its employees and citizens released. Erdoğan’s love of brinksmanship has limits, too. When he tried it with Putin, the Russian leader immediately slapped sanctions severe enough on Turkey to force him to unceremoniously backpedal. In the present case, he is likely to escalate further before backing down, but in the process he is putting the American-Turkish relation at serious risk of irreparable damage. After the detentions and earlier incidents involving Erdoğan’s security guards assaulting peaceful protestors on U.S. soil, anger in Washington is boiling over. Even the most pro-Turkish American diplomats are seething with rage.

What will the next steps be? The U.S. visa announcement was a blunt instrument that is likely to hurt students and businesspeople, among others, whose needs for travel between Turkey and the United States are great; the United States should more carefully target the visa ban. Turkey may make life difficult for Americans fighting in Syria; it can interfere with operations conducted from İncirlik and harass other diplomats. Tourism in Turkey, already in the doldrums, is sure to be a casualty of the dispute, and the Turkish economy as a whole will also suffer (at the time of writing, the lira had already lost more than 3 percent of its value, as had the Istanbul stock market).

Down the road, one can imagine that, once the main operations against the Islamic State in Syria are completed, Washington will tell Ankara that it no longer needs and will vacate İncirlik Air Base. That’s when the real calamity for U.S.-Turkish relations will set in.

---