Can the West bring Turkey in from the cold?

There is a dilemma facing the Turkish President. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is being forced to confront a choice he would rather not have to make – he must now decide between maintaining Turkey’s détente with Russia and pursuing his country’s own geopolitical interests. This predicament leaves Turkish foreign policy caught in a cycle of military aggression followed by diplomatic submission at a dangerous time.

The roots of this conundrum reside deep in the complex fault lines of Middle Eastern politics. In North Africa and the troubled Levant, President Erdoğan and his counterpart in the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, find themselves on different sides of bitter, long-running civil wars.

In Libya, Erdoğan’s policy is to support the embattled UN-backed Government of National Accord in Tripoli, while Putin recognises the insurgent military strongman Khalifa Haftar.

Most pressing, however, is the conflict raging on Turkey’s own doorstep, in war-torn Syria. Here, Moscow’s forces and finances have backed the resurgent Assad regime since 2015 while Turkish troops supply support to the rebels of the National Front for Liberation.

Yet while the logic of Turkey’s geopolitics is anti-Russian, the character of her domestic politics remains anti-Western. Within their respective countries, both Putin and Erdoğan are “competitive authoritarians”. They are skilful political operators who retain power by the manipulation of unfair elections, censorship and repression combined with a patriotic domestic politics and activist foreign policy.

Both men are aware that few tears would be shed in the West if either of them were to be removed from power. This understanding that they have something in common was exploited well by Putin in the summer of 2016 – while a military coup was raging against Erdoğan in Turkey, the man in Moscow was the first to offer his unequivocal support. While Europe and the US held their breath, the Russian strongman held out the hand of friendship. It was a masterstroke of impulsive diplomacy.

But good will and amicable bilateral relations between the two men can only defy geopolitical gravity for so long. This détente now threatens to unravel on the battlefields of Idlib. Having negotiated a de-militarised zone in Northeastern Syria in September 2019, it took a total of seven months for this agreement to be flouted when the Assad regime launched operation “dawn of Idlib” in April 2019.

And so far, all indications suggest that the new ceasefire agreed in Moscow last Thursday will go the same way as its predecessors. The deal has failed to remove the fundamental causes of the Syrian-Turkish conflict.

Then there are Erdoğan’s personal ambitions to consider. As his biographer, Soner Cagaptay, has argued, the man in Ankara is on a mission to make Turkey the Middle East’s standalone superpower. His vision sees Ankara as the bridgehead of Eurasia, with influence equally in Europe, the Middle East, and the Turkic states of the Steppe. He has no desire to be subservient to Putin on his own doorstep.

The NATO alliance should use this opportunity to bring wayward Turkey back into the fold.

This does not mean ignoring the ways in which Erdoğan has acted to stifle free speech and oppress liberal dissidents in his country in the last decade, or ignoring his support for al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists in Idlib. It should not mean forgetting the aggression his government has shown towards Syrian Kurds. What it does mean is recognising that Turkey and the West share a common interest in restoring peace to Syria.

Compromising with an authoritarian such as Erdoğan, in however limited a fashion, comes with clear moral costs – but the price of inaction could potentially be even worse. The situation in Syria has deteriorated to such an extent that the West cannot simply stand  by while a resurgent Assad, buoyed by his Russian benefactor, exacts a terrible vengeance upon Syrian civilians.

Unless these tyrants’ war crimes are confronted with force as well as words, the Syrian people will continue to suffer – and waves of desperate migrants, fleeing their country’s terrible civil war, will continue to seek asylum in Europe. The West’s failure is not only morally bankrupt, it is also woefully short-sighted.

There are, of course, geopolitical obstacles to such a reconciliation between Turkey and the West, despite warm words of solidarity being sounded by Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s Secretary General. Erdoğan has already allowed Russia’s state-owned energy company, Rosatom, to dominate Turkey’s energy markets; and he has also brokered arms deals with the Kremlin, turning his back on the US- and NATO-led F-35 missile defence programme.

In the European Union, where divisions are not so much an unfortunate anomaly as a regular ritual, foreign policy is especially problematic. For while the EU – alongside its key member state, Germany – officially supports the UN and Turkish-backed Government of National Accord in Libya, Brussels cannot marshal member states to follow the same diplomatic line

The EU’s economic powerhouse, Germany, does not have military weight either. And a member state that does, France, finds itself on the opposite side to Turkey over important geopolitical divisions. President Macron, when he is not calling the NATO alliance “brain dead”, is backing General Haftar in Libya and preaching rapprochement with Russia. A sphinx without a riddle, consistent only in his inconsistency, he’s unlikely to be the figure to bring Turkey in from the cold. Instead, his dramatic calls for the West to bring Russia into diplomatic alignment with Europe feel like grandstanding without substance, and naïve posturing dressed up as visionary Realpolitik.

The US departure from the Syrian-Turkish border in October 2019 has also played into Putin’s hands. President Donald Trump’s abandonment of America’s Kurdish allies has allowed his Russian counterpart to bring Kurdish officials and the Syrian regime’s intelligence services together in secret negotiations since December. While the US vacates the scene, Russia consolidates its position.

The Russian President has gambled that Ankara – lacking nuclear capacity and outgunned by the Russian military – will be ultimately unwilling to force an open confrontation with Moscow. And if the West continues to abdicate its moral duty to Syria’s people, time may well vindicate him in this judgment.