Here is a foreign policy challenge in which President-elect Joe Biden seems to be improving President Trump: to face the fact that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a friend of the West, nor is he a friend of freedom.
In a 2014 interview with the New York Times, Biden rightly called Erdogan an “autocrat” and said the United States should support its opponents who would want to remove him from office. “You have to pay a price,” Biden said.
It didn’t pay much price in the Obama or Trump years. He was for a long time President Barack Obama’s favorite leader in the Muslim world, while Trump has boasted that he and Erdogan “have been very good friends for a long time, almost from day one.”
This, when Erdogan has been crushing freedom for at least a decade and at a faster pace since the failed coup of 2016. He has used state power to completely neutralize the press that previously had no freedom, while still imprisoning journalists in a record pace. (Although China wins it by number 1 this year, between 48 and 47 imprisoned journalists.) This year it began to target social media, pushing laws that will make it easier to use as another espionage tool and state persecution. .
And he has imprisoned tens of thousands of political critics, thousands for the “crime” of insulting he.
He is also constantly working to end the republic’s centennial official secularism, with policies aimed at creating a “pious generation” of radical Muslims who will “work for the construction of a new civilization” that emphasizes Ottoman history, rather than Western ideals. .
Some democracy is still alive: after his Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost last year’s Istanbul mayoral election to his Republican People’s Party, or CHP, Erdogan alleged fraud and forced withdrawal. But people in Turkey’s largest city (and the commercial hub) protested en masse, and Ekrem Imamoglu of the CHP is still mayor.
Meanwhile, Erdogan has revived the central government’s war against the Kurds in Turkey, and has even brought this conflict to neighboring Syria, where his interventions in the civil war have consisted more in restricting the Kurds in that nation and giving support for his Islamist allies, not to counter the government of the bloody Bashar al-Assad.
He is also a major proponent of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, and increasingly allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to the dismay of all of NATO’s NATO allies.
The Trump administration on Monday sanctioned Turkey for the purchase of S-400, a Russian missile defense system: it bans all U.S. export licenses and loans from Turkey’s defense recruitment agency and freezes the president’s assets of the agency, Ismail Demir. But the step comes quite late; Ankara ended the sale in Russia more than a year ago.
Biden has the opportunity to re-establish relations between Turkey and the United States. As veteran Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas noted in the Washington Post, “Turkey would not have deviated so far from the West and its human rights record would not have grown so abysmal” if Trump had taken a tougher line with Erdogan.
What is needed, he says, is “an American administration to send a clear message that does not encourage Erdogan’s authoritarian instincts.”
Surely Biden can do so much.
We wish Biden luck: he will need it.