U.S.-Turkish Relations

The Cold War Era

The Republic of Turkey emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after a war of independence had been waged against the outside powers which occupied it. At the time of independence in 1923, Turkey was a largely agrarian country with a citizenry who looked to their Islamic faith as the source of salvation. The country’s founding father Mustafa Kemal, later known as Ataturk, looked instead to the West for lessons on how to build a strong nation capable of resisting encroachment by neighbors bent on territorial expansion. Secularism was enshrined in the constitution to be safeguarded by a strong military.

The prospect that communism might spread became a concern after World War II. Turkey’s westward orientation and geo-strategic location prompted Congress, under the urging of President Harry Truman, to designate the republic as eligible to receive U.S. special economic and military assistance. The Truman Doctrine made these provisions. They were intended to help Turkey, along with Greece, withstand the Soviet-supported rebels attempting to topple non-communist governments.

For Ankara, the Turkish seat of government, this represented a shift from the neutralist foreign policy vision of Ataturk to dependence on the Western alliance, particularly the U.S., to meet national security needs. Turkey became a member of NATO in 1952. This move left Ankara estranged from the Muslim world, although it was of major strategic value to the West. Turkey became the most important southern security flank in Europe, as well as a bulwark against Soviet expansion.

In 1979, the Iranian Revolution toppled the secular government of Shah Reza Pahlavi, a longstanding U.S. ally in the Persian Gulf. This brought a Shiite fundamentalist government to power on Turkey’s border. As Islamic movements appeared in other Middle Eastern countries, Ankara remained steadfastly hostile to political Islam. This increased its value as an ally against the spread of an ideology hostile to the West, in general, and the U.S. in particular. After the USSR was disbanded in 1991, Turkey’s ethnic ties to the newly independent Turkic states of Central Asia added to its strategic importance from Washington’s perspective. So did the geopolitical prospects for making Turkey a transit hub for Caspian and Central Asian oil and natural gas.

The Post-9/11 New World Order

The events of 11 September 2001 were criticized in Ankara. As a result, Washington expected Turkey to be an ally in the war on terror, to back U.S. military operations in its neighborhood, and to maintain its posture as a staunch symbol of anti-Islamic ideology.

Yet it has not played out that way. Ankara was reluctant to support the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, which it perceived as damaging Turkish interests. This was not due to any fondness for Saddam Hussein on the part of the Turks. Rather, it stemmed from concern over what the fall of the Saddam regime would mean to the Kurds living in both northern Iraq and Turkey. At the very least, Ankara feared it would incite Kurdish nationalism among the 20% of Turkish citizens that are ethnic Kurds. It was also almost certain to strengthen calls on both sides of the border for an independent Kurdistan. A March 2003 vote in the Turkish parliament to allow as many as 62,000 U.S. troops to stage an invasion of Iraq from Turkish soil narrowly failed to pass. This was not the outcome expected in Washington, and it left a lingering sense of ill will in both capitals. It also presented the prospect that Turkish domestic politics could again, in the future, disrupt CENTCOM’s ability to supply troops not only in Iraq, but Afghanistan as well.

In the autumn of 2007, an impending Congressional vote that would put the U.S. government on record as condemning the Armenian genocide in 1915 became a major irritant in bilateral relations. Ankara has invested a great deal of diplomatic capital in preventing such condemnations of an atrocity which had occurred on Turkish soil before the republic was founded. The issue generated much discussion within the U.S. over the value of such symbolic acts in redressing wrongs of the distant past. The prospect of such a vote prompted Ankara to threaten to rescind Washington’s transit privileges for essential military supplies, specifically 70% of air cargo and one third of its fuel, shipped through Turkey into northern Iraq. This was enough to dissuade many members of Congress, who had initially backed the bill, not to support it and put the matter to rest for the immediate future.

Looking Ahead

In November 2007, Turkey began its own invasion of Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq to clear out Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) camps which had been used to launch attacks inside Turkey. Ankara was dissatisfied over Washington’s lack of enthusiasm for routing a paramilitary party which the U.S., along with the UN and EU, has declared to be a “terrorist organization.” Washington, for its part, has been reluctant to militarily engage the group in one of the only regions in Iraq that has been stable since Saddam’s government was toppled in 2003. The conflict, in short, put the U.S. in a difficult spot, pitting Turkey, a member of NATO and a long-standing ally, against Iraqi Kurds, its strongest local partner in the ongoing occupation of Iraq.

Ultimately, Washington offered Ankara intelligence and other types of assistance despite the risk of complicating prospects for political reconciliation between the various Iraqi factions. Having expressed reservations about the war at the outset, Turkey is now concerned about the implications of a precipitous U.S. troop withdrawal for regional stability.

The security problem posed by Kurdish militants in post-Saddam Iraq is symptomatic of a divergence in bilateral interests which can no longer be ignored. Simply put, Turkey, governed by an elected Islamist government since 2002, perceives Washington’s agenda as increasingly at odds with its own interests. It is unlikely relations will be restored to their former closeness as a result of a change of administrations in Washington. Turkey has established new openings to the Muslim world, Eurasia, Russia, and China that offer the prospect of alternative economic and security arrangement options.