During his tenure as Turkey’s president, and before that as prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a source of frustration for the U.S.—supporting Hamas, intervening in Libya, and dismantling democracy at home. But, Michael Doran argues, two consecutive American presidents have failed to counter Erdogan effectively due to “a pervasive misdiagnosis of the problem.”
Regardless of what one thinks of Erdogan, his policies that have most enraged Washington—such as launching a military offensive last fall to drive American forces away from the Turkish border or buying the S-400 anti-aircraft system from Russia—have enjoyed very broad domestic support, precisely because the Turkish public reviles the policies of the United States. In short, America does not have an Erdogan problem; it has a Turkey problem. And that is a problem largely of its own making.
The source of America’s Turkey problem is U.S. support of the Syrian wing of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a terrorist separatist group formerly supported by the Soviet Union:
The disintegration of the Syrian state offered the PKK a new opportunity. Throughout 2013 and 2014, the PKK’s Syrian arm, “the Peoples Protection Units,” or YPG, established control of the Kurdish cantons all along the Turkish border. . . . The PKK openly presents Rojava, [as it calls this slice of Syria], as the southern part of a much larger polity that will encompass all of eastern Turkey. As Kurdish autonomous regions sprang up in Syria, a number of Kurdish towns in Turkey also proclaimed their autonomy.
Historically, the United States has respected the Turkish assessment of the threat. But as then-President Obama negotiated his way through the labyrinth of the Syrian civil war, he broke with precedent and allied the United States with the PKK by selecting the YPG as its main partner for combating Islamic State.
[A]rriving at [a strategic] accommodation with Turkey should be seen . . . as a top priority of American foreign policy—the key to managing the central contradiction in American policy vis-à-vis the Middle East. On the one hand, talk of withdrawing from the Middle East is rife on both sides of the political aisle, and the American public has no tolerance for significant military commitments. On the other hand, if the United States leaves the region, Russia, China, and Iran will fill the ensuing vacuum. America is thus betwixt and between.
Read more on Caravan: https://www.hoover.org/research/mr-magoo-turkey