Chairs: Madeleine K. Albright, Chair, Albright Stonebridge Group LLC, and Stephen J. Hadley, United States Institute of Peace
Director: Steven A. Cook, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies
Overview
Turkey is a rising regional and global power facing, as is the United States, the challenges of political transitions in the Middle East, bloodshed in Syria, and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. As a result, it is incumbent upon the leaders of the United States and Turkey to define a new partnership “in order to make a strategic relationship a reality,” says a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)–sponsored Independent Task Force. The bipartisan Task Force is chaired by former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright and former national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, and is directed by Steven A. Cook, CFR’s Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies. The Task Force includes twenty-three prominent experts who represent a variety of perspectives and backgrounds.
“Turkey may not yet have the status of one of Washington’s traditional European allies,” the report explains, “but there is good strategic reason for the bilateral relationship to grow and mature into a mutually beneficial partnership that can manage a complex set of security, economic, humanitarian, and environmental problems.” The relationship should reflect “not only common American-Turkish interests, but also Turkey’s new stature as an economically and politically successful country with a new role to play in a changing Middle East,” argues the Task Force in the report, U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership.
Turkey is more democratic, prosperous, and politically influential than ever before. Still there are worrying domestic developments that raise questions about Turkey’s democratic practices. According to the Task Force, these concerns include: “the prosecution and detention of journalists, the seemingly open-ended and at times questionable pursuit of military officers and other establishment figures for alleged conspiracy against the government, the apparent illiberal impulses of some Turkish leaders, the still-unresolved Kurdish issue, and the lack of progress on a new constitution.”
The Task Force finds that overall, Turkey is not well understood in the United States. The Task Force “seeks to promote a better understanding of the new Turkey—its strengths, vulnerabilities, and ambitions—in order to assess its regional and global role and make recommendations for a new partnership of improved and deepened U.S.-Turkey ties.”
To make the vision for a new U.S.-Turkey partnership a reality, Ankara and Washington should observe the following principles:
- equality and mutual respect for each other’s interests;
- confidentiality and trust;
- close and intensive consultations to identify common goals and strategies on issues of critical importance;
- avoidance of foreign policy surprises; and
- recognition and management of inevitable differences between Washington and Ankara.
==========================================
Independent Task Force Report No. 69
Madeleine K. Albright and Stephen J. Hadley, Chairs
Steven A. Cook, Project Director
U.S.-Turkey
Relations
A New Partnership
U.S.-Turkey Relations
A New Partnership
Independent Task Force Report No. 69
Madeleine K. Albright and
Stephen J. Hadley, Chairs
Steven A. Cook, Project Director
U.S.-Turkey Relations
A New Partnership
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think
tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives,
journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order
to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other
countries. Founded in 1921, CFR carries out its mission by maintaining a diverse membership, with special
programs to promote interest and develop expertise in the next generation of foreign policy leaders; convening
meetings at its headquarters in New York and in Washington, DC, and other cities where senior
government officials, members of Congress, global leaders, and prominent thinkers come together with
CFR members to discuss and debate major international issues; supporting a Studies Program that fosters
independent research, enabling CFR scholars to produce articles, reports, and books and hold roundtables
that analyze foreign policy issues and make concrete policy recommendations; publishing Foreign Affairs,
the preeminent journal on international affairs and U.S. foreign policy; sponsoring Independent Task
Forces that produce reports with both findings and policy prescriptions on the most important foreign
policy topics; and providing up-to-date information and analysis about world events and American foreign
policy on its website, www.cfr.org.
The Council on Foreign Relations takes no institutional positions on policy issues and has no affiliation
with the U.S. government. All views expressed in its publications and on its website are the sole responsibility
of the author or authors.
The Council on Foreign Relations sponsors Independent Task Forces to assess issues of current and critical
importance to U.S. foreign policy and provide policymakers with concrete judgments and recommendations.
Diverse in backgrounds and perspectives, Task Force members aim to reach a meaningful consensus
on policy through private and nonpartisan deliberations. Once launched, Task Forces are independent of
CFR and solely responsible for the content of their reports. Task Force members are asked to join a consensus
signifying that they endorse ‘‘the general policy thrust and judgments reached by the group, though not
necessarily every finding and recommendation.’’ Each Task Force member also has the option of putting
forward an additional or dissenting view. Members’ affiliations are listed for identification purposes only
and do not imply institutional endorsement. Task Force observers participate in discussions, but are not
asked to join the consensus.
For further information about CFR or this Task Force, please write to the Council on Foreign Relations,
58 East 68th Street, New York, NY 10065, or call the Communications office at 212.434.9888. Visit CFR’s
website at www.cfr.org.
Copyright © 2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations®, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
This report may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form beyond the reproduction permitted
by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law Act (17 U.S.C. Sections 107 and 108) and excerpts by
reviewers for the public press, without express written permission from the Council on Foreign Relations.
This report is printed on paper that is FSC® certified by Rainforest Alliance, which promotes environmentally
responsible, socially beneficial, and economically viable management of the world’s forests.
Task Force Members
Task Force members are asked to join a consensus signifying that they
endorse “the general policy thrust and judgments reached by the group,
though not necessarily every finding and recommendation.” They participate
in the Task Force in their individual, not institutional, capacities.
Madeleine K. Albright
Albright Stonebridge Group
Henri J. Barkey
Lehigh University
Elmira Bayrasli
Richard R. Burt
McLarty Associates
Soner Cagaptay
Washington Institute
for Near East Policy
Steven A. Cook
Council on Foreign Relations
Edward P. Djerejian
James A. Baker III Institute
for Public Policy, Rice University
William M. Drozdiak
American Council on Germany
Stephen J. Hadley
U.S. Institute of Peace
Robert W. Kagan
Brookings Institution
Parag Khanna
New America Foundation
Clark B. Lombardi
University of Washington
School of Law
Aliza Marcus
World Bank Group
Larry C. Napper
George Bush School of
Government and Public Service,
Texas A&M University
Denise Natali
Institute for National
Strategic Studies
Joseph W. Ralston
The Cohen Group
Gregory Saunders
BP America Inc.
Patrick N. Theros
U.S.-Qatar Business Council
vi Task Force Members
Vin Weber Nur O. Yalman
Mercury/Clark & Weinstock Harvard University
Jenny B. White Ahmad Zuaiter
Boston University Jadara Capital Partners, LP
Ross Wilson
Atlantic Council
of the United States
Contents
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Task Force Report 1
Introduction 3
U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership with a New Turkey 6
Turkey’s Transformation: Recent Reforms 14
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead 20
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role 36
Conclusion 51
Appendixes 52
Endnotes 61
Task Force Members 63
Task Force Observers 75
Foreword
The relationship between Turkey and the United States was built in
the throes of the Cold War. For decades, their interaction was dominated
by political and military considerations relating to Europe,
especially how best to meet the Soviet strategic challenge and how
best to manage the complex and frustrating Turkey-Greece-Cyprus
triangle. More than twenty years after the end of the Cold War, however,
those traditional priorities are making way for a new agenda that
reflects not just changes in the international system but also Turkey’s
remarkable transformation from a military-dominated society to a
fledgling democracy and rising power in a greater Middle East experiencing
unprecedented upheaval.
Since the Justice and Development Party came to power in 2002, the
country has achieved far-reaching, albeit still incomplete, reforms. The
political system is more representative than it was a decade ago and
the role of the military in the political system has been substantially
reduced. The country’s GDP has more than tripled, making Turkey
one of the world’s top twenty economies; plans to join the top ten economies
within the next ten years appear ambitious but not out of the
question. Turkey is also playing a larger role on the diplomatic stage,
featuring in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and serving as
an example for many in a Middle East searching to find a larger role for
Islam in political life.
To be sure, Turkey’s transition is not yet complete. Journalists and
government critics are arrested in troublingly high numbers and progress
on concluding a new, more fully democratic constitution has been
unnecessarily slow. The government has not gone beyond small, initial
steps to better integrate its Kurdish minority. While economic growth
has been impressive—on the order of 6 percent per year over much of
the past decade—much of the dynamism has been fueled by buoyant
Foreword
consumer spending that is unlikely to be sustainable. Concerns also
remain within and outside Turkey about the influence of Islam in the
country’s politics.
This Council on Foreign Relations–sponsored Independent Task
Force report examines the various trends in Turkey and assesses their
consequences for U.S. policy toward the country and the region more
broadly. The report begins by taking stock of the modern U.S.-Turkey
relationship, noting strains over the past decade stemming from differences
over policy toward Iraq. The Task Force then considers the
political, social, and economic reforms Ankara has made in recent years
along with threats to further progress. The report also includes a discussion
of Turkey’s potential role as a regional energy hub and its growing
importance to foreign policy debates within and beyond its traditional
reach in NATO and Europe.
Within each section of the report, the Task Force offers recommendations
on how the United States can support Turkey’s continued
emergence and build a deeper working relationship that acknowledges
Ankara’s growing importance. It encourages the United States and
other democracies to urge Turkish leaders to follow through with their
commitment to writing a new constitution that better protects minority
rights and basic freedoms and clearly defines the relationship between
military and civilian authorities.
The Task Force further recommends exploring a Turkish-American
Partnership to deepen trade and economic ties and calls on the two countries
to expand bilateral trade and investment. The Task Force advocates
continued liberalization of Turkish law on intellectual property, tax,
and business regulations. And it calls on the United States to work with
Turkey as it becomes a more important actor in the energy sphere.
There is much the United States can do, the Task Force says, to promote
constructive collaboration in foreign policy, from partnering with
the Turkish development agency on regional aid to supporting Turkey’s
burgeoning role as a regional economic engine. Close consultations
are warranted on regional challenges, including stopping the violence
in and bringing political change to Syria and frustrating Iran’s bid for
nuclear weapons and regional primacy. American support for rapprochement
between Turkey and Israel is also encouraged.
I would like to thank the Task Force’s chairs, Madeleine K. Albright
and Stephen J. Hadley, for their dedication to and active involvement in
Foreword
this project. I am thankful to all of the Task Force members and observers
whose expertise on Turkey helped shape the report.
I am grateful also to Anya Schmemann, CFR’s Task Force Program
director, whose contributions and efforts have been instrumental since
the project’s inception. I would finally like to extend my thanks to Project
Director Steven A. Cook for his keen work incorporating many different
perspectives into a valuable report on this critical country.
Richard N. Haass
President
Council on Foreign Relations
May 2012
Acknowledgments
The report of the Independent Task Force on Turkey is the product of
much work and effort by the dedicated members and observers of this
Task Force, and I am appreciative of the time, attention, and expertise
they devoted to this project.
In particular, I would like to thank our distinguished chairs, Madeleine
K. Albright and Stephen J. Hadley, for their strong leadership
and attentive direction. It has been a true pleasure to work with both
of them and the members of their staffs, in particular Fariba Yassaee,
Robyn Lee, Katie Jackson, and Abbey Watson.
I am very grateful for the Task Force members’ and observers’ time
and attention and for their invaluable expertise and guidance. Many
members submitted detailed comments and feedback throughout the
writing process; special thanks go to Henri Barkey, Aliza Marcus, Greg
Saunders, and Clark Lombardi for their written contributions. I would
also like to thank Elmira Bayrasli, William Drozdiak, Larry Napper,
Ross Wilson, and Patrick Theros for their insightful input and written
comments on drafts of the report.
I am thankful to several people who met with and briefed the Task
Force group, including Assistant Secretary of State for Europe and
Eurasian Affairs Philip H. Gordon, Special Assistant to the President
and Senior Director for European Affairs Elizabeth Sherwood-
Randall, and Daniel Friefeld of the Office of the Special Envoy for Eurasian
Energy. In addition, Task Force member Greg Saunders gave a
presentation to the group.
The chairs and I had the fortunate opportunity to travel to Turkey for
consultations that informed this report. We benefited from briefings by
government officials in Ankara as well as by representatives from the
private sector and civil society in Istanbul. The Task Force delegation
is also appreciative of the numerous Turkish officials who offered their
time and insight as well as of U.S. ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone
and his staff.
Acknowledgments
CFR members also provided valuable input on the report. The Washington
Meetings team organized an event in Washington, DC, with
Task Force member Henri Barkey; the New York Meetings team organized
an event in New York, led by Task Force member Aliza Marcus;
and the Corporate Program organized a roundtable in Washington,
DC, led by Task Force members Greg Saunders and Ross Wilson.
I extend additional thanks to CFR’s Publications team, which
assisted in editing the report and readying it for publication, and CFR’s
Communications, Meetings, Corporate, External Affairs, Outreach,
and National teams, who all worked to ensure that the report reaches
the widest audience possible.
Task Force Program director Anya Schmemann was instrumental to
this project from beginning to end, offering invaluable advice and guidance.
She and Kristin Lewis of CFR’s Task Force Program accompanied
us on our trip to Turkey; Kristin was extremely helpful on several
fronts and helped ensure that the Task Force ran smoothly. My research
associate, Alexander Brock, who authored the appendix on Fethullah
Gulen, deserves huge credit and thanks for his research and assistance
with the report. His predecessor, Lauren Linakis, helped get this project
off to a strong start.
I am grateful to CFR President Richard N. Haass and Director of
Studies James M. Lindsay for giving me the opportunity to direct this
effort.
While this report is the product of the Independent Task Force, I take
responsibility for its content and note that any omissions or mistakes
are mine.
Steven A. Cook
Project Director
Task Force Report
Introduction
Among the most important developments in international affairs of the
past decade is the emergence of Turkey as a rising regional and global
power. Turkey has long been an important country as a stalwart member
of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an aspirant to
European Union (EU) membership, and an important link between the
West and the East. Yet the changes in Turkey over the past decade have
been so dramatic—with far-reaching political and economic reforms,
significant social reforms, and an active foreign policy—that the country
is virtually unrecognizable to longtime Turkey watchers. Today
Turkey is more democratic, prosperous, and politically influential than
it was five, ten, and fifteen years ago.
Although left out of the exclusive club of countries widely regarded as
rising powers—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and, most recently, South
Africa (the BRICS)—Turkey very much belongs in the category of
economically successful countries that are emerging global powers.1 If
current trends in Turkey persist and the international system continues
to undergo a redistribution of power, Turkey will in the coming decade
be among the most important actors in the broad region surrounding
and beyond it. Turkey is rapidly becoming a critical energy link between
Europe and Asia. It has sought to play a constructive role in the Middle
East as that region undergoes unprecedented change, especially in Iraq,
where—despite recent tension—Ankara has become a force for stability.
As other American allies prepare to leave, Turkey has remained
steadfast in its support for NATO’s mission in Afghanistan. And on the
economic front, Turkey is an increasingly visible player in the Group of
Twenty (G20).
Some trends are worrying, however: the prosecution and detention
of journalists, the seemingly open-ended and at times questionable
pursuit of military officers and other establishment figures for alleged
conspiracy against the government, the apparent illiberal impulses of
U.S.-Turkey Relations
some Turkish leaders, the still-unresolved Kurdish issue, and the lack
of progress on a new constitution. How these issues are resolved will
have a major impact on the future of Turkey and its democracy. Indeed,
for all the positive political change that the Justice and Development
Party (AKP) oversaw in 2003 and 2004, Turkish leaders have sometimes
resorted to authoritarian measures to intimidate and curb opposition to
their agenda.
On the economic front, dangers lurk in Turkey’s consumption-
fueled growth, which has led to a large and growing deficit in the current
account, and in its robust links to the ailing economies of the EU. Turkey’s
dynamic foreign policy has, at times, also raised tension between
Washington and Ankara. Still, these problems do not diminish the significance
of Turkey’s transformation or the potential opportunities for
the future of U.S.-Turkey relations.
The goal for the United States, which has long-standing diplomatic,
political, and military ties with Turkey, based in large part on the vestiges
of the Cold War, is to modernize the bilateral relationship in a
way that reflects not only common American-Turkish interests, but
also Turkey’s new stature as an economically and politically successful
country with a new role to play in a changing Middle East. Turkey may
not yet have the status of one of Washington’s traditional European
allies, but there is good strategic reason for the bilateral relationship
to grow and mature into a mutually beneficial partnership that can
manage a complex set of security, economic, humanitarian, and environmental
problems. This is precisely what the United States wants
from Turkey. Although a vibrant bilateral relationship already exists,
there is an opportunity to institutionalize the relationship further and
expand issues of common interest.
Ankara was never a client of Washington in the traditional sense of
the term, but nevertheless the asymmetry of power between the two
countries frequently dictated a particular pattern of relations in which
Turkey often believed it was pursuing policies in favor of U.S. interests
at the expense of its own. Given the emerging changes in the international
order, especially the political dynamism in the Arab world, a new
partnership is needed between the United States and Turkey, given their
shared interests in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, the Caucasus,
the eastern Mediterranean, and Central Asia.
Despite general agreement in both Washington and Ankara of the
value of a strategic partnership, precisely what this means and entails
Introduction
remains subject to debate. Certainly on a range of issues, especially
in the Middle East, the United States and Turkey have in recent years
had different expectations of each other. These differences should not
preclude the development of a partnership, in particular as Ankara has
moved closer to Washington’s position on Syria and Iran. The new
Turkey, however, is not well understood by U.S. administration officials,
members of Congress, or the public. This report seeks to promote a
better understanding of the new Turkey—its strengths, vulnerabilities,
and ambitions—in order to assess its regional and global role and make
recommendations for a new partnership of improved and deepened
U.S.-Turkey ties.
U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership
with a New Turkey
Overall, political, diplomatic, and military ties between the United
States and Turkey are robust. In particular, the personal relationship
between President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan has been important in moving bilateral relations forward.
Unlike in the past, Turkey is among the first group of countries that
American officials call on regarding foreign policy issues of importance
to the United States. Indeed, President Obama spoke with Prime Minister
Erdogan by telephone at least thirteen times in 2011, signifying a
strong working relationship between them.
There should be no doubt that Turkey is a close ally of the United
States, albeit one with an independent outlook. In this respect, it resembles
some of Washington’s traditional European allies.
The truth is that Turkey is unlike most other countries: it is both a
formal ally and a country with which the United States has had difficult
relations from time to time, and this will continue to some extent. At
the root of this reality is Turkey’s distrust of the United States, which
is deep, and the result in part of an asymmetry of power. Washington,
too, is distrustful of Ankara, but much less so, partly because the United
States is the superpower and approaches issues with a level of confidence
(which may be off-putting) that enables Washington to be or
appear to be “magnanimous.” In trying to move forward in this relationship,
the United States needs to begin to build trust, which is among the
most difficult tasks ahead.
Political, DiPlomatic, anD military ties
A mythology surrounds U.S.-Turkey relations suggesting that Washington
and Ankara have, through six decades, worked closely and with
little friction. It is true that Turkish soldiers fought and died along with
U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership with a New Turkey
Americans in Korea in the early 1950s, and that Turkey was an important
NATO partner during the long Cold War. Yet as close as this relationship
was, it was hardly ever smooth.
Difficulties arose over Cyprus in the 1960s with the Johnson administration
and again in the early 1970s when, after Turkey’s invasion of
the island in response to a Greek-led coup that Ankara believed placed
the minority Turkish Cypriots in danger, the United States placed an
arms embargo on its NATO ally. The efforts of the Armenian-American
community to convince the U.S. Congress and successive administrations
to recognize the 1915 mass killing of Armenians as genocide
have often resulted in bilateral tension. In the 1990s, differences
concerned human rights. The U.S. invasion of Iraq also created tension
between Washington and Ankara—the result of both the Grand
National Assembly’s inability to pass legislation allowing U.S. forces
to use Turkish territory to open a northern front against Saddam Hussein,
and the post-invasion instability in Iraq that coincided with a
resumption of PKK terrorist attacks on Turkey. Ankara’s 2010 trilateral
Tehran Research Reactor agreement with Brazil and Iran, as well
as Ankara’s subsequent vote against applying United Nations Security
Council (UNSC) sanctions on the Iranian regime, raised questions
in U.S. policymaking circles about Turkey’s commitment to the
Western alliance.
The deterioration of Turkey-Israel relations since 2008, which has
complicated U.S.-Middle East policy and increased tension in the eastern
Mediterranean, has also drawn the interest of a U.S. Congress that
has not always been friendly to Turkish concerns. In addition, public
opinion polls in Turkey consistently reveal unfavorable impressions
of the United States among the Turkish public, an attitude that vexes
American policymakers. This is a problem that can damage the bilateral
relations, especially now that public opinion matters more than
ever before in Turkish foreign policy. Although Turkish leaders clearly
value the relationship, with the exception of former prime minister and
president Turgut Ozal, they have rarely defended the U.S.-Turkey alliance.
That must change.
Yet even if some tension and mistrust mark the history of the U.S.Turkey
relationship, Ankara’s geostrategic importance to Washington
remains undiminished. For example, Turkey has gone from being a
potentially destabilizing factor in Iraq to an important partner in the
reconstruction, economic development, and territorial integrity of the
U.S.-Turkey Relations
country. Turkey was among the first allies to offer troops to the American
effort in Afghanistan and has been a mainstay of the international
force there, although most Turkish troops do not participate in operations
beyond Kabul, with the exception of provincial reconstruction
teams in Wardak and Jawzjan. And, after initial stumbles, Ankara and
Washington have worked collaboratively to respond to the uprisings in
the Arab world, particularly in Libya and Syria.
Finally, Turkey has agreed to base a critical NATO anti-missile system
radar on its territory, which Washington considers an important component
of European security. Ankara had initially hesitated for fear of
antagonizing Iran, but Tehran’s apparent complicity in Syria’s bloody
crackdown has convinced Turkish policymakers to alter their approach
to Iran. Still, controversy remains concerning the radar installation.
Turkey has insisted that no data may be shared with Israel, but Prime
Minister Erdogan’s domestic opposition has raised concerns that Israel
could nevertheless receive tracking information. At the Munich Security
Conference, however, U.S. defense secretary Leon Panetta told
the press that the radar in Turkey is intended for the defense of NATO
and that the United States has a separate and robust program of missile
defense cooperation with Israel.
As Turkey’s current dispute with Israel and its approach to Iran (for
a time) suggest, there will be areas of geopolitical importance where
Ankara and Washington, as well as Brussels, are likely to disagree.
This is not unusual, even for close allies, but to mitigate potential friction
at those inevitable moments of heightened tension, Turkey and
the United States must build a stronger infrastructure of bilateral
cooperation.
The Task Force believes that the United States and Turkey have, for
the most part, common goals on issues of mutual importance. When
Washington and Ankara have diverged, such as in the dispute over
UNSC sanctions against Iran during the summer of 2010, the ability of
the two states to handle the fallout has paid dividends for an enhanced
relationship going forward. The situation demonstrated to both countries
that a public dispute between Washington and Ankara has no
political or diplomatic upside—an invaluable lesson for future differences
between the United States and Turkey.
For that reason, the American and Turkish governments must deepen
the process of consultation that President Obama and Prime Minister
Erdogan established and institutionalize it across both governments
U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership with a New Turkey
from the highest levels down. This will place Turkey and the United
States in an advantageous position to deal with problems and crises as
well as cushion the inevitable disagreements.
recommenDat ions
The United States needs to recognize that today it is dealing with a dramatically
changed Turkey and, as a result, that the bilateral relationship
between Washington and Ankara is undergoing fundamental change.
American officials, members of Congress, and other observers must
jettison their stereotypes of Turkey. In particular, the decline in the
role of the military in Turkish political life does not mean that Turkey is
inexorably headed toward theocracy or movement away from NATO.
The rise of the religiously oriented AKP party is not inconsistent with
democracy, modernization, or economic liberalism. The United States
must not view the sum of U.S.-Turkey relations through the narrow
prism of particular issues, whether they be Armenia, Israel, or ties to
NATO. On the contentious issue of Armenia and the massacres of
1915, for example, the United States has a moral interest in working
with all sides to clarify the historical record. But the U.S.-Turkey relationship
is much broader than the Armenian tragedy, the parlous state
of Turkey-Israel relations, or the false debates about Turkey’s place in
the West. And the relationship can and should be expanded further as
well as deepened. The overlapping strategic interests and potential for
greater U.S.-Turkey cooperation should not be forfeited for specific
political interests.
Indeed, the United States needs to see Turkey as a potential strategic
partner with which it has a relationship comparable not only with newer
partners, such as India and Brazil, but ultimately with its closest allies,
such as Japan and South Korea. Turkey needs to see the United States in
the same way, recognizing, however, that for all the potential in the new
U.S.-Turkey partnership, there are limitations to what the two countries
can effectively achieve without adherence to the following principles:
–
equality and mutual respect for each other’s interests
–
confidentiality and mutual trust
–
close and intensive consultations to identify common goals and strategies
on issues of critical interest that will provide mutual benefit
U.S.-Turkey Relations
–
no surprises in their respective foreign policies, especially in important
areas of interest to either country
–
recognition that there will inevitably be differences, and therefore
that they must work together to manage them so that they do not
damage the relationship
To convert these principles into practical policies and concrete
results, the United States and Turkey need to continue to further
strengthen the close relationship forged by their two national leaders
and extend the principles to their respective administrations at every
level and across all relevant departments and agencies. Toward that end,
Washington and Ankara should establish a government-wide forum for
cabinet-level engagement on the model of the Strategic and Economic
Dialogue with China or the strategic-level consultations with Israel.
In a departure from the dialogue with China, which includes only
the highest levels, Turkey and the United States should also conduct
frequent and routine talks between their foreign policy and national
security organizations to develop a common strategic framework and
long-term perspective on the core issues of common concern. This dialogue
on foreign policy and national security issues should be deepened
to the level of U.S. assistant secretaries and their Turkish counterparts
and should become frequent and routine at that level. In addition, intensive
interaction and cooperation between the two countries in the field
and between their respective diplomats, military personnel, and intelligence
officers is critical.
Beyond these process-oriented recommendations, the United
States and Turkey have resources, assets, and skills that will be complementary
in places that have not historically been areas of U.S.-Turkey
cooperation, including helping various Arab countries achieve democratic
transitions; ending the bloodshed in Syria through the departure
of President Bashar al-Assad and the creation of a democratic, cross-
sectarian outcome; and dealing with the challenge posed by Iran’s
pursuit of nuclear weapons, support for terror, and intervention in the
affairs of its neighbors. Ankara and Washington must continue cooperating
to help sustain the economic and political progress in Iraq and
to assist Iraqis in resolving the remaining cross-sectarian problems
and tensions. In addition, both countries continue to have a mutually
reinforcing role to play in working to bring about stability, security,
and peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership with a New Turkey
Washington must also try again to help the Turks and Armenians
move forward with the 2009 Turkey-Armenia protocols that held out
the possibility of normalization of relations between the two countries.
Change to the status quo there will likely improve Ankara’s relations
with Yerevan, which will also ease the periodic tension between Turkey
and the United States over the Armenian issue and help pave the way
for the leadership role in the Caucasus that Turkey desires. It would also
improve the atmosphere for a resolution of the Nagorno-Karabakh
problem, and the United States should be actively encouraging such a
resolution.
Also, the United States must not neglect the Cyprus problem just
because it seems intractable. The discovery of large deposits of natural
gas off the island’s southern coast has the potential to increase tension
between Nicosia and Ankara given Turkey’s insistence that Turkish
Cypriots share in any economic benefits resulting from the island’s natural
resources. Finally, as Turkey becomes more active commercially
and diplomatically in Africa, Washington and Ankara should develop
cooperative programs and initiatives there.
economic relations
Although political, diplomatic, and military ties are well developed,
trade and investment remain a weak link in the U.S. relationship with
Turkey. Bilateral trade reached only $15 billion in 2010 and remains
overly dependent on large U.S. defense and aircraft sales. The parties
are giving increased attention to the economic relationship. During
President Obama’s April 2009 visit to Turkey, he and President Abdullah
Gul pledged to strengthen the economic pillar of the relationship.
In October 2010, the United States and Turkey launched a cabinet-level
economic commission, the Framework for Strategic Economic and
Commercial Cooperation, and a Turkey-U.S. Business Council. In
December 2011, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. reinforced Washington’s
interest in economic ties with Turkey when he traveled to Istanbul
for the Global Entrepreneurship Summit that Turkey hosted. Indeed,
Turkey is a priority country for numerous U.S. economic efforts. As
part of the National Export Initiative, it is one of six next-tier markets
to which the United States hopes to double exports by 2015. Turkey’s
active entrepreneurial sector makes it an ideal partner country for
U.S.-Turkey Relations
entrepreneurship initiatives, which led to its hosting role for the Global
Entrepreneurship Summit in December 2011.
A strengthened economic partnership not only advances U.S. commercial
interests; it also reinforces the broader relationship. Increased
trade and investment can also contribute to increased people-to-people
ties, helping build constituencies for the relationship in both countries.
High-level focus sends an important signal of interest in the economic
relationship, but without concrete steps and private sector interest,
this component of the relationship will continue to be pushed off
the agenda by more pressing political and military issues. As a result,
the United States and Turkey must explore new ways of deepening an
underdeveloped economic relationship that will not only benefit both
countries economically but also provide a cushion for ties during times
of stress.
recommenDat ions
For a start, a long-term vision for bilateral trade is needed. Pursuing a
U.S.-Turkey free trade agreement (FTA) would be the best approach.
There is a widely held view, however, that Ankara’s relations with the
EU preclude such an agreement. But it is unclear whether the barriers
are political or legal. Given the benefits to both countries, the matter
should be seriously explored to see whether these barriers, if real, could
be overcome—especially since Turkey seems to have been able to enter
FTAs with many other states. In any event, Turkey and the United
States should also adopt a variety of other measures to enhance their
economic relationship.
It is time for the United States and Turkey to expand on the 1990
Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) and the 1999 Turkey-U.S. Trade and
Investment Agreement (TIFA). One way to do this is to negotiate a
new BIT with improved provisions for dispute resolution and investor
protections. Another is to increase the frequency of the yearly discussions
that take place under the TIFA in an effort to overcome obstacles
that U.S. companies have had in the areas of alternative energy, genetically
modified foods, and pharmaceutical industries in Turkey, and that
Turkish companies have encountered while exporting their goods to
the United States in the areas of steel and other sectors.
U.S.-Turkey Relations: A New Partnership with a New Turkey
Yet policymakers in the United States and Turkey should not be limited
to the BIT and TIFA frameworks. Rather, officials in Washington
and Ankara must think bigger. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
that the United States envisages for Asia contains a variety of elements
that are applicable to the U.S.-Turkey economic relationship. To be sure,
the TPP has a much broader scope than a “Turkish-American Partnership”
(TAP), but incorporating the TPP’s emphasis on market access,
regulatory compatibility, business facilitation, assistance for small and
medium-sized enterprises, and promotion of trade in cutting-edge
technologies would significantly bolster economic ties.
Establishing a TAP of course poses certain technical challenges,
some of which may involve the EU-Turkey Customs Union agreement
as discussed earlier. As a result, the TAP could be part and parcel of
larger discussions about the establishment of a transatlantic free trade
area, but it should not be held hostage to them. A TAP would strengthen
what is currently considered the weakest link in the U.S.-Turkey relationship,
potentially spur deeper economic ties across the Atlantic, and
serve the Turkish-American diplomatic, political, and military alliance.
If obstacles to a TAP prove insurmountable, the parties might try a more
limited agreement focused on services, investment, and an intellectual
property rights accord.
Beyond these broad policy initiatives, U.S. officials should encourage
governors, mayors of large cities, and business association leaders
to undertake trade missions to Turkey. The Turkish market of almost
eighty million consumers is largely unknown to most American businesses,
save large firms such as Boeing, Microsoft, Citibank, IBM,
Ford Motor Company, and Motorola. Although some well-developed
Turkish business organizations are dedicated to promoting small and
medium-sized enterprises, there are no corresponding U.S. organizations,
which hampers American access to Turkey’s dynamic and growing
market.
Turkey’s Transformation: Recent Reforms
To understand Turkey’s external relations, one must understand Turkey’s
internal political, social, and economic development and its recent
history. Over the course of the past decade, Turkey has simultaneously
become more European, more Muslim, more democratic, and more
modern. In addition, Turkey—an economic underachiever only ten
years ago—now boasts the world’s seventeenth-largest economy and
has ambitions to be one of the world’s top ten economies by 2023.
Political reforms
The AKP’s most significant achievements are the political changes the
party presided over shortly after coming to power. Indeed, the reforms
that Ankara undertook in earnest to meet the EU’s criteria for beginning
membership negotiations in 2003 and 2004 had a dramatic effect
on Turkish politics.
During this time, the Turkish Grand National Assembly passed
no fewer than seven comprehensive legislative reform packages and a
variety of major constitutional amendments under the auspices of two
AKP governments. The changes fell under broad categories of judicial,
human rights, economic, minority rights, and foreign policy reforms.
And though many of these legislative changes are not controversial, a
significant number helped undermine the semiauthoritarian core of
what had been Turkey’s military-dominated political system.
In an effort to expand personal freedoms and rights, Turkey’s mixed
civilian-military state security courts were abolished, an entirely new
penal code was established, the death penalty was banned, amendments
to the antiterror law made it more difficult to prosecute citizens based
on speech alone, and some prohibitions on broadcasting and teaching
in Kurdish were lifted.
Turkey’s Transformation: Recent Reforms
The reform packages also chipped away at the ability of Turkish
elites—military officers and the civilian establishment—to undermine
their political opponents. For example, the new AKP-dominated parliament
amended Articles 76 and 78 of the constitution to make it more
difficult to ban political parties and politicians from the political arena.
Without these changes, Prime Minister Erdogan, who had been banned
from politics and imprisoned, would have been able to serve as party
leader but not as prime minister.
The reform packages also included a series of changes that either
diminished the Turkish General Staff’s autonomy or compromised
the channels through which the military had historically influenced
politics. The AKP pushed through the Grand National Assembly several
changes to various government boards through which the armed
forces exercised influence. Military representatives were removed from
Turkey’s Council of Higher Education and High Audio-Visual Board.
Established after the military coup of September 12, 1980, these bodies
were useful platforms from which the senior command could ensure
Kemalist orthodoxy by prohibiting Islamism, Kurdish nationalism, and
socialism from university curricula and the media.
By far the most significant alterations to the military’s capacity to
impose its will on civilian politicians were made to the National Security
Council (known by its Turkish acronym, MGK). First, the parliament
increased the number of civilians on the council to outnumber
the five officers who held seats. Second, a civilian was appointed secretary-
general of the MGK, a position that has always been reserved for
a senior officer. In addition, to further limit the influence of the MGK,
the Grand National Assembly reduced the number of council meetings
from monthly to bimonthly, unless the prime minister or president of
the republic specifically requested the MGK to convene.
Finally, the new regulations significantly downgraded the power of
the MGK and its secretariat. Article 118 of the military’s 1982 constitution
directed the government to “give priority consideration to the
decisions of the National Security Council,” which, given patterns of
civil-military relations, was tantamount to an order. Under the AKP’s
seventh political reform package, however, the duty of the MGK was
redefined: “Reaching advisory decisions regarding the designation,
determination, and implementations of the state’s security policies
within the prescribed frameworks, determining a method for providing
the necessary coordination, and reporting these advisory decisions
U.S.-Turkey Relations
to the Cabinet Council.” Moreover, the MGK secretariat, which the
military staffed, was stripped of its executive powers. Consequently,
the secretariat no longer has the capacity to conduct its own national
security investigations.
One way of ensuring that officers adhered to the new regulations was
through control of the budget. The funds allocated to the MGK secretariat
were placed under the exclusive control of the prime minister
rather than the chief of the General Staff. Finally, the new regulations
lifted the veil of secrecy on the decrees that “governed the activities
of the National Security Council General-Secretariat,” which would
henceforth be published in the Official Gazette.
The practical effect of these reforms on Turkish politics and Turkey’s
four-decade effort to join the EU was dramatic. In October 2004,
the Commission of the European Union found that the institutional
changes that Turkey had undertaken met the EU’s Copenhagen criteria,
which laid out clear benchmarks that Ankara had to meet to begin
membership negotiations. As a result, the commission recommended
that the European Council begin accession talks with Turkey, which
opened in 2005.
Certain powerful political actors, the military in particular, were
opposed to the political changes that the AKP undertook. Yet the
Turkish General Staff was constrained from undermining either the
EU-related reforms or the AKP because of extraordinary popularity
of the reforms at the time (2003–2004). By some measures, anywhere
between 60 and 70 percent of the Turkish public supported the AKP’s
constitutional reform packages. Had the military moved against the
AKP or blocked the reforms, it would have risked the standing of the
armed forces with the public—which perennially stood at 90 percent
approval—and damaged the military’s long-standing narrative that it
was the engine of Turkey’s modernization and democratization.
social changes
The AKP’s success between 2003 and 2005 was, in part, a function
of the fact that although the principles of Kemalism—the ideology
espoused by Ataturk—remained important political and cultural
touchstones for many, Turkish society had become more complex and
Turkey’s Transformation: Recent Reforms
differentiated, and many Turks wanted a more liberal and democratic
political order.2
The AKP did not initially attract a broad spectrum of voters, however.
Urban cosmopolitan elites, big business, and large numbers of
average Turks turned out for the AKP only after the party established
a track record. Indeed, in 2002, the AKP rode to power a somewhat
disjointed coalition composed primarily of pious Muslims, Kurds, and
Turkish nationalists. The party only received 34 percent of the vote,
but its 363 seats in parliament made it possible to pass the EU-inspired
reforms with relative ease.3
Overall, some of the most important social changes to occur in
Turkey during the AKP era are related to religion and the expression of
it in the public sphere. The AKP has made it more acceptable and safer
for Turks to express their Muslim identity. For example, with the help
of the opposition Nationalist Movement Party, AKP passed a constitutional
amendment in 2008 lifting the ban on the hijab (headscarf) at
public universities. Even though the courts overturned the amendment,
it is clear that pious women are showing up in fashionable areas of Istanbul,
restaurants, and professional offices—places they were previously
unwelcome. Even though there is no hard evidence that more women
are donning the hijab, this development, which is related to the rise and
confidence of a new, more religiously conservative middle and upper-
middle class, has unsettled Turkey’s secular establishment, which fears
Islamization of Turkish society.4
Indeed, Turkey’s long-running kulturkampf between religious and
secular Turks has not been settled. Turks are undoubtedly freer to
express their religious beliefs in ways they were unable to before—a
positive development, representing an overall improvement in personal
and political freedoms in Turkey. And though the AKP has given impetus
to a process in which Turks are discarding the political and societal
constraints of Kemalism in favor of a more diverse and complex society,
secularist concerns are not entirely overblown. Pious Turks feel more
comfortable under the changes the AKP has wrought, but secular Turks
feel less secure. To ensure social stability and a democratic trajectory, it
is thus incumbent on the new establishment to reassure secular-minded
Turks that their way of life has a place in Turkish society, even if secularists
failed to do the same for observant Muslims during their long
period of ascendancy.
U.S.-Turkey Relations
economic reforms
Turkey’s strong economic growth over the past decade has contributed
to the dramatic changes in Turkish society and solidified the AKP’s
political dominance. A combination of reforms, International Monetary
Fund (IMF) discipline, and the AKP’s overall management of the
economy has produced a remarkable economic transformation. Indeed,
the Turkish economy has gone from being perennially troublesome and
IMF-recidivist to a European and global success story.
When the AKP first came to power, Turkey’s gross domestic product
(GDP) was $231 billion; in 2010 it stood at $736 billion. From
2002 through 2007, the Turkish economy grew by an average of over
6 percent a year. Exports have more than tripled, annual inflation has
dropped from highs of 60 to 80 percent in the 1990s to a more palatable
6 to 10 percent in the past decade, and interest rates have dropped
dramatically. In 2010, GDP expanded by 9 percent—placing Turkey
among the top ten fastest-growing global economies.5 Foreign direct
investment (FDI), which amounted to $684 million in 1990, increased
exponentially to $9.1 billion in 2010. Turkey also now boasts a vibrant
and expanding middle class.6
The groundwork for Turkey’s economic transformation was actually
laid three decades ago when then prime minister Turgut Ozal began
tearing down Ankara’s experiment with the policy of import substitution
industrialization in favor of a free-market economy. In many ways,
Ozal set the stage for the emergence of the so-called Anatolian Tigers—
small and medium-sized businesses in central cities such as Konya and
Kayseri that over time have become major exporters and have challenged
the predominance of Turkey’s traditional, large holding companies,
which are under the control of a relatively few prominent families.
Ozal’s reforms received a boost three years after his death when, in
1996, Turkey and the EU signed a customs union agreement that paved
the way for a dramatic increase in Turkish exports into Europe. The
agreement was a boon to Turkish business, which gained greater access
to the EU’s vast market, and, in response to European competition,
Turkish firms were forced to become more efficient and productive.
This, in turn, helped Turkish producers in other parts of the world.
The foundations for Turkey’s more recent economic success were
laid during a wrenching economic crisis in 2001 and 2002 when World
Bank economist Kemal Dervis was lured home to Turkey and given
Turkey’s Transformation: Recent Reforms
wide latitude to undertake an overhaul of the economy as minister of
economic affairs under then prime minister Bulent Ecevit. Dervis
most importantly instituted sweeping deregulation and banking sector
reform. The latter in particular sought to root out corrupt practices
within state-owned financial institutions that benefited politicians but
led to a collapse of confidence in the banking sector.
The AKP has been the primary political beneficiary of Dervis’s
reforms, and the relationship with the IMF has disciplined Prime Minister
Erdogan’s populist impulses. Initially, the prime minister and
his team sought to temper the IMF’s conditions as the AKP sought to
increase wages and pensions for civil servants; maintain price supports
for the agricultural sector; delay a proposed public procurement law,
which was intended to clean up the crony capitalism and nepotism that
was rife in public contracting; and undertake a tax amnesty. Ultimately,
the exigencies of instilling confidence in international investors and
Ankara’s need for further IMF assistance forced the AKP to drop or
dramatically alter its policies in these areas.
Despite concerns within the Turkish business community that the
appeal of populism might be too great for Prime Minister Erdogan,
when Turkey finally ended its IMF program in 2007, the AKP maintained
macroeconomic discipline. Indeed, the AKP’s economic team
has proved pragmatic, working both to ensure the conditions necessary
for Turkey’s spectacular growth and to help Turkey weather the 2008
global economic downturn. Finally, the party’s pro-business policies
have been a significant source of domestic support, particularly from
the emerging class of global entrepreneurs.
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
For all of the AKP’s achievements over the past decade, Turkey boasts
a political system, foreign policy, economy, and society that remain
very much in transition. For example, although Turkey is more democratic
today than it was when the AKP first came to power, it is not a
consolidated democracy—a condition under which “democracy is self-
enforcing . . . when all the relevant political forces find it best to continue
to submit their interests and values to the uncertain interplay of
institutions.”7 Both Turkey’s authoritarian legacies and the nondemocratic
remedies to which the AKP has sometimes resorted during its
tenure (discussed below) indicate that it is too early to declare Turkey a
mature, liberal democracy.
There are other challenges as well. The positive press surrounding
Ankara’s “new foreign policy” and its potential leadership role in
a changing Middle East hide a more uneven track record in Turkey’s
foreign relations. Although Turkey has become the seventeenth-largest
economy in the world, it continues to confront economic challenges,
such as high unemployment and a yawning current account deficit.
Additionally, Turkish society continues to struggle with a number of
complicated fault lines, including religious-secular, Turkish-Kurdish,
and wealthy-poor.
Democratic reform
anD Political rights
Among these issues, it is perhaps Turkey’s political trajectory—which
is intimately related to the religious-secular, ethnic, urban-rural, and
socioeconomic divides—that raises questions, but this is also an area
ripe for opportunity.
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
Despite the AKP’s early achievements, Ankara’s record is by no
means universally positive. It must be recognized that the AKP was
under political assault at times during its first six years in power. In 2008,
for example, the party confronted the possibility of closure for allegedly
seeking to undermine the secular nature of the Turkish state. The Constitutional
Court found evidence supporting the charges, but the AKP
was not closed because the judges fell one vote short of the seven (out
of eleven) required to close a party. Instead, the AKP was forced to pay
a $20 million fine. Even taking such political assaults into account, the
fact remains that since the party’s landslide reelection in the summer of
2007, the government has backtracked on reforms and displayed at least
a majoritarian view of democracy, if not an authoritarian streak. Still,
democracy is a continuous process, not an end point. Turkey finds itself
in the sometimes difficult process of a transition to more democratic
politics, which will have both strides forward and setbacks.
For example, the government has imposed an enormous and seemingly
punitive tax fine on the Dogan media group, which is owned by
an opponent of the AKP; it has taken legal action against Koc Holding,
Turkey’s top industrial conglomerate, in a manner that suggests the case
is politically motivated; and Prime Minister Erdogan has used a legal
investigation that initially targeted Turkey’s so-called deep state—an
alleged partnership of military, security, and intelligence officials who
guard Ataturk’s legacy—to go after the AKP’s critics in the media, academia,
and the bureaucracy. Indeed, many Turkish liberals initially supported
what has come to be known as the Ergenekon Case as a critical
step toward uprooting Turkey’s national security state. Yet in time some
liberals soured on the investigation because of what they perceived as
defects in the government’s case against certain suspects and a lack of
due process, which has fueled suspicions that the prosecution is politically
motivated. More generally, the AKP has started to employ and rely
on many of the same abusive judicial tactics that previous governments
used to silence critics, including long detentions of suspects pending
trial and indictments that appear to be based on innuendo and gossip.
In addition, the AKP has used its parliamentary majority to alter
the constitution with little regard for the opposition. For example, the
constitutional amendments of September 2010 raised some concerns
in Turkey and the West, although both the EU and the Obama administration
praised the changes affecting the judiciary. Few disagree that
U.S.-Turkey Relations
Turkey’s judicial system has for decades failed in important ways to
meet international standards, and it is generally accepted that Turkey’s
judicial selection process needs to be less politicized. When secular-
nationalist parties held power, these parties packed the courts with
judges who shared their worldview. After these parties were voted from
power, the judiciary prevented the new electoral majority from implementing
policies that reflected the popular will. The 2010 reforms will
give the Turkish government the ability to appoint new judges and fill
future vacancies with judges who better reflect the views of the majority.
The AKP insists that its reforms will both improve the quality of the
judiciary and make it more representative. Critics worry, however, that
the judiciary will become too responsive to the current political majority,
and their concerns need to be taken seriously.
The AKP’s frustration with the existing judiciary was understandable,
but some argue that the reforms nevertheless have the potential
to replace one politicized group of judges with another. Some Turkish
and Western critics charge that the amendments do nothing to bolster
the independence of the judiciary or the judicial system more generally,
though other observers argue that the criticism is overblown and
point out that the changes conform to EU criteria. Regardless, the best
solution to the problem of a politicized judiciary would be to establish
appointment procedures that give people confidence in the quality and
impartiality of judges, such as through requirements of supermajority
votes for appointments to important courts. A new appointment process
must be coupled with checks and balances that both ensure an independent
judiciary can function without improper interference from the
legislative or executive branches and are limited to a sphere of authority
appropriate to the judicial branch.
The government has sought similar types of solutions with other
state organizations that had become bastions of Kemalist orthodoxy,
such as the Turkish Academy of Sciences. Again, as with the judiciary,
the AKP’s answer to the ideological imbalance of the academy was to
implement a rigged and politicized process rather than to establish
regulations and norms that would have protected Turkish science from
politicization.
The Turkish government has also sought to impose mandatory
Internet filters that were, spokesmen argued, intended only to protect
children. After a public outcry, fueled by suspicions that the AKP was
actually interested in quelling political dissent, the restrictions were
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
made voluntary. Compromising Internet freedom is not confined to
the AKP, however. In 2007, the Turkish judiciary—after a legal case was
brought before the courts by hardcore Turkish nationalists—ordered a
ban on the video-sharing website YouTube, on the basis of videos that
disparaged the memory of Ataturk.
Although the public was able to alter the government’s approach to
the Internet, freedom of the press and freedom of expression remain
serious concerns. More than ninety journalists are currently in Turkish
jails. The arrests and general sense that freedom of the press has
been eroded—despite reforms in 2003 to strengthen press freedom—
prompted protests in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in the spring of 2011.
It has also caught the attention of the Obama administration. In a July
2011 appearance on CNN-Turk, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Rodham
Clinton rebuked the Turkish government for its treatment of the press
and its policies on the Internet:
If there is an area that I am concerned about with recent actions
in Turkey, it is . . . the area of freedom of expression and freedom
of the media. I do not think it is necessary or in Turkey’s interest
to be cracking down on journalists and bloggers and the Internet,
because I think Turkey is strong enough and dynamic enough with
enough voices that, if there are differences of opinion, those will
be drowned out in the marketplace of ideas.
Clinton also strongly suggested that it was actually the responsibility
of the Turkish government to defend freedom of expression and freedom
of the press.
On balance, it is clear that though the AKP took dramatic steps in
2003 and 2004 to forge a more open, modern, and pluralist society,
questions remain about Turkey’s democratic transition. In some areas,
the AKP-led government has used the same nondemocratic tools as its
predecessor, making it appear no more liberal than previous Turkish
governments.
Despite the AKP’s June 2011 electoral success, in which the party garnered
49.95 percent of the popular vote, the idiosyncrasies of Turkey’s
electoral law are such that even though Prime Minister Erdogan currently
commands a majority in the 550-seat Grand National Assembly,
it represents the smallest number of seats since the AKP came to power
in 2002. The government will thus be forced to pursue a pragmatic
U.S.-Turkey Relations
approach to critical issues for Turkey’s future, notably a new constitution.
This is good news, given that the prime minister’s critics harbor
fear that Prime Minister Erdogan, whom they accuse of having authoritarian
tendencies, will use the process to aggrandize his own political
power. This will be much harder in the current Grand National Assembly,
which, even as the AKP remains the dominant party, is unable to
pursue fundamental political change on its own without having to rely
on a referendum.
At the same time, questions about the AKP’s commitment to liberal
democratic practices is not the only problem in Turkish politics.
Turkey’s opposition parties are generally weak and deeply divided
internally. Turkey’s transition to democracy would be aided immeasurably
by the regeneration of traditional parties or the development
of new ones invested with democratic ideals that can serve as viable
alternatives to the AKP. Without such parties, the AKP will continue
to be the only serious choice for many Turks who, though they may
not completely share AKP’s worldview, nevertheless find even less to
support in either the Republican People’s Party or the National People’s
Movement Party, which hold 135 and 53 seats in the parliament,
respectively.
recommenDat ions
Over the past decade, Turks have demonstrated that they are capable
of undertaking a wide range of political and economic reforms. In light
of recent concerns about democratic reversals, however, the Task Force
recommends that the United States and Turkey’s other partners in the
Community of Democracies—which was created in part for precisely
this purpose—offer Turkey support and advice toward reenergizing its
political reform program. It would be best if the EU could, as it did in
2003 and 2004, serve as an anchor of Turkish political change, but the
stalled EU membership negotiations make that impossible.
In its place, the United States and other democracies have a role to
play in encouraging Turkey to write a constitution that will advance
and deepen Turkish democracy. They should encourage their Turkish
colleagues to ensure that the drafting process is open, inclusive, and
transparent. The resulting document should enshrine the principles of
both majority rule and protection of minority rights, recognizing that
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
democracy does not mean that those with the most votes can impose
their values on others.
The constitution can help establish the proper relationship between
military and civilian authority—enshrining respect for the military
but remaining under civilian control, free from military tutelage. It can
also codify Turkey’s unique approach to the relationship between religion
and the state—using Prime Minister Erdogan’s September 2011
statement in Cairo about the importance of secular politics in Muslim
societies as a starting point—and thus provide a useful model for postrevolutionary
Middle Eastern states struggling with this question.
The enduring protection of political rights requires that they be
embedded in a system of checks and balances: not just a popularly
elected parliament, but also a free press, independent political parties,
mechanisms for citizens to pursue their grievances through
politically neutral institutions, and an independent judiciary. As discussed
earlier, this last element requires a judicial appointments process
that provides public confidence in the quality and impartiality of
those appointed and constitutional provisions that spell out clearly an
appropriate but limited role for the judiciary that is consistent with a
democratic system.
Yet a new constitution should not be the only measure of Turkish
political reform. After all, given the particularities of Turkey’s electoral
laws, it may not be politically possible for the Turks to write a new constitution.
As a result, Washington and Ankara’s other international
partners should urge the Turks to abolish or reform nondemocratic
laws, regulations, rules, and decrees that, in tandem with the existing
constitution, undermine Turkey’s democratic practices. These include
Article 301 of the penal code, which makes insulting Turkishness a
crime. Despite the limited use of Article 301 recently, it remains in place
and thus contributes to persistent questions about Turkey’s democratic
transition. In addition, Turkey needs to abolish the internal service
codes of the armed forces that previously served as the legal justification
for the military’s intervention in politics and legal provisions constraining
freedom of religion, including those that prevent opening the
Greek-Orthodox Halki Seminary, which was shuttered in 1971. There
has been progress on this latter issue. At the March 2012 Seoul Nuclear
Security Summit, President Obama congratulated Prime Minister
Erdogan on the Turkish government’s apparent decision to open the
seminary, though the Turkish government has not yet given a date when
U.S.-Turkey Relations
Halki will finally reopen. As a final matter, Ankara should reduce the
threshold for parties to enter parliament, which stands at 10 percent and
limits the voices represented in the Grand National Assembly.
Turkey could go a long way toward putting to rest questions about
the rule of law, criminalization of political differences, and press freedom
in Turkey by ending the investigations of the Ergenekon case—
either completing the legal proceedings against those accused of
crimes or releasing them—and resolving the cases of the ninety-six
journalists now detained in Turkish jails. Turkey should also restructure
its court system to ensure timely trials that do not drag on for
years, or even decades.
Finally, a major challenge to Turkish democracy is the weakness of
the opposition parties—recognizing that a vibrant opposition is central
to democratic political systems. A number of measures could be undertaken
to address this problem and would benefit or be available to all
political parties, including the AKP itself, especially when it faces the
challenge any party faces in making the transition from its founders to
a long-lasting institution. Indeed, as the party is now into its third term,
questions have arisen in Turkey about leadership succession within the
party—a particular concern if the prime minister or president leaves
the political scene in the next few years. Whether part of the constitutional
drafting process or not, Turkey’s political parties law needs to be
brought in line with those of its fellow members in the Community of
Democracies. In addition, Turkey’s partners within the Community
of Democracies that sponsor organizations such as the International
Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute should make
them available to legal Turkish parties to offer technical advice on party
building. They can also promote exchanges between political parties
from countries in the Community of Democracies and the full range
of legal Turkish parties on issues such as human rights, rule of law, and
the protection of minorities. This could be part of a broader program of
people-to-people exchanges, exchanges between civil society groups,
and congressional and parliamentary exchanges.
the KurDish issue
In the past, much of the underlying rationale for Turkey’s semi-
authoritarian political system was the perceived threat of ethnic
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
separatism—notably Kurdish nationalism. When Mustafa Kemal
founded the Turkish Republic, he based his new political order and
social setting in part on the idea of Turkishness, which did not accommodate
other ethnic groups in the state carved from what remained
of the Ottoman Empire. From almost the beginning, many Kurds
resisted efforts at assimilation and repression of their language and
unique culture.
The Kurdish conflict is one of the most sensitive issues in Turkish
politics because it has often been violent. As a result, successive Turkish
governments have sought largely nondemocratic solutions to the challenge
that Kurdish political, social, and cultural consciousness is perceived
to pose to the security and integrity of the Turkish state. To be
sure, Turkey’s leaders and citizens have had good reason for these fears.
At one end of the spectrum, Kurdish nationalists have espoused separatism
and used violence in pursuit of their goals. The ensuing conflict
has killed more than forty thousand people since the mid-1980s. At the
other end, many Kurds have sought redress of their grievances and have
demanded cultural and linguistic rights through Turkey’s political institutions.
Neither violence nor politics has been successful.
Prime Minister Erdogan and his party have attracted large numbers
of Kurds because the AKP is widely regarded as relatively more progressive
on the Kurdish issue than other parties, except those political
groups based on Kurdish identity, such as the pro-Kurdish Peace and
Democracy Party (BDP) and its now-shuttered predecessors. In 2008,
Prime Minister Erdogan proposed a $12 billion development program
in Turkey’s Kurdish southeast as a way of giving residents of the area,
which has been a bastion of support for the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK), a stake in the Turkish economy and thus, it was hoped, in the
political system. The plan was never implemented due to political
opposition.
The problem with this approach was, however, its underlying
assumption that economic success would result in political quiescence.
In 2008 and 2009, the AKP began promoting what was called a Kurdish
opening, which observers suspected would address in fundamental
ways the Kurds’ demands for a more inclusive politics. Ultimately, the
opening proved far smaller than initially hoped for, if only because it
was purposefully ambiguous and thus easily left to wither and die once
opposition grew to any fundamental alteration of the status of Turkey’s
Kurdish citizens. It remains unclear exactly why Prime Minister
U.S.-Turkey Relations
Erdogan dropped the initiative, although subsequent PKK violence
made it all the more difficult politically for the government to revive the
opening or pursue new outreach to the Kurds.
Although many Kurds are well integrated into the political and social
life of the country, resolving what is universally known as the Kurdish
problem would do much to improve the quality of Turkish democracy.
This issue is among the biggest obstacles to Turkey’s democratic ambitions
and the root of many of its illiberal practices.
Currently, Turkish society remains deadlocked politically over
extending greater cultural and political rights to Kurds, offering Prime
Minister Erdogan little incentive to tackle the issue again. However,
the overwhelming mandate the government received in the July 2011
elections—even if the vote did not give the AKP enough parliamentary
seats to change the constitution on its own—provides an opportunity
for Prime Minister Erdogan to pursue a new Kurdish initiative.
The United States and other partners of Turkey should encourage
Prime Minister Erdogan to pursue a more progressive approach to the
Kurds of Turkey. With the armed forces less of a factor in Turkish politics,
a major obstacle to a political solution for the Kurdish problem has
been removed. Turkey’s two main opposition groups, the Republican
People’s Party and Nationalist Movement Party, have often opposed
initiatives related to Kurdish rights, yet recent elections indicate that
their political appeal is limited. Still, for all of the AKP’s emphasis on
Muslim solidarity, it too has a core nationalist constituency that makes
it hard to advance a solution to the Kurdish problem, especially when
PKK violence is on the upswing.
The United States does not have a direct role in Turkey’s historic conflict
with the Kurds, but has shown its support for Turkey by remaining
steadfast in its opposition to the PKK. In the past, the Kurdish issue
marred Ankara’s relations with Iraqi Kurds. Turkey’s efforts to improve
relations with Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government has paid off as
the Iraqi Kurdish leadership has, in turn, encouraged a peaceful settlement
of Turkey’s Kurdish issue.
recommenDat ions
American policymakers must be mindful that the relationship
between the Kurds and the Turkish state is perhaps the most sensitive
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
issue facing Turkey, but given the current improved relations between
Washington and Ankara, President Obama has an opportunity to use
his warm relationship with Prime Minister Erdogan and his personal
prestige among Turks to persuade them that a new Kurdish opening
would be worthwhile. The United States should encourage Prime Minister
Erdogan to build on the steps he took in late November 2011, when
he apologized for the massacre of approximately thirteen thousand
Alevi Kurdish residents of Dersim (now Tunceli) between 1936 and
1939 and to make a new gesture toward Turkey’s Kurdish community.
Although some Kurds were suspicious of Prime Minister Erdogan’s
Dersim gesture, believing it was more about competition between the
AKP and the opposition Republican People’s Party, which controlled
the government at the time of the killings, a taboo has been broken.
There is an opportunity for the prime minister to build on the Dersim
apology and the 2009 Kurdish opening to renew efforts to resolve the
Kurdish problem.
At the same time, support for the PKK both within and outside
Turkey has not occurred in a vacuum. It is a natural response to decades
of estrangement and disaffection. While continuing to demand an end
to PKK violence, Washington should privately encourage Ankara to
undertake economic, educational, and cultural initiatives to ameliorate
the alienation of large numbers of Kurds and answer their demands
for official recognition of their identity. This is not only an imperative
for the less developed and predominantly Kurdish southeast, but a
national issue, as the combination of urbanization and decades of violence
has moved large numbers of Kurds to other parts of the country.
For example, Istanbul is now the largest Kurdish city in the world after
Irbil, Iraq. Washington should encourage Prime Minister Erdogan
to follow through with his intention to hold talks with the Peace and
Democracy Party (BDP), which currently holds more than thirty seats
in parliament and controls almost all major municipalities in the southeast.
8 Talks between the government and the BDP would be a welcome
development because many Kurds look to the BDP to speak on their
behalf and regard it as a natural partner for Prime Minister Erdogan in
pursuing a solution to Kurdish demands for greater official recognition
and rights.
The United States can also use its influence with the Kurdish leadership
in Irbil to double their efforts to pressure the PKK to abandon its
armed struggle against Turkey.
U.S.-Turkey Relations
the economy
The Turkish economy has tripled in the past decade on the strength of
unprecedented levels of foreign investment, export growth, and rising
domestic consumption. Yet the country’s rapid economic expansion
poses significant downside risks, and analysts remain concerned about
overheating. The current account deficit, which in 2011 was $77.2 billion,
ballooned to nearly 10 percent of GDP before declining in early 2012,
and domestic credit growth have made Turkey vulnerable to external
shocks.9 Reflecting this reality along with weak European economies,
the Turkish lira was the second-worst-performing emerging-market
currency in 2011. Inflation, which ruined Turkey’s economy and reputation
in the 1980s and 1990s, rose in 2011. Some analysts warn that a
speculative bubble has developed in the real estate market. Observers
expect economic growth to slow in 2012; how much and whether the
government can manage a soft landing are significant questions.
Turkey’s economic decision-makers are well respected internationally,
but concerns exist that Prime Minister Erdogan’s political calculations
have led the government to prioritize high growth at the expense of
macroeconomic stability. Analysts have questioned the Turkish Central
Bank’s decision to not tighten monetary policy by raising interest rates
in the latter half of 2011. Rating agencies have raised concerns about the
bank’s unorthodox monetary policy. The prime minister’s public pronouncements
that interest rates should be at zero, coupled with recent
comments by Minister of Economy Zafar Caglayan complaining about
what he called the interest rate lobby, reinforce reservations about the
independence of financial institutions such as the Central Bank. In
the fourth quarter of 2011, however, the Central Bank did raise short-
term interest rates, which had the desired effect of reducing consumer
demand for credit and domestic production. This may have been precisely
what the Turkish economy needed to avoid overheating.
Turkey’s economic success has both enabled and motivated a more
activist foreign policy. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s approach
to Turkish foreign policy combines diplomatic engagement with commercial
diplomacy. Consequently, Turkey has concluded seventeen free
trade agreements with many more in negotiations, as well as numerous
agreements on visa-free travel for business people and tourists.
Large Turkish business delegations traveling abroad have become a
prominent feature of Turkish commercial diplomacy. Ankara has also
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
pursued a sophisticated campaign to attract foreign direct investment.
Turkish trade with the Middle East is now 26 percent of its total foreign
trade, a figure that is likely to grow. In Africa—not a traditional arena
of Turkish foreign policy—Turkey opened twenty-one new diplomatic
missions in 2010 and 2011 and completed customs union agreements
with South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cameroon.
Moreover, as evidence of Turkey’s attractive business climate,
in December 2011 Amazon.com signed a partnership deal with
Ciceksepeti.com, a Turkish e-commerce site that allows customers
to send flowers and gifts all over Turkey; several major initial public
offerings will be floated in 2012. The government also plans legislation
related to stock and shareholding that will make Turkey an even more
attractive investment.
With all the buoyancy of the Turkish economy, potential problems
loom, such as keeping inflation manageable (the IMF projects a 5 percent
inflation rate in 2012), reducing unemployment, and grappling
with the continuing problem of the current account deficit. In addition,
despite the considerable growth in trade and investment with and in the
Middle East and burgeoning commercial ties to other regions, the bulk
of Turkey’s economic activity remains with the EU, which is itself grappling
with massive debt and slowing economies.10 A struggling EU is an
obvious problem for Turkish traders.
recommenDat ions
The United States can do little to help shield the Turks from Europe’s
slowdown, but it should do more to facilitate collaboration between
U.S. and Turkish firms in third markets that can help Turkey, generate
opportunities for American firms, and promote better economic
futures for countries of common interest. The United States needs
to make clear that it recognizes and supports Turkey’s enormous economic
progress and potential. It should also recognize that Turkey can
be a force for the greater regional economic integration that is so essential
to bringing peace and prosperity to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central
Asia, and the Middle East.
Indeed, in recognition of Turkey’s new role, the United States should
join with other nations to sponsor seats for Turkey in the IMF executive
board and an enhanced role in the G20. These institutions, as well as the
U.S.-Turkey Relations
finance ministries or treasury departments and central banks of important
countries (including that/those of the United States), should intensify
their interactions with their Turkish counterparts so as to assist
Turkey in addressing the main threats to its future economic health.
Washington can also do more to promote further-liberalizing
economic reform in Turkey that will spur next-generation economic
growth and more effective partnerships with U.S. and Western businesses.
Important steps include more modern intellectual property
rights legislation and enforcement; deregulation and other steps to
promote markets and competition in the energy sector; more transparency
and predictability in the areas of taxes, tax enforcement, other
state regulatory functions, and the rule of law; and labor market reform.
To give this teeth, the United States should consider proposing some
kind of agreement or agreements to facilitate freer trade in services,
strengthen investor protections, and/or bolster competition, any of
which would be substantively useful, send important signals to traders
and investors, and avoid what may be policy or legal barriers to a bilateral
free trade in goods agreement. Consideration should also be given
to an Overseas Private Investment Corporation–backed fund for Turkish
entrepreneurs.
energy
Turkey is poised to become a more important actor in the global energy
market, but not because of any major find of resources. Indeed, Turkey is
energy-resource poor. Instead, it is Turkey’s strategic location, literally
in the middle of major energy producers and consumers who are eager
to diversify their supplies, that makes Turkey influential in this area.
Already approximately 4 to 6 percent of global oil supplies passes
through Turkey via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline that connects
Turkey to Azerbaijan and the Caspian countries, the Kirkuk-
Ceyhan pipeline connecting Turkey and Iraq, and transit through the
Bosphorus Straits.11 Turkey, however, would like ultimately to decrease
tanker traffic that passes through the Bosphorus, citing environmental
hazards and dangers to the Istanbul population. The Turkish government,
for example, has revived plans to build a thirty-mile canal from
the Black Sea to the Marmara to bypass Istanbul, while others herald
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
the importance of a new Samsun-to-Ceyhan pipeline project. Both
projects, however, face considerable commercial, technical, environmental
(in the case of the Marmara), and political challenges.
Supplying Europe—still the world’s largest economies—with critical
supplies of natural gas will be the next “Great Game.” Turkey will
play a more substantial and, at times, indispensable role in European and
global trade for two interrelated reasons: Turkey’s increasing demand
for gas to meet its rapidly growing economy, and Turkey as a transit
point for gas supplies coming from newly emerging producers—initially
Azerbaijan and possibly later Central Asia and the Middle East.
At the same time, Turkey and Europe seek to diversify domestic energy
supply, a central component of both national energy security and their
foreign policy agendas.
The Turkish government projects that its own gas needs will double
in line with Ankara’s projections of Turkish GDP and income growth.
The economic problems in Europe—Turkey’s largest export market
and the source of much of its FDI—may ultimately force the Turks to
revise their projections downward, but Ankara (and the Europeans)
will still need to import gas to satisfy and diversify their energy needs.
Under present conditions, Turkey will be short on gas toward the end
of the decade.
As an example of the new Great Game, there are six competing proposals
for shipping gas to Europe, initially from the giant Shah Deniz
gas field offshore of Azerbaijan (the largest natural gas field in the
Caspian Sea), and potentially in later years from Central Asia and the
Middle East.
In late October 2011, a major breakthrough took place. The Turkish
prime minister and Azeri president signed a landmark Inter-
Governmental Agreement (IGA) that, for the first time, permits the
transit of gas across Turkey to Europe. The IGA also provides six billion
cubic meters per year of Azeri gas for Turkey’s growing domestic
market, in addition to the initial transit of ten billion cubic meters per
year of Azeri gas through a gas network upgraded by BOTAS, Turkey’s
pipeline owner and energy trading company, and/or through a new
standalone Trans-Anatolian Gas Pipeline project (TANAP). Azerbaijan’s
state oil company, SOCAR, and BOTAS initiated engineering
studies in the spring of 2012 and intend on finalizing a suitable transit
option by the summer of 2013. In parallel, SOCAR and BOTAS invited
U.S.-Turkey Relations
the Western companies of the Shah Deniz consortium (BP, Total, and
Statoil) to take equity stakes in the TANAP.
The IGA fundamentally altered the political and commercial landscape
for the Great Game. First, it provides the essential political assurance
to Europe that Turkey is committed to contributing to European
energy security. Second, it not only opens the door for the transit of
Azeri gas but also encourages the development of additional sources of
natural gas for European markets. Third, it signals another critical step
in the operationalization of the Southern Corridor. Equally important,
Turkey’s landmark political commitment effectively closed the door
on efforts among some to access and develop Iranian energy supplies.
Turkey and Azerbaijan must complete and implement IGA soon, or
potential suppliers from Central Asia and consumers will hesitate to
make the investments needed for gas to flow.
Finally, it is important to highlight that Turkey does not necessarily
perceive or certainly separate its energy policy from its foreign and
economic policies. The IGA reflects the integration of Turkish foreign
and energy policy, satisfying Turkish domestic demand and promoting
regional imperatives while demonstrating again its attachment and
commitment to Europe. On Iran, moreover, Iranian supply to Turkey
will play an increasingly marginal role and certainly not a critical source
of supply for the Turkish domestic economy in line with Turkish foreign
policy perception of Iran as a problematic neighbor. Turkey now has
more options, and its commitment to the development of transit and
the Southern Corridor will further enhance its foreign and economy
margin of maneuver.
recommenDat ions
If the complicated politics and economics of Caspian Basin gas reveal
anything, it is that Turkey’s role in supplying gas to Europe will be critical.
Still, Turkey has a long way to go before it becomes the energy hub
that Turkish leaders envision. Turkey needs investment in its energy
infrastructure, and even with the enormous new supplies coming from
Shah Deniz II, there will still not be enough gas for the storage and trading
activities necessary to properly consider Turkey a hub. Further, producers
will be reluctant to allow Turkey to reprice their gas, preferring
Turkey’s Transformation: The Way Ahead
instead to pay a transit fee. To have any hope of becoming an energy
hub, Turkey will need to liberalize its energy market, gain the necessary
foreign investment to make significant infrastructure investments
in such things as storage facilities, and gain access to adequate assured
energy supplies.
In the meantime, Ankara can be a regional energy link and play an
important role in Europe’s efforts to diversify its supplies. To achieve
this goal and secure the energy resources it needs, Turkey should, on a
regional basis, encourage the development of diverse energy transport
routes, work to prevent the emergence of choke points and monopolies
en route, and develop a range of sources for oil and gas.
Overall, the United States can continue to play an important role in
facilitating the arrangements needed among suppliers and consumers.
If these are obstacles moving forward, Washington may need to
become involved at political levels, as it did in the development of the
BTC oil pipeline.
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
Turkey’s transformation has not been confined to economic and
domestic policy alone. After years of being an important but somewhat
cautious international actor, with varying degrees of success, Turkey is
pursuing a more dynamic foreign policy that has ranged well beyond
areas of traditional concern, such as Europe, NATO, the Balkans, and
the security of the Aegean and Black seas.
Today, Turkey is an influential player in the Middle East and North
Africa, plays important roles in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is deepening
its ties with Russia, and is active in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
Ankara is also expanding its presence in Africa and Latin America,
following the lead of Turkish business professionals, who have made
modest investments in these regions. Despite Turkey’s aspirations, the
Task Force has chosen to focus its analyses and recommendations on
the Middle East—an area of Turkish foreign policy activism—the EU,
NATO, and the United States. Given all the focus on Turkey and its relations
with the West against the backdrop of the AKP’s Islamist roots
and Ankara’s changing role in the Middle East, it is only appropriate to
highlight these areas.
the miDDle east
Although it seems entirely appropriate for Turkey to want to broaden
and deepen its relations with its neighbors and other countries to the
south and east, the shift in policy under the AKP has been so dramatic
that it has led both Western and some Turkish observers to question
whether Turkey is shifting away from its traditional foreign policy
posture.
That the AKP’s lineage can be traced back to the founding of Turkey’s
Islamist movement in the late 1960s only accentuated concerns
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
about Ankara’s efforts to forge a new path in the Middle East. After all,
Turkey had long been a tepid and wary observer of Middle Eastern politics,
devoting most of its diplomatic energy to the institutionalization of
relations with Europe and the United States.
This Western orientation, especially Ankara’s NATO membership,
was—before the rise of the AKP—a source of mistrust in the Arab
world. More profoundly, the combination of the Ottoman colonial
legacy in the Middle East and Kemalism’s official policy of laïcisme—
which seemed irreligious to many in the Middle East—sowed a divide
between Turkey and the Arab world. Finally, the insular quality of Turkish
politics after World War I resulted in a foreign policy that traditionally
sought to avoid entangling Ankara in the politics, rivalries, and
conflicts of the Middle East. That has now changed.
the arab WorlD
At the same time that the AKP was actively engaged in EU-related
reforms, the Turkish government began pursuing a multidimensional
foreign policy that included renewed relations with Russia, the Caucasus,
and, in particular, the Arab world and Iran. As part of this strategy,
Ankara sought to use its good offices in negotiating Arab-Israeli
peace, especially on the Syria track; held itself out as a problem-solver
in Lebanon; played a constructive role in Iraq beginning in 2008; sought
to broker a Saudi-Syrian rapprochement; and took a hard line on Israeli
policy in the Gaza Strip. This outreach came in tandem with renewed
Arab interest in Turkey and its politics, which was primarily a result of
the AKP’s electoral success.
The AKP’s rise intrigued political activists in the Arab world,
who wondered whether any lessons were to be learned from Turkish
Islamists’ accumulation of political power in an officially secular political
system. For both Arab liberals and mainstream Islamists, the AKP
had something important to offer. From the perspective of Arab liberals,
if the AKP could be emulated in the Arab world, it would go a long
way to resolving a central problem of Arab politics whereby citizens
were often forced to choose between the authoritarianism of prevailing
regimes and the perceived theocracy of Islamist groups. Indeed,
an Arab AKP-type party would give people a way out of this dilemma,
providing hope for a more democratic future. For Islamists, the AKP
U.S.-Turkey Relations
provided a lesson on how Islamists could not only overcome barriers
to political participation, but could also come to power and, with broad
public support, embark on a wide-ranging program to dramatically
remake a once-hostile political arena.
Arabs were also keenly interested in the West’s response to the AKP,
regarding the AKP as a proxy of sorts for the Muslim world’s relations
with Europe and the United States. The first test came when the Turkish
government brought to parliament a request to allow American forces
to traverse Turkish territory to invade Iraq. Although 264 deputies
voted for the resolution and 250 voted against it, there were 19 abstentions.
Those abstentions were critical because Article 96 of the Turkish
constitution requires that “[u]nless otherwise stipulated in the Constitution,
the Turkish Grand National Assembly shall convene with at
least one-third of the total number of members and shall take decisions
by an absolute majority of those present.” The combination of “no”
votes and abstentions was actually more than the number of deputies
who supported the measure. Consequently, the American 4th Infantry
Division was denied access to Turkish territory, forcing an alteration
of U.S. war plans. The Grand National Assembly’s action, which was
widely interpreted in the Arab world as a “no” vote that reflected both
Turkish public opinion and the emergence of a new, more democratic
Turkey that was not a client-state of the West, was warmly received in
many Middle Eastern countries, where opposition to the invasion of
Iraq was near universal.
A second trial came in the summer of 2007, when the General Staff
sought to prevent Abdullah Gul from becoming president. The EU was
critical of the military’s move and, after an initial stumble, the United
States also clearly signaled its disapproval of the attempted intervention
in Turkey’s political process.
The Arab world’s interest in Turkey dovetailed well with Ankara’s
interest in strengthening its links to the Arab states and Iran. Although
some observers questioned whether Turkey’s approach to the countries
of the south and east was related to the Islamist roots of the AKP, the
party’s approach to the Middle East showed more continuity than these
critics suggested.
Although no Turkish government has tried to play the kind of role
in the Middle East that Ankara has sought since the AKP came to
power, that Turkey’s outreach to the Arab world predates the AKP’s
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
rise suggests that something other than ideology is driving Turkish foreign
policy in the region. Indeed, deeper structural reasons for Turkey’s
activism in the Middle East—which has become more pronounced in
the past decade—explain divergent policies between Washington and
Ankara in a number of significant areas.
For example, the end of the Cold War—a conflict whose overarching
security threat bound Washington and Ankara together—has
allowed Turkey to explore new opportunities not just in the Middle
East, but also in Eurasia. In addition, as noted, Turkey’s need for natural
gas gave impetus to improved relations with Iran. Those energy
needs only intensified with Turkey’s economic boom over the past
decade. There were also economic factors that led to Ankara’s deepening
relationship with Syria (now soured). As discussed above,
Ankara reasoned that increased cross-border trade would contribute
to economic development in Turkey’s southeast, which would diminish
Kurdish separatism.
Finally, public opinion has mattered more in the formulation of Turkish
foreign policy since the AKP came to power. This was bound to be
a problem for the United States, given the anti-Americanism that has
long been a feature of Turkish politics combined with a more generalized
hostility toward Washington after the invasion of Iraq, which had
an adverse effect on Turkish security. Anger toward the United States
and a public that is sympathetic to the Palestinians—and does not necessarily
regard countries like Iran and Syria as foes—have translated
into an approach to the Middle East that has sometimes conflicted with
that of the United States, particularly with regard to Iran and the Arab-
Israeli conflict.
In addition to the structural determinants of Turkey’s foreign policy,
which have propelled Turkish activism in the Middle East, propitious
timing has benefited Prime Minister Erdogan and his three foreign ministers—
Abdullah Gul, Ali Babacan, and currently Ahmet Davutoglu—
in their efforts to remake Turkey into a regional leader. For example,
by the time the AKP came to power in 2002, the power of the leading
Arab states was on the wane. Moreover, the United States was increasingly
preoccupied with Iraq (and Afghanistan) in the past decade. This
yawning gap in regional leadership presented an opportunity for the
charismatic Prime Minister Erdogan, who was only too happy to step
in where others would not or could not.
U.S.-Turkey Relations
arab uPrisings
Turkey’s emerging regional leadership seems to place Ankara in a
strong position to help influence the trajectory of politics in countries
like Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and potentially others as the Arab
uprisings move beyond their one-year anniversary. Among observers
in the Middle East, Turkey, and the West, much discussion has centered
on the Turkish model, in which a party with Islamist patrimony presides
over liberalization of both the political system and the economy. Thus
it seems that Turkey is well placed to offer insights and lessons to Arabs
struggling to achieve their revolutionary objectives.
Still, for all the investment, goodwill, and concomitant influence it
has developed over the past decade, Ankara was unable to leverage that
prestige to sway the behavior of either Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi or
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, two leaders the Turks studiously cultivated
during the AKP’s tenure.
After initially opposing NATO military action in favor of a negotiated
solution between Qaddafi and Libya’s Benghazi-based rebellion,
Ankara was forced to accept that its powers of persuasion with the
Libyan leader were limited. In Syria, Turkey was slow to move away
from President Assad, seeking a solution to the Syrian uprising through
dialogue and reform. Yet as the Syrian regime stepped up its use of force
against peaceful protesters with the assistance of Tehran, Ankara’s
good offices proved of little value in bringing the insurrection to an end.
In addition, Syrian efforts to quell the protests through violence have
created a flow of refugees across the Syria-Turkey frontier.
The Assad regime’s continuing use of violence against its people—
by the early spring of 2012, the UN estimated that more than nine thousand
Syrians had died at the hands of Syrian forces—precipitated a
suspension of diplomatic relations between Ankara and Damascus and
the imposition of Turkish sanctions on Syria.12 The measures include
a 30 percent tax on products coming from Syria, a freeze of Syrian
government assets in Turkey, and a ban on financial transactions with
Syria’s central bank. Developments in Syria have both contributed to
sharpening an implicit competition between Turkey and Iran and provided,
in the words of one Turkish interlocutor, “a more realistic view
of the region.”
After the failure of a UN Security Council resolution and a range
of initiatives that demanded President Assad delegate his authority
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
to the Syrian vice president and establish a national unity government,
Ankara has amplified its anti-Assad rhetoric and has been at
the center of discussions about humanitarian corridors and possibly
arming the Free Syrian Army. Ankara’s steady rhetorical pressure on
Damascus and apparent desire to be a leader in resolving the Syrian
crisis is a welcome sign. Turkish activism will bolster the Arab League
and could help provide political cover for Western countries nervous
about the consequences of international humanitarian intervention
in Syria. Yet Turkey remains deeply concerned about a full-fledged
international effort to arm the Syrian opposition, fearing civil war
and chaos along its borders with the likely attendant refugee flow.
Instead, Ankara is seeking to play a leading role within the Friends of
Syria group, which is trying to isolate the Assad regime and pressure
Damascus through increased sanctions, and is supporting UN envoy
Kofi Annan’s efforts to find a political solution to the Syrian crisis. As
the situation in Syria deteriorated just prior to the tenuous April 12,
2012, ceasefire, Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu sought to
rally international action to stem the tide of Syrian refugees across the
border. There are rumors that Ankara, in response to Syrian shelling
that landed on Turkish territory, might invoke Article 5 of the North
Atlantic treaty, which states that “an armed attack against one or more
of them [NATO allies] in Europe or North America shall be considered
an attack against them all.”
Prime Minister Erdogan’s tour of Cairo, Tunis, and Tripoli in fall
2011 was intended to demonstrate that Turkey—as major powers such
as Egypt struggle to realize its revolutionary promise and Saudi Arabia
seeks to contain regional political upheaval—can play an influential
role in nurturing Arab transitions. Prime Minister Erdogan was
greeted with a hero’s welcome in Cairo both because he called for
former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak to listen to the demands
of the Egyptian people early on in the January 25, 2011, uprising and
because of what many Egyptians regard as his principled stand on
the Palestinian issue. While in Cairo, Prime Minister Erdogan made
important statements about the compatibility of secular politics and
pious societies, which angered Egyptian Islamists but encouraged
Egyptian secularists.13
Still, even as Egyptians struggle to build a new political system and
grapple with a collapsing economy, they are likely to look internally
for solutions to their own political problems. To be sure, Turkey is not
U.S.-Turkey Relations
totally devoid of influence. After all, the Egyptian Current Party—an
offshoot of young Muslim Brothers—fashions itself as the Egyptian
version of the AKP, and former Muslim brother Abdel Monem Abul
Futouh regards himself as an “Egyptian prime minister Erdogan.” But
Cairo maintains its pretensions of regional leadership dating back to
the Nasser period and is unlikely to allow the non-Arab Turks to usurp
a regional leadership role that Egyptians believe is rightly and naturally
theirs. Consequently, Egyptian officials were noticeably cool
toward Foreign Minister Davutoglu’s proposal to establish a strategic
partnership in the region, arguing that although Cairo welcomed
Turkish investment, Egypt was not interested in the alignment that
Turkey sought.
It is, however, Egypt’s rejection of strategic ties that highlights what
will most likely be Turkey’s most enduring source of regional influence:
investment. Turkey, with its spectacular economic growth rates, fearless
entrepreneurs, flush balance sheets, well-developed banks, and a
government with pretensions of regional leadership, can be an engine
of Middle Eastern economic growth. Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya (as well
as possibly Syria and Yemen) need investment, infrastructure development,
and technical assistance to put their economies back together,
and Turkey could be a source of all three.
recommenDat ions
The United States and Turkey have an opportunity to cooperate in helping
forge a more democratic and prosperous Middle East. The United
States has already identified this opportunity and has sought to work
with Turkey on “soft landings” for Arab countries that have experienced
uprisings. Turkey is not only a good partner in this effort, but is
also Washington’s only partner with enough clout in enough countries
in the region to play this role. Arabs are genuinely interested in the political
reforms Turkey undertook in the early 2000s and its recent economic
development. Yet the Turks are not the only regional players. The
Qataris, Saudis, and Egyptians would all like to play leading regional
roles, and the Turks will confront a number of challenges, including the
historic Arab distrust of Turks dating back to the Ottoman Empire and
the simple fact that they are not Arabs.
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
Despite these deficits, the Arab world is so politically dynamic and so
lacking in regional leadership that the time may well be ripe for Turkey
to play a more leading role. This is why Turkey is tightening its ties with
Hamas as the organization’s previous patron, the Assad regime, falters.
Washington may not like the Ankara-Hamas ties, but the development
does hold out the possibility that under Turkish tutelage, the organization
might be willing to eventually meet the demands of the Middle
East Quartet: recognize Israel, renounce violence, and uphold all international
agreements between the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
This is a tall order, because it is essentially asking Hamas to relinquish
aspects of its agenda that have made it successful in the past, but Ankara
should be given a chance to pursue this goal. Presently, no other political
actor in the region is as well positioned as Turkey to try. Moreover,
Ankara’s relations with Hamas should be viewed as part of a broader
effort to diminish the influence of Iran in the region that includes ties
to Iraq’s Iraqiya Party and, more recently, stepped-up pressure on the
Assad regime.
More broadly, Washington and Ankara have several opportunities
to work together in supporting the emergence of a more democratic
Middle East.AlthoughtheEgyptianshavebeencooltoTurkey’sregional
leadership, a U.S.-Turkey partnership in Tunisia, Libya, and a post-
Assad Syria has potential. Although Ankara has increased its development
assistance in recent years, the Turkish International Cooperation
Agency (TIKA) does not have the same capacity of its American counterpart,
the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). But
the two agencies could partner to bring development assistance to the
Arab countries that need and want it. Through cooperative ventures,
TIKA could build its capabilities, and the United States could benefit
from its association with Turkey, which enjoys considerable goodwill in
parts of the Middle East. Ultimately, however, USAID and TIKA can
do only so much; the uprisings in the Middle East are an Arab story, and
outsiders will have limited influence in shaping its outcome.
An important role that Turkey can fill is as a regional economic
engine. If Turkish leaders can somewhat insulate the economy from the
adverse effects of Europe’s troubles—as they are trying to do by diversifying
trade and investment to countries south and east of Anatolia—
Turkey will be well positioned to provide the kind of investment and
employment opportunities so badly needed in North Africa and other
U.S.-Turkey Relations
parts of the Arab world. Turkish business is already active in the region,
but more is always better. The United States should extend financing,
guarantees, and political risk insurance to Turkish businesses that
partner with American firms that want to invest in the Middle East.
The United States has already announced $2 billion in financing for
projects in the Middle East, but American firms would benefit from
partnering with Turkish companies that have more experience in the
region and have demonstrated less sensitivity to the region’s present
political uncertainty.
israel
It was actually Israel, not the Arab world, that first became a focal
point of Turkish foreign policy in the Middle East, reflecting a strategic
consensus among the Turkish military establishment, Washington,
and Jerusalem in the mid-to-late 1990s. The centerpiece of the
relationship emerged in February 1996 when the Turkish General
Staff announced that it had struck a training agreement with the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF).
Bilateral military ties made strategic sense for both countries at the
time. After all, Israelis and Turks were outsiders in a region that they
regarded as either explicitly or implicitly hostile. In particular, the
Turkish and Israeli military establishments perceived Syria and Iran as
primary threats to their respective national securities. Both militaries
believed they had much to gain from the agreements in the area of counterterrorism,
where the Turks were battling the PKK and Israel was
focused on the challenge from Hamas and related groups. In addition, a
robust trade relationship was closely linked to the security relationship.
Yet an undeniable diplomatic and political dynamic also drove Turkey-
Israel relations throughout the 1990s. A primary goal of Israeli foreign
policy has long been to break out of the diplomatic isolation that
resulted from the Arab-Israeli conflict. For Jerusalem, upgrading diplomatic
relations with a large, predominantly Muslim country adjacent
to the Middle East was a major diplomatic achievement. That the subsequent
development of bilateral military ties placed Israel’s primary
regional antagonists on the defensive further enhanced Turkey’s value
as a strategic partner.
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
For Ankara, the political and diplomatic benefits of alignment with
Israel lay primarily in Washington. Outside the U.S. foreign policy
establishment, Ankara does not have a natural constituency in Washington.
The Turkish-American community is not as well organized as
Greek-and Armenian-Americans are. The Turks had long understood
that good relations with Israel meant the goodwill of pro-Israel groups
in the United States, which could be useful in fending off Greek-and
Armenian-American advocacy efforts so inimical to Turkey. Ankara’s
strategy was largely successful. In what was to some an astonishing
irony, Israel’s supporters in the United States—the majority of which
are American Jewish organizations—helped shield Turkey from congressional
efforts to recognize the mass killings of Armenians in April
1915 as genocide.
By any measure, the relationship between Turkey and Israel benefited
both countries militarily, economically, and diplomatically. Of
particular importance to Israel, Turkey played a behind-the-scenes role
from 2006 to 2008 in trying to secure the release of Sergeant Gilad
Shalit from captivity in Gaza, and in 2008 in mediating between Syria
and Israel. It was also a benefit to the United States in that the close
coordination between Israel and Turkey kept common foes like Iran on
the defensive; provided Israel with an additional strategic relationship
in the region, which might give Jerusalem the confidence to move forward
on the peace process; and established Ankara as another potential
trusted interlocutor between Israelis and Arabs.
Subsequent disagreements over Gaza, Iran, and the Mavi Marmara
incident of May 2010 precipitated a deterioration in Turkey-Israel relations.
The outcome was Ankara’s decision to downgrade relations
with Jerusalem to the second secretary level in September 2011. The
immediate cause for Turkey’s decision was Israel’s continued refusal to
apologize or pay compensation for the deaths of eight Turkish citizens
and a Turkish-American during an Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara,
which was part of a flotilla of six ships that had sought to run Israel’s
blockade of Gaza. In particular, after the UN investigation into the episode—
known as the Palmer Report—that reaffirmed Israel’s legal right
to establish and enforce a naval blockade of the Gaza Strip but still criticized
Israel’s use of force and treatment of detained activists, the Israelis
concluded there was no reason to issue an apology.14 Turkey, in turn,
rejected the report’s conclusions as politically motivated.
U.S.-Turkey Relations
recommenDat ions
The estrangement of two strategic allies of the United States certainly
complicates Washington’s efforts to ensure peace and stability in the
eastern Mediterranean. Tension over gas exploration off the southern
coast of Cyprus raises concerns of possible naval confrontation
between Turkey and Israel.15 It does not seem that either country actually
wants to raise the level of tension, but accidents and miscommunications
could lead to escalation. The two nations need to communicate
in appropriate channels to develop procedures to avoid such undesired
escalation. Interested parties, including the United States, also need to
engage with Turkey and Cyprus to avoid a confrontation over exploitation
of natural gas resources.
Although stable Turkey-Israel relations are important to both countries
and the United States, domestic political calculations among leaders
in Ankara and Jerusalem block any way out of the Turkish-Israeli
impasse, at least currently. One bright spot, however, is trade. Despite
the late 2011 downgrading of relations, the overall volume of trade
between the two countries has actually risen. Turkey’s imports of Israeli
products have increased by 54 percent, and exports to Israel by 24 percent.
Economic ties may thus be a possible vehicle for rapprochement.
The United States should encourage the interests of both Turks and
Israelis in maintaining economic links in lieu of the seemingly fruitless
search for an end to the estrangement between Ankara and Jerusalem,
as beneficial as that might be for the United States. Promoting economic
ties will, however, provide a cushion that will facilitate mending
political ties in the future.
the euroPean union anD nato
Since almost the time the AKP came to power, a drumbeat of articles
have asked, “Who Lost Turkey?” or “Is Turkey Turning East?”16 Much
of this work says less about Turkey and the AKP than the view among
some in the West that secular nationalists are always preferable to liberal
Islamists. That Turkey has pursued a broader and more independent
foreign policy that has upgraded Ankara’s ties with the Arab world
and Iran as its ties with Israel have cooled has intensified suspicion of
AKP and its intentions.
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
euroPean union
It remains, however, that President Gul during his short stint as prime
minister in late 2002 and early 2003 and subsequently Prime Minister
Erdogan initially strongly supported Turkey’s bid to join the European
Union. Indeed, in 2003 and 2004, when the AKP-dominated parliament
passed seven reform packages, both leaders indicated that the reforms
were directly related to Europe’s criteria for beginning formal membership
negotiations. Those negotiations began in March 2005.
Since that time, however, Ankara’s experience with Brussels has
been generally unhappy. To accede to the EU, Turkey must complete
negotiations with the European Commission on the thirty-five chapters
of EU law. Turkey and the EU have opened and closed only a single
chapter, and individual EU governments have placed holds on a variety
of other chapters, including justice, freedom, and security and judiciary
and fundamental rights, bogging down Turkey’s membership negotiations.
This has had a negative effect on the Turkish public, which continues
to support membership in Europe but is deeply skeptical that the
EU will ever admit a large Muslim country into the fold.
EU officials have often made the case that the problems with Turkey’s
membership are related to the divided island of Cyprus, Turkey’s
still-questionable human rights practices, unfulfilled promises to give
greater cultural and linguistic freedom to Turkey’s Kurds, and massive
transfer of resources to Turkey from the EU that would be necessary to
bring the Turkish economy into line—even with all of its dynamism—
given the gap in per capita income between Turkey and EU members.
But many European countries simply do not want Turkey in the EU
and are using these arguments as an excuse. In fact, there are good reasons
to believe that each of the issues can be resolved. Turkey should
not let frustration and bitterness at how it is being treated on membership
get in the way of entering into beneficial, functional agreements
with the EU.
Despite Turkish suspicions about European anti-Muslim sentiments,
Turkey remains, at least rhetorically, committed to full EU membership.
Indeed, the institutional and economic linkages to Europe that
have developed since Turkey struck an association agreement with the
European Economic Community in 1963 remain critical to Turkey for
both economic and political reasons. Although these ties would continue
to grow under the various alternative arrangements that some
U.S.-Turkey Relations
European leaders have floated, such as a so-called privileged partnership
between Turkey and the EU, Ankara rejects these compromises,
arguing that there is no actual political, legal, or diplomatic reason to
abandon Turkey’s bid for full membership. Turkish leaders also readily
acknowledge that the application process has been beneficial for Turkey
and has helped propel democratic and economic reforms.
recommenDat ions
Turkey’s bid for EU membership remains on life support only because
political disincentives exist on both sides to calling off negotiations and
ending Turkey’s candidacy. The EU does not want to be accused of being
anti-Muslim, and Turkey does not want to give the EU an easy way out
of this membership conundrum. As a matter of principle, however, the
United States should continue to support Turkey’s bid for EU membership
as it works to further institutionalize a Washington-Ankara partnership.
As part of this support, the United States should press its EU
partners to remove the obstacles for Turkish citizens to obtain Schengen
visas. Easier movement of people across borders could improve
relations between Turks and the EU and potentially change European
attitudes toward Turkey’s EU membership.
At the same time, however, the onus is on Turkey to uphold its commitments
to Brussels, which include continued political reform and the
opening of Turkish ports to Cypriot traffic. The latter issue, in particular,
is extraordinarily sensitive given the conflict on Cyprus and the widely
held narrative in Turkey, the United States, and the EU that Ankara and
the island’s Turkish community did what they could to resolve the problem
by voting overwhelmingly in support of the 2004 Annan Plan even
as the Greek Cypriots voted against it in large numbers. For Turks, the
fact that Cyprus had already gained entry into the EU (though not formally
until a week after the failed referendum17) undermines Brussels’
credibility when it comes to the conflict and discourages a reasonable
dialogue between the parties.
The impasse in Turkey’s bid for EU membership should not, however,
preclude the development of robust relations between Ankara
and Brussels. Indeed, as the world changes rapidly, it would be a missed
opportunity for Turkey and Europe to allow the EU membership issue
to stand in the way of cooperation. The emerging rivalry between
Foreign Policy: Turkey’s New Role
Ankara and Paris (and to a lesser extent Berlin) in North Africa should
be replaced with cooperation. The French colonial legacy is still too
fresh in the area for France to go it alone in the region and, though
Turkish entrepreneurs may be interested in investment opportunities,
Turkey’s capacity to assist North African political development
would benefit from EU partners. It is important to emphasize that the
development of Turkey-EU relations is not and should not be a substitute
for Turkey’s membership in Europe. Rather, better ties between
Ankara and Brussels may be a way to improve Turkey’s bid ultimately
to join the EU.
nato
The same questions concerning Turkey’s place in the West or the East
have been asked concerning Ankara’s commitment to the future of
NATO. There are no indications that Turkey, which became a signatory
to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1952, has lost interest in the alliance.
Moments of tension have arisen, of course, including a reluctance
to participate in NATO modernization and most recently Turkey’s
initial reluctance to support NATO’s operation Unified Protector,
which helped drive Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi from power. Turkey
is not unique in this regard, however. Tensions between NATO and
other alliance members are not new, notably with France. In addition,
Greece—another NATO ally—has expressed concern over Turkey’s
military operations in the Aegean, which Athens claims have violated
Greek airspace and territorial waters in more aggressive ways than in
the recent past. The Turks counter that their patrols are routine and
do not indicate a shift to a more aggressive posture. Whether or not
Greece’s claims about the Turkish military are warranted, Ankara is
not seeking a break from NATO by stirring up trouble in the Aegean.
It would, of course, be better for the alliance if whatever outstanding
territorial issues between the countries were resolved, but this type of
breakthrough does not seem to be in the offing.
Concerns circulated in Turkey about the placement on its territory
of an early-warning radar for NATO’s antimissile defense system.
Ankara, which takes seriously the idea of having peaceful ties with all of
its neighbors regardless of the character of their regimes—its so-called
zero-problems policy—was concerned that hosting the system would
U.S.-Turkey Relations
be regarded as a hostile act in Tehran. In addition, given the deterioration
of its relations with Israel, Turkey objected to sharing data from the
radar installation with Israel.
In the end, however, Turkey, which has a clear interest in demonstrating
its commitment to the Western alliance, agreed to the radar station.
Although critics of AKP’s Turkey would like to seize on the Libya and
antimissile system episodes as evidence of Ankara’s drift from NATO
and the West more generally, Turkey’s behavior is similar to that of
other NATO members who balance their national interests with those
of the alliance. No real evidence suggests that Turkey does not continue
to value its NATO membership in the ways it once did. The alliance
is one of the primary and most visible institutional links to the West
and, as Turkey’s relations with the EU remain at a standstill, the ties to
NATO are more important than ever.
recommenDat ions
The tension over territory and territorial waters in the Aegean is
long-standing, but Washington should use its diplomatic and political
capital to contain the dispute. Greece is wracked with unprecedented
political and economic crises and represents no threat to Turkey. Turkey
should avoid anything to suggest that Ankara seeks to take advantage
of Athens’ current troubles. Moreover, the potential for accidents and
unintended escalation is great. This would set Turkey-Greece relations
back and would make it harder to come to a solution for competing territorial
claims in the Aegean. Currently, the best Washington can do is
build on previous confidence-building measures that established direct
communications between the Turkish and Greek militaries by forming
a trilateral military contact group of senior naval and air force officers
from the United States, Turkey, and Greece to deconflict Turkish and
Greek forces and help prevent territorial violations.
Previously, Turkey has played an important role in forging cooperation
between the Atlantic alliance non-NATO members. The United
States should encourage Turkey to continue its outreach in regions
such as Central Asia and Africa, which would enable NATO to develop
stronger links with critical countries in these regions.
Conclusion
Turkey is clearly a country in transition. As with all countries undergoing
fundamental change, there have been both dramatic steps forward
and worrying developments. Overall, however, Turkey’s story over the
past decade is a good one. The country is economically more successful,
more representative politically, and playing a more influential role
in its region and beyond. For the United States, Turkey has always been
an important, if at times complicated, ally. Challenges in the bilateral
relationship surely remain, but as this report indicates, there is a long
list of policies and innovative ideas that will help both countries forge a
genuinely new partnership.
As a result, it is incumbent upon policymakers to make every effort
to develop U.S.-Turkey ties in order to make a strategic relationship
a reality. To do otherwise would be to miss a historic opportunity to
set ties between Washington and Ankara on a cooperative trajectory
in Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East, and Africa for a
generation.
aPPenDix a
Recent History: The Rise of the Justice
and Development Party
Steven A. Cook
The nature of Turkey’s ruling, center-right Justice and Development
Party (AKP) has been the subject of a polarizing debate in the West. The
prevailing discussion has often lacked nuance, complexity, and a sense
of history, which hampers a clear-sighted analysis of the opportunities
and challenges for the United States in updating its ties with Turkey.
In many ways, the AKP is both the expression and engine of the new
Turkey, given its social conservatism, economic liberalism, and muscular
foreign policy. Yet the party is a newcomer to Turkish politics, having
been founded only in August 2001. Where did this party, which has had
a seemingly singular impact on Turkish politics, come from? What were
the economic, social, and political conditions that made its rise possible?
And what are the prospects for its continued political success?
In May 2001, young reformers under the leadership of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan (now Turkey’s prime minister) and his colleague Abdullah Gul
(now Turkey’s president) defied the elders of Turkey’s Islamist movement
when they broke from the group’s traditional leadership, promising
a new political organization that would be dynamic, reformist,
pragmatic, and technocratic and that could lead Turkey to a new, more
democratic future. A few months later, the AKP was founded.
Although Prime Minister Erdogan had been an effective ward politician
during the 1980s and mayor of Istanbul (1994–97) and President
Gul was a high-profile official in Necmettin Erbakan’s government
(1996–97), the founding of the AKP did not initially seem to bode well
for Turkey’s Islamists. Indeed, by precipitating a historic schism within
the movement, Prime Minister Erdogan and President Gul seemed to
be playing into the hands of the Turkish political-military establishment,
which viewed the Islamists as a reactionary threat to Turkey’s
secular, republican system.
Despite doubts among observers, Prime Minister Erdogan and
President Gul were good to their word. They brought with them a large
Appendix A: Recent History
number of existing activists and constituents from the Islamist Virtue
Party, leaving a moribund old guard behind; struck a reformist posture;
and, when it came time for the 2002 national elections, drafted a party
platform that was virtually indistinguishable from what Turkey’s rightof-
center parties had produced over the previous years.
Critics charged that the leaders of the new party were engaged in dissimulation
in an effort to advance the Islamization of Turkish politics
and society. Yet many Turks, unhappy over a painful economic crisis
that began in late 2000 and after a decade of unstable ruling coalitions,
gave the AKP the benefit of the doubt. In the November 2002 parliamentary
elections, roughly 34 percent of Turkish voters who went to the
polls cast their ballots for the AKP, giving the new party 363 of the 550
seats in the Grand National Assembly.
Yet it was not just the crushing economic crisis of 2000–2001 or
the apparent incompetence of the then ruling coalition under Prime
Minister Bulent Ecevit that brought the AKP to power. Deeper socioeconomic
factors were changing the nature of Turkish politics and the
electorate well before the spring and summer of 2001, when Prime Minister
Erdogan and President Gul were first outlining their plans for a
new party. Over the course of the past two decades, Turkey has experienced
two interrelated shifts that have had a profound impact on the
country’s politics and made the rise of the AKP possible. First, Turkey
has become more urbanized. In 1990, only half the population lived in
urban areas, whereas today that proportion has climbed to 75 percent.18
Second, this change is consistent with the Turkish economy’s transformation
from one based primarily on agriculture to one with a strong
manufacturing base.19
Although rural Turks moved into the cities seeking jobs in the newly
emerging economy, they remained largely alienated and shunned by the
prevailing political elites. Islamist political parties such as the National
Salvation Party of the 1970s and its successor during the 1980s and
1990s, the Welfare Party, sought to mobilize the new arrivals with a
worldview and political agenda that matched their values and, importantly,
social services that helped ease the rural-to-urban transition.
The combination of these served as a mechanism of political mobilization
that helped form the core constituency of Turkey’s Islamist political
movement.
Still, this was not enough for the Islamists to come to power in their
own right. As much as the AKP was a natural evolution of Turkey’s
U.S.-Turkey Relations
Islamist movement, which traces its roots to 1969 and the election of
Erbakan as an independent parliamentary deputy who represented
Konya in central Anatolia, it was also in many ways a novel Turkish
political party. Perhaps only Turgut Ozal’s Motherland Party of the
1980s, though it was not part of the Islamist camp even if it shared a
constituency, had as broad an appeal.
When they established the AKP, Prime Minister Erdogan and President
Gul held onto strategies their mentors had previously perfected,
notably provision of social services for political mobilization. They also
retained a veneration for Turkey’s Ottoman legacy. At the same time,
however, the AKP’s leaders disposed of the anti-Western shibboleths
that had become a hallmark of Erbakan’s discourse and the platforms
of his parties. The AKP specifically sought a broad-based coalition
that included its own pious constituency, Kurds, business leaders from
central Anatolia, urban cosmopolitan liberals, left-leaning social democrats,
nationalists, and average Turks, all of whom had grown weary of
political instability and economic crisis. It is true that large numbers of
secularists voted for the Welfare Party in 1995, but Erbakan never commanded
the big political tent that Prime Minister Erdogan and President
Gul eventually built, especially after the AKP’s first term (2002–2007).
Prime Minister Erdogan, President Gul, and their associates had
a view of the West distinctly different from that of the elders of the
Islamist movement. The leaders of the AKP believed that hostility
toward the West had done significant damage to Turkey’s Islamists by
making it easier for the secular establishment to repress them. With
few allies in Washington or western European capitals, even fewer were
willing to protest when various coups and other military interventions
shuttered Islamist parties and banned their leaders.
In addition, according to AKP intellectuals and activists, the party’s
ultimate goal was the development of a truly secular society. Instead of
a French-inspired system of laïcisme, in which the government controls
religion to prevent it from entering the public sphere, the AKP sought
a secularism more akin to Switzerland, before it banned the construction
of minarets, or to the United States, where individuals are free to
exercise and espouse their religious beliefs as they see fit without fear of
repression. For the AKP’s thinkers, the best way to ensure religious freedom
was not to distance Turkey from the West, but rather to join with
it. Even well before a European Union existed, the father of modern
Appendix A: Recent History
Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), had declared that his ultimate goal
was to lift Turkey to the level of “civilization,” meaning Western civilization.
Yet the AKP’s rationale for pursuing integration with the West
was a significant twist on Turkey’s long-cherished goal of membership
in Europe.
aPPenDix b
What Is the Gulen Movement?
Alexander Brock
The Gulen movement, which is named for its founder Fethullah Gulen,
is a source of controversy in Turkey. Turks have widely differing views
about the group and its aims. To secularists, Gulenists pose a threat to
the secular foundations of the Turkish Republic. To Gulen’s supporters
and others, the movement is far more benign, engaged in a broad effort
to develop an inclusive and tolerant interpretation of Islam through
education (both secular and religious) and good works. The purpose
of this brief appendix is to provide some historical context to Gulen,
his worldview, and the movement that bears his name. It is certainly
not intended to be exhaustive, but rather a synthesis of what observers
know about these issues so that policymakers can begin to better understand
an important debate in Turkish society.
Muhammed Fethullah Gulen was born in 1941 in the village of
Korucuk, near the eastern frontier city Ezurum, in Turkey. Gulen’s
formal education, which had been interrupted when his family relocated
to a village without an elementary school, resumed during his
adolescence largely through independent study. He obtained deep
knowledge in the secular sciences, literature, history, and philosophy.
Of the latter, he was attracted to and influenced by Western philosophers
such as Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. His knowledge
would deepen in his early twenties during his military service, when
Gulen’s commander encouraged him to read Western classics, which
were formative in the development of Gulen’s subsequent educational
philosophy. His religious education consisted of Quranic recitation
and memorization, Arabic language courses, exegetical interpretation
(tafseer), interpretation of the hadith, and exposure to Sufism. He
began preaching in 1958.
Beginning in 1966, when he was managing the Kestanepazari Quran
school in Izmir, Turkey, Gulen developed the bases for his educational
Appendix B: What Is the Gulen Movement?
philosophy and his movement, which combines spirituality and a commanding
knowledge of the secular sciences. Gulen’s message was
infused with anticommunist and nationalist sentiments, a recognition
of the Turkish state as the guardian of Islam, and calls to protect it from
both domestic and foreign communist enemies.
On May 1, 1971, in the aftermath of the March 12 “coup by memorandum,”
Gulen was arrested for his religious activism with Turkish youth,
on the charge that he was attempting to alter the religio-political orientation
of the state, but he was released in November of that year without
a conviction.
Gulen’s emphasis on education and altruism appealed to many
Turks, and by the mid-to-late 1970s, he was one of the most famous
preachers in Turkey.
The 1980s were years of rapid growth for the Gulen movement,
largely due to a new political atmosphere under Turgut Ozal, prime minister
of Turkey from 1983 to 1989 and president from 1989 to 1993. Ozal
believed that emphasizing the “Muslimness” of the Turkish national
identity would, if properly regulated by the state, provide an appealing
alternative to more radical Islamist groups that formed during the left-
right social conflict of the 1970s. The Gulen movement’s worldview
made it the perfect candidate for such a policy, known as the “Turkish-
Islamic synthesis.” Gulen’s group subsequently acquired a number of
media outlets to spread its message. At the same time, the privatization
of Turkey’s education system officially opened the door to the movement
to establish its own schools, which helped expand its influence in
Turkish society.
The February 28, 1997, military intervention, which Turks refer to
as the “postmodern coup,” targeted Islamist influence in Turkish society,
including the Gulen movement. In 1999, Gulen was charged with
“establishing an illegal organization in order to change the secular
structure of the state and to establish a state based on religious rules.”
By this time, he had relocated to the United States due ostensibly to a
cardiovascular condition, but undoubtedly also to escape almost certain
incarceration.
In 2008, a Turkish court acquitted Gulen of the charges dating back
to 1999, freeing him to return to Turkey. However, he has chosen to
remain in the United States and currently resides in Pennsylvania with
a small group of his followers.
U.S.-Turkey Relations
the movement toDay: fethullah gulen
anD the aKP
Gulen’s supporters overlap with supporters of the ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP). According to critics, the Gulen movement
has sought to appropriate the AKP’s political agenda through tight relationships
with the party’s leadership. Rumors abound concerning the
alleged Gulenist ties to various senior government ministers, including
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul. A
former Turkish interior minister once claimed that Gulenists make up
70 percent of the nation’s police force.20 Opponents of both the AKP
and the Gulen movement express concern that the party’s control
over the parliament and executive branch provides the Gulenists with
unprecedented reach into government institutions, thereby threatening
Turkey’s secular political order.
Yet the extent to which, if at all, the AKP and Gulenists coordinate
electoral efforts is unclear, though Gulenists overwhelmingly supported
the AKP in the 2007 and 2011 parliamentary votes. During the run-up to
those elections, movement activists used Gulen-affiliated media outlets
to publicly endorse the party, something they had abstained from doing
in the past. Even then, however, Gulenist media outlets have been prime
vehicles for advancing the AKP’s worldview. The daily Zaman was the
first to publish Prime Minister Erdogan and Bulent Arinc’s “new discourse”
in February2000,whichwascentralto whatwould become the
AKP’s guiding principles.21 The Gazeteciler ve Yazarlar Vakfi (Journalists
and Writers’ Foundation, GYV), which Gulen established, hosted
events and workshops throughout the 1990s that were centered on
what would represent the AKP’s views on the relationship between
Islamism and secularism. The AKP has also facilitated the introduction
of Gulenist thought into the mainstream education system.
The Gulen movement and the AKP align on two important substantive
policy issues. The first is the embrace of globalization in opposition
to isolationism. Both support Turkey’s membership to the European
Union and champion Turkey’s private sector, especially its new trading
class and efforts to attract greater foreign direct investment. The
second is the AKP’s rhetorical commitment to incorporating religious
minorities into Turkish society, which dovetails with Gulen’s emphasis
on interfaith dialogue.
Appendix B: What Is the Gulen Movement?
Despite the apparent mutual support, however, there is evidence of
tension between the prominent theologian and Prime Minister Erdogan.
Gulen criticized the prime minister for reducing sentences given to
football officials who were charged and convicted of rigging matches.22
He also spoke out against some AKP officials’ expressed concerns about
the length of pretrial detentions for persons accused of involvement in
the Ergenekon plot.23 In addition, Gulen assailed the AKP for its handling
of the Mavi Marmara incident.24 All of that said, the relationship
between the Gulenists and the AKP is likely to remain strong despite
these periodic spasms, in part because of the strong voter base that the
movement provides for the AKP and the protection and relative freedom
that the AKP offers Gulenists in their operations.
controversy
The evident Gulenist influence in Turkish politics, combined with the
secrecy that surrounds Fethullah Gulen, his movement, and its affiliated
organizations, fuels suspicions that Gulen’s ultimate goals may
not be in line with the progressive Islam that he and his followers articulate
in public.
The central source of controversy surrounding Fethullah Gulen is
that, whatever his worldview, the movement—a term Gulen himself
rejects—that he leads seeks to use the organs of the state to indoctrinate
Turkish society with his ideas. For example, in one revealing passage
from a sermon, which was rebroadcast on Turkish television in 1999,
Gulen stated:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing
your existence until you reach all the power centers . . . You
must wait until such time as you have got all the state power, until
you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional
institution in Turkey.25
Against the backdrop of the AKP’s rise to power in 2002 and the
ideological kinship of and alleged personal ties between Gulenists and
Turkish government officials, this statement, especially when considered
in conjunction with the strong presence Gulenists have in Turkey’s
U.S.-Turkey Relations
police force, judiciary, and media apparatuses, is central to much of the
concern about Gulen and his movement.
An additional source of suspicion is the Ergenekon investigation,
which critics argue is a wide-ranging AKP-Gulenist effort to silence
their opponents and intimidate the public from speaking out against
them, thus ensuring the continuation of their monopoly over the social
and political spheres.
conclusion
The suspicion surrounding the Gulen movement almost exclusively
arises from its ties to, and its overlap with, the ruling AKP, and its secretiveness
and what seems to some an almost conspiratorial character.
According to the movement’s detractors, Gulen sympathizers and
the AKP are able to carry out smear campaigns, investigations, detentions,
and convictions of political opponents through control of large
media outlets and a heavy presence in the police force and judiciary.
The degree to which this alleged conspiracy is connected to Fethullah
Gulen, however, is ultimately unclear. The financial and practical
independence of Gulenist institutions and its members from each other
and from Fethullah Gulen himself make determining any such connection
difficult. It is also difficult to pin down the interplay and dynamics
between the movement and Turkey’s ruling AKP. But the Gulen movement
is clearly a player in Turkish politics and needs to be better understood
by the U.S. policy community.
Endnotes
1.
Jack Goldstone, “The Rise of the TIMBIs,” ForeignPolicy.com, December 2, 2011,
.
2.
The six principles of Kemalism are republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism,
revolutionism, and statism.
3.
Ali Carkoglu and Ersin Kalaycioglu, Turkish Democracy Today: Elections, Protest, and
Stability in an Islamic Society (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 214.
4.
Ali Carkoglu, “Women’s Choices of Head Cover in Turkey: An Empirical Assessment,”
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 29, no. 3, p.
456.
5.
“Economic Outlook,” ISPAT,
Pages/Economy.aspx; “Turkey leads Europe in Economic Growth,” ISPAT,
March 31, 2011,
2010-growth-8.9-percent-leading-europe.aspx; “Growth up in Second Quarter,
Current Account Gap Widens,” Hurriyet Daily News, September 12, 2011, http://
www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=growth-up-in-secondquarter-
current-account-gap-widens-2011-09-12.
6.
Conference on Trade and Development, UNCTAD Statistical Handbook (New York:
United Nations, 2010), .
aspx?sCS_referer=&sCS_ChosenLang=en.
7.
Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern
Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 26;
Metin Heper and E. Fuat Keyman, “Double-Faced State: Political Patronage and the
Consolidation of Democracy in Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 34, no. 4 (1998),
pp. 259–77; Ergun Ozbudun, “Turkey: How Far from Consolidation?” Journal of Democracy,
vol. 7, no. 3 (July 1996), pp. 123–38.
8.
Murat Yetkin, “Yeni Kürt stratejisi ve Irak baglantisi,” Radikal, March 27, 2012, http://
www.radikal.com.tr/Radikal.aspx?aType=RadikalYazar&ArticleID=1083033&Cat
egoryID=98.
9.
1209146546290/4937885-1331724092518/TurkeyCPSFY12.pdf.
10.
“Turkey,” European Commission, December 5, 2011,
bilateral-relations/countries/turkey.
11.
M. Rifat Hisarciklioglu, “The Global Energy Challenges and Turkey: Private Sector
Perspective,” Turkish Policy Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 2 (2010), .
com/dosyalar/files/27-31.pdf.
12.
“Graphic: Death Toll in Syria Reaches 6,000,” Telegraph, February 7, 2012, http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/9066804/GraphicDeath-
toll-in-Syria-reaches-6000.html; “U.N. Takes Another Try at Syria Resolution,”
CNN, February 10, 2012,
62
Endnotes
world_meast_syria-unrest_1_local-coordination-committees-president-bashar-
human-rights?_s=PM:MIDDLEEAST.
13.
Semih Ildiz, “PM Erdogan’s surprising message in Cairo,” Hurriyet Daily News, September
15, 2011,
pm-ErDogan8217s-surprising-message-in-cairo-2011-09-15.
14.
Sir Geoffrey Palmer et al., “Report of the Secretary General’s Panel of Inquiry on the
31 May 2010 Flotilla Incident,” September 2011,
middle_east/Gaza_Flotilla_Panel_Report.pdf.
15.
The tension between Turkey and Cyprus grew in the fall of 2011 over gas prospecting
along both the island’s southern and northern coasts. Ankara worries that the economic
benefits to Nicosia from a major find would reduce incentive for the Greek Cypriot
government to find a solution to the conflict that divides the island. For their part,
Cypriot officials are concerned that Turkey’s prospecting violates Cyprus’s exclusive
economic zone.
16.
James Kittfield, “Who Lost Turkey?” National Journal, November 7, 2010, http://
www.nationaljournal.com/njonline/ns_20100621_3616.php; Semra E. Sevi, “Turkey
Turning to the East,” Harvard Crimson, November 1, 2011, .
com/article/2011/11/1/turkey-married-east-eu/; Doug Bandow, “Who Lost Turkey?”
Reason, April 1, 2003, https://reason.com/2003/04/01/who-lost-turkey/;
Landon Thomas Jr., “Turning East, Turkey Asserts Economic Power,” New York
Times, July 5, 2010, .
html?_r=1&pagewanted=all.
17.
Task Force member Patrick Theros notes, “Turkey accepted that the EU Summit decision
at Copenhagen in December 2002 to admit the Republic of Cyprus was final,
even if no final solution to the Cyprus problem was achieved prior to the May 1, 2004,
formal accession date.”
18.
Bulent Acma, “Economic Consequences of International Migration: Case Study of
Turkey” (unpublished manuscript, Anadolu University, Department of Economics,
2000), p. 3; “Turkey,” CIA World Factbook,
the-world-factbook/geos/tu.html.
19.
Turkish manufacturing is concentrated in chemicals and chemical products, textiles,
metals, machinery, automobiles, and food and beverages.
20.
“A farm boy on the world stage,” Economist, March 6, 2008, .
com/node/10808433.
21.
Ahmet T. Kuru, “Changing Perspectives on Islamism and Secularism in Turkey: The
Gülen Movement and the AK Party,” in “The Muslim World in Transition,” p. 145.
22.
Daren Butler, “Dissent in Turkey’s ruling party over match-fixing,” Reuters, December
8, 2011,
idUKL5E7N83IL20111208.
23.
Thomas Seibert, “Tensions between Turkey’s ruling-AKP and Gulenics fester,”
National, December 26, 2011,
tensions-between-turkeys-ruling-akp-and-gulenics-fester#full.
24.
Emre Uslu, “An AKP-Ulusalci axis?” Sunday’s Zaman, March 14, 2012, http://www.
sundayszaman.com/sunday/columnistDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=274319
&columnistId=108.
25.
Edward Stourton, “What is Islam’s Gulen movement?” BBC News, May 24, 2011,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news.
Task Force Members
Madeleine K. Albright is chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, a
global strategy firm, and chair of Albright Capital Management LLC,
an investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets. Albright
was the sixty-fourth secretary of state of the United States. In 1997,
she was named the first female secretary of state and became, at that
time, the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government.
From 1993 to 1997, Albright served as the U.S. permanent representative
to the United Nations and was a member of the president’s cabinet.
She is a professor in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown
University School of Foreign Service. Albright chairs both the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs and the Pew Global Attitudes
Project and serves as president of the Truman Scholarship Foundation.
She also serves on the U.S. Department of Defense’s defense
policy board, and on the boards of the Council on Foreign Relations,
the Aspen Institute, and the Center for American Progress.
Henri J. Barkey is the Cohen professor of international relations at
Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. His most recent publications
include Iraq, Its Neighbors, and the United States, coedited with
Scott Lasensky and Phebe Marr, and “The Broken Triangle: How the
U.S.-Israeli-Turkey Relationship Got Unglued,” in William B. Quandt’s
Troubled Triangle: The United States, Turkey and Israel in the New Middle
East. He also served on the State Department’s policy planning staff
during the Clinton administration.
Elmira Bayrasli writes about global innovations and entrepreneurship
in the column “Entreventures” on Forbes.com. She is also a regular contributor
to Wamda.com, a platform for Middle Eastern entrepreneurs,
and Aslan Media, where she writes about Turkey. Over the past several
years, Bayrasli has worked to support start-ups in emerging markets at
Task Force Members
Endeavor, served as the chief spokesperson for the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe Mission to Bosnia and Herzegovina
in Sarajevo, and assisted former secretary of state Madeleine K.
Albright. She is an advisory board member for the Turkish Women’s
International Network and Turkish Philanthropy Funds and a mentor
for the Women Innovate Mobile entrepreneur incubator. She is a regular
speaker on innovation and start-ups. Bayrasli is currently writing a
book on the obstacles to global entrepreneurship.
Richard R. Burt is the managing director for Europe, Russia, and Eurasia
at McLarty Associates. McLarty Associates counsels corporations
and financial institutions in the United States and abroad on strategic
planning government issues, market access, mergers and acquisitions,
and political and economic risk issues. He also serves as U.S. chair for
Global Zero, an international campaign seeking long-term elimination
of nuclear weapons. Burt served in the Reagan administration as
assistant secretary of state for European and Canadian affairs and then
as U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1985 to 1989. Under President
George H.W. Bush, he served as U.S. chief negotiator in the Strategic
Arms Reduction Talks with the former Soviet Union. Burt is a senior
adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Aspen Institute’s
Middle East Strategy Group, and a member of the executive board of
the Atlantic Council. He also serves on a number of prominent corporate
boards.
Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow and director of the Turkish Research
Program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He has written
extensively on U.S.-Turkish relations, Turkish domestic politics,
and Turkish nationalism, publishing in scholarly journals and major
international print media, including the Wall Street Journal, New York
Times, Washington Post, International Herald Tribune, Jane’s Defense
Weekly, Newsweek, and Newsweek Turkiye. He also is a regular columnist
for the Hurriyet Daily News. He appears regularly on Fox News, CNN,
NPR, Voice of America, al-Jazeera, BBC, and CNN-Turk. A historian
by training, Cagaptay wrote his doctoral dissertation at Yale University
on Turkish nationalism. Cagaptay has taught courses at Yale, Princeton
University, Georgetown University, and Smith College on the Middle
East, Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. His spring 2003 course on
Task Force Members
modern Turkish history was the first offered by Yale in three decades.
From 2006 to 2007, he was Ertegun professor at Princeton University’s
Department of Near Eastern Studies. Cagaptay is the recipient of
numerous honors, grants, and chairs, among them the Smith-Richardson,
Mellon, Rice, and Leylan fellowships, as well as the Ertegun chair
at Princeton. He also serves as chair of the Turkey Advanced Area Studies
Program at the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute.
Steven A. Cook is Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern
studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is an expert on
Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy. Cook
is the author of The Struggle for Egypt: From Nasser to Tahrir Square
and Ruling But Not Governing: The Military and Political Development
in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey. He has published widely in a variety of
foreign policy journals, opinion magazines, and newspapers including
Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal, Journal of Democracy,
Weekly Standard, Slate, New Republic online, New York Times,
Washington Post, Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, and Survival.
Cook is also a frequent commentator on radio and television. He
currently writes the blog From the Potomac to the Euphrates. Prior to
joining CFR, Cook was a research fellow at the Brookings Institution
(2001–2002) and a Soref research fellow at the Washington Institute
for Near East Policy (1995–96). He holds a BA in international studies
from Vassar College, an MA in international relations from the Johns
Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and both an MA
and a PhD in political science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Edward P. Djerejian served in the U.S. Foreign Service for eight presidents,
from John F. Kennedy to William J. Clinton, from 1962 to 1994.
PriortohisnominationbyPresidentClintonasU.S.ambassadortoIsrael
(1993–94), he was assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs in
both the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations (1991–93). He
was the U.S. ambassador to the Syrian Arab Republic (1988–91) and
also served as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and deputy
press secretary for foreign affairs in the White House (1985–86). After
his retirement from government service in 1994, he became the founding
director of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice
University. His is the author of Danger and Opportunity: An American
Ambassador’s Journey Through the Middle East. He has been awarded the
Task Force Members
Presidential Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State’s
Distinguished Honor Award, and numerous other honors, including
the Ellis Island Medal of Honor and the Anti-Defamation League’s
Moral Statesman Award. He is also a recipient of the Association of
Rice Alumni’s Gold Medal, the group’s most prestigious award, for his
service to Rice University. In 2011, Djerejian was elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and named to the board of
trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
William M. Drozdiak has been president of the American Council on
Germany since 2005. Previously, he was the founding executive director
of the Transatlantic Center in Brussels, Belgium, for the German
Marshall Fund of the United States. Drozdiak worked for two decades
as an editor and foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He
was chief European correspondent until 2001. From 1990 to 2000, he
served as bureau chief in Paris and Berlin. For his coverage of NATO’s
air war on Kosovo, he was part of a Post team selected as a Pulitzer Prize
finalist for international affairs in 1999. From 1986 to 1990, Drozdiak
served as foreign editor and supervised the Post’s award-winning coverage
of the Middle East and the collapse of communism in the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe. Before that, Drozdiak worked as State
Department correspondent for Time magazine and covered the Middle
East while based in Cairo and Beirut for Time and the Washington Star.
He reported on the Israel-Egypt peace agreement, the fall of the Shah
of Iran, the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and the Iran-Iraq War. Drozdiak
played U.S. and European professional basketball from 1971 to
1978. He graduated from the University of Oregon with degrees in
political science and economics, earned a master’s degree at the College
of Europe in Bruges, and studied at the Institute of European Studies at
the University of Brussels.
Stephen J. Hadley is a principal at RiceHadleyGates, LLC, an international
strategic consulting firm, along with former secretary of state
Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of defense Robert Gates, and
former State Department official Anja Manuel. Hadley previously
served first as deputy national security adviser and then as national
security adviser in the administration of George W. Bush. Before joining
the Bush administration, he was a partner in the Washington, DC,
law firm Shea & Gardner and a principal in the Scowcroft Group, an
Task Force Members
international business advisory firm. Hadley served as the assistant
secretary of defense for international security policy under then secretary
of defense Richard B. Cheney from 1989 to 1993 and in a variety
of other capacities in the defense and national security field, including
as counsel to the special review board established by President Reagan
to inquire into U.S. arms sales to Iran (the Tower Commission), as a
member of the National Security Council staff under President Gerald
Ford, and as an analyst for the comptroller of the Department of
Defense. Currently, Hadley is a senior adviser on international affairs at
the U.S. Institute of Peace and a member of the State Department’s foreign
affairs policy board. He graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta
Kappa from Cornell University and received his JD degree from Yale
Law School.
Robert W. Kagan is a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings
Institution. Kagan also serves as a member of U.S. secretary of
state Hillary Clinton’s foreign affairs policy board, as senior adviser to
the Romney campaign, and as co-chairman of the bipartisan working
group on Egypt. He writes a monthly column on world affairs for the
Washington Post and is a contributing editor at both the Weekly Standard
and the New Republic. He served in the State Department from 1984 to
1988 as a member of the policy planning staff, as principal speechwriter
for U.S. secretary of state George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy
in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. He is a graduate of Yale University
and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and
holds a PhD in American history from American University. His most
recent book is The Return of History and the End of Dreams. His previous
book, Dangerous Nation: America’s Place in the World from Its Earliest
Days to the Dawn of the 20th Century, was the winner of the 2008 Lepgold
Prize and a 2007 finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize. His acclaimed
book Of Paradise and Power was on the best-seller lists of both the New
York Times and the Washington Post.
Parag Khanna is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation,
a senior visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign
Relations, a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE)
IDEAS, and director of the Hybrid Reality Institute. He is author of The
Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order and How
to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance. He holds a
Task Force Members
PhD from LSE, and bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the School
of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is a Young Global
Leader of the World Economic Forum and a fellow of the Royal Geographical
Society.
Clark B. Lombardi is associate professor of law and adjunct associate
professor of international studies at the University of Washington in
Seattle. He received his JD from Columbia University in 1998, where
he served as editor in chief of the Columbia Journal of Transnational
Law, and completed his PhD in 2001 at Columbia University’s Department
of Religion (Islamic Studies). He teaches courses in Islamic law,
constitutional law, and law and development. He is the author of State
Law as Islamic Law in Modern Egypt and of numerous articles on Islam,
comparative constitutional law, and the rule of law in the Muslim world.
He is senior editor of the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Islam and
Law. Lombardi has also worked on numerous legal reform projects in
the Muslim world. Prior to joining the University of Washington, Lombardi
clerked for the Honorable Samuel A. Alito, then on the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and also practiced law with Cleary
Gottlieb in New York.
Aliza Marcus is a foreign policy writer and expert on Turkey’s Kurds.
She has written about Turkey and regional issues since the late 1980s and
was based in Istanbul for Reuters in the 1990s. She has also worked for
the Boston Globe and Bloomberg, and between 1997 and 2000 reported
out of Israel and Germany. Her book on the Kurdistan Worker’s Party
(PKK), Blood and Belief: The PKK and the Kurdish Fight for Independence,
was translated into Turkish. Marcus currently works as a communications
consultant to the World Bank and, separately, continues to write
on Turkey and the Kurdish problem both for U.S. and Turkish publications.
Her specialty is the PKK, how it wields power and directs the
Kurdish movement in Turkey, and what this means for peaceful resolution
of the Kurdish problem.
Larry C. Napper is senior lecturer at the George Bush School of
Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University and serves
as director of the Bush School’s Scowcroft Institute of International
Affairs. From March to July 2008, Napper served as co-leader of the
Iraq Governance Assessment Team, which made recommendations
Task Force Members
to U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker and General David Petraeus. In
2005, Napper completed a thirty-one-year career in the U.S. Foreign
Service, which included ambassadorships in Kazakhstan (2001–2004)
and Latvia (1995–98). From 1998 to 2001, Napper was coordinator for
U.S. assistance to Central Europe and the Balkans, administering a
$600 million budget for development and postconflict reconstruction.
From 1991 to 1994, Napper directed the State Department’s Office of
Soviet Union Affairs, reorganizing the office following the collapse
of the Soviet Union and establishing diplomatic relations and resident
missions in each of the independent states that emerged from the
former Soviet Union. From 1974 to 1994, Napper served in diplomatic
assignments in Romania, Moscow, southern Africa, and Washington.
Napper received the Secretary of State’s Career Achievement Award,
two Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, and the State Department’s
Distinguished Honor Award for leadership during the December
1989 violent overthrow of the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania,
among other awards. Napper holds a BA in history from Texas A&M
University and an MA in government and foreign affairs from the University
of Virginia. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1969
to 1972.
Denise Natali is the Minerva chair at the Institute for National Strategic
Studies of the National Defense University. Over the past two
decades she has traveled, lived, and worked in the Kurdish regions
of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria and has authored numerous publications
on Kurdish politics, economy, and identity, including The Kurdish
Quasi-State: Development and Dependency in Post–Gulf War Iraq and
The Kurds and the State: Evolving National Identity in Iraq, Turkey, and
Iran, which received the 2006 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic
Title. Her current research is on federalism and the political
economy of post-Saddam Iraq. Natali also specializes in postconflict
relief and reconstruction, having worked for the U.S. Office of Foreign
Disaster Assistance and international NGOs in Peshawar, Pakistan,
and post–Gulf War Iraqi Kurdistan, respectively. Natali received a PhD
in political science at the University of Pennsylvania and a master of
international affairs at Columbia University’s School of International
and Public Affairs. She has also studied at the L’Institut National des
Langues et Civilisations Orientales in Paris, the University of Tehran,
and Tel Aviv University.
Task Force Members
Joseph W. Ralston completed in 2003 a distinguished thirty-sevenyear
Air Force career as commander, U.S. European Command, and
supreme allied commander Europe, NATO. As NATO commander,
Ralston contributed to preserving the peace, security, and territorial
integrity of the NATO member nations while commanding approximately
sixty-five thousand troops from thirty-nine NATO nations and
others participating in ongoing operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Kosovo, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. He also led
the efforts to integrate the three nations that were admitted to NATO
in 1999 and oversaw the process to invite seven nations to join NATO
in 2002. His previous assignment was as commander of the U.S. Air
Force Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. He
has also commanded the Alaskan Command. Ralston also served as
vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1996–2000), the nation’s second-
highest-ranking military officer. In that role, Ralston chaired the
powerful Joint Requirements Oversight Council, which validated the
requirements for nearly every program of the Department of Defense.
In September 2006, President Bush appointed him the special envoy for
countering the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a terrorist organization
designated by the United States, Turkey, and the European Union.
Gregory Saunders is the senior director, international affairs, responsible
for U.S. and governmental relations in support of British Petroleum’s
(BP) international portfolio of assets and commercial activities.
He joined BP’s Washington office in 2004. Saunders was previously
posted to BP’s global headquarters in London and to BP Algeria. In
Algiers, Saunders served as the director for communications and
external affairs, responsible for corporate responsibility, reputation
management/branding, relationship management, and community
outreach in support of BP’s $5 billion portfolio of gas and oil exploration
activities. Prior to joining BP, Saunders culminated a career with
the U.S. government, including assignments in Asia, Africa, Europe,
and the Middle East. He has a BS in engineering from West Point, an
MA in international relations from the Naval Postgraduate School, and
an MBA from the George Washington University. He speaks French
and Portuguese.
Patrick N. Theros served as U.S. ambassador to Qatar from October
1995 to November 1998. Theros assumed office as the president and
Task Force Members
executive director of the U.S.-Qatar Business Council in March 2000.
Theros served in a variety of positions during his thirty-five-year career
in the U.S. Foreign Service, including as political adviser to the commander
in chief, Central Command (CENTCOM), deputy chief of mission
and political officer in Amman, and charge d’affaires and deputy
chief of mission in Abu Dhabi. Immediately before his appointment
to Qatar, Theros served as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism,
responsible for the coordination of all U.S. government counterterrorism
activities outside the United States. In 1992, Theros was awarded
the president’s Meritorious Service Award for career officials and the
Secretary of Defense Medal for Meritorious Civilian Service. He also
earned four Superior Honor Awards over the course of his career. In
1998, His Highness the Emir of Qatar Shaikh Hamad bin Khalifah Al-
Thani presented Theros with the Qatari Gold Medal of Merit for distinguished
service.
Vin Weber is co-chairman and partner of Mercury/Clark & Weinstock
and Mercury. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives
from 1981 to 1993, representing Minnesota’s Second Congressional
District. He was a member of the appropriations committee and an
elected member of the House Republican leadership. In 2004, Weber
was the Bush-Cheney ’04 Plains States regional chairman. He has
been featured in numerous national publications and is a sought-after
political and policy analyst, appearing frequently on major television
outlets. Washingtonian magazine named Weber fifth in its list
of Washington’s top fifty lobbyists. Weber is former chairman of the
National Endowment for Democracy. He serves on the Board of the
Council on Foreign Relations and co-chaired the Independent Task
Force on U.S. Policy Toward Reform in the Arab World. Weber is
a former member of the U.S. secretary of defense’s defense policy
board advisory committee and also served on the U.S. secretary of
state’s advisory committee on democracy promotion. He is a senior
fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute and is
codirector of its Policy Forum. Weber is a board member of several
private sector and nonprofit organizations, including ITT Educational
Services, the Lenox Group, and the Aspen Institute, for which
he served on the Middle East strategy group. Prior to opening Clark
& Weinstock’s DC office in 1994, Weber was president and codirector
of Empower America.
Task Force Members
Jenny B. White is associate professor of anthropology at Boston
University, is former president of the Turkish Studies Association
and of the American Anthropological Association’s Middle East Section,
and sits on the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies. She has
received numerous grants and fellowships from, among others, the
Social Science Research Council, the MacArthur Foundation, the
National Science Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays. She is author of
Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks; Islamist Mobilization in Turkey:
A Study in Vernacular Politics, which won the 2003 Douglass Prize for
the best book on Europeanist anthropology; and Money Makes Us
Relatives: Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey. She has authored numerous
articles on Turkey and on Turks in Germany and lectures internationally
on topics ranging from political Islam and nationalism to
ethnic identity and gender issues. White has been following events
in Turkey since the mid-1970s. All of her books have been translated
into Turkish. She writes a blog on contemporary Turkey that averages
one thousand visitors a month and was named by Foreign Policy
as one of two blogs on Turkey that President Obama should read:
http://kamilpasha.com.
Ross Wilson is director of the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia
Center and a lecturer in international affairs at George Washington
University. A U.S. Foreign Service officer for thirty years, he served as
ambassador to Turkey from 2005 to 2008 and to Azerbaijan from 2000
to 2003. Earlier postings abroad included Moscow, Prague, and Melbourne,
Australia. Among Washington assignments, Wilson served as
chief of staff for Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick (2005),
an aide to Secretaries Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren Christopher
(1992–94), chief U.S. negotiator for the Free Trade Area of the Americas,
and principal deputy to the ambassador-at-large for the new independent
states of the former Soviet Union (1997–2000). A recipient of
the President’s Meritorious Service Award and other honors, Wilson
holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Minnesota and master’s
degrees from Columbia University and the U.S. National War
College. He is chairman of the board of the Institute of Turkish Studies
and a member of the Academy of American Diplomacy, the American
Foreign Service Association, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and
the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs.
Task Force Members
Nur O. Yalman is a professor of social anthropology and Middle Eastern
studies, emeritus, in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard
University. He is also a senior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows
and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yalman is
a member of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Great Britain
and a trustee of Koc University and Robert College, both in Istanbul.
He is also a member of the International Relations Forum of Turkey.
Yalman was a fellow of Peterhouse at Cambridge University and professor
of social anthropology at the University of Chicago before joining
Harvard. His fieldwork is in Sri Lanka, India, Iran, and Turkey. He is
familiar with the Balkans, the Arab countries, Central and Southeast
Asia, and Japan. Yalman speaks French, German, Turkish, some Persian,
Sinhalese, Italian, and Arabic. His interests include the anthropology
of religion, social and political conditions in the Middle East and
South Asia, and political and intellectual developments in other parts
of Asia. His publications include Under the Bo Tree; A Passage to Peace:
Global Solutions from East and West (with Daisaku Ikeda; also in Japanese);
“Islam and Secularism—Plato and Khomeini: Questions Concerning
the Open Society and its Enemies”; and papers on religion,
politics, ethnicity, nationalism, and secularism.
Ahmad Zuaiter is a founding partner of Jadara Capital Partners, LP.
He has over nineteen years of experience as an investment professional,
serving senior roles in the investment advisory, trading, and portfolio
management functions. Most recently, Zuaiter was a portfolio manager
at Soros Fund Management (SFM) in New York and Istanbul, where
he managed a long/short emerging markets fund with core emphasis
on frontier markets. Prior to SFM, Zuaiter spent four years at Morgan
Stanley Investment Management, also as a portfolio manager responsible
for several long-only mandates in the emerging markets space,
with core focus on Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) markets.
Zuaiter also managed the Turkish Investment Fund, the Eastern
Europe Fund, and the Emerging Europe, Middle East, and Africa
Fund. Previously, Zuaiter was a portfolio manager and analyst at Scudder
Kemper Investments, leading a team of regional analysts covering
EMEA markets and managing two emerging markets portfolios. Prior
to that, Zuaiter held senior positions at EFG-Hermes in Cairo, serving
as head of regional proprietary trading, and at SHUAA Capital in
Task Force Members
Dubai, as a portfolio manager and founder of the Arab Gateway Fund.
Before that, Zuaiter served as a senior position trader with Merrill
Lynch & Co., where he was responsible for Brazil, Colombia, and Chile
trading books. Zuaiter earned a degree in business administration from
Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Task Force Observers
Alan Makovsky is a senior professional staff member (Democratic)
on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs (HCFA), where he covers
the Middle East, Turkey, and the Caucasus. At the State Department,
where he worked from 1983 to 1994, he variously covered southern
European affairs and Middle Eastern affairs for the Bureau of Intelligence
and Research. He also served as political adviser to Operation
Provide Comfort (1992) and as special adviser to special Middle East
coordinator Dennis Ross (1993–94). At the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, a private think tank where he worked from 1994 to
2001, Makovsky wrote and published widely on various Middle Eastern
and Turkish topics. He also founded and directed the Washington Institute’s
Turkish Research Program. He has been with HCFA (formerly
the House International Relations Committee, or HIRC) since 2001.
James C. O’Brien is a principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a
global strategy firm, and a member of the management and investment
committees of Albright Capital Management, an affiliated investment
advisory firm focused on emerging markets. O’Brien served in the U.S.
government for twelve years, including as special presidential envoy for
the Balkans and principal deputy director of policy planning at the U.S.
State Department. He earned a BA from Macalester College in St. Paul,
Minnesota, a master’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh, and a
JD from Yale Law School.
Victoria Taylor is an international affairs fellow in residence at the
Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC. She is a career
Foreign Service officer at the U.S. Department of State. Taylor joined
CFR from the Department of State’s Office of Southern European
Affairs. As the Turkey desk and southern European economic affairs
officer, she managed a wide range of bilateral policy issues with Turkey
Task Force Observers
and has worked to promote U.S. economic interests in Turkey, Greece,
and Cyprus. From 2008 to 2009, Taylor worked in the Office of Iranian
Affairs, where she managed the nonproliferation and Iranian foreign
policy portfolio. Since joining the State Department in 2003, she has
served as an economic officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tunis, Tunisia
(2006–2008); as the political and economic officer at the U.S. Consulate
in Lahore, Pakistan (2006); and as a vice consul at the U.S. Embassy
in Islamabad, Pakistan (2004–2005). Taylor holds a BA in international
relations and diplomatic history from the University of Pennsylvania
and an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science
in development studies. She speaks French, Mandarin, and Urdu.
Independent Task Force Reports
Published by the Council on Foreign Relations
U.S. Education Reform and National Security
Joel I. Klein and Condoleezza Rice, Chairs; Julia Levy, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 68 (2012)
U.S. Trade and Investment Policy
Andrew H. Card and Thomas A. Daschle, Chairs; Edward Alden and Matthew J. Slaughter,
Project Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 67 (2011)
Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations
Samuel W. Bodman and James D. Wolfensohn, Chairs; Julia E. Sweig, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 66 (2011)
U.S. Strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan
Richard L. Armitage and Samuel R. Berger, Chairs; Daniel S. Markey, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 65 (2010)
U.S. Policy Toward the Korean Peninsula
Charles L. Pritchard and John H. Tilelli Jr., Chairs; Scott A. Snyder, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 64 (2010)
U.S. Immigration Policy
Jeb Bush and Thomas F. McLarty III, Chairs; Edward Alden, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 63 (2009)
U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy
William J. Perry and Brent Scowcroft, Chairs; Charles D. Ferguson, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 62 (2009)
Confronting Climate Change: A Strategy for U.S. Foreign Policy
George E. Pataki and Thomas J. Vilsack, Chairs; Michael A. Levi, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 61 (2008)
U.S.-Latin America Relations: A New Direction for a New Reality
Charlene Barshefsky and James T. Hill, Chairs; Shannon O’Neil, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 60 (2008)
U.S.-China Relations: An Affirmative Agenda, A Responsible Course
Carla A. Hills and Dennis C. Blair, Chairs; Frank Sampson Jannuzi, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 59 (2007)
Independent Task Force Reports
National Security Consequences of U.S. Oil Dependency
John Deutch and James R. Schlesinger, Chairs; David G. Victor, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 58 (2006)
Russia’s Wrong Direction: What the United States Can and Should Do
John Edwards and Jack Kemp, Chairs; Stephen Sestanovich, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 57 (2006)
More than Humanitarianism: A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa
Anthony Lake and Christine Todd Whitman, Chairs; Princeton N. Lyman and J. Stephen
Morrison, Project Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 56 (2006)
In the Wake of War: Improving Post-Conflict Capabilities
Samuel R. Berger and Brent Scowcroft, Chairs; William L. Nash, Project Director; Mona K.
Sutphen, Deputy Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 55 (2005)
In Support of Arab Democracy: Why and How
Madeleine K. Albright and Vin Weber, Chairs; Steven A. Cook, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 54 (2005)
Building a North American Community
John P. Manley, Pedro Aspe, and William F. Weld, Chairs; Thomas d’Aquino, Andrés
Rozental, and Robert Pastor, Vice Chairs; Chappell H. Lawson, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 53 (2005)
Iran: Time for a New Approach
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Robert M. Gates, Chairs; Suzanne Maloney, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 52 (2004)
An Update on the Global Campaign Against Terrorist Financing
Maurice R. Greenberg, Chair; William F. Wechsler and Lee S. Wolosky, Project Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 40B (Web-only release, 2004)
Renewing the Atlantic Partnership
Henry A. Kissinger and Lawrence H. Summers, Chairs; Charles A. Kupchan, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 51 (2004)
Iraq: One Year After
Thomas R. Pickering and James R. Schlesinger, Chairs; Eric P. Schwartz, Project Consultant
Independent Task Force Report No. 43C (Web-only release, 2004)
Nonlethal Weapons and Capabilities
Paul X. Kelley and Graham Allison, Chairs; Richard L. Garwin, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 50 (2004)
New Priorities in South Asia: U.S. Policy Toward India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan
(Chairmen’s Report)
Marshall Bouton, Nicholas Platt, and Frank G. Wisner, Chairs; Dennis Kux and Mahnaz
Ispahani, Project Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 49 (2003)
Cosponsored with the Asia Society
Independent Task Force Reports
Finding America’s Voice: A Strategy for Reinvigorating U.S. Public Diplomacy
Peter G. Peterson, Chair; Kathy Bloomgarden, Henry Grunwald, David E. Morey, and
Shibley Telhami, Working Committee Chairs; Jennifer Sieg, Project Director; Sharon
Herbstman, Project Coordinator
Independent Task Force Report No. 48 (2003)
Emergency Responders: Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared
Warren B. Rudman, Chair; Richard A. Clarke, Senior Adviser; Jamie F. Metzl,
Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 47 (2003)
Iraq: The Day After (Chairs’ Update)
Thomas R. Pickering and James R. Schlesinger, Chairs; Eric P. Schwartz, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 43B (Web-only release, 2003)
Burma: Time for Change
Mathea Falco, Chair
Independent Task Force Report No. 46 (2003)
Afghanistan: Are We Losing the Peace?
Marshall Bouton, Nicholas Platt, and Frank G. Wisner, Chairs; Dennis Kux and Mahnaz
Ispahani, Project Directors
Chairman’s Report of an Independent Task Force (2003)
Cosponsored with the Asia Society
Meeting the North Korean Nuclear Challenge
Morton I. Abramowitz and James T. Laney, Chairs; Eric Heginbotham, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 45 (2003)
Chinese Military Power
Harold Brown, Chair; Joseph W. Prueher, Vice Chair; Adam Segal, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 44 (2003)
Iraq: The Day After
Thomas R. Pickering and James R. Schlesinger, Chairs; Eric P. Schwartz, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 43 (2003)
Threats to Democracy: Prevention and Response
Madeleine K. Albright and Bronislaw Geremek, Chairs; Morton H. Halperin, Director;
Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, Associate Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 42 (2002)
America—Still Unprepared, Still in Danger
Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman, Chairs; Stephen E. Flynn, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 41 (2002)
Terrorist Financing
Maurice R. Greenberg, Chair; William F. Wechsler and Lee S. Wolosky, Project Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 40 (2002)
Independent Task Force Reports
Enhancing U.S. Leadership at the United Nations
David Dreier and Lee H. Hamilton, Chairs; Lee Feinstein and Adrian Karatnycky, Project
Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 39 (2002)
Cosponsored with Freedom House
Improving the U.S. Public Diplomacy Campaign in the War Against Terrorism
Carla A. Hills and Richard C. Holbrooke, Chairs; Charles G. Boyd, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 38 (Web-only release, 2001)
Building Support for More Open Trade
Kenneth M. Duberstein and Robert E. Rubin, Chairs; Timothy F. Geithner, Project Director;
Daniel R. Lucich, Deputy Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 37 (2001)
Beginning the Journey: China, the United States, and the WTO
Robert D. Hormats, Chair; Elizabeth Economy and Kevin Nealer, Project Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 36 (2001)
Strategic Energy Policy Update
Edward L. Morse, Chair; Amy Myers Jaffe, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 33B (2001)
Cosponsored with the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University
Testing North Korea: The Next Stage in U.S. and ROK Policy
Morton I. Abramowitz and James T. Laney, Chairs; Robert A. Manning, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 35 (2001)
The United States and Southeast Asia: A Policy Agenda for the New Administration
J. Robert Kerrey, Chair; Robert A. Manning, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 34 (2001)
Strategic Energy Policy: Challenges for the 21st Century
Edward L. Morse, Chair; Amy Myers Jaffe, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 33 (2001)
Cosponsored with the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University
A Letter to the President and a Memorandum on U.S. Policy Toward Brazil
Stephen Robert, Chair; Kenneth Maxwell, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 32 (2001)
State Department Reform
Frank C. Carlucci, Chair; Ian J. Brzezinski, Project Coordinator
Independent Task Force Report No. 31 (2001)
Cosponsored with the Center for Strategic and International Studies
U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 21st Century: A Follow-on Report
Bernard W. Aronson and William D. Rogers, Chairs; Julia Sweig and Walter Mead, Project
Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 30 (2000)
Independent Task Force Reports
Toward Greater Peace and Security in Colombia: Forging a Constructive U.S. Policy
Bob Graham and Brent Scowcroft, Chairs; Michael Shifter, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 29 (2000)
Cosponsored with the Inter-American Dialogue
Future Directions for U.S. Economic Policy Toward Japan
Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Chair; M. Diana Helweg Newton, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 28 (2000)
First Steps Toward a Constructive U.S. Policy in Colombia
Bob Graham and Brent Scowcroft, Chairs; Michael Shifter, Project Director
Interim Report (2000)
Cosponsored with the Inter-American Dialogue
Promoting Sustainable Economies in the Balkans
Steven Rattner, Chair; Michael B.G. Froman, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 27 (2000)
Non-Lethal Technologies: Progress and Prospects
Richard L. Garwin, Chair; W. Montague Winfield, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 26 (1999)
Safeguarding Prosperity in a Global Financial System:
The Future International Financial Architecture
Carla A. Hills and Peter G. Peterson, Chairs; Morris Goldstein, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 25 (1999)
Cosponsored with the International Institute for Economics
U.S. Policy Toward North Korea: Next Steps
Morton I. Abramowitz and James T. Laney, Chairs; Michael J. Green, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 24 (1999)
Reconstructing the Balkans
Morton I. Abramowitz and Albert Fishlow, Chairs; Charles A. Kupchan, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 23 (Web-only release, 1999)
Strengthening Palestinian Public Institutions
Michel Rocard, Chair; Henry Siegman, Project Director; Yezid Sayigh and Khalil Shikaki,
Principal Authors
Independent Task Force Report No. 22 (1999)
U.S. Policy Toward Northeastern Europe
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Chair; F. Stephen Larrabee, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 21 (1999)
The Future of Transatlantic Relations
Robert D. Blackwill, Chair and Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 20 (1999)
U.S.-Cuban Relations in the 21st Century
Bernard W. Aronson and William D. Rogers, Chairs; Walter Russell Mead, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 19 (1999)
Independent Task Force Reports
After the Tests: U.S. Policy Toward India and Pakistan
Richard N. Haass and Morton H. Halperin, Chairs
Independent Task Force Report No. 18 (1998)
Cosponsored with the Brookings Institution
Managing Change on the Korean Peninsula
Morton I. Abramowitz and James T. Laney, Chairs; Michael J. Green, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 17 (1998)
Promoting U.S. Economic Relations with Africa
Peggy Dulany and Frank Savage, Chairs; Salih Booker, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 16 (1998)
U.S. Middle East Policy and the Peace Process
Henry Siegman, Project Coordinator
Independent Task Force Report No. 15 (1997)
Differentiated Containment: U.S. Policy Toward Iran and Iraq
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, Chairs; Richard W. Murphy, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 14 (1997)
Russia, Its Neighbors, and an Enlarging NATO
Richard G. Lugar, Chair; Victoria Nuland, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 13 (1997)
Rethinking International Drug Control: New Directions for U.S. Policy
Mathea Falco, Chair
Independent Task Force Report No. 12 (1997)
Financing America’s Leadership: Protecting American Interests and Promoting American Values
Mickey Edwards and Stephen J. Solarz, Chairs; Morton H. Halperin, Lawrence J. Korb,
and Richard M. Moose, Project Directors
Independent Task Force Report No. 11 (1997)
Cosponsored with the Brookings Institution
A New U.S. Policy Toward India and Pakistan
Richard N. Haass, Chair; Gideon Rose, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 10 (1997)
Arms Control and the U.S.-Russian Relationship
Robert D. Blackwill, Chair and Author; Keith W. Dayton, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 9 (1996)
Cosponsored with the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom
American National Interest and the United Nations
George Soros, Chair
Independent Task Force Report No. 8 (1996)
Making Intelligence Smarter: The Future of U.S. Intelligence
Maurice R. Greenberg, Chair; Richard N. Haass, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 7 (1996)
Independent Task Force Reports
Lessons of the Mexican Peso Crisis
John C. Whitehead, Chair; Marie-Josée Kravis, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 6 (1996)
Managing the Taiwan Issue: Key Is Better U.S. Relations with China
Stephen Friedman, Chair; Elizabeth Economy, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 5 (1995)
Non-Lethal Technologies: Military Options and Implications
Malcolm H. Wiener, Chair
Independent Task Force Report No. 4 (1995)
Should NATO Expand?
Harold Brown, Chair; Charles A. Kupchan, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 3 (1995)
Success or Sellout? The U.S.-North Korean Nuclear Accord
Kyung Won Kim and Nicholas Platt, Chairs; Richard N. Haass, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 2 (1995)
Cosponsored with the Seoul Forum for International Affairs
Nuclear Proliferation: Confronting the New Challenges
Stephen J. Hadley, Chair; Mitchell B. Reiss, Project Director
Independent Task Force Report No. 1 (1995)
To purchase a printed copy, call the Brookings Institution Press: 800.537.5487.
Note: Task Force reports are available for download from CFR’s website, www.cfr.org.
For more information, email [email protected].
The Council on Foreign Relations sponsors Independent Task Forces to assess issues of cur
rent and critical importance to U.S. foreign policy and provide policymakers with concrete
judgments and recommendations. Diverse in backgrounds and perspectives, Task Force
members aim to reach a meaningful consensus on policy through private and nonpartisan
deliberations. Once launched, Task Forces are independent of CFR and solely responsible
for the content of their reports. Task Force members are asked to join a consensus signifying
that they endorse “the general policy thrust and judgments reached by the group, though
not necessarily every finding and recommendation. Each Task Force member also has the
option of putting forward an additional or a dissenting view. Members affiliations are listed
for identification purposes only and do not imply institutional endorsement. Task Force ob
servers participate in discussions, but are not asked to join the consensus.
Task Force Members
Madeleine K. Albright
Albright Stonebridge Group
Henri J. Barkey
Lehigh University
Elmira Bayrasli
Richard R. Burt
McLarty Associates
Soner Cagaptay
Washington Institute for Near East Policy
Steven A. Cook
Council on Foreign Relations
Edward P. Djerejian
James A. Baker III Institute for
Public Policy, Rice University
William M. Drozdiak
American Council on Germany
Stephen J. Hadley
U.S. Institute of Peace
Robert W. Kagan
Brookings Institution
Parag Khanna
New America Foundation
Clark B. Lombardi
University of Washington School of Law
Aliza Marcus
World Bank Group
Larry C. Napper
George Bush School of Government and
Public Service, Texas A&M University
Denise Natali
Institute for National Strategic Studies
Joseph W. Ralston
The Cohen Group
Gregory Saunders
BP America Inc.
Patrick N. Theros
U.S. Qatar Business Council
Vin Weber
Mercury/Clark & Weinstock
Jenny B. White
Boston University
Ross Wilson
Atlantic Council of the United States
Nur O. Yalman
Harvard University
Ahmad Zuaiter
Jadara Capital Partners, LP
www.cfr.org
Leave a Reply