INTERNATIONAL OPINION_ Turkey Adrift

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October 23, 2013, 8:28 am 

Turkey Adrift

By ANDREW FINKEL
NYTimes.com


ISTANBUL — Turkey’s announcement last month that it would buy a long-range defense system from a Chinese company is the latest sign that Ankara’s attempts to strike an independent foreign policy have gone wrong.

To its credit, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) has tried during its decade in power to play a constructive role in the region — as a mediator between its NATO allies and Turkey’s troubled neighbors. The so-called zero problems policy seeks to deal pragmatically with Syria and Iran, to resolve its long-standing dispute with Armenia, and come to terms with problems at home, mainly the demands of its own Kurdish population. In 2008, Turkey even tried to broker a deal between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza strip.

It was never going to be easy: There has been war across its border in Iraq, insurrection in Syria and growing concern over an Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

But now Ankara, long a key NATO ally, has dropped the ball. The plan to buy a defense system from China shocked Washington and Brussels: The system would be incompatible with NATO’s defenses. Moreover, the Chinese manufacturer is on a U.S. sanctions list for violating the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act.

Asked on Tuesday to rate her concern on a scale of one to five, Oana Lungescu, the NATO defense spokeswoman in Brussels, threw up her hands. “What matters to us is the interoperability’’ of the Chinese technology with “NATO’s connected defense system. And in that regard, that number is five.”

Turkey spent years considering rival bids for the missile system. The top contenders were the U.S. makers of Patriot missiles and their French-Italian equivalent — or so everyone thought.

No one should feel sorry for the Western defense contractors. The Chinese undercut the nearest bid by a $1 billion. And the Chinese take a more liberal attitude about transferring technology — they will, for example, allow Turkish co-production of the weapons. The Chinese sweetened the deal by promising to build a new technology park close to an Istanbul airport.

The fact that the defense system may not work seems to have been overlooked.

The big problem is the Chinese weapons cannot be integrated with NATO’s radar technology. No NATO country is going to hand over to the Chinese the radar codes that would allow the defensive missiles to detect friend from foe.

The deal is not yet final and it may well be that the announcement to buy from a Chinese company is a ploy to get the Westerners to lower their prices. But even if the deal stalls, it is a signal that Turkey has lost its way with foreign policy.

“Zero problems” has notoriously become “nothing but problems.” The attempt to mend fences with Armenia was shelved in 2010 when Ankara allowed a deal that would have re-opened a border closed since 1993 to be overruled by an energy provider in Azerbaijan. Also in 2010, relations with Israel collapsed with the infamous Mavi Marmara incident, in which Israeli commandos killed nine peace activists on a Turkish-registered ship trying to run the Gaza blockade.

Relations with Syria have been the most striking failure. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had personally led a diplomatic effort to broker peace between President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian rebels. But pragmatism turned into blind enmity when the Syrian leader refused to follow a Turkish recipe for reform. Ankara then started to covertly arm radical elements of the opposition, only to backtrack when it realized it risked nurturing an Al Qaeda-style movement in its own backyard.

All these setbacks are a source of frustration to a Turkish government that came to power in 2002 hoping to put behind the Cold War divisions of “us and them” and to carve for itself an independent role. Instead, all those uncertainties on its Eastern borders mean that Ankara appears more reliant than ever on its old Western friends. Buying weapons from the Chinese may be a way to reassert that sense of self-reliance.

It may also be a way of reprimanding old allies. After a long hiatus, Turkey is about to open a new chapter in its attempt to join the European Union, but no one pretends negotiations are on track. The Erdogan government feels beleaguered. It faced a summer of protests in major cities fueled by accusations that Ankara has little understanding of democratic dissent. And far from winning support for his policy of trying to bring down the Syrian regime, the Turkish prime minister feels betrayed by the suspicion that Washington will settle for far less — the dismantling of Assad’s chemical weapons.

Erdogan has strong domestic support. He is on the verge of becoming the next president. Yet his influence abroad has never been less. The foreign press and, increasingly, Western governments, make no secret that they think the protesters this summer had it right.

But the answer for Erdogan is not to alienate Turkey’s old friends by buying Chinese missiles, even if they are a bargain.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”



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