Here’s a foreign policy challenge where President-elect Joe Biden appears to be improving President Trump: to face that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not a friend of the West – or freedom for that matter.
In a 2014 New York Times interview, Biden rightly called Erdogan an “autocrat” and said the United States should support its opponents who would like to remove him from office. “He has to pay a price,” Biden said.
He didn’t pay much in the Obama or Trump years. For a long time President Barack Obama’s favorite leader in the Muslim world, Trump boasted that he and Erdogan have been “very good friends for a long time, almost from day one.”
This, when Erdogan has been crushing freedom for at least a decade, and at a faster pace since the failed 2016 coup. He has used state power to completely castrate the once free press, while still imprisoning journalists at record speed. (Although China beats him to No. 1 this year, 48 to 47 imprisoned reporters.) This year, he began to pay new attention to social media by pushing through laws that will make it easier to use them as another tool for state espionage and persecution. .
And he has jailed tens of thousands of political critics – thousands for the “crime” of insult him.
He is also steadily working to end the republic’s age-old official secularism, with policies aimed at creating a “devout generation” of radical Muslims who “will work for the building of a new civilization” that emphasizes Ottoman history, in instead of western ideals.
Some democracy lives on: After his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, lost last year’s mayoral election in Istanbul to his rival Republican People’s Party, or CHP, Erdogan alleged fraud and forced a reconsideration. But the people of Turkey’s largest city (and its commercial nerve center) protested en masse, and the CHP’s Ekrem Imamoglu is still mayor.
Meanwhile, Erdogan has revived the central government’s war against the Kurds of Turkey and has even taken that conflict into neighboring Syria – where his interventions in the civil war have been more about curbing the Kurds of that country and supporting his Islamist. allies, then countering the rule of bloody Bashar al-Assad.
He is also a big driver of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas – and is increasingly linked to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, much to the dismay of all of Turkey’s NATO allies.
The Trump administration on Monday sanctioned Turkey for purchasing S-400s, a Russian missile defense system: it bans all US export licenses and loans to Turkey’s defense procurement agency and freezes the assets of the agency’s president, Ismail Demir. But the move comes quite late; Ankara completed sales in Russia more than a year ago.
Biden has the option of resetting Turkey-US relations. As veteran Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas noted in The Washington Post, “Turkey would not have deviated that much from the West and its human rights record would not have grown so hopelessly” had Trump been harder on Erdogan.
What is needed, she says, is “a US administration to send a clear message that does not encourage Erdogan’s authoritarian instincts.”
Biden certainly can.
We wish Biden the best of luck – he will need it.