The West should look past Erdogan and deal with Turkey

For the still mostly liberal West, Turkey has become that deeply irritating, MAGA-baseball-cap-sporting cousin, seen only grudgingly once a year for Thanksgiving, because he always sounds off on women, wokeness or the evils of life-saving vaccines. By now the rest of the family has tuned him out so thoroughly they don’t even hear when he tries to reconnect.

As with most families doomed by circumstance to be part of each other’s lives, that’s a mistake.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government have been gradually dialing down tensions with the US and Europe in some areas, even as they raise them in others, for about two years now. This week, unconfirmed Turkish media reports suggest another olive branch might be on the way: the offer to settle a long-running dispute with the US by crating up the S-400 air defense battery it bought from Russia seven years ago, and allowing US inspectors to ensure it stays that way. 

The S-400 system was once a huge story, a demonstrative middle-finger gesture Erdogan made to Washington shortly after surviving an attempted coup he blamed on the US. It was also a form of protection at a time the Turkish leader felt alienated from supposed security allies, and therefore vulnerable.

So, to secure against any troublemaking from Moscow, Turkey’s historic rival for regional dominance, Erdogan agreed to buy the Kremlin’s long-range missile defense system and signed gas and energy deals with Russia. If that meant upsetting the rest of the NATO family (as President Vladimir Putin knew it would), all the better.

Independence from the West had also meant ending reliance on US-dominated global financial markets, which Erdogan liked to describe as the “interest-rate lobby.” He accused this supposed cabal of financiers of trying to secure higher rates at Turkey’s expense, because - in a dire case of ideology trouncing empirical evidence - he believed higher rates to cause inflation.

That policy ended in a predictable disaster, driving inflation above 70%. So, after securing reelection to a further five-year term last May, Erdogan returned to financial orthodoxy. And having first helped Putin to flout US and European sanctions over Ukraine, Turkey also began to comply (encouraged by the threat of third-party penalties for its banks).

Earlier this year, Turkey’s Baykar Technologies started building a factory to co-produce armed drones in Ukraine. In June, unlike Brazil, India and some other regional powers seeking more distance from Washington, Turkey signed the joint communique at the Geneva peace conference Ukraine had organized in support of its 10-point plan for ending the war on favorable terms. And on Thursday, Turkey’s foreign minister attended an informal meeting of European Union colleagues for the first time in five years. According to the Financial Times, the lunch session ran over the allotted duration and was seen as a broadly positive effort at Turkish outreach.

Putin isn’t happy about any of this. He’s made that clear by repeatedly delaying an expected visit to Turkey, and by asking Turkish journalists to tell Erdogan the Ukrainians are using his drones to attack a Russia-Turkey natural-gas pipeline.

But just as rampant inflation has forced Erdogan’s return to international financial markets, so the war in Ukraine has served as a reminder that Turkey has no viable security alternative to NATO; not Russia and not China.

Nor is it going to be able to secure a top-flight stealth fighter jet anytime soon, except within the F-35 joint strike fighter project Turkey was thrown out of over the S-400 purchase. Greece’s decision in July to buy 20 of the jets has made finding a solution to that problem much more acute.

The worst of it, says Huseyin Bagci, a Russia specialist and founder of Ankara Global Advisory Group, isn’t just that the S-400 battery was never put into service, but that Turkey also didn’t get the technology transfer over which it had refused to buy NATO equivalents. The deal was a dead loss for Ankara, he says, and for Russia “a $2.5 billion ice cream they’ve been licking on Red Square.” 

It’s unclear how interested the US remains in Turkey’s S-400 system, after agreeing in February to the $23 billion sale of new F-16s and F-16 upgrade kits, in exchange for Turkey ratifying Sweden’s accession to NATO. Meanwhile, although Germany earlier this year lifted a block it had placed on the sale of Eurofighter Typhoon jets to Saudi Arabia, it’s unclear whether it will approve a similar sale to Turkey.

Ankara’s relationship with the West has changed for good. There can be no pretense of shared values anymore, as Erdogan continues to lock up journalists and coopt nominally independent institutions. In many ways he was MAGA before MAGA existed.

But a transactional relationship still needs transactions. Europe, too, needs to get over the lingering sting of Erdogan’s verbal bomb-throwing, because the West needs Ankara at least as much as Turkey needs European markets and NATO’s security umbrella. Turkey not only controls access to the Black Sea and has the potential to create or prevent future European migration crises, it also has capacity to produce the artillery shells, drones and other weapons at the scale and cost Europe will need as the post-Cold War “peace dividend” is reversed.

“We’re entering a new era,” as the veteran Turkish foreign policy analyst Soli Ozel puts it. “The US, no matter who comes to power after November will be less invested in Europe, so the EU and Turkey will have to work together more on both hard and soft security issues.”

There are things that all sides can do to improve the relationship. In Europe’s case it could ease tightened visa restrictions that are making travel difficult even for businesspeople visiting EU countries for work; Turkey is an EU customs union member. It should also encourage rather than block arms transfers like the Eurofighter that imply long-term commitments that could help tie Turkey’s security interests to those of the EU. The US, meanwhile, could take another stab at getting that S-400 issue resolved.

Erdogan, for his part, needs to dial down his anti-Western rhetoric, including his current tirades over Israel. But even if he doesn’t, Turkey will remain long after he’s gone.