This is Part 2 of a two-part interview in which Asli Bali discusses Turkey`s foreign policy interests and objectives with regards to the Middle East. In this second part of the interview, Asli discusses Turkey’s foreign policy in the face of the Arab uprisings, with particular reference to Egypt, Libya, and Syria. The interview was conducted on 11 February 2012. It was transcribed by Ziad Abu-Rish and Kristina Benson.
Edited Transcript (Complete audio file below)
Ziad Abu-Rish (ZA): Last time in the interview, you talked to us about how over the past ten years Turkish foreign policy has featured a transformation to a more focused engagement with Turkey’s neighbors and other regions. What we would like to do today is to specifically focus on the past year—or the last twelve to fourteen months—with regards to the Arab uprisings. What do you understand to be Turkey’s interests and practice with regards to its foreign policy and the Arab uprisings?
Asli Bali (AB): Where we left off is that we were talking about a view that was described as “strategic depth”—that Turkey had something to gain with engaging with the Arab world and the Middle East, but also with the Balkans, Russia, and even farther flung parts of the world such as Africa, Central Asia, and so on. Along with this view was also a policy of “zero problems,” also associated with the foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, which essentially held that Turkey would be in a position to balance with all of the neighboring states such that it could reduce not only its own bilateral conflicts with those countries, but also act as a mediator in order to resolve ongoing crises in the region that stood in the way of better integration, economic harmonization, and so forth.
In this capacity, amongst other things, Turkey became both close to—for example Syria—and working as a mediator, for example, in crises within which Syria and Israel were involved. In addition, it sought to normalize its relations with erstwhile adversarial parties besides Syria, such as Greece, Bulgaria, Russia, and others. So Turkey, generally speaking, was pursuing a strategy of “zero problems.”
Obviously, this strategy hit the rocks during—and was in fact already subject to criticism before—the uprisings of 2011. Prior to 2011, people claimed that it was not possible to have a strategy of zero problems and the illustration of that was the deterioration of Turkey’s relationship with Israel. The response that the Turkish government advanced to such criticism was that Turkey’s relationship with Israel was deteriorating because Israel’s relationship to every country in the international system was deteriorating, which was because of its own aggressive behavior.
So “zero problems” did not mean that Turkey was not going to respond if an actor in the region is going out of its way to be aggressive, destabilizing, or so forth. And therefore that example does not stand as an indictment of the overall strategy because it had been successful elsewhere. So there was no problem with squaring the circle and having good relations with Greece, Syria, the European Union, and the United States. That was the position.
This policy came under real stress in 2011 as the “zero problems`” strategy had come to be associated with interacting and engaging with regimes in the region. As those regimes came into direct conflict with the underlying populations of civil society with which Turkey had also expressed solidarity in more general terms—whether it was economic wellbeing or engagement with specific political groups on the ground—the open conflict between the rulers and the ruled in the region generated a real dilemma for Turkey. This dilemma first arose critically in the Egyptian case. Events in Tunisia occurred so rapidly and Tunisia is far enough outside the sphere of influence that Turkey had been cultivating that that it had not been a real test for the policy.
Egypt was a real test. It was a country with which Turkey had presumably been developing a more positive strategic relationship, and now the Mubarak regime was confronting an underlying population with which much of the Turkish leadership and the forces that support the Turkish government identified--specifically Muslim Brotherhood amongst other actors on the ground in Egypt that were in one way or another associated with the 25 January uprising in Egypt. That initial stress—or strain—on that particular policy resulted in a very rapid about-face in the Turkish position on Egypt. In fact, Turkey was way out in front and ahead of the curve in calling for Mubarak to step down and taking a very strong position in defense of the underlying society and in defense of those that were calling for an end to that regime and the introduction of democratization.
Indeed, at that moment, it looked very much as if Turkey was offering itself as a model for what democratization might look like in a country like Egypt. Of course, it had very good relations with the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as well as other groups and had been encouraging them to think about the AKP—the governing party in Turkey—as a potential model for how one might enter into electoral competition through formal political party participation should Egyptian political liberalization make that possible. This appeared to be a moment for Turkey to vindicate the kind of leadership role it imagined for itself in the region by setting an example both by opposing authoritarian continuation as well as by aligning itself with new actors on the ground and offering its services in an advisory capacity and so forth.
Some of this, even within the Egyptian context, has gotten Turkey into trouble. For example, when Mr. Erdogan went to Cairo six or seven months after the fall of the regime and made comments about the importance of secularism and a secular state, holding Turkey out as an exampl. That really rubbed many in Egypt and elsewhere in the region the wrong way in terms of the characterization he was offering in terms of the alleged success that the Turkish model had been. Nonetheless, Egypt presented a test that Turkey survived relatively well in so far as it was on the so-called “right side of history” as it sided with the forces that eventually prevailed—at least in the immediate period—and it appeared to be vindicating its own set of commitments to political and economic liberalization in the region.
Other instances represented more of a challenge. In some places, Turkey took a back seat to others who took a driving position in policy. This was the case in Bahrain, for example, where—although Turkey did decry the kinds of regime violence that was visited on opposition groups in the streets in Bahrain—Turkey took a back seat because the Bahraini case was both a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-driven set of regional responses and because of the strong US position. But this was also because another emerging theme in Turkish foreign policy has been the significance of Turkish sectarian identity in the direction that Turkish foreign policy has taken. So in Bahrain you had a majority Shia population rising up against a Sunni ruling family. Although Turkey did not directly align itself with that Sunni ruling family, it also did not take the aggressive posture that it had taken in Egypt, for example, in defense of those who were in the streets. Consequently, many raised the question of whether or not this was something to do with sectarian identity. This is a question that is going to recur over and over again. It became even more acute as the year went on, notably in Syria, where the Turkish position became increasingly baffling and ever changing.
Another example of where Turkey faced a real conundrum is Libya. This is something that has been covered with detailed attention because the West was very dismayed at the role that they understood Turkey to be playing, initially as an apologist for the Libyan regime basically resisting argument that Qaddafi must go and more importantly resisting arguments that a UN Security Council-backed intervention was appropriate. Turkey did have lots of different motivations for this. One, which I think remains defensible, is an overall questioning of whether or not direct forms of intervention in terms of no-fly zones, aerial support, or boots on the ground actually represents a form of humanitarian benefit to the civilian populations.
This deep skepticism is born from having been a frontline bordering state in Iraq, for example, and really questioning whether or not something was—by virtue of being Security Council-authorized—actually likely to improve the circumstance on the ground. The made this principled position clear over and over again. However, there were other interests as well. For example, tens of thousands of Turkish contractors were on the ground in Libya. Turkey was very much in the lead in evacuating so-called foreign workers—by which the international community mainly meant Western workers and then in the Turkish and Chinese cases you had an expansion of the definition of what foreign workers were. it did not represent African migrants, refugee populations, and whole classes of people that were certainly being viewed and treaded as foreigners in Libya but were receiving no humanitarian assistance at all. So Turkey evacuated its own population out and resisted the initial North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) initiative to engage in intervention.
Ultimately, Turkey came around and by the end was at the forefront of appearing in Benghazi and expressing solidarity with the National Trasitional Council (NTC)—subsequently the Interim Transitional National Council (TNC)—and attempting to rebuild relations with Libya, which is still an ongoing effort now in order to put the country and its own private sector back into the position it had been under the Qaddafi regime. So it is a mixed bag. On the one had there was certainly some alienation from and the United States as a result of the position Turkey initially took. There was reversal in that position over time. Turkey ended up not showing solidarity with the regime nor with the population on the ground. What that is going to produce in the end is unknown. Of course the lack of clarity on the transition process in Libya today means that this is equally true of any party no matter what position they took.
That is a wide view of overall events that are taking place in the region. There was a tendency on the Turkish part to take a backseat where there were strong GCC interests: Yemen, Bahrain, Oman and elsewhere. There was a much more aggressive posture when it came to the Levant and Egypt. Then there is the outlier position that Turkey took on Libya. But nowhere has there been a more acute test for Turkish foreign policy, a clear strain on any possibility of a “zero problem” policy going forward, and a real challenge to how this country is going to align itself in the region in the face of massive destabilization at its borders in Syria.
ZA: In thinking a little bit more about Syria, can you tell us how you see the shifts in the position that Turkish foreign policy has taken with regards to the uprising in Syria? What interests undergirded those shifts? And where does Turkey stands now, both with regards to the issue of whether the regime should stay or go and to the question of foreign intervention?
AB: As a matter of background, it is worth noting that Turkey invested very heavily in rehabilitating its relationship with Syria. There was in the last decade an unprecedented degree of engagement with Syria as compared to the entire prior history of the republic. As recently as 1999, Turkey and Syria had closed their borders, had come to loggerheads over the stationing in Syria of a PKK leader—Abdullah Ocalan—along with a near military confrontation over this issue, and overall relations were at an all-time low. Yet within two-to-three years of that moment, Turkey had not only reopened the border and established much stronger relations with Syria, but it also began investing very heavily in a trade policy—based in its own southeast and southern territory—rooted in a relationship first with Aleppo and later with Damascus that blossomed into a very strong relationship. This strong relationship had multiple different facets: first, a very strong trade relationship; secondly, a lifting of visa requirements and a vision of economic integration in a kind of free trade zone that was intended to be modeled on the precedent of the European coal and steel community—the idea that in order to resolve political crises in the region one should begin with economic integration and that this economic integration could start with a model that takes Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan as a Levantine unit with which Turkey could merge in a free trade zone. This went quite far to include the lifting of visa restrictions as well as many other facets such as negotiation of contracts and huge numbers of trade delegations going back and forth between the countries.
So there was a trade dimension, as well as a straightforward economic dimension of the incredible influx of new consumers and tourists into Turkey. Syria became a hub for a completely new brand of tourists to Turkey. Whereas prior to this, Turkey’s large tourist sector in the economy had been attracting tourists from Europe, Russia, the United States, and the Americas. Suddenly Turkey was an incredible hub for Arab tourism, a lot of which traveled through Syria and was in fact Syrian in nationality. There was a boom for example in cities like Gaziantep, which is in the Hatay province near Aleppo and was a large provincial town but is now a metropolitan center as a result of renewed relations in the region as a whole. So it was quite a successful strategy in terms of integration. On the one hand you had trade. On the other hand you had economic benefits of direct population exchange as well as cultural and educational exchange that were occurring under the auspices of that broader integration. You also had many track-two diplomatic initiatives taking place in which you would see, for example, exchanges between Turkish and Syrian universities or athletic institutions. There was a real view towards broadening the Turkish conception of their role in the region and developing very strong relations with Syria.
The remaining dimension that has not been mentioned is the personal relationship that Prime Minister Erdogan developed with Bashar al-Asad, which was in and of itself very significant. Actually, there is a parallel here to the deteriorations with Israel in terms of the relationship that Erdogan had with Asad. He felt a direct sense of trust and confidence in his counterpart and believed that they were on the same wavelength and pursuing the same sets of policies with the same kinds of goals. There had been a prior moment wherein Turkey also attached to its more general policies towards Israel the relationship between Erdogan and Israel’s then-prime minister Ehud Olmert. In the Israeli case, particularly in 2008/2009 with the Israeli attack on Gaza, Erdogan felt a personal betrayal as a result of the idea that Olmert had engaged in this aggressive policy in violation of a set of understandings that were in place with Turkey in connection to negotiations that were ongoing with Syria and mediated by Turkey. Similarly, in the case of Bashar al-Asad, there was a sense sometime in the summer of 2011 of personal betrayal.
Initially, Turkey put serious political capital on the line in the early period of the uprising in Syria to try and get the Asad regime to embrace a radical posture of reform that would be far enough ahead ofwhat was being demanded by protesters so as to head off the possibility of serious destabilization. The Turkish position was to learn from the experiences that were witnessed elsewhere in the region and stop the dominoes here [in Syria] by actually making the types of liberalizing changes necessary and avoid bloodshed. That was a policy that was pursued with great vigor from approximately April 2011—when thing began to deteriorate in Syria—through July 2011. There was group after group going [to Syria] well after other countries in the West as well as the Gulf had abandoned an engagement strategy with Asad. The Turkish foreign minister was still traveling to Damascus and being deeply criticized by the West for this attempted engagement.
Towards September 2011, Turkey began offering specific deadlines to the Asad regime to accomplish certain things that they felt had been put on the table as commitments to reform that had not materialized. As these deadlines came and went, and particularly with the spike in violence that was witnessed during the month of Ramadan in Syria, there came to be a breaking point beyond which--at least from open source records and the appearances that were generated by public statements. Prime Minister Erdogan seems to have felt a sense of personal betrayal that really led to a snap.
What we saw then was something in the order of a 180-degree change in the Turkish posture towards Syria. First of all, it became an aggressive supporter of sanctions and of cutting off trade relations. Obviously, this represented a huge departure from what had been a decade-long engagement policy on the part of the Turkish government. There were other developments as well. Turkey was hosting a larger and larger number of Syrian refugees on its southern border with Syria while managing these refugee areas both politically and in terms of media access.
Increasingly, Turkey—by the fall of 2011—had come to be a sort of host country for Syrian opposition parties that were beginning to try and create some type of an umbrella structure through which they could organize some kind of government in exile. This was then coupled with the offering of a home base for defecting military figures from the Syrian opposition. So you not only have political groups like the Syrian National Council (SNC) setting up shop in Istanbul, Antalya, Ankara, and elsewhere, you also have the Free Syrian Army operating as a logistical and political matter out of Turkey. That is a step significantly further than simply engaging in the kinds of international sanctions regimes that were in place.
Turkey also began talking about establishing civilian corridors—humanitarian corridors—on Syrian soil. This is something that keeps resurfacing as an idea. It is less and less being associated today—February 2011—with a Turkish initiative. However, the idea that that initiative represents—presumably some type of Turkish presence on the ground on Syrian soil in order to create some kind of buffer zone where civilians would be received and where the Syrian government could not operate—is an astonishing escalation in the position that the Turkish government is taking. It is a genuine and direct undermining of a neighbor’s sovereignty, which is exactly contrary not only to the decade of engagement policy but also to eighty-five years of republican history of specifically claiming that the Turkish government has no irredentist claims, will not exceed its territory in any way, and will not infringe in any way on its neighbors. This is a core principle of Turkish foreign policy that seemed to be called into question with this suggestion of a humanitarian corridor.
So what are the Turkish interests? The first thing—and here I return to a point I raised earlier—is the overwhelming emergence of sectarian identity as an element in Turkey’s orientation towards the Arab uprisings. In Syria, you have something on the order of seventy percent of the population being Sunni—that are understood at least in the Turkish context as driving the opposition in Syria—and a visceral identification with this group. There is also the view that Turkey can play a significant role in shaping outcomes after the regime falls if they are in touch with the right types of leaderships. For example, a claim that is systematically made by Turkish officials—and that can be heard in interviews with Syrian dissident figures—is the idea that the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria has somehow “moderated.”
So the language of “moderate Islam” which is the way Turkey has come to be stylized in the West—which is deeply problematic—is now being applied to Syrian opposition figures with the claim that it is because they were in exile in Turkey or took asylum in Turkey. This setting up of Turkey—as a model or an advising force that can shape the "day-after scenarios"—is an element of the sectarian complexion that Turkish orientation towards Syria has taken. Turkey is also taking a serious economic and trade hit. There is a desire to see resolution brought sooner rather than later.
With respect to intervention, as I have already suggested earlier, Turkey has seemed to be a lot less principled than it was in the Libyan case in the way it has conducted its foreign policy with respect to Syria, toying with various ideas of intervention including the idea of a humanitarian corridor described earlier. At present, I believe that Turkey has withdrawn to some extent from that view. The reason for that is something that is in and of itself quite distressing. Turkey played an incredibly important role in the 1990s as an arms and financial supplier to Bosnian Muslims in what was basically the Yugoslav civil war. That role was critical to the political awakening of many constituencies in Turkey that have now come to be part of the broad umbrella to which the Turkish Justice and Development Party (AKP) appeals.
While it certainly is not jihadism or anything along those lines, it is the idea that there is an obligation to come to the assistance of Muslim communities under siege where they face terrible odds (and so forth) by offering various types of support on the ground, but essentially through back-channels and getting equipment and money into that place. There is real experience in the philanthropic sector in Turkey in dealing with a situation like this that was born out of the 1990s. That model to my mind as an observer—and these are clearly my own views—appears to be reemerging in the Turkish context at least with respect to Syria.
So rather than call for foreign intervention, what I see as more likely to occur is Turkey at the forefront along with wealthy Iraqi Sunnis and Lebanese Sunnis—in a sense, the wealthy Sunnis of the Arab world—serving as conduits for arms and money to flood into Syria in an attempt to equalize the odds. Of course, the implication of that equalization strategy is a potentially very intense civil war with incredible amounts of bloodshed. This is probably the least desirable medium-term position to take if what one cares about is the welfare of the civilian population. If what one cares about is achieving a particular political outcome with respect to this regime—particularly at low cost to external actors—then this of course a “brilliant” strategy on some level. It means that actors will generate markets for arms and offer financial assistance to parties one is hoping to back in a day after scenario, without actually putting ones material or forces in harms way and without taking the political capital loss of being associated with being a frontline actors in an actual intervention.
This plays into the hands of broader international interests with respect to Syria. While China and Russia are being decried for having vetoed the Security Council resolution, I see very little likelihood that had that resolution passed we would have seen a military intervention materialize in Syria. This is for a host of reasons, including that Syria is a frontline state with Israel and that there is no "day-after scenario" that the United States and other major actors can confidently expect. In the aftermath of a much more limited set of engagements in Libya and elsewhere, there is no appetite for intervention in Syria. There is a lot of appetite for posturing and what I believe is an emerging international strategy of allowing supplies, weapons, and money to go into Syria to enable actors on the ground in Syria to take up arms against the regime and bring a conclusion to the ongoing hostilities there on that basis.
ZA: In conclusion, I would like to ask you about the following. One of the things that does not seem to be considered for relieving the situation in Syria—bringing an end to the regime violence—is creating exit options for Assad and his regime. Given Turkey and more specifically Erdogan’s 180-degree turn in their relationship with Assad and the regime, do you see Turkey being able to play a role in creating exit strategies for the regime should the Syrian regime decided they wanted to explore those strategies? Or is Turkey no longer a viable option to facilitate such exit options?
AB: I think the short answer is that Turkey is no longer a viable option, mainly because it has spent all of its leverage in an attempt to push the Assad regime in a particular direction and strategy it had devised. When there was resistance to that, the resultant 180-degree turn meant that most of the relations that they could have leveraged have been severed now. In addition, I think that there is no clear exit strategy for the regime as an international matter because of the identity of the regime and its relationship to an underlying set of minority communities that will be left extremely vulnerable should the regime step down other than on very specific terms.
People will respond to any discussion like this one—where the question is “what can be done?”—by saying that it is unacceptable to do nothing, and the only alternative to doing nothing appears to be sanctioning some kind of military intervention or at least turning a blind eye to the flow of arms and finance. To my mind, that is an extremely irresponsible way of setting up the range of possibilities or the opportunity field that is available in responding to a situation like this one. I say it is irresponsible only because it seems to take no account at all of what the actual humanitarian cost is of doing something, especially if “something” means military intervention or the supply of weapons and arms into the country.
There seems to be no attempt, as an empirical matter, to ask how many more lives would be saved through these “do something” strategies rather than through the “do nothing” strategies. Instead, the idea being advanced is that by doing something, we have supposedly taken a principled stance of some kind, are properly aligned with the civilian population, or are showing our metal as individuals who care about humanitarian welfare and so forth. But this is without actually engaging in a calculation that is related to the goals that we are allegedly being motivated by, such as the actual humanitarian consequences on the ground.
At the same time, we are taking off the table options that seem politically undesirable because they are compromise because they somehow seems as being an apologist for rescuing the regime and so forth. But it is those opportunities that have a prospect today, I think, of at least slowing the rate of killing at the moment and hopefully coming up with a regime exit strategy that does not involve civil war and that does not involve military intervention. That would be the following.
The Assad regime—as of right now—has no clear exit strategy for a variety of reasons and has been treated as a complete pariah in the international community. Again, there is a "footnote" attempt to refer the regime to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Everything that is being spelled out for them as a “day-after scenario" for the regime itself is destructive from their perspective. So if you push their backs to the wall, they have nothing left to lose. There is no reason to expect the regime to take an exit option. If in fact staying and fighting to the end is more attractive than exit, then obviously the regime is not going to go with exit.
What that means is that in any kind of negotiation setting, you need to generate options that are actually more desirable than fighting till the end. The way to do this in the case of Syria is by bringing to the table parties that actually have leverage over Syria. Turkey may not be such a party, but Iran is such a party and Russia is such a party. Why would you want Iran and Russia at the table? It is because Iran and Russia are in a position to actually influence outcomes from the perspective of the Assad regime. It actually is quite dependent on support from these and perhaps some other important international players. Why are Iran and Russia not at the table?
The Security Council resolution effort—as far as I can see—was simply an empty strategy. It was a strategy that was predictably going to end the way it did end. But more importantly, it was not generating any kind of a proposed framework for resolution in the Syrian context. It was simply a broader condemnation and a leaving of the door open to more serious measures down the line—if and when someone emerged who was prepared to take those measures. For the reasons I already described, I do not think that any of the West, the United States, England, or France—more specifically the permanent members of the Security Council or any other Western actors—are prepared to take on the costs of intervening in Syria. So it is an "empty card" that enables these powers to characterize Russia and China as the opposition—as the reason that something more is not happening in Syria. Whereas, arguably, there never really was an important prospect of something happening.
I would not call this "engagement" with those parties. Engagement with those parties (e.g., China, Iran, and Russia) would mean giving them an incentive to coming to the table and adopting together with the West a position that is consistent with respect to the Assad regime. They do not have an automatic incentive to do so because they are aligned very differently in terms of their own geopolitical interests in Syria than the West. But if there was a serious commitment to bringing to an end blood loss and if the actual goal was not political outcomes in terms of regime survival or the end of the regime but rather a goal of saving lives on the ground in Syria, you would offer incentives to bring Iran and Russia to the table. You could relax the intense drum beat of war that is currently being pursued towards Iran on the nuclear program, which is a huge red herring.
So, there are many points of potential cooperation available between those countries in the West that support the opposition in Syria and those who support the Syrian regime regarding how to furnish an actual exit option. The failure to do that, in my mind, is a political and moral crisis. It is one thing to think of how the government should be acting. But as individuals who claim to be acting in solidarity with Syria, the exclusion of these kinds of models or ideas to actually generate incentives, to bargain, to bring people to the table in order to come up with a negotiated solution—the exclusion of this as somehow politically unattractive—is a not only a political failure. It is a moral failure and a failure of political imagination and leadership.
[Click here for Part 1 of this interview, wherein Asli provides more background on Turkey`s 2000-2010 turn towards a foreign policy of engagement with the broader Middle East and other regions of the world, with particular attention to issues related to Western orientation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Iran.]