Does Turkey Still Belong in NATO?

by Daniel Pipes
Philadelphia Bulletin

April 6, 2009 

Smack on its 60th anniversary, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization finds itself facing a completely novel problem – that of radical Islam, as represented by the Republic of Turkey, within its own ranks.

Ankara joined NATO in 1951 and shortly after Turkish forces fought valiantly with the allies in Korea. Turks stood tough against the Soviet Union for decades. Following the United States, Turkey has the second-largest number of troops in the alliance.
With the end of the Cold War, NATO's mission changed and some saw Islamism as the new strategic enemy. Already in 1995, NATO Secretary General Willy Claes compared Islamism to the historic foe: "Fundamentalism is at least as dangerous as communism was." With the Cold War over, he added, "Islamic militancy has emerged as perhaps the single gravest threat to the NATO alliance and to Western security."
Indeed, NATO first invoked Article 5 of its charter, calling on "collective self-defense," to go to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, responding to the 9/11 attacks launched from that country.
More recently, former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar argues that "Islamist terrorism is a new shared threat of a global nature that places the very existence of NATO's members at risk" and advocates that the alliance focus on combating "Islamic jihadism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction." He calls for "placing the war against Islamic jihadism at the center of the Allied strategy."
Claes and Aznar are right; but their vision is now in jeopardy, for Islamists have penetrated the 28-state alliance, as was dramatically illustrated in recent days.
 
Prime ministers Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (left) and Anders Fogh Rasmussen in 2002.
 
As the term of Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer concludes in July, a consensus had emerged to make Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, 56, his successor. But Fogh Rasmussen was in office in early 2006, when the Muhammad cartoon crisis erupted and he insisted that as prime minister he had no authority to tell a private newspaper what not to publish. This position won him much criticism from Muslims, including Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who instructed Fogh Rasmussen at the time that "Freedoms have limits, what is sacred should be respected."
When Fogh Rasmussen came up for the NATO post, Erdoğan continued his grudge, saying that his government looks "negatively" on Fogh Rasmussen's candidacy because, Erdoğan explained, "I asked for a meeting of Islamic leaders in his country to explain what is going on and he refrained from doing that. So how can I expect him to contribute to peace?"
Eventually, Fogh Rasmussen was selected as the consensus candidate, but at a steep price. The Dane won the job only after engaging in intensive negotiations with Turkish president Abdullah Gül hosted by Barack Obama. Fogh Rasmussen promised to appoint at least two Turks and publicly to address Muslim concerns about his response to the cartoons. More broadly, Erdoğan announced. Obama "gave us guarantees" concerning Turkish reservations about Fogh Rasmussen.
The hoops that Fogh Rasmussen had to jump through to win Ankara's support can be inferred from his cringe-inducing, dhimmi-like remarks on winning the appointment: "As secretary general of NATO, I will make a very clear outreach to the Muslim world to ensure cooperation and intensify dialogue with the Muslim world. I consider Turkey a very important ally and strategic partner and I will cooperate with them in our endeavors to ensure the best cooperation with Muslim world."
We appear to be witnessing the emergence not of a robust NATO following the Claes-Aznar model, one leading the fight against radical Islam, but an institution hobbled from within, incapable of standing up to the main strategic threat for fear of offending a member government.
Nor is Islamism NATO's only problem with Turkey. In what is emerging as a Middle Eastern cold war, with Tehran leading one faction and Riyadh the other, Ankara has repeatedly sided with the former – hosting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, advocating for Iran's nuclear program, developing an Iranian oil field, transferring Iranian arms to Hezbollah, openly supporting Hamas, viciously condemning Israel, and turning Turkish public opinion against the United States.
Noting these changes, columnist Caroline Glick urges Washington to "float the notion of removing Turkey from NATO." The Obama administration is not about to do that; but before Ankara renders NATO toothless, dispassionate observers should carefully think this argument through.

Middle East Forum

Comment on In the name of Islam

Comment on In the name of Islam: a liberal appeal by Alvin H. Rosenfeld 

During a recent visit to Istanbul, I learned first-hand the results of the political manipulation of anti-Semitism that Soner Cagaptay describes in his post. The outpourings of hatred against Israel and, especially at the street level, also against Jews during the time of the Gaza fighting rattled the nerves of Turkey’s Jews, many of whom had never before encountered popular anti-Semitism of this kind and were stunned by its ferocity. 
To be sure, Turkey was hardly alone in witnessing large demonstrations of public anger leveled against Israel and those who allegedly comprise its supporting “lobbies.” Manifestations of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic animosity took place on the streets of cities throughout Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Few, if any, however, surpassed the size, determination, and passion of anti-Jewish hostility on display in Istanbul and some of Turkey’s other towns.
Moreover, these raw feelings were not confined only to organized street demonstrations but spilled over into the country’s schools, shops, work-places, newspapers and television stations, etc. In short, while Turkey was only one player in a newly globalized movement of extreme hostility focused on Israel and the Jews, the country stood out for what appeared to be an effort to stimulate and spread such aggressive feelings. None of Turkey’s Jews was physically assaulted, and its major institutions, which are heavily secured, received no damage. But many of the community’s members, finding themselves on the receiving end of such an angry onslaught, were made to feel not just uneasy but unwanted.
In seeking to account for this disturbing state of affairs, Soner Cagaptay looks away from history and towards politics. Given recent political developments in the country, he is not wrong to do so, although a truly comprehensive explanation would have to look back in time and acknowledge periods of relatively good relations between Jews and Muslims but also some extremely tense and even destructive times. There were periods when Jews suffered as the result of discriminatory government policies against minorities in general, such as the levying of special taxes on non-Muslim Turkish nationals (1942), which proved to be ruinous for many Jews. At other times, Jews have been specifically targeted as such: in earlier decades there were anti-Jewish riots in some parts of the country; and recent years have seen lethal terrorist assaults against Turkish synagogues and assassination attempts against prominent figures in the Jewish community. Despite the often heralded “tolerance” that Ottoman rulers extended to the Jews, all has not been entirely just and amicable over the generations. Had it been so, the size of Turkey’s Jewish population―once numbering perhaps 90,000 souls―would be a lot larger than the roughly 20,000 it is today.
Nevertheless, Cagaptay is correct to put the blame for the worst of today’s anti-Semitic developments on the country’s political leadership headed by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s present prime minister, whose penchant for using incendiary language may have been a prod to the open release of anti-Jewish sentiments within nationalist and Islamist segments of Turkish society. When a country’s prime minister charges that “Israel’s barbarity is beyond cruelty,” that “Israel has become a country of bandits” and is guilty of “crimes against humanity,” that “Israelis” (or Jews) “know very well how to kill,” and that “sooner or later, Allah will punish [them],” his inflammatory messages will not be lost on his supporters, numbers of whom are likely to take their cue from their nation’s leader and act accordingly. Add to these pernicious charges the irresponsible accusation that Jews “control the media” and “disseminate false reports on what is happening,” and the picture, already ugly, becomes worse still.
Much of the overwrought rhetoric cited above appeared in the run-up to Turkey’s municipal elections, which have just concluded. Some commentators interpret the Turkish prime minister’s harsh words as intentionally aimed to improve his party’s chances with the electorate. (If so, the tactic seems to have failed, for the AKP fared less well in this election than in the previous one.) Others see Erdoğan’s rough treatment of Israel’s Shimon Peres at Davos as exposing more visceral, less politically calculated impulses. 
Whatever his motives, Erdoğan’s encouragement of popular anti-Semitism can only damage his country internally and make it appear to be an unreliable actor on the international stage. He himself seems to have recognized as much when he belatedly issued a much-publicized statement declaring, “Those who think to act against Jews will have to face me.” This stern warning was highlighted in some of the mass media, which also registered a cautionary note about the damaging effects of popular anti-Semitism, noting that it is bad for the country and should be restrained.
No one knows for sure what lies ahead, but a couple of conclusions might be drawn from these unnerving events. One has long been known: anti-Semitism is nothing for people in positions of leadership to fool around with, for when released into society, it will have predictably toxic effects. Those on the receiving end of such venom will suffer, but in different ways, so, too, will those who use anti-Semitism for their own ends. 
Pursuing a politics of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish incitement may elevate Turkey’s Islamist image in Iran and win Erdoğan favor in parts of the Arab world. But if Turkey wishes to be seen as a responsible partner among Western nations, it would do well to curb populist appeals that encourage the growth of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism within the public sphere. To do otherwise, as Soner Cagaptay persuasively argues, is to take the country down a path that it does not want to follow.

Alvin H. Rosenfeld is professor of Jewish studies and English at Indiana University.

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