Biden looks to harness NATO’s rogue sultan

President Erdogan flouts the alliance’s norms but can still prove a useful ally against Russia.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in Ankara. Picture: AFP.

Turkey’s restless sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has everybody guessing. Is he conspiring with Russia to split NATO? Is he America’s indispensable Eurasian ally? He can’t be both. Or can he?

For Joe Biden, next week’s meeting with the Turkish President on the fringes of the NATO summit will be a crucial one. Biden has promised to roll back the authoritarian tide, to renew the moral core of US foreign policy. An oped written by the American President ahead of his trip to Europe casts both the G7 and NATO summits in that light; the relatively short piece mentions democratic values 14 times. Biden’s first task, then, is how to deal with a fellow NATO leader whose democratic instincts atrophied long ago.

Turkey joined NATO in 1952 and with its proximity and hostility to the sprawling Soviet empire became a real prize in the Cold War. Western policy was tailored accordingly. Turkey sent a contingent of troops to the Korean War; in return American aid flowed into what seemed to be a liberalising Turkey.

Now, however, Erdogan demands a degree of strategic autonomy alongside NATO membership. It is Turkey that waters down Western calls to punish the Belarusian President, Alexander Lukashenko, for diverting and forcing down a Ryanair jet, that tempers criticism of Vladimir Putin. And it was Turkey that took the jaw-dropping step of negotiating the delivery of S-400 air defence systems from Moscow.

The Trump era reaction was to withhold the new American F-35 fighter jets from Erdogan. The think-tank chatter was that Erdogan had become too much of a maverick, that his NATO membership should be suspended. After all, Turkish officers would have to be trained by Russian experts in the S-400. That ran against the whole purpose of the alliance. And his response to a botched army coup in 2016 saw Erdogan purging wide swathes of the NATO-friendly officer class. Choices had to be made.

Biden will probably use the F-35 ban as a bargaining chip. His team understands that if Turkey is to change course, rediscover the merits of being inside a quintessentially Western defence organisation, both sides will have to be engaged in a constant negotiation. Turkey has changed since the 1950s but so has NATO; managing the alliance will have to be more than an appeal to build a defensive line of democracies against an aggressive Russia. It will be a transactional alliance.

That has left Erdogan free to roam. He is at loggerheads with (NATO member) Greece in the eastern Mediterranean, he suggests that Israel’s leaders will “only be satisfied when sucking blood”, he launches air raids on Iraqi Kurds, he is at odds with the US on Syrian Kurds, he is trying to lever himself into (NATO member) Bulgaria’s domestic politics by openly supporting the Turkish minority there. The Caucasus, the Levant, Syria, Libya (where he successfully backed the government against the forces of a rebel general backed by NATO member France) – there is scarcely an area of tension in the former Ottoman territories where Erdogan doesn’t have skin in the game.

But Erdogan is biddable on Russia. His current hyperactivity is down to advances by the Turkish arms industry, which has developed new generations of bomb-laden drones. These proved successful in Libya and, most significantly, to Azerbaijan’s short war against Russian-backed Armenia. The Bayraktar drones wiped out large chunks of Armenia’s tank-led army. Now other countries nervous about Russia are interested in, or have already bought, Turkish drones – a cheap, effective way of slowing down Russian armour. Poland, Kazakhstan and Latvia have the drones on their shopping list.

So, crucially, does Ukraine. Erdogan met his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, in April when Kiev was rattled by the sudden appearance of 100,000 Russian troops on its borders. For Biden that is an interesting development. It gives the US an additional way of credibly defending Ukraine without having to ship over US weapons. And in this case at least Erdogan won’t be a fickle ally. Since the days of Catherine the Great, Russia has been a competitor to Turkey in the Black Sea.

Biden may speak up for political prisoners when he sees Erdogan but he has already taken the measure of the Turkish leader as a useful player. If the US is going to largely withdraw from the Middle East it will need Turkey to stabilise the region, even if it does so in its own interests. And the alternative to Erdogan – the next election is 2023 – might not be able to hold the country together in quite the same way.

Erdogan’s military adventurism is partly diversionary, to deflect attention from a collapsing currency and multiple discontents. But the Realpolitiker in Biden, rather than the human rights evangelist, is almost certainly nervous that political instability in Turkey could turn into a cascadingly chaotic version of Lebanon. And suck in the US willy-nilly.

Better then to accept the status quo, even if Erdogan’s ambitions to be a regional hegemon end up unsettling NATO. After all, even Angela Merkel swallowed the toad and sealed a halfway successful deal with Erdogan to hold up Syrian migrants from overwhelming the European Union.

The US, Britain and Turkey are the big defence spenders in NATO. Lose Turkey and you don’t just open up a dangerous front in the Middle East, you lose the cash. The NATO summit confronts Britain as well as Biden with a sadly familiar dilemma: we know Erdogan is a rogue, but can we turn him into our rogue?

THE TIMES