The press coverage of the recent NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal makes it appear that the 27 member military coalition is unified and is still heavily influenced and controlled by the military and economic power of the United States. However, a judicious review of the 61 year old intergovernmental military alliance reveal that some members states are beginning to openly reveal their recognition of China as the next world superpower. Perhaps no greater example of China’s ever-growing economic power was the recent decision by the Turkish government, NATO’s second largest standing military force, to hold its annual Anatolian Eagle military exercise not with the United States and Israel as it had done from 2001 to 2008, but with the China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF).
Although most Americans have been shielded from the news bulletin of Turkey holding a military exercise with China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), the information reveals the dangers of maintaining a Cold War military alliance in the ever changing 21st century. Unable to disband NATO after the end of the Cold War in 1989 due to the political power of the military industrial congressional complex in America the foreign military alliance of the Cold War era is obsolete, outdated and is undermining American national security. An in-depth analysis of Turkey, a country with the world’s 4th largest military and NATO’s second largest standing military force, reveals how outdated and obsolete the Cold War era military alliance has become.
Turkey and NATO during the Cold War
Considered a strategic NATO ally, Turkey has benefited from a U.S. policy that is long on military assistance and short on constructive criticism. From the beginning of Turkey’s membership in NATO, largely a political victory against the Soviet Union, the United States has had to walk a fine line between advocating democracy and human rights to the world, while allowing Turkey to discriminate against its Kurdish minority population and tolerate Turkey being ruled by a military coup during the 1980s.
Due to Great Britain no longer able to supply economic and military aid to Greece and Turkey, the United States and the Truman Administration decided to support Greece and Turkey so they would not fall under the sphere of Soviet influence. This led to the decision to provide Turkey with Marshall Aid resources in 1947 and eventual NATO membership in 1952. The new geo-political importance of Turkey allowed both of the leaders of Ankara and Washington to benefit from the military and economic alliances. Ankara benefited by being able to continue their repressive policy towards the Kurds, while the United States benefited by having an ally in the Cold War and by acquiring a strategic location for its military and intelligence gathering operations on the Soviet Union.
While the United States never publicly lectured Ankara on its treatment of its Kurdish ethnic monitory population, the Johnson administration did send a letter in 1964 questioning some of the actions by the Turkish government. Similar to the two-faced American support for Turkey during the Cold War, the spurious justification for NATO during the Cold War to protect Western European countries from communism was a mockery considering that over a quarter of the Italian population up until 1978 voted for the Partito Comunista Italiano (Communist Party of Italy).
Due to Cold War politics, the United States Congress, along with a grateful military industrial complex, approved the sale of billions of dollars of military equipment to Turkey. In reality though the Soviet Union was the least of Turkey’s worries and instead, Turkey used the arms sale from the United States to build up its military to challenge its long time Aegean foe Greece on its western border and to help suppress the Kurdish rebellion on its eastern border. By turning a blind eye to Turkish human rights abuses in the Kurdistan region and Turkey’s 1974 military invasion of Cyprus, the United States saw Turkey both as a secular state with a predominately Muslim population and as a buffer between Europe and the Middle East.
The 1980 Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement between the United States and Turkey had the goal of achieving political influence in Turkey through military arms purchases and economic cooperation. The agreement allowed the U.S. to build military bases on Turkish soil; in exchange for helping to modernize Turkey’s military. In addition to gaining political influence with the country, the agreement also increased the power of the Turkish military, which is widely known to be highly secular and is often referred to as the "inner state". Unlike the United States, where the president is commander in chief of the armed forces, in Turkey, the military is not clearly controlled by civilian leaders. Long seen as the founder of the republic, guardian of the regime, and the guardian of secularism, the 1980 Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement with the United States greatly influenced the power of the Turkish military.
The 1980 Defense and Economic Cooperation Agreement opened the door to a flood of U.S. arms transfers, and since 1980, the U.S. has shipped $9 billion worth of arms to Turkey and provided $6.5 billion in grant and loan military aid to purchase U.S. equipment. Put more directly, American defense corporations like United Technologies, Boeing, and Grumman were able to sell their weapons to the Turks and the American taxpayer would subsidize the sale. A textbook example of corporate welfare. The corporate welfare continued until 1999, when Congress finally phased out this type of military aid to both Greece and Turkey out of a recognition that these relatively well-off states could finance their own arms purchases. Before FY 1999, Turkey had been the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid.
Turkey and China
Once valued as a deterrent to the Soviet threat, after the end of the Cold War, Turkey is now considered a key ally by the United States in stopping terrorism, drug trafficking, and Islamic fundamentalism from seeping across the Bosporus Straits. During the 1990s and 2000s, Turkey was used by Washington political leaders acting on behalf of American petroleum interests as a pipeline route from the Caspian Sea region, avoiding and isolating an oil and natural gas pipeline route through Iran. During this time, Turkey also won U.S. favor by supporting the 1991 Gulf War, participating in Bosnian peacekeeping operation, and providing a base for U.S. fighter planes monitoring the "no-fly-zone" in northern Iraq.
In 2003 however, the geo-political tectonic plates began to grind ever slowly towards the east with the election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a leader with a background of political Islam and a leader with an agenda of bringing Turkey into the European Union. The unilateralist decision of the United States to attack Iraq put Turkey is a very awkward situation. While the United States believed that it decades long military support of Turkey would gain it the right to launch the U.S. 4th Infantry Division from Turkey and be part of a pincer movement on Saddam Hussein's regime, it appears that Erdogan and the new leaders of Turkey were more concerned about appeasing leaders of the European Union, who were not supporters of the Iraq War, and a economic bloc Turkey was aspiring to join.
As the 2003 attack on Iraq by the United States has proven to be one of biggest mistakes in American foreign policy, the recent eastern drift of Turkey away from Washington and Brussels reflects the changing regional politics of the Middle East, a cooling of relations with Israel, one of Turkey’s strongest allies in the region and the diminishing power of the Turkish military in domestic affairs. As Arnaud de Borchgrave, a member of the Atlantic Council recently wrote:
Erdogan no longer sees Turkey's role in NATO as a priority. And to make sure there was no possibility of the country's military staging what would be a fifth coup since 1960, a group of 52 military commanders were arrested last February. They were allegedly planning to blow up mosques as a signal for the military to overthrow the Islamic-oriented government.
Supported by a robust and growing economy, Turkey’s economy is expected to grow by 10.3 percent in 2010. This increase, which matched China’s as the fastest growing economy in 2010 among the Group of 20 major economies, is enabling Turkey sustain a 10-year military modernization and revitalization plan. The strong economy in addition to the recent problems affecting the Euro, have influenced Turkey to begin to look towards China for its long-term economic development. As a recent New York Times article highlighted, the decision by Turkey to look to China instead of Europe for long-term economic growth also compliments
China’s broad, strategic push into Europe. It is snapping up assets depressed by the global financial crisis and becoming a significant partner of other hard-hit European nations. Ultimately, analysts say, Beijing hopes to achieve not just more business for its own companies, but also greater influence over the economic policies set in the power corridors of Brussels and Germany.
Turkey, Iran, and Israel
Further complicating matters for leaders in Washington and Brussels is the recent warming of relations between Ankara and the Islamic Republic of Iran and the strained relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv. While most mainstream political pundits will scrutinize the warming of relations between Iran and Turkey from the Islamic point of view, a more astute and balanced analysis would look at the relations of the two countries from the natural resource and energy point of view. Currently Turkey is heavily dependant on Russia for its natural gas energy and it is a rational move by Turkey to look to Iran to diversify its sources of energy. The recent diplomatic move by the Erdogan government to persuade Iran to suspend its secret nuclear weapons program was an example of the more independent regional role Turkey is assuming in the region.
Another sign of the tectonic shift of Turkey away from the west and the changing dynamics of the Middle East, is the recent deterioration of diplomatic relations between Ankara and Tel Aviv. While Turkey was the only Muslim country to recognize Israel, and a close military alliance between the two countries was so strong that the Israeli air force could use Turkish air space for training and for an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear installations, the Israeli invasion of Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009 which killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis quickly eroded relations between the two countries. Making international headlines in January 2009 during the Davos World Economic Forum, Mr. Erdogan walked out of a discussion after an angry exchange with the Israeli president, Shimon Peres, on the Israeli military offensive in Gaza. Further damaging relations between the two countries was the Israeli commando attack on a flotilla of Turkish vessels bound for Gaza with relief supplies. Making matters worse, Israel branded the civilians onboard the flotilla as activists in the Islamic group Insani Yardim Vakfi, on par with al-Qaida. This accusation did not go over very well with Turkey as the group is a key supporter of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ruling party.
Contrary to the fears of most Americans, the close relations that Ankara is developing with China and other regional governments in the area such as Tehran and Damascus can actually be beneficial for America in the long run. Unfortunately, due to the immense political and financial power of the military industrial congressional complex in America, leaders in Washington and Brussels will look at the world from behind their fortified bureaucratic compounds, while China gains more political power in the world through economic cooperation and development deals.
Perhaps Arnaud de Borchgrave, a member of the Atlantic Council, and a senior fellow at the conservative leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies, put it best when he recently wrote:
One cynical Turkish ex-foreign minister, speculating about the Afghan war, confided, "The way things are going, your Congress will have made Afghanistan secure for China to make a deal with a new Taliban regime to exploit the $3 trillion worth of minerals verified by U.S. intelligence."
Turkish officials who see the global balance of power trending eastward can also see over the horizon a great Turkic nation that spans most of central Asia. For them, this is a more exciting vista than a slow NATO retreat from Afghanistan. Or a European Union, where Turkey's nemesis Greece, the sick man of Europe, almost collapsed the painfully erected House of Europe.
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