Here is a foreign policy challenge in which President-elect Joe Biden seems to be improving in the face of President Trump: in the face of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan not being friends with the West – or freedom, by the way.
In a 2014 New York Times interview, Biden called Erdogan an “autocrat” and said the United States should support its opponents who want to oust him. “They have to pay a price,” Biden said.
He didn’t pay much in the Obama or Trump years. He has long been President Barack Obama’s favorite leader in the Muslim world, while Trump boasted that he and Erdogan “have been very good friends for a long time, almost from day one.”
That is, when Erdogan has been crushing freedom for at least a decade and at a faster pace since the failed coup in 2016. He used state power to completely neutralize the once free press, while imprisoning journalists in a record rhythm. (Although China beats him for No. 1 this year, 48 to 47 reporters have been jailed.) This year, he began tracking social media again, promoting laws that will make it easier to use them as another spy tool. and state persecution. .
And he was jailed for tens of thousands of political critics – thousands for the “crime” of insult it.
He is also constantly working to end the century-old official secularism of the republic, with policies aimed at creating a “godly generation” of radical Muslims who “will work to build a new civilization” that emphasizes Ottoman history, rather than Western ideals.
Some democracies are alive: After his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, lost the Istanbul primary last year to rival Republican People’s Party, or CHP, Erdogan claimed fraud and forced a removal. But people in Turkey’s largest city (and commercial nerve center) have protested en masse, and Ekrem Imamoglu of CHP is still mayor.
Meanwhile, Erdogan has revived the central government’s war against the Kurds in Turkey and even led that conflict to neighboring Syria – where his interventions in the civil war were more about detaining that nation’s Kurds and supporting its Islamist allies than countering the bloody rule of Bashar al-Qaeda. Assad.
He is also a major driver of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas – and increasingly allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to the dismay of all NATO allies in Turkey.
The Trump administration on Monday sanctioned Turkey for acquiring the S-400, a Russian missile defense system: it bans all US export licenses and loans to the Turkish defense purchasing agency and freezes the assets of the agency’s president, Ismail Demir. But the movement comes quite late; Ankara completed the sale in Russia more than a year ago.
Biden has the opportunity to reset Turkey-US relations. As veteran Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas noted in The Washington Post, “Turkey would not have strayed so far from the West, and the human rights record would not have risen so abysmally” if Trump had taken a heavier line. with Erdogan.
What is needed, she says, is “an American administration that sends a clear message that does not encourage Erdogan’s authoritarian instincts.”
Surely Biden can do so much.
We wish Biden good luck – she’ll need him.