Erdogan positions powerful Turkish military as backbone of regional strategy
By James M. Dorsey
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
ushered in the new year, pledging to employ his country’s military to secure
Turkey’s place in a rebalanced new world order.
Mr. Erdogan spelled
out his vision when he inserted himself on December 30 into an
address by his defense minister, Hulusi Akar, to several hundred masked Turkish
and Azeri military officers in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku.
Speaking on the loudspeaker of
Mr. Akar’s handphone that the defense minister held up to the microphone, Mr. Erdogan
compared Turkish military interventions,
foreign bases and/or participation in United Nations peacekeeping missions in
lands of the former Soviet Union, Kosovo, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Qatar to
the creation during World War One of the Islamic Army of the Caucasus by Enver
Pasha, the Ottoman war minister.
The Islamic Army captured Baku
in the last days of World War One but failed to cement a basis for military support
in the century since for pan-Turkist or Turanist ideologies that seek to unite
peoples of Turkic origin.
Critics, nonetheless, assert
that Turkish support for last year’s Caucasus
war in which Azerbaijan defeated Armenia constituted a
step in that direction.
Mr. Erdogan, however, appears
to define Turkey’s place in a new world order as Turkish
leadership of a broader Muslim world of which lands
populated by Turkic ethnicities are part.
“The Turkish military, with a
past full of glory and honor, will continue to fulfill…the task assigned to
them in our country and all over the world… I wish our soldiers success, who
fight to preserve peace, calm and stability in many places from Syria to Libya,
from Somalia to Kosovo, from Afghanistan to Qatar,” Mr. Erdogan said.
Mr. Erdogan’s broader focus
has not stopped his defense minister from stepping up meetings with representatives
of Turkic minorities, until recently the preserve of a separate government
department.
“Ankara’s interest in its
ethnic kin abroad has markedly perked since the flare-up of the
Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia in late September,”
said Turkish military analyst Metin
Gurcan, referring to the disputed Armenian enclave that is legally part of
Azerbaijan..
Mr. Erdogan made his Baku remarks
against the backdrop of heightened
strains with Iran, efforts by Turkey’s Mediterranean
detractors backed by the United Arab Emirates to stymie Turkish efforts to
expand its access to regional gas deposits, and domestic criticism of his massive
expenditure on religious soft power at a time of economic
hardship.
Mr. Erdogan’s emphasis on
military power was likely to complicate his overtures
to Israel with which he has had tense relations in past years
in a bid to ease potentially difficult dealings with the incoming
administration of President-elect Joe Biden.
Mr. Biden has criticized
Turkey’s abysmal record on human rights and the rule of law and is unlikely to
look kindly at NATO-member Turkey’s acquisition of an advanced Russian
anti-missile defense system.
Israel backed last month’s admission
of the UAE as an observer to the Cairo-based Eastern
Mediterranean Gas Forum that groups Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Jordan, and
Palestine alongside the Jewish state.
Turkey has denounced the forum
as an effort to deprive it of its economic rights in the Eastern Mediterranean
and last year dispatched an exploration vessel to disputed waters.
The move by the UAE, one of
Turkey’s foremost rivals in a struggle for dominant political and religious
influence in a swath of land stretching from the Atlantic coast of Africa into
Central Asia, potentially constitutes a change in Emirati strategy.
Middle
East scholar Samuel Ramani argued recently that the UAE’s hard
power and coercive efforts to block Turkish advances had failed. Those efforts
included military backing of Libyan rebel leader Khalifa Haftar and threats to sanction
Algeria for its stepped-up cooperation with Turkey.
“In recent months, the UAE’s
efforts to forge an Arab consensus against Erdogan’s ambitions have unraveled.
Despite Iraq’s periodic frustrations with Turkish cross-border strikes on the
PKK, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has courted Turkey as a regional
partner. In an even greater blow to the UAE’s anti-Turkey agenda, Saudi
Arabia’s King Salman struck a conciliatory tone with Erdogan after their
November 20 discussion,” Mr. Ramani said.
Mr. Ramani was referring to recent
Saudi overtures to Turkey, with which it has been on a
collision course since the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, as
well as the outlawed Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) that increasingly wages its
intermittent 30-year old guerrilla war against Turkey from bases in the remote
mountains of pre-dominantly Kurdish northern Iraq.
“The seemingly
collapsing foundations of the UAE’s anti-Turkey strategy suggests that Abu
Dhabi needs to rethink its approach to containing Erdogan’s ambitions... the
UAE could devote more resources towards containing Turkey in the eastern
Mediterranean and Sub-Saharan Africa,” Mr. Ramani said, suggesting that the
Emirates may pivot to a soft power approach.
That would
likely entail stepped up competition with Turkey in the provision of emergency
and development aid to third countries as well as increased rivalry for
religious soft power in the Muslim world.
The UAE has
cast itself as a paragon of a moderate and tolerant albeit statist strand of
Islam as opposed to Turkey’s more strident advocacy of a heavily nationalist
tinted political interpretation of the faith.
The UAE has
been on the warpath against political Islam for more than a decade. It has
designated the Turkish-backed Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization
and backed French President Emmanuel Macron and
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in their crackdown on Islamist and Turkish nationalist
groups.
Mr. Erdogan
has for more than a decade rejected notions of more moderate and more radical
strands of Islam. “Islam cannot be classified as
moderate or not… Animosity
(towards Islam), unfortunately, strengthens the scenarios that there is a so-called
clash of civilizations in the world. Those, who defend such speculations, may
go further to identify terrorism with Islam which is based on peace,” he asserts.
Taken by his
word, Mr. Erdogan was suggesting with his year-end remarks in Baku that as far
as he is concerned, his strategy of hard and soft power, in contrast to the
UAE, is working and is likely to continue to shape Turkish policy in the coming
year.
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