Yet, obviously, their interpretations of the concept of an alliance are extremely different and it might take a long time for them to reach an agreement on a joint definition. Turkey is alienating its US supporters and needs to demonstrate its commitment to its partnership with the West, the Obama administration’s top diplomat on European affairs warned in remarks delivered around two weeks ago, and considered to be “a rare admonishment of a crucial NATO ally.” The US official had cited Turkey’s vote against a US-backed United Nations Security Council resolution on new sanctions against Iran and noted Turkey’s rhetoric after Israel’s deadly assault on a Gaza-bound flotilla on May 31. The Security Council vote came shortly after Turkey and Brazil, to Washington’s annoyance, brokered a nuclear fuel-swap deal with Iran as an effort to delay or avoid new sanctions.The Turkish Foreign Ministry’s response came within days of that “admonishment” from Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Phillip Gordon and was clear and sharp.
“We find it unfair and unfortunate. Unfair because Turkey doesn’t need to prove its loyalty to the Western world, and unfortunate because the fact that these remarks came before Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and US President Barack Obama’s meeting makes one think that there is a problem regarding the timing as well,” spokesman Burak Özügergin said when reminded of Gordon’s remarks in Washington, which came only a few hours before Erdoğan and Obama’s meeting in Toronto on the sidelines of a G-20 summit.
On suggestions that Turkey has been moving away from the West, US President Obama joined the debate earlier this week.
Although the dominant tone in Obama’s remarks could be and have widely been interpreted as a tribute to Turkey’s critical and strategic importance as a NATO ally, one particular expression was actually totally contradictory to how Turkey assesses its position within the Western world.
“I think the most important thing we can do with Turkey is to continue to engage, continue to hold out the advantages for them of integration with the West, while still respecting their own unique qualities and not acting fearful about the fact that they are a Muslim -- predominantly Muslim country, and that’s going to reflect itself in its democracy,” Obama said in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera published on Thursday.
Certain expressions which are used within the context of Turkey’s relationship with the Western world such as “a part of the Western world” or “whether Turkey’s ties with the West are breaking off” are particularly annoying for Ankara since it implies an annexation of Turkey to the West, or at least affiliation of Turkey with the West as though it were an outsider.
Thus Obama’s expression of “Turkey’s integration with the West” has led to a similar connotation in the Turkish capital.
“Turkey is not only a part of the West, but is in and of itself the West,” Özügergin told Sunday’s Zaman. “Like, for instance, how Greece is a different color of Europe, like how Germany is a different color of Europe, Turkey is just a different color of Europe as well,” he said. Turkey’s position within the Western world is not a position which could be subject to a “breaking off,” he added.
Subject, object, dependency
Turkey and the US do not have a relationship in which each side questions the other side’s authority, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said on Tuesday, in a bid to elaborate on Ankara’s interpretation of its alliance relationship with Washington.
“In bilateral relations, differences of views may sometimes create synergy, too, and that’s what is happening. I’m trying to protect the interests of the Turkish Republic. And our interests are not having sanctions, coups, conflicts and nuclear weapons in our region. Everybody has to fulfill the requirements of the alliance relationship,” Davutoğlu said.
“We don’t have a relationship with the US where everybody questions each other’s authority. Our alliance relationship does not sway. If we don’t have any differences of views, then one side becomes the object and the other side becomes the subject and this leads to dependency. And society’s psychology doesn’t tolerate this [dependency],” he added.
In remarks delivered at the Chatham House think tank in London on Thursday during an official bilateral visit to the UK capital, Davutoğlu said that the question, “Are we losing Turkey?” is extremely annoying. Such a question is humiliating for Turkey and Turkey is not an object to be lost or to be found, he said, underlining that such a question should not be asked by anybody if the parties are in an alliance and a union.
“By definition, the essence of a real partnership is actually about the handling of differences of views in this relationship. The United States is still insisting on speaking in terms of the Cold War vis-a-vis requirements of an alliance relationship, while Turkey is tirelessly trying to explain that the definition and content of this alliance relationship has to be updated,” Turkish diplomatic sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Sunday’s Zaman.
Déjà vu: Yet another concept floated for defining prospects
Whenever a crisis looms over bilateral relations between the United States and Turkey, either because of an explicit rift on a particular issue or because of a new administration in Washington or a new government in Ankara -- or just ahead of a key summit between the administrative leaders of the two countries -- a hasty effort emerges to redefine the nature and future of the decades-old relationship between the two countries.
The Obama administration’s irritation with Turkey’s vote against a US-backed UN Security Council resolution on new sanctions against Iran adopted on June 9 and Turkish rhetoric after Israel’s deadly assault on an aid flotilla on May 31 appear to be at the center of the latest efforts to find a new description to the nature of the future relationship between the two NATO allies.
The most outstanding of those concepts or descriptions -- offered nowadays by prominent analysts specializing in Turkey-US relations as an appropriate adjective for future relations -- is “transactional.” The adjective has been circulating after the two aforementioned developments, which came at the expense of Washington’s uneasiness and before the June 26 bilateral meeting between Erdoğan and Obama in Toronto.
Analysts such as Ömer Taşpınar, a faculty member at the US National War College and a researcher at the Brookings Institution, and Henri Barkey, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, suggested that Ankara and Washington have been heading toward a new paradigm of “transactional partnership,” basically defining such a partnership as a “give-and-take relationship.”
Nonetheless, Ankara doesn’t seem to be eager to “buy” such a paradigm with regards to its relations with Washington, since such a paradigm would have meant the degradation of the relationship to a level where only mutual interests would be subject to that relationship.
“Such a definition has a limiting characteristic. Yet the circulation of this concept is also an admittance of the fact that right now things are not really great between the two capitals. It can also be interpreted as an attempt by some decision and policy-makers in Washington to salvage what can be salvaged in this relationship,” the same diplomatic sources told Sunday’s Zaman.
“This is not the tone we would like to see in our relationship with the United States, because it would be ignorance of the decades-old alliance relationship, which has a physical ground and which is based on values,” the same sources added, as an indication that Turkey will not stop explaining to the US its interpretation of the concept of “alliance.”
Diplomacy
