BY MICHAEL
RUBIN ON
24/03/2016- NEWSWEEK
The situation in Turkey is
bad and getting worse.
It’s not just the deterioration in security amidst a wave of
terrorism. Public debt might be stable, but private debt is
out of control, the tourism sector is in
free-fall and the decline in the
currency has
impacted every citizen’s buying power.
There is a
broad sense, election results notwithstanding, that President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan is out of control.
He is imprisoning opponents, seizing newspapers left
and right and building palaces at the rate of a mad sultan or aspiring caliph. In recent weeks, he has once
again threatened to dissolve the
constitutional court.
Corruption
is rife. His son Bilal reportedly fled
Italy on
a forged Saudi diplomatic passport as the Italian police closed in on him in an alleged money
laundering scandal.
His
outbursts are raising eyebrows both
in Turkey and abroad. Even members of his ruling party whisper about his increasing paranoia which,
according to some Turkish officials, has gotten so bad that he seeks to install
anti-aircraft missiles at his palace to prevent airborne men-in-black from
targeting him in a snatch-and-grab operation.
Turks—and
the Turkish military—increasingly recognize that Erdogan is taking Turkey to
the precipice. By first bestowing legitimacy upon imprisoned Kurdish leader
Abdullah Öcalan with renewed negotiations and then precipitating renewed
conflict, he has taken Turkey down a path in which there is no chance of victory
and a high chance of de facto partition.
After all,
if civil war renews as in the 1980s and early 1990s, Turkey’s Kurds will be
hard-pressed to settle for anything less, all the more so given the precedent
now established by their brethren in Iraq and Syria.
Erdogan long
ago sought to kneecap the Turkish military. For the first decade of his rule,
both the U.S. government and European Union cheered him on. But that was before
even Erdogan’s most ardent foreign apologists recognized the depth of his
descent into madness and autocracy.
So if the
Turkish military moves to oust Erdogan and place his inner circle behind bars,
could they get away with it?
In the realm
of analysis rather than advocacy, the answer is yes. At this point in election
season, it is doubtful that the Obama administration would do more than
castigate any coup leaders, especially if they immediately laid out a clear
path to the restoration of democracy.
Nor would
Erdogan engender the type of sympathy that Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi did.
When Morsi was ousted, his commitment to democracy was still subject to debate.
That debate
is now moot when it comes to the Turkish strongman. Neither the Republican nor
Democratic front-runners would put U.S. prestige on the line to seek a
return to the status quo ante. They might offer lip service against a coup, but
they would work with the new regime.
Coup leaders
might moot European and American human rights and civil society criticism and
that of journalists by immediately freeing all detained journalists and
academics and by returning seized newspapers and television stations to their
rightful owners.
Turkey’s
NATO membership is no deterrent to action: Neither Turkey nor Greece lost their
NATO membership after previous coups. Should a new leadership engage sincerely
with Turkey’s Kurds, Kurds might come onboard.
Neither
European nor American public opinion would likely be sympathetic to the
execution of Erdogan, his son and son-in-law, or key aides like Egemen Bağış
and Cüneyd Zapsu, although they would accept a trial for corruption and long
incarceration.
Erdoğan
might hope friends would rally to his side, but most of his friends—both
internationally and inside Turkey—are attracted to his power. Once out of his
palace, he may find himself very much alone, a shriveled and confused figure
like Saddam Hussein at his own trial.
I make no
predictions, but given rising discord in Turkey as well as the likelihood that
the Turkish military would suffer no significant consequence should it imitate
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s game plan in Egypt, no one should be surprised if
Turkey’s rocky politics soon get rockier.
Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. A former Pentagon official, his
major research areas are the Middle East, Turkey, Iran and diplomacy.
