Who lost Turkey? Erdogan! Well, sort of, I suppose I'll have to concede.
While Erdogan will not be there forever, the substance of his ‘stronger Turkey’ foreign policy is popular at home. Certainly, Turkey should stop attacking the West with claims to represent a universal, victimized Islam. And it should stop using refugees as diplomatic leverage with the EU or tampering with the long-stable front line in Cyprus. In short, it should seek to de-escalate tensions rather than fuel them.
Nobody should assume that Turkey will be ‘found’ as the biddable junior partner some in Europe and the US fondly but mistakenly imagine. ‘What the US foreign policy establishment failed to grasp sufficiently was that the United States cannot persuade Turkey whenever it wishes,’ writes Lisel Hintz, the US academic, in her article No One Lost Turkey. ‘This denial of Turkey’s agency is pure hubris.’
It is true that Erdogan jumped on existing trends (including the rising power of rural Islam over secular cities) pushing Turkey back to what is really an imperial great power outlook.
The time of NATO integration was a response to Soviet threats. The passing of that threat and indeed the end of Russia bordering directly on Turkey has ended that centuries-long threat from the north, opening up options elsewhere. So the NATO period was perhaps an interregnum that we think was a new secular normal.
But the intense friction does seem to be caused by Erdogan whose passing from the scene may make it easier for a more powerful and regionally active power to get along with NATO and its neighbors.
But it is really important to accept the take that viewing other countries as lacking agency, thinking that they only react to our actions which we can modulate to get other countries to act the way we want is both self-centered and wrong.
Turkey will do what Turkey will do. They have a long history (way) outside of the Western bloc.
And Turkey's return to imperial goals is part of a trend. Heck, perhaps we should count the British in this trend, too, and say that NATO was their temporary security net.
UPDATE: I don't think it is fair to say that Trump's imposition of sanctions on Turkey is a 180-degree reversal of policy given the ejection of Turkey from the F-35 industry and general disapproval.
Hoping the threat of sanctions would change Erdogan's policy didn't work but abandoning that restraint is no reversal.
