The West Should Look Past Erdogan and Deal With Turkey

For the still mostly liberal West, Turkey has become that deeply irritating, MAGA-baseball-cap-sporting cousin, seen only grudgingly once a year for Thanksgiving, because he always sounds off on women, wokeness or the evils of life-saving vaccines. By now the rest of the family has tuned him out so thoroughly they don’t even hear when he tries to reconnect.

As with most families doomed by circumstance to be part of each other’s lives, that’s a mistake.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his government have been gradually dialing down tensions with the US and Europe in some areas, even as they raise them in others, for about two years now. This week, unconfirmed Turkish media reports suggest another olive branch might be on the way: the offer to settle a long-running dispute with the US by crating up the S-400 air defense battery it bought from Russia seven years ago, and allowing US inspectors to ensure it stays that way.

The S-400 system was once a huge story, a demonstrative middle-finger gesture Erdogan made to Washington shortly after surviving an attempted coup he blamed on the US. It was also a form of protection at a time the Turkish leader felt alienated from supposed security allies, and therefore vulnerable.

So, to secure against any troublemaking from Moscow, Turkey’s historic rival for regional dominance, Erdogan agreed to buy the Kremlin’s long-range missile defense system and signed gas and energy deals with Russia. If that meant upsetting the rest of the NATO family (as President Vladimir Putin knew it would), all the better.

Independence from the West had also meant ending reliance on US-dominated global financial markets, which Erdogan liked to describe as the “interest-rate lobby.” He accused this supposed cabal of financiers of trying to secure higher rates at Turkey’s expense, because - in a dire case of ideology trouncing empirical evidence - he believed higher rates to cause inflation.

That policy ended in a predictable disaster, driving inflation above 70%. So, after securing reelection to a further five-year term last May, Erdogan returned to financial orthodoxy. And having first helped Putin to flout US and European sanctions over Ukraine, Turkey also began to comply (encouraged by the threat of third-party penalties for its banks).

Earlier this year, Turkey’s Baykar Technologies started building a factory to co-produce armed drones in Ukraine. In June, unlike Brazil, India and some other regional powers seeking more distance from Washington, Turkey signed the joint communique at the Geneva peace conference Ukraine had organized in support of its 10-point plan for ending the war on favorable terms. And on Thursday, Turkey’s foreign minister attended an informal meeting of European Union colleagues for the first time in five years. According to the Financial Times, the lunch session ran over the allotted duration and was seen as a broadly positive effort at Turkish outreach.