It’s Time for America and Turkey to Reconcile

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s relationship with the United States has long been tumultuous, and his abrupt cancellation of his trip to the White House in May was no exception. The meeting would have been Erdogan’s first during the Biden administration—the long-delayed invitation a sign of the dysfunction between the once close allies. But then, after weeks of preparation, the Turkish president called it off, seemingly upset that the White House failed to formally announce the visit two weeks in advance.

By canceling the May meeting, Turkey missed an opportunity for a much-needed reset with the United States. During his administration, former President Donald Trump developed a good rapport with Erdogan, but his personalized approach paralyzed traditional diplomatic channels and institutional links between the two countries without delivering tangible results. U.S.-Turkish relations worsened when Ankara decided to purchase a Russian missile system in 2019, triggering U.S. sanctions. After Joe Biden became president, his administration kept Erdogan at arm’s length, hoping to signal its disapproval of Turkey’s democratic backsliding and growing entanglement with Russia. Following Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel, Erdogan’s harsh criticism of U.S. support for Israel’s military offensive in the Gaza Strip combined with his own public embrace of Hamas made it more difficult for the Biden administration to soften its approach to Turkey, especially as it prepared to launch Biden’s reelection campaign. But earlier this year, positive momentum in the relationship began to build when Ankara agreed to end its yearlong obstruction of Sweden’s bid to join NATO, and Washington approved Turkey’s purchase of F-16 fighter jets in return. Erdogan’s visit to Washington was meant to be the final pillar of this three-part deal.

After the latest diplomatic breakdown, the Biden administration may be tempted to return to its earlier approach of keeping Erdogan at a distance. But at a time of global mayhem, neither Turkey nor the United States has the luxury to remain estranged. Turkey, with its Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts, sits in proximity to both Gaza and Ukraine, putting it in a pivotal position between the two wars now occupying policymakers in Washington. It is a major regional military power and has a manufacturing economy. Turkey’s neighborhood includes regions of contestation between the United States on one side and China, Iran, or Russia on the other. For Ankara, stronger ties with Washington would help it balance an imperially minded Russia, boost economic growth, and keep its foothold in any future European security order.

A return to the two countries’ ironclad Cold War alliance may not be in the cards. But a new, mature relationship—one that is more transactional and allows the occasional infidelity—is a better alternative than drifting apart, which would leave Turkey isolated and the United States deprived of a capable regional partner. Even if all a reset accomplishes is a Turkish tilt toward the West, the United States stands to reap significant geopolitical advantages.

A DIPLOMATIC OPENING

Now is a particularly good time to reach out to Erdogan. After his long-dominant Justice and Development Party faced its largest-ever defeat in local elections in late March, Turkey’s strongman is vulnerable. Young, urban voters have already signaled their desire for an alternative to his 20-plus-year reign. Erdogan’s experiments with unorthodox economic policies and strident nationalism produced no tangible benefits for younger Turks, and discontent with the state of the economy, institutional erosion, and brain drain are persistent problems for his regime. Erdogan and his team have begun to acknowledge that the solution to Turkey’s economic and geopolitical troubles may lie in a closer relationship with the West. He will attend the G-7 summit on June 13, for example, at the invitation of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. Erdogan will continue to seek opportunities to reduce his international isolation and present himself as a statesman to his domestic audience.

Still, there will be limits to any reconciliation with Washington. Erdogan has cultivated a post-Western identity in Turkey and built a foreign policy to go with it, moving away from Turkey’s traditional Cold War ties to Europe and the United States and engaging in a geopolitical balancing act that often irritates Ankara’s Western allies. Turkey’s leaders want to remain in NATO. Yet they also are keen to continue to trade with Russia, they talk of Western decline, and they position the country as a champion of the developing world, investing in economic and defense relationships across Africa and Central Asia.

There is no turning back the clock to a time when Turkey was firmly a part of the transatlantic fold. Yet Washington can still harness Erdogan’s ambitions for strategic autonomy to help balance Chinese, Iranian, and Russian influence in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East. The West looks warily at Turkey’s assertiveness, but this active foreign policy may in fact be the solution to the West’s problems with Turkey. The country’s geographic location, its regional clout, and its rising defense industrial capacity make Turkey a valuable partner for navigating multipolarity and disorder.

The United States stands to reap significant geopolitical advantages from a Turkish tilt toward the West.

Erdogan’s refusal to break with Russian President Vladimir Putin has been an irritant in U.S.-Turkish relations, but it is unlikely to turn into anything worse. The relationship is stitched together at the top by personal ties between Erdogan and Putin, who both seem to believe that the age of Western dominance is over and that each has a historic mission to rebuild a lost empire. But Russian-Turkish cooperation, too, has limits; the Ottoman and Russian Empires fought more than a dozen wars, and Ankara and Moscow still compete today. They jockey for influence in the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the Middle East. They have fought proxy wars in Libya, where the Turkish military intervened on behalf of the UN-backed Government of National Accord while Russia’s Wagner paramilitary company aligned with rival forces led by General Khalifa Haftar, and in Syria, where Turkey backed the opposition militias fighting the Russian-supported regime of Bashar al-Assad. In 2020, Russian fighter jets killed 33 Turkish soldiers in Idlib in northern Syria.

Erdogan and Putin still manage to shake hands amid these conflicts because both draw economic and strategic benefits from the relationship. Turkey’s military presence in Syria, for example, is allowed as part of a deal with Russia. The Russian president humors Erdogan’s desire for regional authority in a way the West does not, and Erdogan, in turn, has avoided taking a firm position on the war in Ukraine.

Turkey plays a unique role in this war; as one former senior U.S. official put it, Ankara is “deep in both ends of the equation.” It has maintained ties to Kyiv and to Moscow out of caution, cynicism, and a degree of opportunism. Although Turkey has refused to enforce Western economic sanctions on Russia and has profited from cheap Russian gas, soaring trade, and Russian tourists who are no longer able to travel to Europe, it has also been selling military equipment and drones to Kyiv. Turkey has quietly entered into dozens of joint defense projects with Ukrainian firms and restricted the passage of Russian navy ships through the Turkish Straits. Erdogan may not want to break off ties with Putin, but he is well aware that an independent Ukraine with a military presence in the Black Sea is essential to Turkey’s efforts to balance against Russia.

START WITH DEFENSE

Had it not been for the war in Ukraine, Ankara’s relations with the Biden administration may have been much worse than they are now. The conflict has highlighted the importance of Turkey’s geographic location and forced Washington to recognize that Turkey’s participation in NATO, however capricious, is critical for the security of the Black Sea region and Europe as a whole.

But realizing the benefits of Turkish participation requires a healthier degree of coordination between Turkey and the United States. There is still little interaction at the executive level, although Washington is attempting to rebuild institutional ties that have weakened over the past decade. The two countries have set up strategic dialogues that cover issues such as defense, economic cooperation, and the future of Syria. Progress is slow, but these lower-level links may be more consequential than a presidential visit as Turkey and the United States chart out the next phase of their relationship.

The natural place to build on this momentum is with defense industrial cooperation. During the Cold War, Turkey was one of the top buyers of U.S. weapons systems, and it, in turn, benefited from NATO’s security umbrella. But defense collaboration has since declined. Over the past decade in particular, Turkey’s Western partners, responding to Turkey’s democratic backsliding at home and bellicosity in the region, have grown reluctant to sell arms to Ankara. Turkey’s decision to purchase the Russian S-400 missile system in 2019 sharpened the divide: the United States imposed sanctions on Turkey, and concerns about the risk of Russia gathering intelligence through the weapons system triggered Ankara’s expulsion from NATO’s F-35 fighter jet program. Until the recent F-16 fighter jet deal, the United States (like most NATO allies) had not made a single defense sale to Turkey in six years. If Ankara and Washington can agree on a way to deactivate and monitor the S-400s, resolving the issue for good, they can clear the way to a new defense partnership.

Turkey is a valuable partner for navigating multipolarity and disorder.

And while Turkey faced barriers to purchasing Western weapons, its domestic defense industry expanded. Turkey’s defense spending as a percentage of GDP has historically been high, and the country now meets 80 percent of its own military needs, from drones to tanks to warships, through domestic defense production. It is also in a position to sell arms to Ukraine and to help replenish European countries’ stockpiles of basic defense items such as armored vehicles, short-range missiles, ammunition shells, and drones. At the beginning of the full-scale war in Ukraine, Ukrainian troops effectively used Turkish Bayraktar drones to push back the Russian assault on Kyiv. Since then, Turkish and Ukrainian firms have developed joint production ventures, and Turkey has been quietly selling missiles, armored vehicles, artillery shells, and cluster munitions to Ukraine.

Turkey has become an important supplier for the United States, too. Washington purchased battle-ready ammunition from a Turkish company earlier this year, and in February, the Pentagon announced a deal with another Turkish firm to manufacture artillery shells in Mesquite, Texas. The factory is expected to account for 30 percent of all 155-millimeter artillery shell manufacturing in the United States when it reaches full production capacity by 2025. Turkish defense offerings may not be on the cutting edge of technology, but Turkish firms can produce military equipment cheaply and quickly. With Turkey also contributing to European defenses, the United States will be able to devote less money and effort to Europe’s security and focus more on U.S. priorities in the Indo-Pacific. Thinking of Turkey as a defense supplier instead of in its traditional role as a buyer can thus open up new possibilities in transatlantic security planning.

THE QUESTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Human rights should not be an afterthought in a U.S.-Turkish reset, but to have any hope of progress in this area Washington needs a smarter approach. With the exception of the four years under Trump, the United States has long tried—without much success—to promote human rights issues in its dealings with Turkey. In recent years, Washington and other Western capitals have imposed sanctions and delivered lectures in an attempt to push Ankara toward more liberal policies, but these efforts have had little effect.

There is no reason to expect that continuing to marginalize Erdogan will produce better outcomes for the Turkish public. One of the worst periods for human rights in Turkey’s recent history came after the failed coup attempt of 2016, when Erdogan’s paranoid government enforced a sweeping crackdown on Kurdish politicians, members of the Gulen movement (whose followers it blamed for orchestrating the coup attempt), and those associated with an earlier purported Western plot to bring down the Turkish government during urban protests in 2013. Among those arrested was the Turkish philanthropist Osman Kavala, who was jailed in 2017 on bogus charges of attempting to overthrow the government by organizing protests on behalf of the American financier George Soros. Kavala became a symbol of the Turkish government’s suspicions that civil society organizations are merely agents of the West trying to topple Erdogan or curtail the country’s independence. In the wake of the coup attempt, both U.S. and European leaders have condemned the Turkish government’s repressive measures and repeatedly urged Ankara to release Kavala. But clearly their strategy is not working; despite strong external pressure, Kavala and other political prisoners remain behind bars.

There is no reason to expect that marginalizing Erdogan will produce better outcomes for the Turkish public.

U.S. policymakers should now consider an alternative approach to Turkey’s human rights issues. Historically, it has been easier to advance human rights at times when Turkey could expect to become more firmly embedded in Western institutions. In the mid-1990s, for example, when Ankara’s scorched-earth campaign against the Kurdish insurgency resulted in widespread abuses, Washington responded with a combination of carrots and sticks, curbing weapons sales but at the same time offering its support for Turkey’s European integration. After the Turkish electorate rejected the country’s mainstream political parties in the 2002 elections, bringing Erdogan’s party to power, the new government—at least for its first few terms—latched on to the promise of a democratic future for Turkey as part of Europe. But then the EU accession process stalled, and Erdogan grew reluctant to expand rights and freedoms in Turkey for fear of opening the floodgates of dissent that could threaten his regime. To encourage a return to that earlier reformist mindset, the United States will need to offer Turkey a new bargain, tying progress on human rights to a larger geopolitical project.

To that end, the West should secure Turkey’s position in NATO, the Council of Europe, and the European Court of Human Rights, affirming its commitment to long-term cooperation with Ankara. Turkey has grown increasingly authoritarian, but it still has competitive elections, and domestic pressures for greater freedoms have been mounting. After his historic election loss earlier this year, Erdogan met with Ozgur Ozel, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, who pressed for a “normalization” of domestic politics, a return to the rule of law, and the release of political prisoners. Turkey’s membership in multilateral institutions gives domestic human rights defenders political leverage, and engagement through these forums can empower actors who have legitimacy within the Turkish system—and have a better chance than Western critics of reversing the country’s democratic backsliding.

GEOPOLITICAL CHESS

The United States and Turkey should explore opportunities for cooperation where their geopolitical interests overlap. Ankara’s quest to become a regional heavyweight and Washington’s desire to counter Chinese and Russian influence can, in practice, be complementary aims. Turkey has been conducting extensive diplomacy with African countries since 2007, and its involvement on the continent now includes infrastructure projects worth billions of dollars, defense agreements, and drone sales. Ankara cannot match China’s state financing capabilities, but Turkish firms in some cases outcompete Chinese companies for highway and airport construction contracts. And although its security presence is primarily in North Africa and the Horn of Africa, Turkey recently expanded its defense cooperation with countries in East and West Africa and in the Sahel—including in Niger, which recently expelled French and U.S. forces.

Turkish outreach in Central Asia, built on kinship ties with Turkic states, has so far yielded market access and defense sales for Ankara. But Turkey’s presence in the region can also facilitate the establishment of a trade route that connects Central Asia to Europe, bypassing Russia. This project would be separate from—but could still be compatible with—the U.S.-supported proposal for an Indian–Middle Eastern–European trade corridor, which Turkey’s geographical position does not allow it to join. As the United States encourages its European partners to reduce their economic exposure to China, Turkey, which already has a sizable industrial base and a customs union with Europe, should also factor into Washington’s plans.

Turkey sits in the middle of too many global flash points for the United States to delay a new dialogue.

The United States should urge Turkey to play a constructive role in the Caucasus, as well. Azerbaijan, with Turkey’s backing, has fought two wars against Armenia since 2020, but Baku and Yerevan have recently resumed peace talks. Ankara has also indicated that it is willing to normalize ties with Armenia and open their shared border. The Biden administration should now ask Erdogan to push Azerbaijan toward a formal peace agreement with Armenia. If Erdogan were to then participate in a deal between the two rivals, a resolution among all three countries could set the groundwork for a stable security order and reduce Russia’s traditional influence in the region.

Working together on Gaza is trickier, but Washington should not underestimate Turkey. Ankara has largely been excluded from U.S.-led diplomacy in the Middle East after Erdogan voiced support for Hamas and sharply condemned U.S. support for Israel. Erdogan’s anger over the devastating human cost of Israel’s operations in Gaza echoes the sentiments of large parts of the Turkish public who believe not only that Israel is violating international law but also that Turkey, as the successor to the Ottoman Empire, has a historic mandate to protect the Palestinians. The United States should not expect that attitude to change, but it can work with Turkey to put pressure on Hamas to release its hostages in exchange for a durable cease-fire. And when the time comes for the postwar stabilization of Gaza, Turkey’s construction industry and political support will both be valuable. In particular, Ankara’s approval of the governance structure that emerges will bolster its popular legitimacy in the Sunni Muslim world.

Syria is undoubtedly the thorniest issue for the United States and Turkey to address. Ankara sees Washington’s partnership with Syrian Kurdish fighters linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a militant organization outlawed in Turkey, as the ultimate betrayal. Successive Turkish incursions have created a Turkish zone of influence in northern Syria, but Ankara still has ambitions to subdue the autonomous Kurdish region across the border—a prospect that worries Washington. But without an alternate long-term solution, the best the United States and Turkey can do is to freeze the status quo. For now, separate administrative units backed by Turkey, the United States, and the Syrian government would continue to exist side by side. To prepare for an eventual withdrawal of the remaining U.S. troops, Washington will need to work with Turkey and the Syrian Kurds to find a political settlement that guarantees Kurdish rights inside Syria without posing what Turkey considers an unacceptable threat.

Washington may be tempted to wait out Erdogan before trying to reconcile with Ankara, but Turkey’s strongman still has at least four more years in power. And in the meantime, Turkey sits in the middle of too many global flash points for the United States to delay a new dialogue. The next time the two leaders meet, Biden should take the opportunity to begin a conversation with Erdogan not just about the standard slate of bilateral issues but also about a broader reset. Ankara has much to offer the United States and its European allies in trade and defense partnerships, as well as in helping to contain the influence of China, Iran, and Russia, particularly in regions where Turkey is active but the United States’ reach is limited. There will be no return to the Cold War transatlantic relationship, but Erdogan’s Turkey has not yet crossed over to the Chinese-Russian orbit, and there is an opening for Turkey to tilt back toward the West if its partners make the advantages of cooperation clear. Weighing the costs of continued estrangement and the potential benefits of a reset, Biden should resolve to extend Turkey a hand.