Turkey is provoking a political civil war in Washington, DC. With Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan scrambling up the regional balance of power, U.S. officials don't know how to deal with their once-stalwart North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ally. Liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves—none of the old categories apply.

On one side, an unlikely coalition of evangelical Christians, left-wing human-rights activists, and War on Terror veterans think Turkey is more trouble than it's worth. On the other side, Cold Warriors and State Department insiders are warning against a messy divorce. And on a shoestring budget, Turkey's Kurdish rivals have managed to present themselves as a better alternative to the second-largest army in NATO.

Tensions are coming to head, with Turkey threatening this weekend to attack the U.S.-backed forces in Syria.

The government of Turkey spent nearly $6.6 million on U.S. politics in 2018, not counting the cost of maintaining an embassy, according to data published by the Center for Responsible Politics. Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings show that the Syrian Democratic Council’s diplomatic office in Washington was operating on an annual budget of under $120,000, including the cost of running the office.

“My general feeling is in DC, people really don’t know what to do with Turkey,” said Hişyar Özsoy, a member of Turkish parliament who addressed the Congress last month.

The debate over Turkey is a glimpse of what U.S. foreign policy will look like in an increasingly multipolar world. As the United States is forced to prioritize between friends, interests, and values, different factions in Washington have their own ideas of America’s role.

“A lot of the senior leadership at the professional level in the State Department particularly have a long institutional memory of engaging with Turkey as a clear NATO ally, and as a country that served broader U.S. geopolitical objectives, particularly vis-a-vis the Soviet Union,” explained Center for a New American Security fellow Nicholas Heras. “The rising generation of leaders in the Pentagon—those officers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan—have had mixed experiences with the Turks.”

Officials, researchers, and activists have quietly grumbled about the split for awhile, but over the past month, a series of high-profile meetings between Kurdish leaders and U.S. policymakers coincided with public debates by a range of former State Department, Pentagon, and White House officials.

The public got a rare look at the inner debates of the so-called foreign-policy “blob.”

Missiles and Coups and Bears—Oh My!

During the Cold War, Turkey was the tip of the American spear pointed at the Soviet Union. Now that the communist threat is gone, however, Turkey doesn’t have much of a reason not to work with Russia—except for U.S. objections.

Under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) of 2018, the president is supposed to sanction any country that buys military equipment from Russia. Turkey triggered the act earlier this year when it bought S-400 anti-aircraft missiles from Russia.

“There is no well of sympathy in Congress for Turkey” anymore, said retired Ambassador Eric Edelman at a September 19 panel discussion at the Johns Hopkins University. While there used to be a forty-person pro-Turkey caucus in Congress, he claimed, the S-400 incident has left only “degrees by which you want to punish Turkey.”

President Donald Trump has kicked Turkey out of the F-35 fighter jet program, but he has carefully delayed CAATSA sanctions. And although Congress has expressed annoyance with the lack of sanctions, the bipartisan group of frustrated lawmakers has not been able to force Trump to act.

“There’s some holes in [CAATSA]. I’m not really expecting President Trump to pursue sanctions,” added Center for American Progress senior fellow Alan Makovsky, sitting on the same panel as Edelman. “And Congress is risk-averse.”

Edelman believes that Erdoğan was fixated on buying the S-400 because it can shoot down the types of American-made fighter jets that were used in a July 2016 military coup d’etat attempt: “We tend to think, since 2016, that another coup is out of the question. I don’t think he does.”

“This is not going to snap back even if Erdoğan departs the scene,” Edelman warned, because the leader’s supporters have “just injected a toxic blend of anti-Americanism, antisemitism, and nationalism into the body politic.”

“A lot of this of course has to do with Erdoğan and other things, but there’s also another reality,” said Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute, in an interview with the National Interest. “Turkey is no longer in the mood of just being a pliant ally of the United States that constantly has to adjust its interests and its demands and its preferences to whatever the U.S. decides. The U.S. is no longer capable of being this hegemon of the region.”

As Erdoğan said at the United Nations in New York on September 24, “the world is bigger than five.” He was referring to the five permanent members of the Security Council: Britain, France, Russia, China, and America. Perhaps he wants it to include a sixth.

But he also has a short-term reason to pivot away from the United States. Russia is now entrenching itself in Syria.

“The perception that we’re pulling out and Russia is here to stay is not just Erdoğan,” Edelman claimed. “[Israeli prime minister] Bibi Netanyahu has been to Moscow more than he’s been to Washington in the past four years.”

At the moment, the U.S. presence in the Middle East depends on İncirlik Air Base, a military airport in southeastern Turkey. “If you ask most people at the Pentagon, most people will say that İncirlik is still valuable to the U.S. strategically,” Makovsky claimed.

In recent decades, Turkey has shown its strength in and around the base. Makovsky, who worked as a State Department liaison officer at İncirlik in the 1990s, said that “you’re constantly reminded that it’s not an American base.” During the 2016 coup attempt, loyalist forces besieged the base in order to capture some of the coup plotters inside.

The base also hosts fifty tactical nuclear weapons. Ploughshares Fund president and nonproliferation expert Joe Cirincione told the National Interest that the hydrogen bombs are there to reinforce the “extended deterrence guarantees” of the North Atlantic Treaty.

“Every time somebody like me asks to take them out, the claim is that our allies would feel that we were backing out of our defense commitments,” he said.

Under the Cold War treaty, the United States and its European partners are duty-bound to defend each other in times of war.

That hasn’t stopped NATO allies from clashing with each other. Turkey nearly went to war with Greece, another NATO member-state, over the island of Cyprus in 1974.

Some of Turkey’s fights with U.S. allies are unique to Erdoğan, though. The populist leader has sided with Qatar over Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf family feud. He has also made himself a champion of the Palestinians against Israel, publicly feuding with Netanyahu.

It’s a long slide from the 1980s, when Netanyahu was a young diplomat in Washington trying to shore up the Turkish-Israeli alliance against Palestinian and Armenian nationalism.

Rise of the Kurds

But a new generation of U.S. warfighters has driven the biggest wedge between Turkey and the United States.

“In the 90s, the U.S. basically followed Turkey’s example. Turkey was calling the shots, and the relationship was very warm, very cordial,” said American Kurdish Information Network (AKIN) founder Kani Xulam. “The Pentagon had no relationship with the Kurds, so to speak. Now the American generals go to Syria, for example, and they meet with Kurdish leaders, and they sit down and plan how to keep ISIS down.”

During the Cold War, the fight for Kurdish independence was mostly a left-wing cause. Leading guerrilla groups, such as the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, were either pro-Soviet or explicitly communist. Many of Kurdish nationalism’s opponents—including the Shah of Iran and Saddam Hussein of Iraq—were bulwarks against communism in the Middle East.

But in 1991 and 2003, the largest Kurdish parties in Iraq helped U.S. forces fight Saddam Hussein, who had attempted a genocide against the Kurds. Since 2003, Turkey has waged its own parallel campaign in northern Iraq aimed at hunting down the PKK—and later, shoring up the group’s Kurdish rivals.

“Some [American officers] served alongside the Turks in Afghanistan, but others remember how the Turks were, for much of the Iraq War, sort of a complicating factor,” explained Heras, who has advised U.S. counterterrorism officials on Syria. “For those who served in the counter-ISIS campaign, the Turks have been very adversarial.”

During the recent Syrian Civil War, an alliance of Kurdish, Assyrian, and Arab fighters called the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) has been the U.S.-led coalition’s most reliable partner against ISIS. Turkey considers the YPG—the main Kurdish component of the SDF—to be an extension of the PKK.

The PKK is officially designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government.

Gen. John Allen, formerly President Barack Obama’s envoy to the international anti-ISIS coalition and now president of the Brookings Institution, described the problems he had with Turkey in a September 10 panel discussion.

Allen told the journalists and experts gathered at the Brookings Institute about the first anti-ISIS meeting at NATO headquarters in December 2014: “We had Cyprus there, with Turkey and Greece also there. This was such an emergency, and the diplomacy was so profound by our ambassadors . . . it really came together very well.”

But during the crucial Battle of Kobani in October 2015, when the U.S. military first began to arm Syrian Kurdish fighters, tensions flared up.

“The border was closed. Nothing was coming to [the defenders of Kobani] across the Turkish border,” Allen said, explaining that the U.S. military had to fly through Syrian airspace to supply the besieged Kurdish fighters. “As they were approaching the drop site, I was on the phone to the ambassadors of the various countries . . . There was a huge sense of appreciation from all the ambassadors, except the Turkish ambassador, who was very quick to register his displeasure.”

Allen’s successor, Brett McGurk, pushed the Obama administration even closer to the SDF. He later resigned in protest over Trump’s December 2018 decision to begin pulling American troops out of Syria, publicly denouncing the “wholesale abandonment of the SDF.”

Turkey has turned McGurk into a hated symbol of the U.S.-SDF partnership. McGurk spoke at the same September event as Allen, where a man who identified himself with the Turkish embassy shouted that “millions are under the boot of Marxist terrorists!”

McGurk laughed off the comment, but Allen felt compelled to respond. “Turkey, in the end, is happy” about the SDF clearing ISIS from its borders, he claimed.

“Turkey has a CENTCOM problem.” explained Soner Çağaptay, director of the Turkey program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and author of Erdoğan’s Empire. “CENTCOM built a tactical relationship with the YPG, but Turkey sees this as unacceptable after ISIS is defeated.”

CENTCOM is the acronym for U.S. Central Command, which is the combatant command in charge of U.S. forces in the Middle East. Although its area of operations includes most of Turkey’s neighbors, U.S. forces in Turkey itself fall under EUCOM, the U.S. European Command.

Heras complained to the National Interest that “EUCOM acts like Erdoğan's agent in the U.S. defense establishment.”

Çağaptay believes that relations have improved somewhat since U.S. Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr. became Joint Chief of Staff. Dunford has done a better job of bridging the gap between EUCOM and CENTCOM, in Çağaptay’s view.

“CENTCOM is used to dealing with weak and failed states. EUCOM deals with strong allies,” Çağaptay told the National Interest. “The Turks are turned off when they’re treated as a weak state.”

The Rise of Ambassador James Jeffrey

After McGurk quit the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo replaced him with a candidate tailor-made to smooth over the rocky relationship: Ambassador James Jeffrey.

“Jim Jeffrey is a force to be reckoned with,” said Çağaptay, a former colleague of Jeffrey at the Washington Institute. “He’s a strong believer in the U.S.-Turkish relationship. He’s very realpolitik.”

Parsi explained how it all fits together: “Jeffrey's worldview is one in which he strongly believes that the U.S. needs to have a very strong military presence, and that without U.S. power backing it, the international system—the whole thing—will collapse.”

Indeed, the special envoy has worked at the very center of the U.S.-Turkish alliance against communism. Jeffrey began his career as a State Department political-military officer in Turkey from 1983 to 1987, at the beginning of the PKK’s rebellion. And he returned as U.S. Ambassador to Turkey in 2008, when the insurgency was heating up again.

During a September 26 press conference, Jeffrey referred to “PKK-linked element of the Kurdish movement in Syria that later expanded into the SDF.”

“The Turks, understandably, having lost many tens of thousands of people to a PKK insurgency that began in 1984, are very worried about a large force of people commanded by folks who have ties to the PKK,” he said. “We acknowledged that. We actually talked to the people in northeast Syria—and there are many groups—and they all sort of understand that the Turks do have a reason to be concerned.”

Jeffrey’s signature achievement in Syria has been the “safe zone.” The SDF agreed to dismantle its fortifications along the Turkish border and allow joint U.S.-Turkish patrols on the Syrian side. In exchange, the U.S. military is shielding the SDF from a deeper Turkish incursion.

Turkish officials have signalled that they’re not satisfied with their end of the bargain. It’s unclear how much more the SDF can give, according to Gönül Tol of the Middle East Institute. “At this point, having a safe zone that is thirty kilometers deep that is totally off limits to the [SDF] would really undermine U.S. strategy,” she said at the Johns Hopkins event.

Given the importance of the Kurdish question to its internal politics, Turkey has shown that it is willing to take matters into its own hands. In January 2018, Turkish forces invaded the SDF-held enclave of Afrin, which they are still occupying.

On Saturday, Erdoğan called elements of the safe zone “fiction,” threatening to launch a unilateral invasion east of the Euphrates “as soon as today or tomorrow.”

There were no U.S. troops in Afrin at the time, but there are east of the Euphrates. If Turkish forces were to kill an American soldier, Tol said, “then all bets are off.”

But Jeffrey calculates that it’s not worth throwing away the relationship with Turkey—a state of eighty million people and the second-largest army in NATO—for a non-state militia, according to Çağaptay.

“The State Department is always going to privilege state actors over non-state actors. It’s how it’s wired,” said Heras, who has observed SDF operations inside Syria. “The State Department is not the [Department of Defense]. It’s not the CIA. It’s not an organization that deals particularly well in murky and gray zone contexts. Engaging with a treaty ally state actor is exactly the type of work the State Department is best suited for.”

As former Ambassador Robert Ford complained in an October 1 op-ed, “[t]he Americans are creating a bigger risk to peace in Syria over the long-term. They are providing a military umbrella for a mini-state to emerge in eastern Syria.”

“[Turkey] is a government. So they have money. They have lobbyists working for them,” said Xulam, who founded AKIN because “every country had an embassy, but we [Kurds] didn’t have one.”

But the U.S.-Kurdish alliance is giving Kurds unprecedented access in Washington. On October 2, the leadership of the Syrian Democratic Council briefed reporters on their recent visit to the U.S. capital.

“The parties we met with were mostly from Congress and the State Department, but we see that they have begun to put their weight behind a political solution,” said Executive President Ilham Ahmed. “In addition, there is a need for lengthy discussions and debates about how to reach a true and realistic solution. I focus on the word realistic so that we are not being fanciful in proposing projects or solutions.”

“Mr. James Jeffrey played a role in conveying the discussions between us and Turkey, and we thank him,” she told the National Interest in Arabic. “The Pentagon also played a positive role, and we also thank them.”

Ahmed said that Jeffrey was the highest-ranking official that she met with during her most recent visit. When asked about her brief encounter with Trump during a January visit, Ahmed smiled silently. Her translator added in English: “no comment.”

The Bible and the Bill of Rights

Özsoy, whose People’s Democratic Party is the main legal avenue for Kurdish dissent in Turkey, also told the National Interest that U.S. officials were “quite receptive” to his latest visit. Shortly after a meeting of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission at the House of Representatives, he said that “there is more interest in talking to people who are either from Turkey or who work on Turkey,” thanks to the S-400 dispute and the Syrian war.

“They are less into questions of, say, human rights and democracy in Turkey. That is a bit discouraging,” he added. “We are also trying to bring in that discussion about democracy, about human rights, about the rule of law, about the whole crackdown on the democratic opposition.”

Traditionally, dissidents like Özsoy could rely on activists focused on human rights and a liberal world order.

Xulam first came to Washington in 1993 to draw attention to Saddam Hussein’s infamous gas attack against Kurds at Helebçe, and soon expanded his mission to include the plight of Kurds in his native Turkey. Among the congressional Democrats and Republicans that Xulam worked with at the beginning, he found natural allies in former Rep. Bob Filner, a Jewish-American civil rights pioneer in the American South, and former Rep. Elizabeth Furse, a white anti-Apartheid activist who grew up in South Africa.

“[Furse] opened her arms to us right away. I didn’t have to educate her. Of course, Turkey is not South Africa, but oppression is oppression,” Xulam said. “Bob Filner—who when he was nineteen had joined Freedom Riders, and had gone to Mississippi, and had been beaten up, and thrown into prison—I didn’t have to educate him on the oppression the Kurds were going through because he had familiarity with what the dominant race can do to a minority.”

Activists clashed with the Turkish government in Washington—literally—in May 2017. A group of protesters confronted Erdoğan outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence at Sheridan Circle with shouts of “long live the YPG” and “baby killer Erdoğan.” In response, counterprotesters and the Turkish security detail broke through a DC police line to beat several of the demonstrators.

“Anarchists and antifascists are clear in our opposition to Erdoğan’s fascism and cruelty. That’s why I was out protesting in May 2017,” Lacy MacAuley, one of the activists attacked that day, told the National Interest. “I was in Turkey in 2015 and early 2016 and I saw with my own eyes how Erdoğan is wrecking democracy, women’s rights, and the basic freedom of the people.”

The Turkish embassy accused the protesters of supporting the PKK and “aggressively provoking Turkish-American citizens who had peacefully assembled to greet the president.”

The incident caused a diplomatic uproar. The House of Representatives unanimously demanded the prosecution of Turkish security officials, and a bipartisan group of senators asked the State Department to strip Erdoğan’s guards of their diplomatic immunity. A federal grand jury indicted fifteen members of Erdoğan’s security detail and four others in the attack.

Erdoğan called the U.S. reaction “scandalous.” A few weeks before a meeting between Erdoğan and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the U.S. Department of Justice quietly dropped most of the charges. But a hate crimes lawsuit by several protesters injured in the attack is still working its way through U.S. courts.

A group of pro-Erdogan demonstrators shout slogans at a group of anti-Erdogan Kurds (foreground, back to camera) in Lafayette Park as Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan met with U.S. President Donald Trump nearby at the White House in Washington, U.S. May 16, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Left-leaning activists have butt heads with Turkey on other issues as well. Humanitarian interventionist Samantha Power and liberal dove Ben Rhodes, both veterans of the Obama administration, came out last year in favor of recognizing the murder of 1.5 million Armenian Christians during World War I as a genocide.

The Armenian Genocide is a taboo subject in Turkey, and politicians across the Turkish political spectrum have stoked fears about Armenian demands for reparations.

“The old paradigm was: Turkey’s our ally, they’re on our team, and we basically give them an across-the-board deference to Turkish sensitivities, and in return, Turkey is supportive of our regional priorities. That was the peace that persisted for over a century,” said Aram Hamparian, executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America. “Given Turkey’s adversarial, even anti-American conduct, the talking points they were once able to play against us are basically useless now.”

Hamparian singled out the left-wing People’s Democratic Party as a rare ally within Turkey.

In recent years, however, an unexpected demographic has taken interest in Turkey’s human rights situation: evangelical Christians.

“Some on the Left are focused on human rights or genocide prevention, and they've traditionally been the supporters of the Armenian community’s efforts to get the Armenian Genocide recognized,” Hamparian told the National Interest. “You have on the Right also a diverse set of constituencies, including hawks who are increasingly critical of Turkey, and you have religious freedom folks who are increasingly critical of Turkey.”

Erdoğan has introduced a new brand of Muslim populism to Turkish foreign and domestic policy. He used his platform at the United Nations this year, for example, to draw attention to Muslim causes around the world: Kashmir, Palestine, the Rohingya crisis, and the anti-Muslim terrorist attack in Christchurch, New Zealand.

The Turkish leader’s fiery rhetoric now worries evangelical Christian leaders in America, nervous about their own ability to evangelize in the region.

In a 2016 tweet, evangelical favorite Mike Pompeo had called Turkey an “Islamist dictatorship.” A senator at the time, he deleted the tweet after becoming Secretary of State.

Evangelical fears came to a head when Turkey arrested Pastor Andrew Brunson, a Presbyterian missionary, on a litany of espionage and terrorism charges in October 2016. Brunson’s case soon became a cause celebre.

Facing increased pressure from Christian advocates, Trump asked Erdoğan to release Brunson in May 2017. Evangelical leader Johnnie Moore told Religion News Service that “we [were] able to make the President and Vice President aware that this was a priority of ours” through the “clear and open lines of communication between evangelicals and this White House.”

A year into Brunson’s detention, Erdoğan offered to release the Presbyterian pastor in exchange for the extradition of Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher in Pennsylvania accused of ordering the July 2016 coup d’etat attempt.

“You have a pastor as well,” he said. “Give him to us.”

At the first ever State Department Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom in August 2018, evangelical heavyweight and Vice President Mike Pence shot back that there is “no credible evidence” against Brunson and threatened economic sanctions against Turkey.

With a tweet praising Brunson as a “great Christian,” Trump soon delivered on the sanctions threat. The new sanctions exacerbated an ongoing trade war that was threatening to plunge the Turkish economy into chaos. Finally, in October 2018, the Turkish authorities sentenced Brunson to time served, allowing him to walk free.

It was the first time the U.S. had imposed sanctions on a NATO ally.

But as far as the Trump administration broke with precedent for Brunson, it has not touched any of Turkey’s core red lines.

Reversing a century of U.S. policy on a sensitive topic could be the ultimate bridge-burner. And many U.S. policymakers might not ever believe in divorcing an ally, especially in such a dramatic way.

For now, the “blob” is still trying to manage the global order through alliances. It will be just a little less comfortable than before.

“Everybody would like the other side to move faster, to be even better. That’s not something unusual in diplomatic affairs, but again, we are generally satisfied,” Jeffrey said at the September press conference. “We listen to the Turks’ concerns. We try to respond to them when we can.”

Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest and a former Foreign Language Area Studies Fellow at Columbia University. His work has appeared in Reason and America Magazine.

Image: Reuters