e Gazan “War†

and Their Strategies:

Part Three: Turkey

By: Victor Davis Hanson

November 10, 2023

Then we come to the increasingly unambiguous role of Turkey.

Ostensibly, Turkey is a critical U.S. and NATO ally. It possesses NATO’s largest military aside from America’s, and its geographical location is critical for NATO security concerns—controlling the historical Bosporus with its opening to the Black Sea and situated in the heart of the Middle East.

Turkey hosts the huge U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik which is shared by several NATO and Middle Eastern allies. The U.S. has stored at least 50 nuclear bombs at Incirlik, ostensibly solely under American stewardship.

Currently, any possible nuclear target—Iran, Russia, or China—are now Turkish friends if not allies. The base has been used effectively in a variety of strategic contexts during our long history in the Middle East.

Yet, Turkey is no longer the secular state of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan it has reduced elections to de facto ratifications of his dictatorship. He continues to conduct overflights over the Greek islands of the Aegean. He stirs up hostilities over occupied Cyprus and has serially threatened Greek Cyprus, Greece itself, and Israel with surprise air attacks.

During the 2016 Turkish coup, it was not always clear whether the Americans had complete access to their nuclear arsenal at Incirlik. This past week demonstrations flared up at the base, as protesters threatened to eject the U.S. and its allies from Turkey. Promises, promises, promises…

Recently, Erdogan championed Hamas and threatened to send Turkish troops into Gaza, a ploy that would tear the NATO alliance apart. Turkey tried to stop Sweden from entering NATO and it has turned on its traditional ally Germany, which pulled its troops out of Incirlik.

Erdogan split with the U.S. over the Turkish bombing of the Kurds in Syria. The ecumenical UNESCO World Heritage List site of Hagia Sophia—built by the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the greatest cathedral in Christendom for 1,000 years—has been transformed into a mosque under Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman rule.

Indeed, Erdogan has announced Islamist Turkey is returning to its ancient role as the most powerful protector of the Islamic Middle East. Westerners remember a different Ottoman and post-Ottoman Turkey—as the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide and its systematic mass murdering of Greeks throughout once Hellenic Ionia.

Ironies abound. In truth, the great imperial and colonial oppressor over the Arab Middle East was always the Ottoman Empire, which ruled the Arab world with an iron hand for over 500 years—until dethroned by the Allies in World War I.

Now in the Gaza war, Erdogan has championed Hamas, alone of his NATO partners. The Obama administration predictably sought to appease Turkey and dub it the Obama special conduit to the Islamic Middle East—a mollification that of course earned Obama utter Turkish contempt.

In sum, by any classical definition, Turkey is at best a hostile neutral and at worse a belligerent. But while NATO has rules about admitting nations to the alliance, it is vague about how to expel them. Moreover, the U.S. military feels that the Erdogan â€œaberration†will pass and Turkey will eventually return to its secular and pro-Western stance of the late 20th Century, although there is no evidence that Erdogan—or those in his party who would succeed him—lacks popular support.

So what is Turkey’s agenda? It is to remind NATO that it is a maverick and must be courted and appeased, by ostensibly gravitating toward the new China/Russia/Iran axis, while of course enjoying all the advantages that NATO membership offers.

Erdogan will threaten to attack Israel and intervene on behalf of Hamas, but probably will not, especially if Hamas is on the verge of defeat. During the last year-and-a-half of the wounded Biden administration, Turkey assumes that it has a brief window to redefine its relationship with the U.S. and NATO since an impending Republican administration would likely be far less sympathetic to Turkish triangulation, but far more receptive to reestablishing our historical close ties with our pro-American Mediterranean triad of Cyprus, Greece, and Israel.

In sum, Turkey will bluster and threaten Israel, but likely conclude that NATO membership offers more pluses than minuses, especially if it can continue to be courted even as it snubs its partners.