By Noah Rothman
Thursday, November 14, 2019
Sen. Lindsey Graham explained on Wednesday that his
decision to block the U.S. Senate’s consideration of a bill recognizing the
expulsion and extermination of more than a million Armenians by Turkish forces
in the early part of the 20th century was born out of a sense of decorum. “I
objected to the Armenian resolution yesterday, not so much on substance, but I
did not want to have that resolution passed while the Turkish president was in
town,” Graham said, according to Fox News Channel reporter Chad Pergram.
By all accounts, Graham has no love for Turkey’s
autocratic leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or the modern sultanate over which he
presides. As Axios reporter Jonathan Swan related, Graham was one of a handful
of senators invited into the Oval Office with Erdogan. There, he admirably
chided the Turkish leader over his invasion of Syria’s Kurdish-held territories
and the atrocious behavior displayed by soldiers under Ankara’s command.
Graham’s effort to preserve the high-flown choreography
that typifies diplomatic relations between heads of state is noble but
misplaced. Turkey’s increasingly dictatorial and anti-Western president does
not deserve the honor.
Erdogan used the dubious 2016 coup attempt against him to
imprison tens of thousands of dissidents and journalists, as well as to purge
the military of elements still beholden to the institution’s secularist past.
Amid Erdogan’s post-coup crackdown, the Turkish regime cut off power to and
surround the American-manned airbase at Incirlik. The West protested but took
no further action, and Erdogan consolidated his power. The full effect of his
campaign against dissenters was on full, grotesque display in the White House
on Wednesday, when so many of the Turkish press in attendance prefaced their
questions for both presidents with obsequious praise.
The following year, Turkey—frustrated by the Trump
administration’s refusal to extradite an exiled cleric living in Pennsylvania
who Erdogan that blames for a laundry list of woes—began harassing and even
arresting U.S. diplomatic personnel. After the United States protested, Turkey
announced a halt to all non-immigrant visas from the United States and
suspended future weapons purchases from Washington. In 2018, Erdogan was
inexplicably rewarded for his behavior with a visit to the American capital,
where his security detail was implicated in the brazen assault of otherwise
peaceful demonstrators. Many of the charges against Erdogan’s bodyguards were
dropped, but only because Ankara would not cooperate with American prosecutors.
Amid its incursion into Syria in October, Turkish forces
launched a barrage of artillery rounds so near to known U.S. positions that
U.S. officials did not believe it could be an accident. If the “bracketing” of
U.S. positions with artillery was intentional, it would serve Turkey’s interests.
The American president had signaled his intention to withdraw U.S. forces from
the northeastern border with Turkey but dithered in the execution. Ankara was
not taking any chances that the aggressive effort by Trump’s Republican allies
to get the president to change his mind would be successful. The prospect of
armed conflict with Turkish forces in those fraught hours was very real.
“That’s an area weapon,” one U.S. soldier said of the 155-millimeter shells
exploding around American positions. “That’s not something we ever would have
done to a partner force.” But Turkey is not a “partner” in any conventional
definition, even if it remains a nominal member of the NATO alliance.
In Washington this week, alongside the president, Erdogan
took the opportunity to castigate House Democrats and praise Trump for
struggling on despite inheriting “the burden of Obama’s flawed foreign policy.”
You don’t have to be particularly enamored with either the 44th President or
his party’s House majority to look with contempt upon Erdogan’s manipulative
effort to leverage America’s domestic political squabbles for his own cynical
gain. Moreover, the productive outcomes that Graham’s defense of Turkish
dignity was designed to preserve did not materialize. Turkey did not commit to
abandoning the sophisticated anti-aircraft batteries it purchased from Russia
in naked defiance of NATO’s demands, and Trump received no guarantees about the
status of the safety of Kurdish forces with whom America continues to work.
There’s a lost virtue in practicing the art of diplomacy
in public while reserving more contentious issues for behind closed doors. But
Erdogan is due no deference from American lawmakers. He is due an
embarrassment. It’s tragic that, when American lawmakers had the chance to hand
him one, they passed.
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