Turkey Not Only Appears Hostile to the West – It IS Hostile to the West

Turkey not only appears hostile to the West – it is hostile to the West. Yet it wants to remain in NATO, and finds it outrageous that the European states he has so maligned do not want Turkey to become part of the EU, which would bring another 82 million Muslims within Schengenland, allowing them to move freely throughout the 27 nations of the EU. Is it surprising that such a prospect fills Europeans with horror?

As for continuing Turkish membership in NATO, it makes no sense – and has not for years. NATO is supposed to be a military alliance of democracies. Erdogan is a despot, who has made 74 changes to the Turkish constitution, to give himself unheard-of powers, and to extend his possible tenure until 2029. He has crushed free speech, by jailing more journalists than any other leader in the world. Many of those journalists, once released from jail, have found it impossible to practice their craft in Turkey and have gone into exile. Hundreds of thousands of teachers, lawyers, university professors, intellectuals, and artists as well as members of the civil service, the judiciary, and the military have been jailed or have lost their jobs.

Erdogan has predicted that if the West does not cease its hostility to Muslims, there will be a “war between the crescent and the cross,” leaving no doubt as to which side Turkey would be on. He has slandered the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria– the first two are NATO members, the last one a quasi-member – as being led by “Nazis.” He has not contributed as expected o NATO military missions. When the United States wanted to bring troops through Turkey into northern Iraq in 2003, he refused to allow that northern front to be opened. Nor did he allow the Americans the use of Incirlik Air Base for their airplanes, though he did agree to let the U.S. use Turkish airspace. Some will remember how Erdogan accused the American government in January 2017 of supporting “an army of terror” because it wanted the Kurdish YPG fighters in northeastern Syria, who had proven their mettle as America’s best allies against ISIS, to be a major component of the border forces guarding the frontier between Syria and Turkey. They would be there mainly to help suppress any possible resurgence of ISIS in Syria. For Erdogan, any Kurdish group near the Turkish border could potentially help the Kurdish PKK separatists inside Turkey, and therefore had to be opposed. For Erdogan, all Kurds are “terrorists” — it doesn’t matter to him that the Kurds were America’s most loyal and effective allies against the Islamic State.

Nor was that the only time he accused the Americans of “terror.” Still worse, he deceived Washington by promising not to attack the Kurds in Syria, and once his troops were inside the country, he promptly did exactly that.

Erdogan’s forces were finally let loose directly on the Syrian Kurds in January 2018, even after the Americans had repeatedly made clear they wanted 30,000 Syrian Kurdish troops to help guard the border. To mark the moment when the Turkish forces moved into Syria to attack the Kurds directly, worshippers in 90,000 mosques in Turkey prayed the Surah al-Fath, the 48th chapter of the Qur’an, in which those engaged in jihad are promised material rewards taken from those they defeat; the Speaker of the Turkish Parliament proudly called the Turkish attack on the Kurds in Afrin a “jihad.” In Erdogan’s orchestra, no one sounds a secular Kemalist note. The Kurds were duly pushed back from the Syrian-Turkish border area west of the Euphrates. The Americans did not intervene.

There is no good reason for keeping Turkey in NATO. Expelling Turkey would bring home to Erdogan that he can no longer behave outrageously and expect to get away with it, as he has for years. There is a price to pay for his pan-Islamic threats to destroy Israel, for his unprovoked attacks on Syrian Kurds, for his slander of NATO members, for his despotic domestic ways, in jailing more journalists than any other leader has done and discharging from their jobs hundreds of thousands of Turks – professors, teachers, lawyers, judges, military men — whose only crime was that they were deemed insufficiently loyal to him, and in some cases, even imprisoning them. There is a price to be paid, too, for his not having let the Americans open a northern front into Iraq, and for preventing them the use, when it was most needed, of the Incirlik Air Base. There is a price to be paid for all that arrogant talk of giving the Americans “an Ottoman slap,” and for threatening to attack any American soldiers found to be fighting alongside Kurds in Syria. It’s long past time to give Turkey not an Ottoman slap, but the American boot. No NATO member would be saddened to see Turkey, given its current leader, expelled from the alliance. Show him the door. Let Recep Tayyip Erdogan try to find another group that would be willing to take him in.