Robert Ellis
Jerusalem Post, Dec. 11, 2022
Both the Biden administration and the GOP might be lulled into believing that Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan could be the honest broker they need to act as go-between between the United States and Russia. But this is not the case.
By now it must be apparent that Turkey has joined forces with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Iran’s Ebrahim Raisi, China’s Xi Jinping and Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman.
When the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, it presented itself as moderate, Westward-looking and neoliberal, and the US and the European Union were taken in. As then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice gushed, the AKP was “a government dedicated to pulling Turkey West toward Europe.”
The AKP made use of EU conditionality to obtain economic benefits, but with the show trials against secular opponents from 2008 to 2013 and the crackdown on Istanbul’s Gezi Park protests, it showed its real face.
The same year, the head of the AKP’s Istanbul branch made it clear that “the new Turkey” the party was building would not feature a future that its liberal supporters could accept or desire.
European parliamentarian Andrew Duff, a former AKP supporter, concluded that the AKP had replaced Kemalism with Islamism. His Dutch colleague, Marietje Schaake, bewailed, “Our dream of a European Turkey has turned into a nightmare, and it is time for a wake-up call.” … source