While Turkey’s military adventures have roots in the ‘Neo-Ottoman’ project that Erdogan is relentlessly pursing and accordingly changing the country’s both internal and external orientation, a lot of what Turkey is doing on the external front—Syria, Libya and the Mediterranean—has to do with the progressively degenerating NATO and its decreasing ability to act as a military alliance. Until recently, it was never usual to see a NATO member acting out explicitly against the alliance, as in case of its purchase of Russia’s S-400 system, or its NATO allies, such as France and Greece in the Mediterranean. Over Turkey’s ‘energy adventure’ missions in the Mediterranean, Greece has already called an emergency meeting of the EU foreign ministers. France, on the other hand, has increased its Mediterranean military presence. The moves come against Greece accusing Turkey of ‘threatening peace’ in the region.
As it stands, NATO countries are once again reaching an ‘eye-ball to eye-ball’ situation. This is deeply related to the crisis within NATO whereby the main trans-Atlantic powers, the US and EU, have grown considerably distant from each other. In fact, this has happened to the extent of pursuing different, even conflicting, policies on as crucial issues as Iran, China’s future role in Europe and Europe’s ‘energy-relations’ with Russia. The US-EU dispute over contribution to the NATO budget has further exacerbated the situation, leading France’s Macron to declare NATO a ‘brain-dead’ organisation.
Increasing confrontation between France and Turkey will only strengthen Macron’s position. Apart from the fact that both Turkey and France are opposing different sides in Libya, France’s decision to challenge Turkey in the Mediterranean and Libya has also to do with how the former’s ‘secularism’ is clashing with Turkey’s increasing drift towards an Islamist approach.
Indeed, Turkey eyes its Libya and Mediterranean missions as integral elements of its bid to revive Ottoman era dominance and add to Turkey’s national power potential vis-à-vis its NATO/European rivals. It is not just a coincidence that Turkey’s very first deep-sea drill ship in the disputed waters of the Mediterranean was/is named after an Ottoman Sultan, Fatih, who conquered Byzantine Constantinople
For Erdogan, if Turkey is barred from accessing the energy resources, its rival NATO countries will “imprison our country, which has the longest coastline in the Mediterranean, [and turn it] into a coastal strip from which you can only catch fish with a rod.” Antagonism is visibly present. Ankara accuses Brussels of taking sides. “The EU seems to have been completely taken hostage by the maximalist positions of Greece and Greek Cypriots,” Cagatay Erciyes, director-general for maritime affairs at the Turkish foreign ministry, was reported to have said. The EU, he said, “prefers to be a party to the problem, rather than helping to solve it”.
However, while Turkey wants to defeat the ‘imprisonment’, the EU seems determined to do so; hence, its decision to impose sanctions on Turkey for its drilling off the cost of Cyprus. In June, European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels decided to suspend about $164 million in aid to Turkey and shelve talks on an aviation accord. They also asked the European Investment Bank to review its lending to the country, which amounted to nearly $434 million in 2018.
It is important to note that the measures have been taken buy the EU, not the NATO itself. While France has criticised and took steps to counter Turkey, US response has mostly been numb, leaving Europe to deal with its own mess. The US position is in turn explained by ‘the isolation’ Trump has faced in Europe. Growing distance between the US and the EU is one crucial reason why the US has no allies against China.
Accordingly, if the US has no European allies against China, NATO’s European members do not have US support against Turkey. Although the US-Turkey relations have not been particularly good in the wake of Turkey’s purchase of Russian S-400 system and a subsequent US decision to exclude Turkey from F-35 programme, the two countries have already started to rediscover their love for each other, with Turkey pitching to the US ideas of developing an alternative global supply chain route to counter China.
That Turkey-US relations are potentially normalising and that the US, despite the fact that Turkey-Cyprus dispute has already turned into a regional struggle for resources, has so far refused to insert itself in the conflict shows that not only is NATO from an ‘alliance’ but that the cleavages are increasingly becoming big enough to render the alliance a paper organisation only.
Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
