For the moment, and for so long as Assad stands, the region will see Iran as winning. As long as Iran continues work on its nuclear program, time works against Erdogan. This is what lay behind Turkey’s recent decision to accept installation of a U.S. radar needed to protect against Iran.
Against this background, Erdogan launched his Arab Spring tour, expelled the Israeli Ambassador and threatened naval war with Israel. He sought to shift the focus to those Arab and largely Sunni lands where his strengths lay; but his liabilities lurk still. Arab League dignitaries in the audience were enraptured by Erdogan’s denunciations of Israel, but others - the Egyptian military included – do not relish where this may lead. And the League’s serious business that day was Syria, about which Erdogan sat silent. As he left the hall, Syrian exiles called him “coward.”
Indeed, some in the Turkish opposition have begun to denounce Erdogan’s morally hypocritical “glass house.” They ridicule his government’s travels as motion without results. They deride his vanity, a man given to delivering moral sermons whose tests he fails - ironic commentary on the man who still holds with pride the Gaddafi prize for human rights.
All this, then, marks Erdogan’s reverting to trump: the anti-Israel card. Erdogan’s hostility to Israel undoubtedly runs deep. In 2006, he embraced Hamas, devoted to Israel’s destruction. But now he slaps trump down with ever greater ferocity, threatening military conflict.
Erdogan’s broader international standing slides, too. The UN Palmer Report criticized his support for Turkish ships attempting last spring to run Israel’s legitimate effort to keep weapons from terrorists in Gaza. Erdogan’s efforts to block Cyprus from enjoying the rights of EU membership, and his military threats against Cyprus lawfully developing resources useful to the EU, win few friends.
For a would-be leader of the new Middle East, his anti-Israeli, anti-Western tactics look awfully similar to the old. So far, at least, Erdogan’s foreign policy has mostly just entangled Turkey more in the unproductive Middle East politics his predecessors avoided. Erdogan’s foreign minister has essentially admitted as much. While calling the “zero problems” policy a success, he now defines it narrowly as Turkish-Egyptian alliance, one implicitly directed against Israel.
It would be nice to suppose that Turkey’s inherent strengths, its past moderation and the apparent political and moral limits to Erdogan’s regional influence might soon turn him to a more sober course. After all, a would-be “leader” must eventually show results more substantial than applause.
