The American foreign policy community is up in arms because Donald Trump told the New York Times he is disdainful of NATO. They’re right to be upset, but where were they when Barack Obama helped put Russia on NATO’s Turkish border with his Syria policy?
The split looks partisan—Democrats criticize Trump on NATO and give the sitting Democratic president a pass—but just last week members of the foreign policy establishment on the left and right were giddy with excitement that the president of Turkey might be toppled in a coup, thereby throwing a NATO country into chaos.
So the NATO issue isn’t about partisanship. Rather, it’s evidence of the foreign policy community as a whole, right and left, coming unmoored.
For those who cheered the coup attempt, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is such a nasty piece of work (and make no mistake, he is) that anything is better than him in his palace in Ankara. It doesn’t matter if the military overthrows a U.S.-allied government elected by the people; it doesn’t matter how many of those people die in the streets during a coup attempt; it doesn’t even matter how the coup and the policies that follow might affect American interests—just hang Erdogan from a lamppost and let the streets run with blood.
Some among the chattering classes here in the American capital even think it was a phony coup, that Erdogan himself engineered it to augment his power. In other words, Washington has become like a Middle East coffeehouse where overheated intellectuals rehearse conspiracy theories about how the world really works and to whose benefit it works.
The coup was real. It comprised a quarter of Turkey’s military and very nearly succeeded. Erdogan’s escape had more to do with luck than anything else. In the immediate aftermath, Secretary of State John Kerry opined that the coup plotters hadn’t done a very good job, which further fueled a counter-conspiracy theory holding that the United States was behind the coup. It’s nonsense, but the optics still aren’t good. The man Ankara holds responsible for the coup, Fethullah Gulen, lives in the United States, where he has influence with lawmakers and helps shape American thinking about Turkish politics. The Turkish pilot who bombed the parliament building has reportedly found asylum in Syria with the Democratic Union party, the Kurdish outfit that the White House sees as its main ally in the campaign against the Islamic State.
Kerry hinted that Ankara might be risking its NATO member status, but even if he were able to make good on his threats (he’s not), it’s hard to see why that would frighten Erdogan. NATO is a U.S.-led institution created during the Cold War to contain Soviet expansionism. But the way Ankara sees it, NATO is the means through which the Obama administration bullied Turkey to ignore its national interests in the Syrian conflict, which has destabilized the country and, as we saw last week, put his government at risk.
When the anti-Assad rebellion began in 2011, the White House contracted its Syria policy out to Erdogan, who tried to talk sense to his former friend the Syrian dictator. When Assad only amped up his war on peaceful protesters, Erdogan called for his ouster. As the war became bloodier and the refugee crisis created by Assad’s campaign of sectarian cleansing worsened, the Turks wanted their NATO partner in Washington to take the lead. In early 2012, then-foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu proposed a number of measures, including a buffer zone, a humanitarian corridor, and a reorganization of the Free Syrian Army. His American counterpart, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told Davutoglu the Americans weren’t “there yet.”
In time, it became clear that the White House was not interested in forcing Assad from power no matter how strongly NATO partner Turkey made its case. Instead of worrying about Turkey’s stability, the White House, as Obama later explained, had to respect Iranian interests in Syria. Since Assad was an Iranian client, the United States wouldn’t touch him, lest it compel the Iranians to walk away from the nuclear negotiating table. The Syrian rebel fighters backed by the Pentagon were forced to sign a document promising they wouldn’t use their arms to fight Assad, only Sunni jihadist groups.
Nonetheless, this hodgepodge of farmers, carpenters, and engineers—as Obama contemptuously referred to the rebel fighters—gained ground against Assad until Moscow escalated its presence in Syria last September to defend Assad. Russia thereby gained a base close to the Turkish border, where it flies missions in support of Syrian Kurds whose Turkish affiliate, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), has been making war on Turkey for more than 30 years. That is, even before the White House proposed an intelligence-sharing program with Russia earlier this month, the White House has been partnering with Russia and the PKK, two Turkish adversaries, to the detriment of Ankara’s interests. In August, Erdogan will become the second leader of an American ally, after Benjamin Netanyahu, forced to visit Moscow and petition Vladimir Putin for relief on its borders with Syria, because his NATO partner has left him no choice except to accommodate the interests of the country NATO was designed to contain.
The split between Erdogan and the White House is about Syria policy and nothing else. Obama now says he’s worried about Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies, but when he first entered the White House and the Turkish leader was using rigged trials to send journalists and military officers to jail with fake evidence, Obama said nothing about Erdogan’s creeping dictatorship. If Obama is unhappy with Erdogan these days, it’s more likely because, on Syria, the Turkish leader was prescient and Obama was dead wrong. Indeed, should the next administration want to challenge Iran’s position in Syria, it will be the NATO alliance with Turkey that has preserved options for the United States to protect and advance its regional interests.
So Trump has an alarming disdain for NATO? Well, then, he has learned at the feet of a master. Obama has made disdain for allies his trademark. It was Obama who tore up what he disparagingly calls the “Washington playbook” for foreign policy. When he decided not to make good on his promise to punish Assad for using chemical weapons—in violation of Obama’s own red line—the president felt liberated. “There’s a playbook in Washington that presidents are supposed to follow,” Obama told the Atlantic. “And the playbook prescribes responses to different events, and these responses tend to be militarized responses.”
What he meant by “playbook” is the foreign policy consensus built by the leaders of both parties, many of whom had witnessed the horrors of World War II firsthand and decided it would be best to avoid repeating them. As we are now coming to understand, that consensus was an achievement that nearly rivals our country’s founding documents in its understanding of human nature, the American character, and the disposition of democracies.
Our foreign policy is best guided by simple principles not because Americans are simple-minded, but because we elect a new president every four years, and we need some measure of consistency. Washington’s mandarin wannabes typically evince disdain for the supposed naïveté of U.S. foreign policy by complaining that we play checkers while our adversaries play chess. That’s true, and it’s how it was designed. George Kennan is known as America’s premier Cold War strategist for authoring a very long checker tutorial: Containment is played by moving this piece to that square, blocking another square, taking this piece of your opponent here, and ignoring those there. It doesn’t matter if your opponent has a three-dimensional chessboard in his mind, if you have a nuclear arsenal, a blue-water navy, and the biggest economy in world history. If you don’t win, it means either you really screwed up or you turned the board over.
Obama did the latter. And his “revolution” in American foreign policy was underway well before he let Assad off the hook. When the administration began its negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program, it was effectively undoing the very substance of the American foreign policy consensus—the alliance system.
Lord Palmerston famously said that nations have no permanent friends, only permanent interests. What else would you expect from a 19th-century British statesman whose neighbors on the continent were frequently at daggers drawn and within a century would destroy themselves in two wars? The same principle works for the Middle East, where states are pressed up against each other and riven by a host of rivalries. It doesn’t work in the same way for America. Our neighbors are two friendly nation-states and lots of fish. It is through our allies that we keep the world relatively safe and sane, and the various arrangements and treaties, like NATO, that we make with them secure their place and ours in the world.
Our elders, our betters, understood that allies are not perfect, and sometimes worse. Obama complains that France, Britain, Germany, and Japan aren’t pulling their weight on self-defense and military matters? One of the main points of the postwar consensus was to keep them in check and their militaries pointed at Russia rather than at us or at each other.
The Saudis have to share their region, says Obama. But Riyadh never wanted to run the Middle East—they’re proudly a U.S. client state and have paid for the privilege with huge arms purchases and oil, which keep production lines open and Americans at work. So Obama calls them “free riders.” Saudi Arabia wants Washington to dictate the order of the Persian Gulf, to protect its interests, which it at one time believed were in line with American interests.
But that’s not how Obama sees it. The Iran deal is Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative, and traditional American allies in the Middle East—Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, among others—have paid a high price for it. Europe is paying a high price for it in the unchecked flow of refugees and a freer hand for Russia to make mischief. So will America; it already has. What happens when you turn over the checkerboard? Pandemonium. That’s why there’s a fight over NATO. And that’s why the foreign policy establishment has lost its mind. Its rage at Trump’s dangerous NATO speculations would be easier to stomach if it had ever managed even a peep of criticism at the chaos unleashed by Obama.
Soon or later Europe must pay her fair share. So will the US socialists.