Breakfast

Fresh orange juice, cheese omelettes, home fries, grilled tomatoes. After twelve hours spent guzzling fake suspense, shiny hyperbole, and black coffee, a few of the survivors seriously considered skipping the beginning of Obama’s victory speech to hit up the buffet. But as the crowd in Chicago started screaming and the Kenyans started dancing and the Americans around me started crying, I couldn’t help but get caught up too. That’s right: even I was teary and proud and full of hope, and I kind of liked it. I’m still cynical about an Obama presidency, but tonight (today, tomorrow? I have lost my sense of time) the Senator earned the election and accomplished something great.

We watched both McCain’s concession and Obama’s victory address in sleep-deprived silence. Both were elegant, fitting bits of rhetoric. Both were also foreboding. Watching McCain choke back emotion and exit gracefully among the jeers of a hateful crowd was painful and frightening. So were Obama’s words about a “new spirit of service” and “new spirit of sacrifice”—and the sight of my friends and colleagues eagerly cheering them on. But all this was outweighed by the joy of knowing that this endless election is over.

At 7am, I headed back to the auditorium for a conference call with former Ambassador Marc Grossman. I managed to spew up an incoherent question on the magnitude of Obama’s soft power bump in Turkey, and got an interesting answer: “I don’t really like the term ’soft power.’ I prefer smart power.” He defused another question, regarding a potential Armenian resolution, with diplomatic delicacy: Turks, Grossman argued, should accept that Obama’s support for a resolution as fact, and work on improving relations with modern Armenia. Fair enough—but he downplayed the destructive impact of such a measure.

On my way out of the auditorium, I grabbed a quick cup of coffee before running out the door. After 25 wakeful hours of incessant election coverage, I had to get to class. An hour ago, I turned in my Turkish final.

What Obama means for Turkey

The networks just called Pennsylvania for Obama, garnering another 21 electoral votes and a round of cheers from the 30 hardy souls still holding vigil around the shiny tinny cacophony of CNN. Looks like other networks are calling Ohio. It’s been over for two months, but now it’s really over. Let the Wednesday morning quarterbacking begin.

So, what will happen after the unicorn rainbow hope-o-rama fades? And how will the Obama administration affect Turkey? I can think of a few ways, which I’ll elaborate on further when I get a few moments of decaffeinated peace after the Blitzer blitz:

1. “The Armenian Question.” This is the big one. In a statement released last week, Sen. Obama again emphasized his belief that “the Armenian genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence.” The great majority of Turks disagree. If an Obama administration approaches this problem with diplomatic discretion, there’s a chance that the “question” might finally be answered for good. But this seems rather unlikely: it would require a big change of heart from the Turkish government, and as the Democrats keep picking up Senators this evening, the probability of a bullheaded genocide resolution from Congress and the nasty fallout that might ensue continues to increase.
2. Soft power surge. The world is painted blue, but only twelve percent of Turks currently hold a favorable view of the United States, according to the latest Pew Global Attitudes survey. Despite the Armenian hangup, tonight’s Obama win should soften anti-American attitudes among the Turkish public. Whether it will also affect the Kemalist general staff or the Turkish government is less clear.
3. More attention towards Turkey. The Obama campaign specifically cites “restoring the strategic partnership with Turkey” as an administration goal in one of its foreign policy papers. Thanks to Iraq, the United States has paid plenty of attention to the Turkish military, but this indicates that we may start paying more attention to Turkey’s government, too.
4. Pullout and PKK. Obama understands well the importance that Turks attach to Kurdish terrorism in the southeast. Negotiations between Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish leaders and eventual troop withdrawals of the sort Obama has proposed could mitigate the PKK threat, which would do a great deal to restore the rather tense Turkish-American relationship of late.
5. Strengthening “strategic depth.” Obama’s willingness to talk with the governments of nations like Iran and Syria would reinforce Turkey’s current policy of open dialogue with its turbulent neighbors. Turkey might also become an important mediator for American overtures to these untouchables.

And in the time it took me to pull together this post, the election’s been called for Sen. Obama. Let the euphoria begin.

Turkey’s AK party ban: breaking a window of opportunity

(STR/AFP/Getty Images)

“It isn’t exactly pretty — and certainly isn’t tidy — but peace really does appear to be breaking out in the Middle East.”

That’s the thesis of an odd, unnervingly optimistic Stratfor analysis by Peter Zeihan, published earlier this month. Just how optimistic? Consider this:

“One gets the feeling that if the progress could hold up for just a touch longer, not only would there be an Israeli-Syrian deal and a U.S.-Iranian understanding, the world itself would change. Those of us here who are old enough to remember haven’t sensed such a fateful moment since the weeks before the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989.”

Amid the choreographed snubs, rattling sabers, and wacky slowdowns of late, that may sound insane. But a comprehensive peace deal could well be in the offing, thanks to one important player omitted by Stratfor’s analysis: Turkey.

Over the last five years, the leaders of Turkey’s center-right AK party, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdoğan, President and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, and current Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, have forged a newly assertive foreign policy. Their new doctrine of “strategic depth” is based on the ideas of Ahmet Davutoğlu, an international relations professor who serves as chief foreign policy adviser to the AK government. Davutoğlu’s influence on Turkish foreign policy is huge — according to The Economist, both Erdoğan and Gül address him as hoca, the Turkish term for a wise mentor.

The theory of strategic depth calls for Turkey to be “a country that is always at the epicenter of events, whatever they may be.” In practice, that has meant not just continuing to make reforms with an eye towards joining the European Union, but also engaging with Turkey’s regional neighbors through both diplomacy and trade. The approach has had its hang-ups — most notably when Gül invited Khaled Mashaal, leader of Hamas, for an official visit after his party’s win in the 2006 Palestinian elections. But on balance, the new ambition in Ankara is perhaps the most important accomplishment of the AK government. The share of trade with Turkey’s neighbors has increased from 6 percent of all trade volume in 2000 to 35 percent in 2007. Relations with neighbors Bulgaria and Georgia have significantly improved. Most important, Turkey is on friendly terms with nearly everyone in the Middle East — including Israel.

Avni Doğru describes Turkey’s quiet involvement all over the region quite well:

Turkey has been playing a key mediating role in several conflicts, including those between Syria and Israel, between Palestine and Israel, and in Lebanon. Syria and Israel just had their third round of indirect talks under Turkey’s mediation in Istanbul. Similarly, the Ankara Forum had several meetings so far and brought the private sectors of Israel and Palestine together to work on possible rapprochement. The Ankara Forum also hosted a meeting between the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli President Shimon Peres before the Annapolis summit in November 2007. After the 2006 Lebanon war, the AKP government decided to send 1,000 troops – one of the largest contributions – to the UN Interim Force in Lebanon despite harsh domestic opposition. Also, during the recent Lebanon crisis in May 2008, Turkey played the mediator role between the Shia opposition and the Sunni establishment thanks to its good relations with both parties. Its balanced policy toward each group also secured Turkey an active role in bridging the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq in 2007. It has similarly worked behind the scenes in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan on peace-building efforts. In fact, Turkey is now the only country that enjoys good relations with every country in the Middle East.

Add to that already exhaustive list Erdoğan’s recent trip as the second head of state to visit post-invasion Iraq (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the first), and Turkey’s help “consolidating and facilitating” U.S.-Iranian nuclear negotiations, and it’s clear that Turkey has a crucial role in every current conflict in the Middle East. And on top of all this, they are likely to win a non-permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Some strategic depth, indeed.

Their importance in U.S.-Iranian negotiations is certainly underestimated. The Turkish government, officially opposed to an Iranian nuclear program, is in frequent diplomatic contact with Iranian officials. U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley met with Ali Babacan in Ankara last week. So did Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, on his way back from talks in Geneva. If there have not already been formal backchannel negotiations between Iran and the United States facilitated by Turkey, Babacan has certainly been acting as a de facto intermediary.

Understanding Turkey’s role clears up some of the tense signaling of recent weeks. If the real negotiations are quietly underway with the help of Turkey, officials in Israel and the United States are free to play hardball in public, and Iranian negotiators have an incentive to act defiant with goofy stunts like the “none paper” they presented in Geneva. Meanwhile, mediated negotiations between Israeli and Syrian diplomats continue to make public progress. Suddenly, a peace breakout doesn’t seem so implausible.

However, there is one major complication. Although Erdoğan’s government is playing an increasingly crucial international role, his domestic house is in disorder. On Monday, Turkey’s Constitutional Court will begin final deliberations on whether or not to disband the AK party for anti-secular activities. It is almost certain that they will shut down the party and ban its leaders from politics.

Staunch secularists, including the military, many judges, and Turkey’s elite Kemalist establishment, see AK’s brand of Islamism as a creeping threat to Turkey’s long-established secular order, and AK’s leaders as agents of a plot to impose sharia law on the Turkish Republic. The truth is more complicated.

There is no doubt that AK is an Islamist party. Their political strength comes both from a “silent majority” voter base of conservative and religious Turks, especially outside Turkey’s urban centers, and a spectacular track record of economic growth. The party was formed by a faction of politicians from the Welfare Party, itself banned as anti-secular in 1998. And although the leaders of AK have done much for liberalism in Turkey — abolished the death penalty, promoted legal equality, opened the economy and tamed inflation — they have also done their share of dumb, illiberal things, including a 2004 attempt to criminalize adultery, local bans and regulation on alcohol consumption, a crackdown on pork butchers and pig farms, and a famous attempt to lift the prohibition on headscarves at university. All these policies are rooted in conservative, traditional belief, and few of them have been reported by those in the West with a simple view of the troubles. AK have also been keen practitioners of kadrolaşma, the Turkish tradition of stuffing bureaucracies and government offices full of sympathetic appointees. But none of their actions are a threat to secularism or democracy any more than, say, the Bush administration’s attempts to push abstinence-only sex ed and appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court threatened the American way. The argument against AK is reductio ad sharium.

The secularists are also more complex. Although often portrayed simply as a “hard-line Kemalist elite” out of touch with the wishes of the people, they are more than just military brass eager for an antidemocratic coup. Historically, the military, which sees itself as part of a long tradition started by Atatürk, himself a military commander, has been an important defender of secularism. Past coups have been no victory for democracy, but they have established crucial “red lines” for Turkish civil society and helped stabilize the political arena by preventing the undue influence of both statist and Islamic extremists. However, their time has passed, and the generals ought to recognize rule of law as the real protector of the secular state.

Last time his party was challenged, during protests over the headscarf ban, Erdoğan called a snap election that handed AK a renewed mandate and a bigger share of parliament. Whether he will do so again remains to be seen. A snap election before the ruling would not be a surprise. However, over the course of their second term in power, AK has lost some support in the Kurdish southeast by allowing the military to crack down on the PKK. AK also faces a vocal, mobilized secular opposition. Considering this, a preemptive election would be a strategic mistake. A post-ban election would be more prudent, since the court ruling will solidify the party base. Rebuliding after a ban is also a well-established process in Turkish politics: If banned, AK’s representatives will stand for election as independents, preserve their majority, and form up as a new party with a different name. Although their leaders will ostensibly be banned from politics for five years, it would be a victory for secularism in name only, leaving the most extreme secularists “stuck between a coup and a hard place,” as one diplomat recently told The Economist.

However, the turmoil caused by a party ban would throw the government into disarray for a bit, and the hassle of forming a new party and parliamentary coalition would certainly put a halt to the negotiations sponsored Erdoğan’s government and close the window of opportunity for an international agreement. If the potential for a broad Mideast peace negotiated via Turkey is true, an AK ban will be a very bad thing.

U.S. officials are hesitant to comment on the ban for fear of alienating the Turkish military, the institution where our strategic interests currently lie. As long as a quarter of the fuel consumed by coalition forces in Iraq enters through the Habur gate, and 70 percent of air cargo is flown in from the U.S. air force base in Incırlık, this will probably remain the case. However, next week will be a crucial time, not just for the future of democracy and secularism in Turkey, but for the prospects of peace in the Middle East. Losing AK means losing the crucial peace negotiations they are helping to mediate, which mean losing our last best hope for a grand agreement. We can only hope someone in our government finds the courage to speak up.

Lowering the bar

Great news from the Balkans: “Last night Kosovo took her place amongst the community of nations.”

Was it a breakthrough with Belgrade and Moscow? Official recognition from a few more states? Surprise turnover of UN authority to EULEX?

Nope. But they did place pretty well in that beauty pageant.

(via FP Passport)

Q: Will Israel attack Iran?

Declarations of imminent military action in Iran are nothing new, but a worried Admiral Mullen, a wary Ehud Barak, and a wargaming Revolutionary Guard have restored speculation over a potential strike by Israel or the United States to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons program. So will Israel attack Iran? Depends whom you ask:

A: Yes, “barring a loss of nerve or political will by Israel”

A: On balance, yes. “Add it all up, as I do in this week’s column, and you’re looking at a lot of the system providing weak obstacles and more than a little sub rosa push toward war.”

A: Absolutely not. After failure in Lebanon, “the chance that the Israeli government will attack the region again is almost nil.”

A: Not likely. “The odds are very low. When Israel bombed Osirak in 1981, and when they bombed Syria more recently, there was “radio silence” before and after the operation. Whereas now with Iran, it’s been a much more public campaign. If the Israelis were serious about doing it, there would be a much more studied silence. I don’t think they want to do it and are hoping to intimidate Iran into compromise.”

A: Maybe. “The likelihood of Israel bombing Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities is not zero, but it is not as high as many experts seem to think.”

A: Nah, we’re on the brink of an Israeli-Syrian U.S.-Iranian understanding. “The Cold War interregnum is coming to a close and a new era is dawning.”

A: No. “What we’re seeing is a lot of signaling going on.”

A: Yes. “Missile launches are the ultimate in provocation,” ánd this “in combination with uncertainty of the upcoming U.S. elections…makes an attack by Israel on Iran almost certain.”

A: Unlikely, since an attack requires access to U.S.-controlled Iraqi airspace and Secretary of Defense Bob Gates “would not be on board for an Israeli strike.”

A: Possibly. “Numerous declarations by very senior figures in Israel have placed Israel in the position where it would seem committed to act against Iran even unilaterally”

A: No. Admiral Mike Mullen told the IDF “that Israel did not have a green light to attack Iran and that it would not receive U.S. support for such a move.”

A: No way. U.S. and Israeli threats are “a funny joke.”

A: Potentially. The current estimated probability is between 32 and 35 percent. (NB: very low trading volume)

A: Unlikely, no, no, yes, who knows? Five for the price of one! Respectively: “a strike is still less rather than more likely, although I am increasingly concerned,” “very, very unlikely,” “it would come at a great expense to Israel,” “the writing on the wall looks deadly serious,” “if Israel were going to strike Iran, it might have already done so.”

A: No. This is Tupac-Biggie all over again.

For my part, count me in with Gates and Kaplan. I think we’re watching some very scary signaling, but any attack is far from imminent.

Towards a new balance in Russia?

Henry Kissinger offers an optimistic outlook on Dmitri Medvedev and Russian democracy in a recent Washington Post op-ed:

Whatever the ultimate outcome, the last Russian election marks a transition from a phase of consolidation to a period of modernization. The ceding of power by a ruler at the height of his influence is unprecedented in Russian history. The growing complexity of the economy has generated the need for predictable legal procedures, as already foreshadowed by Medvedev. The government’s operation — at least initially — with two centers of power may, in retrospect, appear to be the beginning of an evolution toward a form of checks and balances.

A Russian democracy is not foreordained, of course. But neither was the democratic evolution in the West.

Medvedev’s words more than foreshadow the fundamentals of liberalism. Earlier this year, he pledged respect for the rule of law and “freedom in all its forms.” Last week, he said “we should fight neglect of the law and legal nihilism; the economy should be based on market values, and property rights should always be protected.” Plus, his career as a law professor and detachment from the state security apparatus suggest that he comes from a culture of deference to law before state power.

But it’s hard to see that deference in action with Khodorkovsky still in jail, Lugovoi happily serving in the Duma, and nasty grumbles in Abkhazia and the Czech Republic. Moreover, as chairman of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas behemoth, Medvedev wasn’t exactly a champion of the market, and Putin’s undemocratic turnover of the government was far from a Washingtonian succession.

I’m more inclined to see Medvedev as a Tom Hagen to Putin’s circle of siloviki — a public face who keeps his hands clean but stays loyal to the leader he’s advised for 17 years. As nicely as that analogy may fit, however, it seems a bit too simple. This article on Putin’s government, published well before the Medvedev transition, identified three factions in the Kremlin: liberals (then marginalized, now extinct), technocrats, and siloviki. Medvedev has something for everyone — a liberal education, a technocratic career, and years of proximity to Putin. Combined with the wide swath of constitutional powers afforded the President and Putin’s attempts to keep each faction under his own control, it’s clear that two centers of power have emerged, as Kissinger notes. But whether or not they will check and balance or defer and divide remains unseen.

Regardless, one thing is clear:

Ever since the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, a succession of U.S. administrations has acted as if the creation of Russian democracy were a principal American task. Speeches denouncing Russian shortcomings and gestures drawn from the Cold War have occurred frequently. Proponents of such policies assert that the transformation of Russian society is the precondition of a more harmonious international order. They argue that if pressure is maintained on the current Russia, it, too, will eventually implode. Yet assertive intrusion into what Russians consider their own sense of self runs the risk of thwarting both geopolitical and moral goals.

If two decades of nagging haven’t transformed Russian democracy, it’s time to give it up. That doesn’t mean giving up on democracy — foreign policymakers ought to be clear that we support real independence for Georgia and Ukraine. But easing up on the rhetoric and cooperating without co-opting when our interests run parallel may well be the best way to let true Russian liberalism emerge.