Turkey and Trump’s Balance-of-Power Instincts
Trump is ready to take advantage of Turkey’s new prominence to achieve his European goals.
In a recent presidential statement, Donald Trump avoided the phrase “Armenian genocide” in what might be considered an olive branch towards a renewed bilateral relationship with a changed Turkey. April 24, Armenian Remembrance Day, often occasions a presidential message, but traditionally avoids incendiary terms.
“Today we commemorate the Meds Yeghern, and honor the memories of those wonderful souls who suffered in one of the worst disasters of the 20th Century,” the statement read. “One and a half million Armenians were exiled and marched to their deaths in the final years of the Ottoman Empire. On this Day of Remembrance, we again join the Great Armenian Community in America, and around the World, in mourning the many lives that were lost.”
This is different from President Joe Biden’s statement, which reflected his policy of viewing the world through the binary lens of democracy and autocracy. His statement started, “Today, we pause to remember the lives lost during the Meds Yeghern—the Armenian genocide—and renew our pledge to never forget.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has gestured towards his “good friend” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Trump waxed lyrical about the Turkish president recently while sitting next to the visiting Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Washington, DC to lobby against selling F-35s to Turkey and against tariffs on Israel, as well to promote a joint strike on the Iranian nuclear program. “Congratulations, you’ve done what nobody’s been able to do in 2,000 years. You’ve taken over Syria with different names, but same thing. I said, you’ve taken it over. He’s taken it over through surrogates,” Trump said.
As I have written in these pages, there is an interesting historical parallel here, and the rise of Turkey and the chain reaction that development has set off in the greater Middle East is one worthy of chronicling. Rarely in international relations do we get to see a former great power reverse long-term decline and gain influence at such an accelerated pace that it becomes the top contender for regional preponderance. Trump instinctively seems to recognize that reality, and has quietly preferred a new equilibrium in the region; this naturally might realign regional forces to the consternation of others.
Some of it might be attributed to the president’s instinctive realism and desire to deal with strong rulers, with whom long-term alignments can be arranged without worries about public passions and political volatility. But, squint a little, and one might be able to catch the first glimpses of an interesting balance of power in the making.
The Turkish question will continue to vex Europe, especially post-American retrenchment. Turkey is too big and too important geographically to keep out of European balance. It shows a growing appetite to provide order, to push for political settlements and new equilibria in the historic lands it ruled for centuries.
There is no real hegemonic challenge to the U.S.; even China is surrounded by powerful states that are openly hostile to the idea of a Chinese order. (Chinese conduct also doesn’t make it easy to ally with her, as Britain is finding out.) American problems are internal, from trade deficits, to inequality, to a budding oligarchy and a notoriously pseudo-intellectual elite, to imperial overstretch abroad, and the potential collapse of the meritocratic, race-neutral Trump coalition due to growing racial animosity from certain segments of the coalition. But like all internal problems, they can be solved with prudent politics, a unifying optimistic story, and the imposition of stern order on those who attempt to harm this coalition. But Europe is in a different spot. Her problems are structural, based on history and geography.
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The Indian political realist Kautilya, in his Mandala theory, coined the concept of enemy’s enemy, which proposed that immediate neighbors are the enemies of the state, and that any prudent sovereign should therefore consider that the state bordering the other side of a neighboring state can be an ally. Kautilya’s Arthashastra, written around a hundred years after Thucydides, was translated to English and in something of a historic irony essentially led to the “divide and rule” strategy of the British in India. It is unlikely that Trump has read any of it, but characteristically, he has perhaps grasped—Kautilya might say, as a prudent sovereign—the historic importance of Turkey in his bid to burden-shift to Europe, while keeping the continent on some form of a leash to dissuade it from uniting politically.
In fact, one of the first splits after (even a hypothetical) American retrenchment is already emerging on the question of Turkey and how to fit her into the European balance: as a historic balancer to Russia and a glue in Western-Islamic alliance against any concentrated Eastern power center, or a neo-Ottoman empire with predatory designs over Armenia, Syria, Cyprus, and Greece? Keeping Turkey out of Europe would result in a massive rising enemy just outside the frontiers, and accepting it would only encourage internal tensions and centrifugal forces within the European Union.
Trump understands that “Europe,” despite decades of supranational narrative building, is not a singular coherent political and strategic entity bound by one culture and language. The chances are that, without the Pax Americana, the EU will split along the standard historic divisions. This is not to say that a return of historic animosity and war in the old continent is desirable, and, for what it is worth, a compromise burden-sharing force posture is already available. But the point remains the same. America will be just fine, but it is better to have individual good bilateral relations with the major powers of the globe, including Russia and Turkey, as in a concert of great powers, than to have the crusading foreign policy of a legion of democracy versus autocracies. The latter encourages reckless and free-riding smaller allies to pursue potentially dangerous utopian aims. The ancients, both Thucydides and Kautilya, would perhaps approve of this realism.
