Under its present leaders, Turkey would be emerging as both a partner and a force hostile to American interests in the duplicitous Pakistani manner, if it were a “regional power,” or indeed any power, at all. As it is, in spite of its government’s “neo-Ottoman,” Regional Power or even pro-Great Power pretensions, today’s Turkey is not even a Small Power in spite of its 75 million inhabitants, million men in uniform, trillion-dollar economy, and evident geographic advantages.
The partnership part derives from Turkey's status as a long-standing member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which Westernized the culture of Turkish military officers, and which is supplemented by American use of the Incirlik air base near Adana in S.E. Turkey.
The hostility part derives from the intensely though covertly Islamist ideology of the ostensibly democratic-conservative ruling AKP (Justice and Development Party), expressly created by the AKP’s founding leader and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to repackage the openly and violently Islamist ideology of the MSP (Nationalist Movement Party) in which he entered politics, in order to win power without provoking a military intervention in defense of secularism. An ostensibly “pro-American” and “Pro-European” stance is Erdogan’s and the AKP’s shield as it de-secularizes Turkey bit by bit–complete with creeping Shari’a restrictions–with much success in leveraging European influence to marginalize the armed forces, whose essential role in defense of secularism has ignorantly been ignored by European officialdom. The stridently anti-Western Milli Gazete daily, the AKP’s truest voice, Erdogan’s recurrent outbursts, and such major episodes as the 2003 reversal on U.S. transit to Iraq, have all repeatedly breached the veil of duplicity, though without much effect.
As for Turkey’s nullity as not even a Small Power, it derives from its exceptionally crippling internal divisions, of which the political opposition of the CHP (Republican People’s Party) and other secularist parties is the least important; while they are energized by the Islamization that advances each day, they are inescapably outnumbered by the less educated Turkish-Islamic majority, the 50% whose females are headscarved and which votes for Islamization and the AKP. Much more important is Turkey’s Alevi-Bektashi community, numbering at least twelve million, which is vaguely Shi’a but more properly Turkic/animistic (and humanistic) under a thin Islamic veil (no pilgrimage, no fasting on Ramadan, etc). Long cruelly persecuted by Turkey’s Sunni rulers, they oppose any policy that would favor the Sunni interest (i.e., any policy likely to be favored by the very Sunni AKP, such as help for Syria’s rebels at present). In the province of Hatay subtracted from Syria under French rule, there are also a million or so Alawite Arabs–entirely unrelated to the Alevis and indeed rebranded in the 1920s as Nosairi heretics from Ismaili Sevener Shi’ism. They vehemently support their compatriot Assad, naturally enough. Then there are the fully identified Kurds and Zaza, both Alevi and Sunni, who account for at least 20% of the population, and strongly oppose any action by the Turkish armed forces that they have so long resisted, with tens of thousands killed since the 1970s. The prevalence of Kurds, Zaza, Turkish Alevis and Alawite Arabs in Turkey’s eastern provinces adjacent to Iran, Iraq, and Syria has its own significance.
Even more immediately crippling of Turkey’s ability to operate as a power in its conflicted region is the military paralysis caused by the AKP’s long-term effort to humiliate and marginalize its military leadership, whose staunch, and socially liberalizing secularism it depicts as merely authoritarian and undemocratic. Within that broad AKP effort (foolishly endorsed by European officialdom) top generals and more colonels have been accused, tried, and convicted on conspiracy charges, arising from the supposedly vast and certainly nebulous Ergenekon plot to take over the government to protect Turkey’s still secular constitution. Given the acute mistrust that divides them, the AKP leaders will not and could not order the Turkish armed forces into action, and that makes Turkey impotent in a bellicose part of the world, without even a Small Power’s influence over Syrian villages near its borders.
