Joe Biden’s valued ‘autocrat’

SEVERAL NEWS OUTLETS have lauded President Biden’s meeting on Monday with Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “upbeat.” 

Have you been following Biden’s comments about Turkey and its president? In April he riled up the entire Turkish nation by labeling the 1915 Armenian tragedy Turkish “genocide.” Earlier he called the Turkish president an “autocrat,” proposed to support Erdogan’s  opponents during the next elections, and so on.

Yet after he met Erdogan for barely an hour, Biden declared the meeting “very good” and “positive and productive.”  His Turkish counterpart called it “fruitful, sincere.”

What prompted the two to kiss and make up?

It reminds me of Erdogan’s first visit to the White House on December 10, 2002. Weeks before, his Justice and Development Party (AKP), rooted in Islam, had won a thumping majority at the Turkish parliamentary elections, routing the long-established, staunchly secularist ruling party. But the head of the victorious party, Erdogan, was still barred from coming into office as prime minister because of his earlier conviction in an ultra-secularist court for reciting an Islamic poem at a public meeting in 1997. (A piece of legislation would soon waive that prohibition.)

Erdogan needed to get Bush to push the European Union to advance Ankara’s membership issue at the bloc’s crucial summit at Copenhagen two days later. Before heading for the White House, the Turkish leader gave a previously scheduled talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, which I attended from the second row of the audience. As Erdogan was walking up to the podium to give his speech, the entire audience applauded him except three people on the front row. One was Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish neoconservative who was then deputy defense secretary masterminding the Iraq war, and two people who had accompanied him to the meeting.

The meeting over, I buttonholed Erdogan for about 10 minutes to ask him a couple of questions about his impending meeting with Bush. I had known him from several visits to Turkey. He said it was “important” that Bush put in a good word for Turkey to EU leaders before their Copenhagen meeting.

As Erdogan was getting up to leave me, I said, “Bush is a prisoner at the hands of Islam-bashing neocons who hate you. They call you an Islamist. Do you think you can get his support?”

“They need Turkey, not me,” Erdogan said, releasing my hand from his.

Now last Monday’s meeting.  Erdogan was asked to explain what had made his meeting with Biden productive, the Turkish leader said, without elaborating, that he and the U.S. president had agreed on the need for “cooperation to promote regional security.” In other words, despite his tirade against Erdogan and the Turks, Biden realized that Turkey had a vital role to play for “regional security.” One such role had been announced just after the meeting. After American and allied troops would be pulling out of Afghanistan before September 11, Muslim Turks would be guarding and maintaining the Kabul airport, about the only venue through which America and the West would carry on their diplomatic, security and business affairs in Afghanistan. Troops from any Western countries would be easy targets from the Taliban and other Afghan forces, fuming over 20 years of American occupation of their country.

Secondly, Biden’s avowed mission on this trip was to recommit America to NATO and other alliances, which President Donald Trump had denigrated and alienated. To promote NATO, you need the alliance’s second-largest army, which is Turkey’s.

Thirdly, since the end of the Cold War America and NATO have continually been invading Muslim countries and otherwise attacking Muslim forces. Brown Muslim Turks are about NATO’s only shield, however tenuous, against Muslim accusations of it being a white Christian force refighting the Crusades.

Finally, spanning the Middle East and Europe, Turkey is the West’s only physical link to the Muslim world.  The country is, as former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu once told me, “the bridge between Islam and the West.” Moreover, Gallup and other polls have found that Tayyip Erdogan is the most popular leader in the Muslim world. Biden can use him and his country productively to promote America’s much-needed outreach to Muslim societies.

• Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator, now living in Bangladesh.