Coup attempt in Turkey

[Crazy_Ivan80]

Turkey is a pretty hard diplomatic problem at this point. I don't know how the US should go about handling them.

There doesn't seem any good path forward from the US standpoint.

there's also the big problem of big turkish 5th columns in other countries. We've had groups of them taking to street and engaging in violent behaviour against turks suspected of being of the wrong camp, as well as against the police. Significant security-risk there if Erdogan decides to fan the flames of war.

[Valmy]

By far the most plausible theory I have read so far is that this indeed was a pro-Gulenist plot, started in a haphazard fashion before they were ready, as they got wind of the pending mass arrests (that ended up happening post-coup).

While it did not involve the whole military it did involve a significant part of it and there were some senior people involved.
My understanding had been that while the Gulenist movement had penetrated the judiciary and non-military security forces, their presence in the army and air force was negligible.

The Gulenist movement is rather pacifist in its ideology so that wouldn't surprise me.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I think a break with Turkey is ultimately required, to be honest. It'll happen slowly over time.

The importance of the US-Turkey strategic relationship just isn't as important as it was in the Cold War. That isn't to say it is unimportant--there's a lot of value in being able to launch things like AC-130s from Turkey, these low and slow flying ground support planes are at their best when they can circle around an engagement area for hours, raining down immense amounts of death and destruction virtually with impunity (in the sort of asymmetric wars we fight now--interestingly AC-130 type tactics would be useless against any real military since they're sitting ducks in the sky.) Planes like the AC-130 have been a big part of our war against ISIS and most are flying out of Incirlik to my knowledge. If they fly from further away, they have less effective time in the battlefield, more fuel is spent getting to/from and it's all around less efficient.

Plus, to be frank Turkish air space and our base there haven't been guaranteed to us in times of war--Turkey denied both use of its air space and use of forces launched from our base in Turkey during the 2003 Iraq War; they later relented on the air space issue but not on the use of territory issue, which meant for that war we effectively couldn't use our base in Turkey anyway. Turkey has been a tepid to poor ally in the war against ISIS, hampered at least in part by Erdogan's cold geopolitical calculations that ISIS wants to kill Kurds, so he wasn't all that anti-ISIS until they started blowing people up in Turkey.

The value of the nuclear deployments in Turkey are essentially zero, for us, strategically. Their presence is purely a relic of the Cold War and unnecessary.

Arguably if we're going to remain "engaged" in Iraq we probably just need to set up a more permanent and beefed up military base there, the reality is we have like 6,000 boots on the ground in Iraq now and are constantly bombing targets in the country, it may make sense for semi-permanent base to be built there. When Obama took office his plan was to have a "beefy Embassy" in Iraq and sign a BSA, but otherwise disengage. At the time Iraq had fallen almost fully into the Iranian sphere and refused, so we left. Arguably if Iraq had signed a BSA we'd have been compelled to respond to  the initial wave of ISIS expansion much, much quicker and we wouldn't be here now, but it is what it is. Given that the Iraqi government now realizes it needs American military help to avoid collapsing, I suspect a new round of negotiations on a BSA would probably get us Iraqi approval for a major and semi-permanent military base in country. With that the need for the air fields in Incirlik go down.

There are some negatives to a base in Iraq, a base in a war zone tends to be politically unpopular (although it used to be relatively common that we had bases in places where bad things were expected to happen at any moment), and also will definitely be a target for terrorist attacks--although we could mitigate that by making it a sole-U.S. installation, not a shared U.S./Iraqi one. There will also be domestic opposition that such a base could engage us in mission creep, but again, with 6,000+ boots on the ground in Iraq it's a fait accompli that we're at war in Iraq again. It's really up to the President to avoid it becoming us super embroiled in heavy ground fighting there--and while I'm a frequent critic of Obama foreign policy he's actually done a pretty damn good job of avoiding that exact problem in the war against ISIS.

[Malicious Intent]

The Gulenist movement is rather pacifist in its ideology so that wouldn't surprise me.

Pacifist and religiously tolerant as long as you don't break with Islam. Gulen has in the past been very clear: It is imperative that every muslim who converts to another faith or becomes an atheist has to be killed.
I am not aware that he changed his views in the last couple years.

[OttoVonBismarck]

In Islam only killing apostates as opposed to all infidels is the equivalent of extreme pacifist liberalism.

[Monoriu]

I think a break with Turkey is ultimately required, to be honest. It'll happen slowly over time.

But why?  Even if Turkey is becoming less democratic, surely it is still much better than, say, Saudi Arabia?  If the US has no problem maintaining Saudi Arabia as an ally, why break with Turkey? 

[Valmy]

We won't break with anybody we don't have to break with. No reason to intentionally add to our list of enemies.

I mean presuming we don't start electing total morons to the White House. Not naming any names.

[OttoVonBismarck]

 To be honest Trump is right on some of that stuff, we have a lot of alliances now that serve little purpose and benefit the United States not at all. From what I can tell the biggest argument for keeping most of them is the weird sort of conservatism seen in the lefty Foreign Policy nerds who assume an alliance signed should never be ended. The reality is that lack of flexibility makes almost no sense.

To be frank, I'm actually in favor of an overhauled NATO in which countries are required to either recommit to meeting the 2% of GDP defense spending requirement, or we simply exit the alliance and enter bilateral alliances with key allied countries like Britain, Poland, and any of the Baltic States who want our protection. We've actually become in some ways the foreign policy arm, in terms of military action, of a number of large and rich European states that refuse to meaningfully fund or outfit their own military force. This makes no sense in the 21st century. This isn't the Cold War where the value of these relationships was preventing the spread of the Soviet Empire. That empire is dead and never coming back.

To Mono's point, we aren't going to create a major deployment in Saudi Arabia again, we drew down there in 2003 because our presence in that country was frankly enraging far too many crazy Muslims to be worth it. As to kicking Turkey out of NATO, Saudi Arabia is not in NATO, and we are not formal allies with Saudi Arabia. We are strategic partners with Saudi Arabia, meaning they help us and we help them where it is mutually beneficial. We have no defense commitment to Saudi Arabia, we are not required or expected to defend Saudi Arabia, we do not share nuclear weapons with Saudi Arabia. I'm not saying we end all of our bilateral relationships with dictatorships around the world, but we don't just have a set of military/intelligence shared interests with Turkey (as we do Saudi Arabia), we have a formal, binding military alliance. An attack on Turkey, under the NATO charter, we have to treat the same as an attack on the United States; this is the deepest form of alliance. We have 40 nuclear weapons in Turkey with shared NATO/Turkish control of those  weapons.

I'm not actually sure where you even pulled SA out of your hat, kicking Turkey out of NATO doesn't change our relationship with Saudi Arabia. To be frank, as NATO-skeptic as I am now, if we continue to be cool with Turkey when they fall into true despotism, which is probably coming in the next five years, I could see it being a good time to roll on out of the alliance entirely.

[OttoVonBismarck]

This is also frankly, what Europe wants. The long term goal of the EU Federalists is for a superstate with a NATO-independent European defense capacity, and frankly I'm fine with that. We've done a lot for Europe for 70 years, enough that I think we don't need to do anymore. Europe is cool now, Russia ain't ever rolling West again, they're stable and they have the capacity to take care of themselves. We need to pivot stronger towards Asia to better encircle China with a ring of countries that are anti-Chinese due to its innate desire for expansionism. I hope that in that quest we avoid a repeat of the Cold War, and instead prompt a Chinese realization there is far more benefit from working within the international system than against it. But this weird idea that we must maintain what we've set up in Europe til the end of time is bizarre to me.

[Valmy]

To be honest Trump is right on some of that stuff, we have a lot of alliances now that serve little purpose and benefit the United States not at all. From what I can tell the biggest argument for keeping most of them is the weird sort of conservatism seen in the lefty Foreign Policy nerds who assume an alliance signed should never be ended. The reality is that lack of flexibility makes almost no sense.

I couldn't disagree more. There is nothing lefty about preserving an international order that benefits us. What sense does ripping it down that make? What exactly would we gain from all this 'flexibility'?

[Razgovory]

What about power projection?

[Berkut]

I am not quite as extreme as Otto, but fundamentally I agree that the terms and conditions under which NATO was formed clearly no longer exist. That doesn't mean NATO *must* go away, but it does mean that if it cannot change to something that is useful for everyone involved in the modern world, it is foolish to maintain it "just because".

Right now I don't understand what the utility is for the US. It just seems to me a way for Europe to get us to foot the bulk of their security bill.

It is hard of course, to evaluate the actual value. Certainly the US benefits from NATO and the security it provides to the West. But I don't see how there is anything like a equitable sharing of the costs of that security.

[Berkut]

To be honest Trump is right on some of that stuff, we have a lot of alliances now that serve little purpose and benefit the United States not at all. From what I can tell the biggest argument for keeping most of them is the weird sort of conservatism seen in the lefty Foreign Policy nerds who assume an alliance signed should never be ended. The reality is that lack of flexibility makes almost no sense.

I couldn't disagree more. There is nothing lefty about preserving an international order that benefits us. What sense does ripping it down that make? What exactly would we gain from all this 'flexibility'?

The order benefits us, of course, but is NATO necessary for that order?

And is the cost of that order being fairly shared?

[OttoVonBismarck]

I would say my "preferred" form of NATO would be we maintain the concept that an attack on one member is an attack on all--I have no real problem if France/Germany/Italy/Spain (despite being the worst NATO members) were legitimately attacked, in America coming to defend them. I cannot fathom any country actually attacking them, because none have the force projection capabilities. The border states like the Baltics are in genuine threat, and I'm fine guaranteeing their safety. But NATO is more than just a defensive pact now, it's the major tool of military intervention in the Europe/MENA region, often times with the United States, frankly, paying the price in blood and money to achieve primarily European goals.

Who does the civil war in Syria most impact, outside of the Middle East? Not the United States, but Europe, which is where all the refugees are going. And yet, America has shouldered the overwhelming majority of the cost of Western involvement in this war. What's more, is we've been publicly castigated by figures like Hollande for not doing more. That's where I want off the bus. As part of a new framework, I see almost no reason to continue involvement with Turkey.

[Berkut]

I think as well we fall into this trap of "Well, if we bail on them, then we lose whatever influence we have..." which just means that we have no leverage, since the alternative is always "Shit is better than nothing, so have a dosing of that!".

At some point, as Trump would say, you *must* be willing to walk away, or the other party will always win in any negotiation.

Right now, NATO is pretty sure the US will never walk away, so why should they meet their obligations?

I don't even know if NATO makes sense if they all DID meet their obligations.