https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17098/biden-turkey-relations
Erdoğan is waiting for an opportunity to “persuade” Biden that his Islamist regime is in fact a staunch ally of the Western civilization.
What Erdoğan diplomatically refers to as “common interests” are in reality a list of Turkish demands: 1) Remove Turkey from the CAATSA list. 2) Allow Turkey to activate its Russian-made air defense architecture. 3) Ignore the Turkish public bank’s role in violating U.S. sanctions on Iran. 4) End the U.S. alliance with Syrian Kurds and allow Turkey to crush them. 5) Praise, do not criticize, Turkey’s democratic record.
An aggressive overt and covert Turkish lobbying campaign in Washington will soon begin. As a first sign, Turkey has hired a Washington-based law firm, Arnold & Porter, to lobby for its readmission to the F-35 program. Under the six-month, $750,000 contract, Arnold & Porter will “advise on a strategy for [the Turkish defense procurement agency] and Turkish contractors to remain within the Joint Strike Fighter Program….
Three U.S. presidential administrations encouraged Erdoğan recklessly to harm Western interests and further destroy whatever pieces of democracy were left in his own country by allowing him to maintain his transactional relationship with the U.S. rather than weakening his regime.
Biden now has a chance to stop and even reverse that unpleasant chapter in modern Turkish history.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s two predecessors, Donald Trump and Barack Obama, made the same mistake, though for different reasons. They both mishandled Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his increasingly Islamization of Turkey’s secular lifestyle, education system, politics and institutions. Obama apparently hoped that Turkey’s post-modern Islamists could be an example to less-democratic Islamic regimes in the Middle East. Trump, on the other hand, seemed not to care if his pro-Erdoğan overtures emboldened Turkey’s Islamist strongman and simultaneously weakened the NATO ally’s ties with the West and Western institutions.
In a 2010 interview with the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, Obama referred to Turkey as a “great Muslim democracy.”
“The U.S. always expressed the opinion that it would be wise to accept Turkey into the European Union,” he said. In a 2012 Time interview, Obama named Erdoğan as one of the five world leaders with whom he had the strongest bonds. In 2011, Tom Donilon, the president’s former national security advisor, said that Obama regarded Erdoğan as “a man of principle, and also a man of action.” When Obama became conscious of his strategic mistake, it was too late. Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic’s April 2016 issue:
“Early on, Obama saw Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the sort of moderate Muslim leader who would bridge the divide between East and West—but Obama now considers him a failure and an authoritarian…”
Despite irrefutable evidence that Iran (through helping it evade sanctions) and Russia (through purchasing its S-400 defense system) mattered more to Turkey than Western interests, Trump took over the Erdoğan enthusiasm from Obama. Amid the stand-off over Turkey’s military incursion into northern Syria in 2019, Trump hailed Erdoğan as a “hell of a leader, a tough man.”
