The recent revelation that Turkey’s intelligence chief Hakan Fidan burned ten Iranians working with Israel’s Mossad inside Iran had quickly generated predictions that Western intelligence agencies would begin limiting their cooperation with Ankara. The ten had been working with Jerusalem to discover details of Iran’s nuclear program – widely considered to threaten Western interests – and in any case, as one intelligence figure after another emphasized in the immediate aftermath, the betrayal had been nearly unheard of.
Reports began to emerge of Washington cutting intelligence sharing and technology transfer agreements. More broadly, real questions began to get asked about Turkey’s viability as a Western ally.
The intelligence cooperation between Turkey and Iran is in a “very, very good state,” according to the Iranian Ambassador Alireza Bigdeli…. “Why do they not like it when Turkish and Iranian intelligence agencies cooperate? They expect Turkey to have good cooperation with MOSSAD or CIA. There is that side to it. Turkish and Iranian agencies always have cooperation, and they should have so, and they will have so. It is normal between neighbors to have that, but they treat it with doubt,” Bigdeli said….
Bigdeli said Iranian-Turkish relations contained many levels and dimensions, and to assume a rift on Syria’s policies would cause a rift between the countries would be wrong. “Unlike what is assumed by others, the relations between the two countries are so deep that an issue like Syria cannot have that great of an impact. If it had been two other countries that experienced the last few months, they could have gone through serious crises. But the warmth between us has never gone away,” Bigdeli said.
The statements – and the analyst concerns that are bound to follow – come amid increasingly vocal criticism of Erdogan’s foreign policy sensibilities and his government’s foreign policy posture.
Georgetown Turkey scholar Michael Koplow had months ago rolled his eyes at what he described as the paranoid anti-Israel “histrionics” of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg had bluntly described Erdogan as a “a semi-unhinged bigot” and stated that the prime minister’s anti-Semitism was “making him stupid.” The Wall Street Journal described his policies as “increasingly anti-U.S., anti-Western, anti-Semitic and… anti-Arab.”
Reuters meanwhile noted that Ankara’s foreign policy calculations – hostility toward Israel, coziness with Islamists, and what might be described as a kind of pomposity – had left it “sidelined” and “increasingly lonely.” In the Weekly Standard senior Lee Smith suggested that the AKP’s overarching foreign policy is grounded in an assumption that’s just straightforwardly false:
This, then, is the upshot of Turkey’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy. In the Middle East, you are destined to have problems with your neighbors. What’s more, the policy—the brainchild of an academic theoretician, now Erdogan’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu—does not account for the power politics of the region or allow for normal pursuit of the national interest.
Imagine the Middle East as a large checkerboard where you sit on black. You will have problems with everyone surrounding you who sits on red, so you want to befriend all the other players on black. In effect, this was the rationale for Israel and Turkey’s strategic alliance. Syria was a problem for them both, as was Iran. Erdogan traded the relationship with Israel for a fantasy—never imagining that even if he attempted friendship with everyone in the region except Israel, he’d still keep running into trouble.
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