During the Cold War, Turkey seemed like a sure bet: here’s a secular, Westernizing country right across from the Soviet Union (all the better that the Turkish-Russian rivalry over the Black Sea had historical roots!). So, NATO brought Turkey on board. We made it a base for our nuclear weapons. Ties became tighter and tighter.
But then Erdogan came on the scene. He took the country in a different direction, throwing more journalists in jail and aiding ISIS as well as other Takfiri organizations. The Turkish state’s attacks on Kurds have gone up in recent years too.
This put the US in an odd position: here is a country with which we have deep economic and historical ties turning not only more conservative (which is not generally a big deal for US interests) but also more openly jihadist and xenophobic. We have waffled on exactly what to do, though, only last year, Trump basically sold out the SDF (a Kurdish-Arab militia in Northeast Syria) to Turkish interests.
The shift in the use of the Hagia Sophia is just another part of Erdogan’s culture war. Re-Islamifying (and thus re-Turkifying) the building is red meat for the base; it’s a way of signaling just how committed he is to their vision of the world (whether he is or isn’t in actuality, what matters, of course, is how he plays his hand to his supporters). Maybe it is even a way of cementing support before moving up elections (after some setbacks in a prior cycle). When we see it in our typical terms from our Western perspective, we take the bait; we gin up exactly the sort of reaction Erdogan’s base would want: they are the disfavored and the persecuted, beset on all sides, finally ascendant once again. We might make a rough analogy here to Trump’s moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem: a way of constructing alliances and baiting opponents.
But is this not on the US for enabling such behavior from an ally? Are we so devoted to NATO (a Cold War-era organization) that we’re willing to accept open support for ISIS, persecution of a minority group, and so much more? The answer is probably “yes,” at least at the elite level, among those who matter in making these sorts of decisions. I’m not sure this humble blogger nor any of you readers will really have a say in what happens.
What we can do is fail to take such an event on the partisan terms in which it is fed to us. We can refuse to pretend it’s the result of a clash of civilizations; rather, it is the weaponization of a tense topic for nationalistic ends—both in the US (where Christians may be rallied to the anti-Islamic banner) and in Turkey (where more and more the flag of Turkey may be brandished in the name of a new nationalism). Is our government not at fault here? Should we not be dissatisfied with the whole lot of enablers who make cynical alliances and feed us double-talk? Will we seethe at the symbols, leaving the levers of power unchanged?
Let him with ears hear.
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