Turkey

Turkey's collapsing relations with Israel over the past week or so have occasioned a new round of hand-wringing about whether the West is losing Turkey. But that drama has overshadowed another, countervailing, development: Turkey's agreement to host a NATO air defense radar. This has recently been one of the most sensitive Turkey-NATO issues; NATO wanted Turkey to host the system, but Turkey didn't want it to explicitly target Iran, even though it is obvious to everyone that that's the threat the system is intended to protect against.

But for whatever reason, the Turkish government has changed its mind, agreeing to host the radar and even (in a somewhat between-the-lines fashion) acknowledging that it has to do with Iran:

“We are of the opinion that the step taken [in deploying the radar system] is important for our region. That’s why we, as the government, have decided [to station the system in Turkey] after broad consultations,” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said late Tuesday.

That has bolstered Turkey's relationship with NATO, argues Lale Kemal in Today's Zaman:

Turkey's decision to host on its soil the radar component of a US-sponsored missile shield project should be seen as a political decision reaffirming Ankara's ties with NATO. This decision comes at a time when the alliance has begun to perceive Turkish foreign policy goals as a deviating from those of the Western club. One Western official commented on the Turkish decision to host the missile defense radar saying, “Turkey is back in the club.”

NATO is warning Turkey against buying Russian or Chinese air defense systems, saying that if Ankara does so NATO will no longer share its information about incoming missiles, according to a report in the newspaper Hürriyet Daily News. Turkey, you may recall, has been shopping for a new air defense system, and is considering options from Russia, China, the U.S. and a European consortium. That list of potential partners has made the purchase a sort of bellwether for those concerned about Ankara's geopolitical orientation. But NATO, apparently, is making it known that it doesn't approve of the non-Western sellers:

One Western expert countered that “if, say, the Chinese win the competition, their systems will be in interaction, directly or indirectly, with NATO’s intelligence systems, and this may lead to the leak of critical NATO information to the Chinese, albeit inadvertently. So this is dangerous.”

“NATO won’t let that happen,” another Western official told the Hürriyet Daily News on Monday. “If the Chinese or the Russians win the Turkish contest, their systems will have to work separately. They won’t be linked to NATO information systems.”

This was the first time NATO has strongly urged Turkey against choosing the non-Western systems.

It has never seemed likely that Turkey would buy the Russian or Chinese systems, and it's been suggested that Turkey is just keeping them in the competition so as to draw concessions from either the Western companies or Western allies. So is NATO's warning a way of saying, "There's no way you're buying the Russian or Chinese system, so don't try to use that as bargaining leverage"?

NATO is currently undertaking a review of its nuclear posture, including the status of the tactical nuclear weapons that the U.S. maintains in five NATO countries, including Turkey. Some NATO members -- mainly the Baltics and ex-Warsaw Pact states -- want the U.S. to keep the nuclear weapons in Europe, while others (like Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway) are pushing for a dramatic move, including possibly completely removing the nukes from Europe. Turkey falls somewhere in between those countries, but more on the side of maintaining the nuclear weapons, writes Steven Pifer, an arms control expert at the Brookings Institution, in a new paper "NATO, Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control."

Turkey has hosted U.S. nuclear weapons since 1961, and currently at the Incirlik air base the U.S. has an unknown, but small, number of tactical B-61 nuclear bombs and fighter-bomber jets that can drop them. (The total number of U.S. nuclear bombs in Europe is thought to be about 200, down from a Cold War number of 7,000.)

The question of U.S. nuclear weapons in Turkey is one that Ankara has been quiet about, and on which the government hasn't taken a public position. That's not too surprising: according to a 2006 survey, 77 percent of people in Turkey were "very or somewhat concerned about the presence of nuclear arms on their territory," the highest percentage in any of the five countries in which NATO hosts nuclear weapons. (The others are Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.) One would expect, too, differences of opinion between the country's current government (which has been reaching out to improve relations with Middle Eastern neighbors) and the military elite (with a strong Western orientation). And probably neither side sees anything to gain in bringing the issue out into the open.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visits Turkey on Friday, and some reports suggest that the Turkish government is prepared to agree to host a NATO missile defense system there. Turkey, you'll recall, wanted to impose several conditions on the system's deployment in Turkey, mainly that it not explicitly target Iran and that information from the system not be shared with Israel.

It's not clear that any of those issues have been resolved, but a couple of U.S. senators have called on the administration to consider using the South Caucasus, instead. Senior U.S. missile defense officials, the senator wrote, have said that "a forward-deployed X-Band radar in either Georgia or Armenia would have significant advantages for the missile defense of the United States," according to a letter (pdf) obtained by ForeignPolicy.com blogger Josh Rogin. (Presumably the reference to Armenia is a mistake and they mean Azerbaijan, which gives a sense of how attuned to the regional dynamics the senators are.)

If this sounds familiar, it's because the same senators said the same thing in February -- though then they were accompanied by two additional senators. It's not clear why those senators dropped out of this campaign, but it could be because the whole idea makes little sense. As Daniel Larison writes:

What does a soccer/football match-fixing scandal in Turkey have to do with the country's arms trade? Well... something, even if it's not clear yet what exactly that might be. But one of Turkey's best defense journalists, Lale Kemal, writes in her column in Today's Zaman that the Ergenekon conspiracy, in which many senior members of the military were alleged to have been plotting a coup against the "Islamist" AKP-run government, may have been getting funding both from corrupt arms sales and from the match-fixing.

Kemal writes that some soccer club members are also local representatives of foreign defense manufacturers, and have been cut out as the AKP government makes a push to import less and produce more of its defense goods.

As the current government has adopted policies to boost the development of local arms, the financial resources of some middleman in the arms business are believed to have fallen.

Early in 2009 a defense industry specialist submitted a thick, confidential file to then-Ergenekon prosecutor Zekeriya Öz. The file contained, among other things, allegations that some Ergenekon suspects might have used resources earned in arms deals to fund the activities of alleged coup plotters. At the time, this defense industry expert filed a complaint with prosecutor Öz's office against the alleged generals and colonels who, he claimed, abused fund revenues earmarked for arms purchases. Öz reportedly launched an investigation over possible links between the arms trade and financial resources that went to Ergenekon activities.

Could Turkey be heading towards membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization? China, at least, seems enthusiastic about it, according to a report in the Associated Press of Pakistan:

“China is very positive for Turkey to become a SCO dialogue partner. However, whether it become dialogue partner it would depend on the consensus of the member states of the SCO”, said Cheng Guoping, Chinese Assistant Foreign Minister...

“Turkey is a friendly country of China and in terms of economic, political, security and people-to-people cultural exchanges and cooperation we have very smooth cooperation”, Cheng observed.

Now, becoming a "dialogue partner" would put Turkey in the same class as Belarus and Sri Lanka, which is to say, not very significant in the SCO. But it's still an intriguing move, not least because it seems like China is especially interested in Turkey's cooperation. A Chinese scholar, Zhao Huasheng, speaking recently here in Washington, mooted Turkey as a possible cooperation partner, as well. As Cheng put it:

The SCO is an open organization as defined in its charter, he said, noting that it is willing to cooperate with “organizations and nations that hold the same opinions as us”.

How, exactly, China imagines that Turkey has "the same opinions" as China is not clear, but that's an interesting statement, in the context. Last year the two countries carried out two rounds of military exercises, which raised some eyebrows in Washington.

Turkey reportedly had some interest in SCO cooperation a few years ago, but I haven't been able to find any Turkish official commentary on this, or analysis (if there is some out there, I'd love to hear about it).

A U.S.. naval ship, the USS Mahan, visited Istanbul last week for a short port visit. These sorts of things happen all the time and aren't usually noteworthy. But the blog Bosphorus Naval News paid close attention to this visit, and noted that the visit may have been driven by commercial, rather than merely friendly, motivations. The destroyer's visit happened to take place during a big defense exposition, IDEF, and the U.S. ambassador's comments at the expo used the ship as a showpiece for U.S. defense industry:

I join Commander Mondlak and his crew in inviting you to tour the proud USS Mahan. This fine example of American high technology and advanced engineering, and is itself the result of partnerships between numerous American companies, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, McDonnell Douglas, General Electric, Alliant, Gould, and Sikorsky, many of whom are represented at IDEF.

In particular, the Mahan has a sort of radar that is under consideration for the next generation of Turkish ships. And U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin had just signed a deal with Turkish manufacturer Havelsan involving production of those radars.

The signed contract of course raises the question whether the next generation of Turkish warships will have SPY radars and components of AEGIS systems on board.

The blog, in a separate post, takes issue with that deal given that Turkey also manufactures naval radars:

The naval security organization BlackSeaFor turns 10 years old this spring, and while its military/security role has been more limited perhaps than its founders envisioned, it has become a useful forum for regional cooperation. That's the analysis of Russian military expert Dmitry Gorenburg. In particular, it is now the only forum in which the Georgian and Russian militaries cooperate, which is no mean feat:

Russia and Turkey have been the driving forces behind BlackSeaFor since its founding. Both states find it a useful venue for enhancing their bilateral relationship and prefer it to other potential naval cooperation options because it is closed to participation by navies from outside the Black Sea region. Several years ago, they sought to turn the initiative into the main counter-terrorism forum in the Black Sea. While this effort succeeded in having counter-terrorism added to the list of BlackSeaFor’s tasks, it had little practical impact on improving the participating states’ maritime counter-terrorism capabilities...