By: Kadri Gursel
The Justice and Development Party (AKP) leaders who have ruled Turkey for the past 12 years generally ignore and sometimes deny the criticism that they have pushed Turkey into loneliness in the region and the world because of their foreign policies.
There is only a single reference of AKP officials accepting — with reservations and justifications of course — that they are the architects of Turkey’s loneliness. It is a 140-letter Turkish declaration in August 2013 in social media by Ibrahim Kalin, then-chief adviser to the prime minister. His tweet read: “The claim that Turkey is alone in the Middle East is not correct. But if this is a criticism then we must say. This is precious loneliness.”
The godfather of this so-called concept of “precious loneliness,” Kalin was appointed deputy secretary-general of the presidency after Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected president. But AKP circles did not adopt his concept, and the child was abandoned and hoped to be forgotten.
This so-called preciousness Kalin attributed to Turkey’s loneliness could at least have had some boast of "standing on the right side of history at the risk of isolation and adhering to ethical superiority."
But in international relations, loneliness means the inability to set up alliances and failure to persuade international organizations to take action. To assert that this loneliness is an asset for Turkey is nothing more than a futile attempt at spin-doctoring.
I noted in an international meeting in Bodrum on Oct. 17-19 that Kalin’s “precious loneliness” concept, which was received with cynical smiles by the world at the time, has not been forgotten despite the passage of time.
A senior Western security official who was attending the 10th “Bodrum Round Table,” organized by prestigious Istanbul-based think tank Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM), when talking on the unwillingness of Turkey to join the anti-IS coalition, posed a question: “Is Turkey being dragged to a dangerous loneliness?” I later found out that this “dangerous loneliness” warning by this official who didn’t want to be identified was actually a predetermined message. It wasn’t spontaneous. If Turkey’s loneliness really needed a modifier, that would obviously be not “precious” but “dangerous.”
To be in danger is in the nature of Turkey’s loneliness. Turkey with its policies, until the eruption of the IS crisis at its southern border, had already sentenced itself to loneliness in the region and world. Ankara, by exaggerating its affinity to the Muslim Brotherhood in its reactions to the July 3, 2013, coup in Egypt, had already confronted the new administration in Cairo as well as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Ankara’s Gaza and Hamas-focused Middle East policy had become a factor blocking a satisfactory solution to efforts of normalizing relations with Israel that were severed after the 2010 flotilla incident. After 2011, Ankara’s Syria policy, which sought to topple the Damascus regime and replace it with a Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government, brought Turkey into confrontation with Damascus-Baghdad-Tehran. As a result, the only country in the Middle East that Turkey has an alliance with is Qatar.
The AKP government opted to distance Turkey from the EU perspective and in general terms from the West and orient it to the Middle East as a strategy compatible with Ankara’s internal and external politics. The outcome was loneliness also in Europe.
In the General Assembly vote for two-year UN Security Council membership on Oct. 17, Turkey’s resounding defeat with 60 votes (against 132 votes for Spain) was noted as a dramatic illustration of Turkey's loneliness in international organizations as well.
Before Ahmet Davutoglu became foreign minister in 2008, Turkey received 151 votes to become a Security Council member for a two-year term.
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