Peter Belfiore

Trump made the right call on Turkey for the wrong reasons

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This month, the Trump administration announced a fresh round of sanctions against Turkey for its continuing detention of an American evangelical pastor. In light of the Turkish government’s increasingly autocratic leanings and its past material support for the Islamic State, it’s the right move, but made entirely for the wrong reasons.
The pastor, Andrew Brunson, is accused of having been involved in the failed 2016 Turkish military coup against the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In April, President Trump referred to Brunson in a tweet as a “fine gentleman and Christian leader in the United States,” and wrote that he is “being persecuted in Turkey for no reason.”
Trump might be right there, but by highlighting Brunson, and ignoring the rest of the Erdogan regime’s litany of failings, which include mass incarcerations of journalists and purges of government employees and judges deemed not sufficiently loyal, Trump is reinforcing the toxic notion that Muslims and Christians — East and West — are diametrically opposed.
Call it a cynical appeal to his base, of which evangelicals make up a significant portion, or an earnest belief that the Islamist Turkish government is determined to persecute Christians. Whatever his reasons, Trump’s argument continues a bad habit that generations of Western leaders have shared, of singling out crimes against minority ethnic groups in predominantly Muslim countries while ignoring larger socioeconomic and political issues, trends and history, often with disastrous results.
Consider Lebanon. The French, during their years of empire building, intervened in a late-19th-century feudal dispute among Christian peasants and their masters, who were predominantly adherents of the Druze faith — a religion that incorporates elements of Shia Islam and Hinduism, among others. The French, as was their MO, backed the Christians and enshrined in a constitution for the small Mediterranean enclave a separation of powers based on religious background, dividing governmental responsibility along ethnic lines, and blurring distinctions between religious and political ideology.

The balance of power between ethnicities that the reworked government called for led to a devastating, decades-long civil war starting in 1975, when that balance was thrown off with the influx of politically active Palestinian refugees, who were predominantly Muslim, and resulted in nearly 150,000 deaths.
Modern history is littered with interventions on behalf of minority communities that have only exacerbated local tensions, so Trump is not alone in this regard. President Obama dramatically intervened on behalf of Iraq’s minority Yazidi population, which in 2014 had been driven up Mount Sinjar, in northwestern Iraq, by the Islamic State, whose leadership sought to wipe out the group and sell off its women as sex slaves.
The move to airlift the Yazidis off Sinjar was widely praised at the time, but what was lost in the assessment of the crisis was that the Islamic State’s ascendency was made possible by America’s 2003 intervention in Iraq, and its attempt to rework the political landscape to favor the country’s Shia Muslim majority.
Beyond pitting ethnic groups that have historically gotten along against one another, comments like Trump’s about Brunson and Turkey also collapse history and distract focus from the country’s more than decade-long slide into authoritarianism.
Since its formation out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, Turkey has long struggled to define its identity. Its founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, pushed a top-down focus on secular democracy, which has long spurred debate in the country over what role, if any, religion could play in government.
Repeated military coups wrested government control from civilian hands, with multiple ideologies — from communism to Islamism — competing for dominance. Political instability, with military leaders concerned about civilian efforts to incorporate religion into politics, lasted for decades, until Erdogan stepped on to the scene in 2002.
His Justice and Development Party framed itself as moderate Islamist, and appealed to rural communities that had historically felt left out of the strictly secularist inclination of the state while appearing relatively benign to more secular-leaning urban populations.
The wide swath of public support allowed Erdogan to slowly amass extraordinary powers, with regional experts now concluding that he had never had an interest in a good-faith participation in liberal democracy.
As he pushed reform after reform adding parliamentary and judicial powers to his office, the military in 2016 made one final attempt to step in. It failed, and gave Erdogan the pretext to purge entire swaths of the public sector and replace them with loyalists. Brunson appears to have been caught up in this effort, but for Trump to single him out only serves to ignore the rest of the crackdown.
Worse, it reinforces the much-maligned notion that the geopolitical world revolves around religious axes, with the West acting as moderating force. The reality is that Western influence and interventions have proved to be the most destabilizing developments in Middle East history.
American leaders can and should do better. With our wealth and influence, we have the ability to hold the world’s governments to higher standards of accountability. It’s long past time we get to it.

Peter Belfiore is the editor of the Oceanside-Island Park Herald. Comments about this column? PBelfiore@liherald.com.