Among the issues the Turkish and US presidents discussed in their Nov. 13 meeting in Washington was Operation Peace Spring. Turkey has taken a public relations beating over its latest incursion into Syria, and Ankara quietly agrees with the rest of the world that it has utterly failed in diplomacy on all fronts. Not even Northern Cyprus or Palestine backed Turkey’s operation and Ankara knows well its public diplomacy campaign against the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF) has failed utterly. One of the Turkey’s worst nightmares was the internationalization of the Kurdish conflict, but all of Ankara's efforts have proved counterproductive on this issue as well.
Since Oct. 16, opposition parties’ main criticism against the government has focused on President Donald Trump’s notorious letter with an attachment from SDF commander Mazloum Kobane.
Even the way Ankara reacted to the leak of the letter was a fiasco. Initially, it was the quintessential Justice and Development Party (AKP) reaction to all foreign matters unpleasant: to proclaim “it doesn’t exist in our eyes.” This came along with the claim that officials threw the letter in the trash. Yet in an Oct. 24 interview, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly said he would be taking the letter back to Trump on Nov 13. Throwing an official letter in the trash is as meaningless as taking it back to its author. There are proper diplomatic mechanisms that could have been utilized to deal with such a letter but they were not put into place. Why not? In addition, neither of the cease-fire agreements Ankara signed with Russia or the United States acknowledge the YPG as a terrorist organization — which is one of the core justifications for Erdogan's initiation of this operation. Does the Turkish signature on these documents mean an official recognition of the YPG as a legitimate entity? These are basic questions Ankara would rather not hear at all. Failed diplomatic efforts generate hefty bills beyond the tarnished global image of a country.
Al-Monitor asked what lies behind such a haphazard public diplomacy and foreign policy interactions in conversations with Turkish and foreign diplomats, senior bureaucrats from defense and intelligence agencies as well as scholars of international relations. Our findings can be summarized in three categories.
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