Turkey’s Choice of Chinese Missiles Poses Problem for West
Washington is upset by Prime Minister Erdogan’s decision to enter into negotiations to purchase an air-defense system from a Chinese state company under sanctions by the United States.
Washington has reacted with concern over the decision of Turkey's Defense Industry Executive Committee (SSIK), the absolute authority on the country's defense projects and procurement, to acquire China’s FD-2000 system to fill the NATO member's high-altitude and long-range air defense gap. The committee met on Sept. 26 with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to enter into contract negotiations with the state-owned China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corporation (CPMIEC).
Two days after the SSIK meeting, on Sept. 28, a spokeswoman for the US State Department told Reuters, "We have conveyed our serious concerns about the Turkish government's contract discussions with a US-sanctioned company for a missile defense system that will not be inter-operable with NATO systems or collective defense capabilities. Our discussions on this issue will continue."
The sanctions to which the spokeswoman referred were applied because CPMIEC violated the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Act, enacted in 2006 by the United States, to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile technology to the countries cited in the laws title. The company's FD-2000 system overtook the Patriot (Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, United States), SUMP/T Aster-30 (Eurosam, French-Italian) and S-300 (Rosoboronexport, Russian) missile systems in the international bidding, which had been ongoing for almost seven years.
The Chinese system, similar to the Russian S-300, has two major advantages: a total cost $3 billion less than the other systems and the possibility of coproduction that would allow technology transfer. Coproduction and priority for technology transfer is a state policy Ankara has been implementing in foreign defense purchases since the second half of the 1970s. Of course, these two advantages are not enough to fully understand the SSIK decision because, above all, it is a political decision with far-reaching implications.
