What lies behind Erdogan’s Syria offer to the West?
The Turkish president’s appeal to the West to back Turkey in Syria and make political gains “at minimum cost” comes as a sign he has little intention of giving up his ambitions in Syria.
As the Syrian crisis enters its 11th year this month, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has appealed for Western support in Syria in an apparent hope to advance plans for a safe zone along the Turkish border and hamper Russia in Idlib, if not revive his regime-change ambitions.
In a March 15 article for Bloomberg, Erdogan argues that restoring peace in Syria depends on “strong Western support” for Turkey and that the “most sensible” option for Western leaders is “to throw their weight behind Turkey and become part of the solution in Syria, at minimum cost and with maximum impact.”
Erdogan’s emphasis on “minimum cost” has unpleasant political connotations in Turkey, dating back to the early years of the Cold War, when American leaders would often advocate military partnership with Turkey as a cheap way of advancing US security interests. In remarks to Congress in 1953, for instance, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles argued that Turkish soldiers “get 23 cents a month,” while US soldiers “would cost you 10 times as much.” Such comparisons left lasting marks in Turkey’s political lexicon and the great Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, an avowed socialist, even penned a poem titled “The 23-cent soldier.” For many, military collaboration with the United States remains akin to “being America’s cheapest soldiers.”
In his article, Erdogan describes Idlib as “the opposition’s final stronghold,” never mind that the province is controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which Ankara itself designates as a terrorist group, and other al-Qaeda-inspired factions. He claims Turkey “saved millions of lives” in Idlib a year ago when it struck regime positions to stop attacks on the region. Yet Turkey’s intervention in Idlib in February 2020, which claimed the lives of dozens of its soldiers, failed to stop regime forces from taking control of the key M5 highway and besieging Turkish military outposts in the region. Moreover, the population in the area was hardly in the millions as locals had already fled their homes in droves. More crucially, the groups Erdogan calls “the opposition” are the same groups he pledged to eliminate in two deals with Russia in September 2018 and March 2020.
