Following last week’s high-level meetings, it seems that the Trump administration managed to temporarily halt bleeding in the U.S.’s relationship with Ankara, which has been badly affected by the war in Syria.
The bewildering high-level diplomatic traffic of the past week to overcome the highly contentious positions between Turkey and the U.S. over Syria is an indicator that the Donald Trump administration may be more serious than before about finding a solution to Ankara’s security concerns.
At the end of the second week of Turkey’s “Operation Olive Branch” into Syria’s Afrin to fight the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Ankara considers an offshoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), tension between the Turks and the Americans continues but in a fairly controlled manner.
The awareness on both sides of the trend that is pushing Turkey-U.S. relations toward a train crash is not enough to prevent the direction in which we are heading today. We are at the point where both sides have “zero trust” in each other. The Jan. 24 phone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was supposed to soothe tensions triggered by Turkey’s “Operation Olive Branch” into Syria’s Afrin district but it has turned into a new crisis itself.
The recent announcement that the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS is working with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) to establish and train a new “Border Security Force,” with a final force size of approximately 30,000, did not come out of the blue.
It was only the first working week of the New Year for Americans after the Christmas break, but news reports indicating a rough start to 2018 for Turkey-U.S. relations broke one after the other.
Relations between Turkey and the U.S., which have been going through an intense stress test since U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision last May to go ahead with a Pentagon proposal to send heavy weapons to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in Syria, closed this painful year with a relatively positive vibe thanks to the last-minute settlement of the visa spat. The U.S. decided to fully resume visa services in Turkey in the last days of 2017 after 80 days of crisis diplomacy between Ankara and Washington.
After almost a year in office, U.S. President Donald Trump will unveil his first National Security Strategy (NSS) on Dec. 18. It may be full of bad news for Turkey.
I must confess I am still under the influence of “post-Reza stress disorder,” having spent days in the New York courtroom watching him reveal his role in a scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran.
