No Turkish delight (Rep. Ed Royce)

It's a long-time member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, it has been pushing hard to join the European Union, it has been viewed as a model for secularism in the Muslim world, and it's .... planning to host an indicted war criminal next week.  It's Turkey.  Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, wanted for war crimes over the genocide in Darfur, will visit Turkey ("Turkey Set to Host President of Sudan").  I can assure you Turkey won't be pressuring Bashir to stop the killing in Darfur.  

Turkey and Sudan say their relationship is all about their economies.  And trade has quadrupled over the past three years.  But deeper currents are connecting.  Next week's visit is the latest sign of Turkey's shift away from the West and towards political Islam.  Radical Islam is integral to the ruling party in Khartoum, Sudan.  Last month, Turkey pulled the plug on a routine military exercise with NATO and Israel's air force.  Exercises with Syria are planned though.  Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose Islamist AKP party came to power in 2003, recently called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "our friend."  Ahmadinejad will be in Istanbul too, by the way, as part of the one day Organization of the Islamic Conference meeting.  As Darfur will be ignored, so too will Iran's nuclear drive.   

This isn't just my hunch.  One Middle East analyst recently noted, "the AKP's foreign policy has not promoted sympathy toward all Muslim states.  Rather, the party has promoted solidarity with Islamist, anti-Western regimes (Qatar and Sudan, for example) while dismissing secular, pro-Western Muslim governments (Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia)." (WSJ editorial: "The Turkish Temptation").  Present-day Turkey's embrace of rogues abroad shouldn't surprise, given that Ankara has moved to "tax" domestic independent media and jail political opponents.  Readers of this space know that aggressive attitudes abroad and bad behavior at home closely track (see North Korea, Iran).

This isn't some two-bit country with a growing radical population.  This is Turkey: a country of 77 million strategically sitting between east and west.  This is a NATO ally, with the accompanying security commitments and access to military technology.  We don't need any more foreign policy headaches, but Turkey's political and social trends are quite troubling indeed. 

Cross-posted from Rep. Royce's Foreign Intrigue Blog.