Smile and Smile: Turkey's Feel-Good Foreign Policy

Claire Berlinski

As the First General Law of Travel tells us, every nation is its stereotype. Americans are
indeed fat and overbearing, Mexicans lazy and pilfering, Germans disciplined and perverted.
The Turks, as everyone knows, are insane and deceitful. I say this affectionately. I live in
Turkey. On good days, I love Turkey. But I have long since learned that its people are apt to
go berserk on you for no reason whatsoever, and you just can’t trust a word they say. As one
Turkish friend put it (a man who has spent many years in America, and thus grasps the depth
of the cultural chasm), “It’s not that they’re bad. They don’t even know they’re lying.”

My friend is right, and his comment suggests a point about Turkish culture that I doubt many
Westerners grasp. People here—and, I would guess, throughout the Middle East and
Mediterranean, though Turkey is the only country I know well—see “truth” as something
plastic, connected more to emotions than to facts or logic. If it feels true, it is true. What’s
more, feelings here tend to change very quickly—and with them, the truth.

Take, for instance, my former landlord. Last year, my apartment was burgled. Under Turkish
law, if your apartment is burgled, you have the right to insist that your landlord install bars on
your windows. When I put this to my landlord, he objected, screaming violently, as so often
people here do for no reason any American would accept as legitimate. First, my landlord
screamed, there was no risk of burglary: there had never before been a burglary in our
neighborhood. (Actually, our neighborhood was notorious for it.) Second, he screamed, to
install bars would create a hazard: burglars would use them to climb up to the second floor.
He offered both arguments in the same sentence. He was unperturbed by the obvious problem
with his line of reasoning.

Later, when I discussed the matter with Turkish friends, they explained to me that I had made
a critical negotiating mistake: I had insulted his honor by telling him I would have bars
installed rather than asking him. The argument, they explained, had nothing to do with the
real risk of burglary, and certainly nothing to do with my rights under Turkish rental law. It
was about my failure to show the man the proper respect.

I’m not sure my Turkish friends were right about that, though. They are, after all, Turkish, so
they pretty much say whatever sounds good to them at the time. They tend to explain these
situations ex post facto with appeals to the subtleties of Turkish culture, but the story never
stays the same. I’ve been in similar situations in which these same Turkish friends have
explained that my mistake was asking, rather than telling. Asking, they have assured me, is a
sign of weakness, so no wonder my adversaries sought to take advantage.

Not only is truth here derived from emotion, but the emotions themselves are more intense
and more transitory. Arguing a mild difference of opinion by screaming and threatening
would come across to Westerners as weak at best, lunatic at worst. Not here. No shame
attaches to displays of anger that in the West would result in the issuance of restraining
orders. The fights dissipate as quickly as they start; everyone proceeds to drink tea and
moistly proclaim their mutual love. The entire incident is then forgotten, except by the
American, who is still shaking with rage and nurtures her resentment forever.
The Turkish diplomat Namik Tan put it to me this way, shortly before decamping for his new
job as ambassador to the United States, then promptly being recalled to Turkey to express the
nation’s diplomatic pique at an ostensible insult to Turkish honor, then returning to America
again, presumably to drink tea and proclaim Turkey’s love: “The West must understand,” he
said, “that in this region, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. Sometimes it equals six,
sometimes ten. You cannot hope to understand this region unless you grasp this.” You might
think he meant this metaphorically, but in my experience this is literal. If someone here feels
very strongly that he wants two plus two to make ten (or two o’clock to be ten o’clock, in the
case, say, of a promise to deliver goods or services on a deadline), then—voilà!—that’s what
it means, and there is an emotional truth to it, in the mind of the speaker, that is morally more
important than any literal truth.

They don’t even know they’re lying. In Turkey, it is normal and expected to say that you will
do something, have done something, or agree with something when, in fact, you won’t,
haven’t, or don’t. This is so common that no one thinks of it as lying, in the sense that it is not
viewed as unethical. It is just being polite. They assume you know they’re not being truthful,
and they expect you to be lying as well, so it all evens out. I remember precisely the moment
it dawned on me that this is how things work here. I’d asked a Turkish friend to send me an e-
mail before noon. I don’t remember what it was all about now, but it was business-related.
Knowing that time here is also a highly plastic concept, I’d pressed the point quite firmly:
Before noon. Before the big hand and the little hand are pointing straight up. I had elicited
multiple, firm promises that the information would be sent before noon, and that he
understood the importance of this. I communicated the reasons why, should he fail to do this,
it would cause quite a number of serious problems, not just to me, but to him, because it
concerned a joint business venture. (Terrible idea in the first place, but that’s another story.)
He agreed at least three times that he would send it.

When he didn’t, I was vexed. “Why,” I asked, “did you say you would send it if you didn’t
mean it? If I’d known you weren’t going to do it, I would have known to plan things
differently.”

He took umbrage at my tone. “You should have known I didn’t mean it,” he said angrily.

“How should I have known?”

“Because,” he exploded, “I didn’t want to!” He was enraged, I think, that I could be so obtuse.

These aspects of the Turkish national character have obvious significance to anyone who
doubts the world would be better off with the Persian Gulf under an Iranian nuclear shield,
and all of southern Europe and the Middle East within striking distance of nuclear-tipped
Iranian missiles, which is to say, anyone rational, which is to say, not the prime minister of
Turkey, who is, obviously, Turkish, and says pretty much whatever sounds good to him at the
time.

When I hear American officials discussing this region, I shudder. My government is

obviously out of its depth. For all the talk of President Obama’s secret, traitorous sympathy
with the Islamic world, or his childhood experience of the mysteries of the exotic Other, the
man is—obviously—as American as a stalk of corn waving lonely on a Kansas plain. I am
certain he, and everyone around him, thinks in terms of “reasons,” “logic,” “arguments,”
“truth,” and “facts.” I am sure that deep down, he believes everyone does. All Americans do,
just as all Turks believe the rest of the world is basically like them.

The utter irrationality of Turks—and the utter uselessness, for them, of our Western notions of
truth and logic—are points Americans won’t grasp unless they’ve lived here quite some
time—and even then they won’t grasp them, because they make no sense. But they’d best
begin to try, because the prime minister is quite busy sending flotillas of unusually fractious
Turkish humanitarians into war zones, transforming himself into the improbable hero of
Hamas, and practicing nuclear diplomacy à la Turca. American negotiators were no doubt
scratching their heads upon learning that Turkey had not merely abstained from voting on the
Iranian sanctions package, but voted against it. An abstention, after all, would have registered
Turkish misgivings more than adequately; the “no” vote manifestly obviates everything
Turkey has long been saying about the role it seeks to play as a bridge between the East and
the West, particularly in the wake of the Gaza flotilla fiasco. The bridge is now burnt. Turkey
has taken sides, and the winner is the East.

According to its government, Turkey rejected the sanctions package because it had something
better to offer, namely, the Turkish-Brazilian fuel swap. The logic of the recently negotiated
deal with Iran was explained splendidly by one Professor Tolga Yarman from Okan
University, in comments cited approvingly by the daily Zaman, a paper closely associated
with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. Yarman, the paper reported, “drew
a similarity between Iran’s rugs and the nuclear deal, saying Iran is giving away its nuclear
rope and giving up waving its nuclear carpet and in return getting a nuclear rug.” Don’t bother
trying to parse that. No, nothing lost in translation either. You just have to shut your eyes and
get in the mood: Iran’s getting a nuclear rug—we call this rug Shiva, destroyer of worlds—so
rejoice.

What Turkey is getting from the deal is rather more unclear. If you look closely at the terms—
with cold, soulless, logical, Western eyes—you’ll notice that what Turkey would appear to be
getting is a very large amount of radioactive waste. In exchange, it plans to give Iran highly
enriched uranium for free, having extracted no meaningful concessions. Iran’s foreign
ministry spokesman, Ramin Mehmanparast, declared immediately after the announcement of
the deal that of course Iran would continue its own uranium enrichment program. Turkey
agreeably pronounced this a wonderful diplomatic triumph that obviated the need for
sanctions. It was, Turkish diplomats insisted, just like the deal the West had tried to get from
Iran six months prior but failed to obtain.

Now, this is partially true: Americans did propose a similar deal. But the key to the deal they
proposed was that Iran would agree to stop enriching its own nuclear material. And that was
when Iran had only half as much nuclear material to swap. Iran was supposed to trade it all
for fuel rods suitable for medical research. It’s true that the same amount of material is to be
exchanged under the terms of this new plan as under the old one. But when the plan was last
proposed, in October, the swap would have left Iran with less than the one thousand kilograms
of material needed to produce weapons-grade uranium. Since then, Iran has continued to
churn out low-enriched material. It now has twice as much, and it will keep more than enough
to build weapons. The logic of the original plan, in other words, has been completely
obviated; only the idea of a swap remains. The new deal is entirely to Iran’s advantage. But
logic is not the source of this initiative: emotions are.
From the Turkish point of view, there is a good feeling, and that’s good enough. Moreover,
the Turks are furious over the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara, and furious here is reason
sufficient unto itself. No one in the Turkish press is asking why a boat with civilian women
and children on board was sent to break a military blockade, or why that blockade was
imposed in the first place, or how Turkey might have reacted had Israel sent a similar flotilla
to deliver uninspected cargo to strongholds of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the PKK). Nor
are they asking who would be the losers in a Turkish-Israeli naval battle—only weeks ago an
unreal, apocalyptic prospect, but now well within the realm of imagination. No one is noting
that there is a contradiction in the Turkish position. Diplomacy, Turkish leaders insist, is the
only solution to the Iranian threat, but this enthusiasm for diplomacy was hardly on display
when the decision was made to challenge the Israeli military using a boat packed with agitated
human shields. The Turkish government offers its arguments for diplomacy with Iran and
provocation toward Israel in the same sentence. No one here seems perturbed by the obvious
problem with
this line of reasoning.

Many in the West have interpreted the Turkish position as evidence that the place is under the
control of Islamic crypto-fundamentalists. This is certainly part of the picture and a very
important part, but do not make the mistake of thinking that’s all there is to it. The West is
overlooking something both more subtle and more obvious: Emotions are running the show.
The Turks have a good feeling about their recent encounters with Iran and a bad feeling about
their recent encounters with Israel. Long-term, rational economic and geostrategic interests?
To hell with those. The patient, subtle advancement of an Islamist agenda? To hell with that,
too. This is a logic-free zone. Iran’s not a threat. No sanctions need be applied.

The only real material advantage that accrues to Turkey from the bargain is the chance to do
trade with Iran—in the short term, at least. I single out Turkey for no special opprobrium in
noting that its government finds it commercially advantageous to pretend there’s nothing
going on in Iran requiring any urgent further attention from the world; France and Russia have
long followed the same policy. But France and Russia are both nuclear powers in their own
right. Should Iran acquire the Bomb, they at least have a deterrent. Turkey is not a nuclear
power. Iran is a state with whom it has a very long history of enmity and quite a number of
significant outstanding geostrategic and religious conflicts. The Ottoman and Persian Empires
have been competing for regional hegemony since the Safavid and Qajar dynasties. As the
nineteenth-century Ottoman statesman Fuad Paşa remarked, in comments no less true today,

The government of [Iran], which is in a state of continual disorder and in the grip of Shiite
fanaticism, has always been at one and in agreement with our enemies. Even in the Crimean
War, she came to an agreement with Russia and united her ambitions with hers. The fact that
she was unable to bring her hostile calculations to fruition was due to the West’s prudent and
vigilant diplomacy. Today, the Shah’s government follows in the wake of [Russia]. As long as
the Ottoman government is not occupied elsewhere, the discredited Iranian government,
being impotent, ignorant, and incapable of taking any initiative on its own, dares not quarrel
with us. However, at the moment of our first confrontation with Russia, Iran will take her
place among our most irreconcilable enemies, due to her political dependence and, more
important, her blind jealousy, in spite of our cautious and well-intentioned attitude.

Russia’s fear of rising nationalism among its Turkic minorities gives it good reason to favor
Iran. An Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would almost certainly cooperate with Russia
to the detriment of Turkey, dominate Central Asia and the Caucasus, and put an end to
Turkish aspirations to be a great power. A regional nuclear arms race would likely ensue. Iran
has close diplomatic relations with Armenia; Turkey has no diplomatic relations with
Armenia. Tehran has supported the Kurdish-separatist PKK, with which Turkey is at war. The
Iranians are still Shiite fanatics who deplore both Sunni Islam and the Turkish secular state.
There is no way whatsoever that it could be in Turkey’s long-term military or economic
interests to live next door to a nuclear Iran, however impressive the short-term trade benefits
of this deal might be—and they are not even that impressive.

“Long-term thinking,” however, is not really a Turkish trait. If something works for the next
two hours, many a Turkish repairman has assured me, that’s good enough. Foreigners here
have a word for the kind of jerry-rigged system Turks like to construct rather than building
something that might still work in ten years’ time: Turknology. My apartment is full of
Turknological wonders: wires that for the moment seem to be conveying electricity, even if I
dare not touch them; windows that at least serve to keep the rain out, though they cannot be
opened.

American policymakers know this deal makes no sense, but they’re tripped up at the logical
stumbling block: Why on earth are the Turks so pleased about it? (Having never once visited
Brazil, I won’t begin to try to explain what they are getting out of it, although I would note
that Brazil is tough to reach with intermediate-range ballistic missiles, so it can afford to be a
bit more cavalier about these things. And, of course, they haven’t offered to adopt Iran’s
radioactive pets.)

What Turkey is getting out of it, hard though this is for Americans to grasp, is the feeling that
a happy deal has been concluded, and even more importantly, the feeling that Turkey matters.
As one commenter on the English Web site of the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet put it, “For the
first time Turquey [sic] is showing to all the world that it can propose serious solutions to
problems that neither US nor the West could solve it. Turquey is becoming a big and powerful
nation who deserves respect and proud.” It is irrelevant, in this universe, whether the solutions
are, in reality, serious. Few people here are thinking that deeply about it. Most are just thrilled
that the world must now pay attention to Turkey—and tickled that the West doesn’t like it. Of
course, there are some people here who are thinking deeply about the ramifications of these
policies, and they’re terrified. “We’re going to lose everything we’ve worked for like this,”
one acquaintance said to me. “We’ll end up back in the Stone Age.”

Critics of the deal “are envious,” Prime Minister Erdogan declared, “because Brazil and
Turkey brokered and pulled off a diplomatic success that other countries had been negotiating
without result for many years.” It doesn’t matter that he didn’t pull it off either, or that what
other countries had been trying to achieve, in proposing similar exchanges, was a deal in
which Iran agreed to stop enriching the damned stuff altogether. The emotions are the facts.
Stranger still, Erdogan almost certainly truly believes that the objections are rooted in envy.
He too assumes everyone lives in a world like his, one in which the emotions are the facts,
and it is not an incidental point that in Turkey envy is a particularly important emotion. Envy
of the West—in tandem with envy’s sibling, resentment—has certainly helped define modern
Turkey, so it could truly seem plausible, in his mind, that the sentiment runs both ways.

From an anthropological point of view, this is all very interesting and curious. From a
strategic point of view, it’s a disaster—for the West, of course, but much more so for Turkey,
which will find out soon enough that whatever anyone might feel, two plus two does equal
four, every single time, and the difference between half and all the uranium is actually quite
significant.

What should the West do? Beats me. All I know is that calmly pointing this out will have
absolutely no effect. I, after all, can’t even persuade a Turk to send an e-mail on time. Even
when he promises.