by Kim Ghattas
Every world leader, political advisor, opposition figure, or wannabe leader, foreign or American—everyone who had something to say and was in Washington for official or informal meetings—sought to get onto that talking circuit. The more you advertised your vision or theory about a specific issue, the more chances it could gain traction with decision makers inside the administration. In Washington, unlike Paris or London and especially Moscow or Beijing, there was a close connection between public discourse and policy. The revolving door between government and think tanks means that today’s China expert at the Brookings Institution could be tomorrow’s Asia policy chief at the National Security Council.
Davutoğlu was a popular guest and often gave multiple talks during his visits, at different think tanks around town, all of them oversubscribed. A short man with black hair, rimless glasses, and a permanent smile lurking beneath his salt-and-pepper mustache, Davutoğlu was an eternal optimist, and, like the country he represented, highly energetic, always in motion.
The day before, on April 12, 2010, he had attended a Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. Iran dominated much of the talk. The country upsetting America’s best-laid plans everywhere, from Lebanon to Afghanistan, was busy enriching uranium in nuclear plants. Under the Non-Proliferation Treaty, any country had the right to civilian nuclear energy, but Iran’s centrifuges were spinning the uranium closer and closer to the level needed to build a nuclear weapon. Tehran insisted that it merely wanted civilian energy for power to light up people’s homes. But the West was suspicious: Iran had kept the full extent of its nuclear program hidden for years until an exiled Iranian armed militant group revealed the whereabouts of a major secret facility in 2002. The United Nations had already punished Iran with three layers of sanctions for failing to abide by all the rules, but Iran’s centrifuges kept spinning. The United States was now pushing for another round of sanctions.
Turkey, Iran’s neighbor, saw an opportunity to play a role bridging the gap between East and West. While Davutoğlu talked to Clinton at the summit, his prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had conferred with Obama in a trilateral meeting with Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Brazil and Turkey were both in a nonpermanent seat at the Security Council, they both wanted to join the club of global powers—and they both had trade ties with Tehran. They didn’t want Iran to have an atomic bomb, but they believed that more talking could make a difference. For fifteen minutes, Lula and Erdoğan tried to convince Obama to give their type of diplomacy a chance. Though Obama was not convinced, he didn’t categorically say no. His administration was all about multilateral diplomacy, and he wanted to encourage other countries to do their bit to keep peace in their part of the world, especially the rising powers.
Turkey was really the only or, at least, the most sustained success story of the wider Middle East. Just ten years before, Turkey had been stagnating; military coups constantly disrupted its politics, and one aging, uninspiring prime minister seemed to replace the next. But the country had weathered the financial crisis of 2008, and its economy was still growing at around 7 percent a year. Turkey was now the world’s seventeenth-largest economy and turning into a vibrant Islamic democracy with a populist, forward-thinking prime minister and an academic-turned-diplomat foreign minister. Both men tapped into the Turkish national sense of pride and grandeur; the Turks, after all, were the heirs of the Ottoman Empire, which had once stretched from the outskirts of Vienna to the Horn of Africa.
Davutoğlu was a ball of energy. He was everywhere and had a plan for everything, his conversation peppered with phrases such as “I’ve just visited,” or “Tomorrow, I’m going to,” transiting through Shannon Airport in Ireland to refuel, flying into world capitals just before or just after Clinton. Tehran was often on his schedule. Turkey’s government had a small fleet of planes available for its top officials, and Davutoğlu seemed to live on one of them, constantly crisscrossing the world, trying to solve crises from the Balkans to Israel, from Syria to Iran. With one foot in the East and the other in the West, Turkey wanted to be a bridge, especially between the United States and countries that, Davutoğlu liked to insist, America did not understand.
That day in Washington, he spoke at length about his favorite vision—the model partnership between his country and the United States. Unlike previous global powers, he said, America was disconnected not only historically but also geographically from the rest of the world; this isolation gave America security but no strategic depth. Turkey was a regional power, with six very diverse neighbors, a rich history and identity; it was also predominantly Muslim—all of this added up to assets when it came to solving problems, assets that the United States decidedly lacked. Strategic depth—Turkey had so much of it in Davutoğlu’s eyes that these two words were the title of his six-hundred-page book on Turkey’s uniqueness. He thought it was obvious: the United States needed Turkey.
The two countries had been allies since 1952. During the Cold War, the United States and Turkey shared a fear of Soviet expansionism, and it had made sense then for Turkey to defer to the United States. But though the relationship was strong, in a world of rising regional powers like India and Brazil, Turkey wanted to shine and forge its own path. The Turks had never been subservient to the United States, but now they were even less willing to let Washington lead. And they were not afraid of irritating the Americans, in ways big and small.
* * *
The Obama administration got an early taste of Turkish prickliness at a summit in Strasbourg in April 2009 when Turkey opposed the appointment of the new secretary-general of NATO, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former prime minister of Denmark. The Scandinavian country was at the heart of a controversy that started in 2005 when a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, setting off demonstrations across the Muslim world. The Turks were critical of Rasmussen’s handling of the crisis. They also did not appreciate his tolerance for a television station run by the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, a separatist Kurdish party in Turkey that broadcast from Denmark. The Turks could be tough negotiators: to get Erdoğan’s backing for Rasmussen, Obama had to promise that the new NATO chief would appoint a Turk as his deputy.
Whenever we traveled with Clinton and a meeting with Erdoğan was on the agenda, his stern bodyguards, as unsmiling as nightclub bouncers, made the secretary’s DS agents or the Secret Service look like start-up geeks. The Turks frequently had dustups with other guards who stood in their way, once sending two UN security officials to the hospital. Another time, they came close to a fistfight with an American ambassador over access to a room where Clinton and Erdoğan were meeting. Turkish newspapers would then be full of accounts about how Turkey had safeguarded its honor and stood up to the arrogant Americans. Turkey was pushing back against America again, but this time, American national interest hung in the balance.
For more than six months, Clinton had been working diligently to get the Chinese and the Russians on board for a fourth round of hard-hitting UN sanctions against Iran, which Brazil and Turkey were keen to avoid. Obama had gone from promising to meet with America’s foes when he was a candidate to simply calling on those foes to unclench their fists during his inaugural address. But hopes that his persona was enough to transform the dynamics of international diplomacy quickly collided with realpolitik. While pursuing engagement with Tehran, the administration was working to be sure they were ready if diplomacy failed. The Russians didn’t necessarily like Iran and especially didn’t care for its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but they shared with Iran a rejectionist attitude toward the West. Moscow enjoyed making Washington’s life difficult, so it often banded with Iran to needle the Americans. When Clinton last visited Moscow, she had said there was growing international consensus for more sanctions on Iran. Sitting next to her, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, laconically said he didn’t think there was any need for more sanctions. In the end, the Russians always voted in favor of sanctions against Iran, but only after ma
king everyone’s life difficult, obstructing the process for months and softening the wording of drafts to the point that the final text barely had any bite. The Russians were also helping Tehran build a civilian nuclear reactor in Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf coast in southeast Iran.
No one had the emotional scars from dealing with Iran that America had, from the hostage crisis of 1979 to the marine bombings in Beirut in 1983. But everybody remembered that the weapons of mass destruction used as an excuse to topple Saddam Hussein were never found. So Washington’s warnings about Iran’s nuclear advances were often met with skepticism outside of the United States, Europe, and Israel. But in September 2009, the Obama administration, France, and the United Kingdom revealed that Iran had for years hidden yet another nuclear facility deep under a mountain near the holy city of Qom. The Russians were stunned. How could their intelligence services not have known? They were shown the evidence, and it was irrefutable. They were furious; they had been deceived and lied to by their own camp.
Just before the Qom revelations, Iran had agreed to discuss its nuclear program with the P5 + 1 group, which includes the 5 permanent members of the UN Security Council—the United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, the United States, as well as Germany. The P5 + 1 was now planning to use the world’s outrage to force Iran into a compromise at the talks in Geneva. But Iran loved to talk; it was an opportunity to buy time and stave off more sanctions.
The five big powers wanted a freeze for freeze: if Iran froze all of its enrichment activities, UN sanctions would be frozen in return. But that freeze was a very elusive end goal. They suggested an intermediary step to help build trust. Tehran had a nuclear medical reactor that needed new supplies of highly enriched uranium, and Iran wasn’t able to produce its own fast enough. So the P5 + 1 made an offer that could both help ease international concerns about the uranium that Iran was stockpiling and also help Iran demonstrate that its intentions were peaceful: give us 1,200 of your 1,500 kilograms of low-enriched uranium (LEU), they told the Iranians, we’ll enrich it further in Russia and France, and we’ll return the nuclear fuel to you to be used in the medical facility. With only 300 kilograms of LEU left on its soil, Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon would be seriously set back. The Iranians said yes, but then went home to study the proposal further. They never properly responded. They were too divided themselves, between conservatives and ultraconservatives, and no one trusted the outside world: they worried that if they handed over their uranium, they would never see it again. The Russians were incensed: their credibility was on the line. The sanctions that Lavrov had dismissed several months ago were edging closer.
The Turks were starting to fret—they didn’t have a nuclear program and didn’t want anyone in the region to have a nuclear weapon. But they were also worried about the prospects of more sanctions on Iran. Erdoğan and Davutoğlu got to work. They traveled to Iran on several occasions, working to set themselves up as middlemen between Tehran and Washington, trying to convince Iran to take the deal. With Brazil, they started to explore different formulas and variations of the plan.
Perhaps because he was an academic, Davutoğlu was an affable man with none of the rough edges that came with Turkish pride, but he believed in his country’s destiny. In front of his audience at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, he boasted in close-to-perfect English about his efforts to have excellent relations with countries on Turkey’s borders, which he called a zero-problem-neighborhood policy. Waving his hands and raising his left index finger, Davutoğlu spoke emphatically about his country’s desire to bring to the region “a new era of stability, peace, and prosperity.” And that included Iran.
“Diplomacy, diplomacy, diplomacy, more efficient diplomacy. Not military tension, not economic tension, which will affect Turkey, a neighboring country,” said Davutoğlu. He was very open about his motivations to counter the moves toward sanctions at the United Nations. His country had a major stake in this fight: its economy was zipping along and would be slowed down by sanctions against Iran. Ties between the two neighbors had blossomed since Erdoğan’s moderate Islamist AK Party (Justice and Development) came to power in 2003. From $1 billion in trade with Iran in 2000, it was now $10 billion. Iran was Turkey’s second-largest source of energy and its main land route for trade with Asia. Iraq had been Turkey’s largest trading partner until it came under sanctions after the Gulf War in 1990, and Turkey’s economy had been hard hit.
Turkey was also feeling left out of the discussions about sanctions. At the UN Security Council, China, Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France had permanent seats, with the other ten seats rotating among the 193 member states. Turkey was currently on the UN Security Council, but, sitting in the CFR conference room, an indignant Davutoğlu complained no one had shared with them the details of the sanctions that were being prepared.
“Until now, we didn’t get a briefing, we were not consulted, and we don’t know what is in the package … Maybe the P5, they are consulting among themselves. Of course we are not against this, but we don’t know the content.”
* * *
Perhaps Hillary could answer his questions. He was heading to see her again at the State Department the following day. Clinton had met Davutoğlu on her first trip to Turkey in 2009, when he was still an advisor to Erdoğan, laying the groundwork for his vision of Turkey’s foreign policy and its role in the region. She appreciated his intellect and respected his worldview and his energy; she viewed him as one of her more consequential counterparts even if she didn’t always agree with him. She liked that he came to every one of their meetings brimming with ideas and a commitment to pursue his country’s interests. Developing a relationship with Davutoğlu was also a way of keeping Turkey close, in the orbit of the West. He was one the foreign ministers Clinton spoke to most.
The Turks had wanted to become part of the European Union, but Europe—France, especially—was hesitant to open its arms. The Turks were deeply insulted. Parts of Europe had once fallen under the Ottoman Empire; now Old Europe was going to keep Turkey out of the EU? The Turks looked East and tried to re-create part of their old Ottoman space with a visa-free zone with Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. They embraced their Muslim identity and bluntly criticized their old friend and military ally Israel for oppressing the Palestinians. Their new ambition to be a regional power, a bridge between West and East, meant they were cultivating ties with countries and groups that were hostile to the West—countries like Iran but also groups like Hamas, the Palestinian radical militant group. The Turks appeared to be slowly drifting away from the United States’ orbit. Turkey was a NATO ally in a key strategic area, and Washington could not afford to let go of Ankara’s hand.
Clinton and Davutoğlu called each other by their first names and always started their conversations by talking about their families. She gave him a high five in public when he became a grandfather; he praised her in front of the cameras, saying her leadership went well beyond the institution of the State Department. They had developed a good rapport, and there was never enough time to talk about all the subjects on the agenda. Both were voluble, and the conversations could sometimes get intense, like on this occasion. Iran diplomacy was intricate and emotional for everyone.
Clinton and Davutoğlu first spent a few minutes chatting in her office and then walked across the hall with their teams to the conference room to get down to business. Surrounded by four peach-colored walls, senior American officials sat on one side of the long table and Turkish officials on the other. P. J. Crowley, the State Department’s spokesperson, took notes so he could update journalists with any details about the conversation that could be made public. Most of the time, Clinton gave a small press conference with ministers after their meeting in the round, blue Treaty Room, around the corner from her offices. But neither minister had the time or desire to be quizzed by the media, so on this occasion P. J. would answer our questions at the Daily Press Briefing.
* * *
“Two minutes till the briefing, two minutes.” The announcement over the public address system into the bull pen alerted the State Department press corps that P. J. was on his way down. The briefings usually took place around noon. The meeting with Davutoğlu was expected to last forty-five minutes; it ended just before three in the afternoon, clocking in at almost two hours. Half a dozen journalists exited their cubicles in the bull pen and walked thirty steps around the corner and into the briefing room on the Building’s second floor.
Several dozen journalists were already there, mostly foreigners who worked for their country’s national media. Any journalist with a press card was allowed to attend the briefing and ask a question. Sometimes the briefing started with an announcement, but this was no press conference—it didn’t matter whether anyone in the Building really had anything new to say, whether there was a breakthrough in Mideast peace talks or China had jailed another dissident. Journalists representing countries around the world wanted to know what the United States had to say or what it planned to do about the smallest incremental development in the politics of their own countries. Unless he or she had a meeting scheduled afterward, the spokesperson would call on every journalist who raised a hand. The briefing was filmed in full and broadcast to news agencies worldwide. Officials would comb through it for reaction to international events or a mention of their country’s name. On the evening news, in Japan, Tripoli, or Islamabad, the anchor would say, “The State Department spokesperson today congratulated Japan on the election of its new prime minister,” or “The U.S. today offered its condolences to Pakistan after a bomb killed fifty people.” No matter how many episodes of The West Wing TV series with White House briefings my friends and I had watched in Beirut, lifting the veil over the real thing was still startling. When we heard on television that the United States was talking about us, we could not fathom that if a State Department spokesperson mentioned our country it wasn’t necessarily because American officials had held a meeting, discussed the situation at length, and consciously decided to make a statement about Lebanon, but rather because someone in the briefing room had raised a hand. I experimented a couple of times, asking a question about Lebanon and watching the answer appear on the news in Beirut when there had been no real movement in the United States on the issue. The look of disappointment on people’s faces in Beirut, as well as other countries, when I told them how the briefing worked was revealing of the extent to which people thought they were America’s sole concern.