GoT and POTUS

“WikiLeaks Earthquake” is what the Turkish media outlets and newspapers have called it all day, but the best description of this public catastrophe comes from the Internet: a diplomatic striptease, whose duration is a mystery, and whose international political consequences are as yet unknown.

A Turkish politician stated on Monday that both Yaşar Yakiş (who served briefly as minister in the aftermath of the AKP vote-siege of 2002, when Abdullah Gül left to become the Tayyip Erdogan government’s foreign minister) and Oguz Oyan, a delegate of the opposition party CHP, were in agreement that the WikiLeaks dispatches show only the weakness of the USA.

The “WikiLeaks Earthquake” has apparently rocked the geological layout of international politics to the core. America is smaller; the new up-and-coming states such as Turkey, Brazil, India and China will be bigger. Because what, exactly, is a superpower? A country which has its fingers all over the globe but can’t control its own civil-service apparatus and is, in addition, incapable of scoring political successes in any of the major conflicts currently raging in the world?

Besides, the AKP representatives are more inclined to take the critical to unfriendly written thoughts of U.S. diplomats as proof of the correctness of their own “no problem with the neighbors” foreign policy, while the opposition uses the dispatches for their own purposes.

American diplomatic gossip and analysis of Turkish foreign policy under Tayyip Erdogan, who is described in the dispatches as a foreign policy adventurer, are all part of a larger discourse about Turkey currently going on in the West. Such commentary is found in newspapers and opinion pieces, in the big foreign policy journals and at academic conferences. This is not to say that the same interested journalists, diplomats, ministers, and politicians should be kept from talking to each other.

The most sensitive passages in the dispatches are those in which informants are named. The Turkish government — “GoT” in the lingo of the State Department — is dealing with the disloyalty within their ranks. Thus the attacks in the Turkish parliament on Minister of Defense Mehmet Vecdi Gönül, who in 2004 allegedly informed the then-U.S. ambassador Eric Edelman that Abdullah Gül — who at the time was the Foreign Minister — had repeatedly praised the ban on American troops deploying on Turkish soil during the run-up to the Iraq war in a closed door meeting.

Personal derogatory remarks are a different thing. Mustafa Kibaroglu, political security expert at the Bilkent Univeristy in Ankara, sees a cultural difference between American and Turkish diplomats in many passages of the WikiLeak dispatches. The latter would have neither the freedom nor the willingness, in a written dispatch to superiors, to pass on such information. Lately though, as the case of the Turkish Ambassador in Vienna, Kadri Tezcan, shows, many diplomats at least verbally have fewer inhibitions about such things.

As of Monday night, WikiLeaks has released 39 dispatches from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara under the “TU” moniker. We are a long way from the 7,912 documents published during this diplomatic mission. All 39 dispatches are enjoyable to read; three are particularly noteworthy: the short “Character study” of Tayyip Erdogan, which the then-ambassador Edelman (2003-2005) wrote; a weighted and pointed analysis of the “neo-Ottoman” foreign policy of Ahmet Davutoglu; and the most recent document, the minutes of a 40-minute meeting between Davutoglu and U.S. Under Secretary of State William Burns from Feb. 18 of this year, about the divergence of American and Turkish interests — or, if not interests, then perceptions — on questions ranging from Israel to Iran.

In less than a week, on Dec. 7, Erdogan has a meeting with POTUS, the president of the United States. Before then, it’s likely that one or more ambassadors named in the WikiLeak documents will have been removed or the leaker identified.