President Donald Trump has unapologetically decimated the career Foreign Service in favor of handpicked political appointments and envoys. Many of these individuals are long-term friends and business partners. This is not necessarily bad. Some State Department careerists protest too much when they clutch pearls and speak about how their service was always above politics, while many of the same people regularly leaked to undercut initiatives with which they personally disagree.
While Trump and Barrack can cite Clinton’s ethical lapses as precedent, questions over the genesis of Turkey policy erode U.S. credibility not only in the Eastern Mediterranean but across the globe.
Tom Barrack, Trump’s ambassador in Turkey and his envoy for Syria, Iraq, and sometimes Lebanon, is among his most influential aides. Even Barrack’s critics acknowledge that he has, almost single-handedly, reworked U.S. policy toward the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East in Turkey’s favor.
Barrack has been a leading voice for selling Turkey the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet and waiving sanctions for Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 air defense system. He has downplayed both Turkey’s ethnic cleansing in Syria and its violation of Greece’s sovereignty. Critics in both Turkey and the United States allege he has used his position to enrich himself.
Either way, confusion about policy genesis replicates the worst aspects of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s tenure, when foreign officials believed that access required pay-to-play donations to the Clinton Foundation. While Trump and Barrack can cite Clinton’s ethical lapses as precedent, questions over the genesis of Turkey policy erode U.S. credibility not only in the Eastern Mediterranean but across the globe.
Barrack, of course, might also be genuine in his belief that Washington should rely on Ankara as a proxy to defend U.S. security interests in the region. The problem with such a position is that Turkey today supports some of the worst Sunni terrorist groups, from Gaza to Libya. Barrack appears to believe that a regional balance between Turkey and Israel can create enough stability to allow the U.S. to exit the region.
Sound familiar? It is a repeat of President Barack Obama’s theory that Middle East peace required a balance between Israel and Iran. The entire logic of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 nuclear deal, was the idea that bringing Iran in from the cold would create stability by recreating mutually assured destruction on a regional level.
Barrack may see Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as an ally, but the Turkish leader is an ideologue as committed to building Turkey’s military industry, developing nuclear power, and destroying Israel as was the late Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
What Obama failed to understand was that it was the ideology fueling the Islamic Republic’s hatred that made stability impossible. Lifting sanctions and encouraging investment only allowed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to refill its coffers, fuel its proxy warfare, and jumpstart its missile and drone programs. Within a decade, the region saw a major war.
Barrack’s desire to transform Turkey into the only power capable of balancing Israeli power will likely follow the same trajectory. Barrack may see Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as an ally, but the Turkish leader is an ideologue as committed to building Turkey’s military industry, developing nuclear power, and destroying Israel as was the late Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
Barrack’s antics, efforts to help Turkey bypass sanctions, and his single-minded promotion of Turkey’s imperial ambitions have Trump’s apparent backing and will come to overshadow Trump’s regional legacy. Just as any sensible historian sees the root of today’s war in the decisions of Obama and his secretaries of State, policymakers a decade from now will understand that the roots of future conflict in the Middle East rest in the naive and misguided policies promoted by Ambassador and Special Envoy Tom Barrack in Trump’s name.
