Will the U.S. allow ally Turkey to join BRICS?

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The attack on two U.S. Marines in Izmir, who were disembarking from the USS Wasp, curiously coincided with Turkey’s official application to join BRICS.

The incident in the port city is notable because the attackers were activists from the Turkish Youth Union (TGB), which is ideologically aligned with the «Vatan» («Homeland») Party. As early as 2021, this party called for the closure of U.S. military bases in Turkey, the recognition of Abkhazia’s independence, and the recognition of Crimea as an integral part of Russia.

The young men apparently intended to lynch one of the Marines and chanted, «Yankees, go home!» It’s worth remembering the origins of this slogan: it was first uttered by Cubans more than 60 years ago, when they urged U.S. troops stationed in Guantanamo (a thorn still not removed) to leave.

Turkey’s application to join BRICS+ shows that the West is not the only option for Ankara, which applied for EU membership in 1959 and remains stuck in the waiting room.

Why is Turkey interested in joining the BRICS intergovernmental organization? There are many compelling reasons: BRICS controls approximately 30% of the world’s land area, 42% of the world’s population, and accounts for 35.7% of the world’s GDP in purchasing power parity terms.

More importantly, as Sinan Ülgen, head of the Istanbul-based think tank EDAM, explains, there is a growing understanding of the need to «strengthen ties with non-Western powers as U.S. hegemony wanes».

This understanding has emerged amid the ongoing anti-Erdogan propaganda in the West, particularly in the U.S. Sinan Ülgen is not concerned about retaliation from either the U.S. administration or NATO countries, as BRICS is «primarily an economic organization and it is more likely to affect relations with the EU than with NATO».

No one is predicting that Turkey will leave NATO, and that is right. It will remain a relatively loyal partner of the West, but its willingness to sit on two stools at once shows that a real pivot to the East has begun.

Public opinion also supports this shift: 80 percent of Turks see the U.S. as Turkey’s enemy, based on the widespread belief that Americans were complicit in the failed 2016 military coup (when Russian intelligence reportedly warned Erdogan in time of the attempt on his life).

Mistrust is further fueled by Washington’s support for militants of the Democratic Union Party in Syrian Kurdistan, which is allied with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a group designated as a terrorist organization for decades. In addition, the U.S. arms the Israeli military, which has been accused of genocide in Gaza, among other things.

How did the U.S. contribute to the rise of anti-American sentiment in the former Ottoman Empire? The answer lies in an article by Svante E. Cornell, Director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at the American Foreign Policy Council.

According to Cornell, the key mistake was the full-scale invasion of Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003 and the «subsequent creation of a de facto Kurdish state in northern Iraq, which allowed the PKK to entrench itself in the mountainous regions bordering Turkey».

The uncontrollable fanaticism of ISIS then pushed the U.S., as Cornell points out, «into the arms of the Syrian Kurds, who were the only fighting force willing and able to fight ISIS in Syria».

Washington bet on the creation of so-called “border security forces”, composed mainly of Syrian Kurds, with a strength of more than 30,000 fighters. Their salaries and weapons were of American origin. In doing so, Washington once again painfully aggravated Ankara’s Kurdish sensitivities.

For the U.S., Turkey’s application to join BRICS — despite the temporary moratorium on new members following the group’s expansion this year — is bad news. Will Washington object to NATO member Turkey playing on two chessboards at once? Absolutely.

Turkish political analyst Hüseyin Vodinalı, in a January 2017 article on the online news portal OdaTV, reminded readers of the Kemalist principles behind the desire to close the U.S. air base at Incirlik in southern Turkey (from which the U2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers took off for Soviet airspace in 1960), along with nearly 50 other military installations used by the Pentagon.

Vodinalı argues that Turkey’s fundamental foreign policy mistake has been to maintain tension in its bilateral relations with Russia. «In my view», Vodinalı writes, «the real culprit is İnönü (Turkey’s second president from 1938–1950), who violated Atatürk’s great legacy — ‘never ruin relations with Russia and never sign an alliance with the West’ — just six months after his death. And, of course, all subsequent governments».

Today, after the failure of the «zero problems with neighbors» foreign policy, Ankara is essentially aligning itself with the concept of a multipolar world. Sinan Ülgen explains Ankara’s motives as a «desire for greater strategic autonomy». One of the reasons for this independent stance is «growing dissatisfaction with the West and the European Union». Moreover, according to Bloomberg, citing its sources in Ankara, Erdogan’s inner circle has come to believe that the «geopolitical center of gravity» is shifting.

It’s clear that the day when the Yankees will be forced to pack up and leave their outposts in Russia’s soft underbelly is still a long way off. However, the very fact that Tayyip Recep Erdogan and his allies have sought to join a developing alternative and global alliance (even if for the «sultan-pharaoh» this is just another cunning move to raise the stakes in negotiations with the EU and NATO) deals a reputational blow to the United States.

It is predictable that Washington will increase pressure on Ankara, either through diplomacy or coercion, to slow Turkey’s cooptation into BRICS+ and prevent the further spread of anti-American sentiment in Turkish politics.

Is it beneficial for the BRICS countries, especially Russia, to stimulate Turkey’s interest in joining this new «family of nations»? Absolutely.

In fact, as Elena Panina, director of the Institute of International Political and Economic Strategies (RUSSTRAT), believes, «with Turkey out of American influence, the great Eurasian powers are winning the ongoing ‘battle for Europe’ (of which the conflict in Ukraine is the most visible part), bringing the Old World back from Atlanticist captivity to the mainland».

Therefore, it is essential to make it clear to Ankara that the BRICS+ community will not keep Turkey in the waiting room, as the European Union has done for the past 60 years.