Handling Turkey’s Erdogan: What Washington can learn from Russia

Russian President Vladimir Putin knows to handle his fellow authoritarian leaders; he relentlessly applies leverage to extract concessions. This is a lesson that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson should bear in mind when he meets his Turkish counterpart this week.

Tillerson will primarily deal with the complications of Ankara’s ongoing military offensive in northern Syria. And changing Washington’s wonted tone could be key to winning back a rogue NATO ally. 

Anti-Americanism is running high in Turkey, and a consular spat that led to a “visa crisis” in December shows signs of reescalation. Bilateral relations between the NATO allies are so strained that Ankara has recently threatened to strike at U.S. forces embedded with Kurdish fighters in Syria, just miles from the Turkish position. Just this Monday, the Turkish foreign minister warned that U.S.-Turkish relations will “either be fixed or completely broken.”

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Aykan Erdemir is a former member of the Turkish parliament and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @aykan_erdemir.

Merve Tahiroglu is a research associate at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on Twitter @MerveTahiroglu.

Follow FDD on Twitter @FDD. FDD is a Washington-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.