Steven A. Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. His book, Thwarted Dreams: Violence and Authoritarianism in the New Middle East, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2016.

To Westerners, it might seem that Vladimir Putin was exaggerating in anger when, after a Turkish F-16 on Tuesday shot down a Russian fighter jet allegedly violating Turkish airspace, he referred to the government in Ankara as “terrorists’ accomplices.”

Americans aren’t used to thinking of Turkey—our NATO ally and most powerful backstop in the Muslim world—in this way. And surely Putin is just engaging in some saber-rattling. But as Turkey and Russia dispute the incident, it is casting a spotlight on one of the most troubling developments in the evolving struggle in the Middle East: When it comes to fighting the Islamic State and extremism more generally, Turkey—and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—has become a significant part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.


You wouldn’t know this from the official rhetoric. NATO is standing firmly by Turkey in the wake of Tuesday’s incident. And the Obama administration often trumpets the critical importance of Turkey’s participation in the international coalition to counter ISIL. Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for that coalition, told Turkey’s Hurriyet Daily News this summer that the United States “can’t succeed against Daesh [the Islamic State] without Turkey.” And after a bloody two weeks—during which ISIL claimed credit for the Paris shooting and bombing spree, the killing of 43 people in another bombing in Beirut and the downing of a Russian airliner over the Sinai Peninsula—Erdogan, an Islamist who runs a country that is 99.8 percent Muslim, appeared with President Barack Obama ahead of the G-20 summit in Antalya and spoke firmly against jihadism: “We are confronted with a collective terrorism activity around the world. As you know, terrorism does not recognize any religion, any race, any nation or any country. … And this terrorist action is not only against the people of France. It is an action against all of the people of the globe.”

For the uninitiated, Erdogan’s statement must have seemed heartening. But close observers of Turkey know better: Over the past five years, American policymakers, Turkey watchers, terrorism experts and a slew of journalists have come to understand that while Ankara can play a constructive role in combat ing extremism and resolving the Syrian conflict, it has chosen not to. And as that conflict spreads and jumps borders, the Turks’ myopia on jihadism in Syria may very well come back to haunt them and their Western allies.

Of course, the Turks didn’t start the war across their border in Syria, in what has become ISIL’s breeding ground. In fact, by Turkey’s own accounts, it made huge diplomatic efforts with Syrian President Bashar Assad to head off that conflict when civil war began to erupt in the summer of 2011. That Syria has descended into unspeakable violence is first and foremost the fault of Assad, his enablers in Tehran and the Kremlin, and Hezbollah, which has provided the manpower to fight alongside Assad’s army and militias. The Turks also deserve credit for how they have handled the flow of more than 2 million Syrian refugees into their country: Turkey has spent $7 billion to care for these people, in well-organized refugee camps that meet international standards.

Still, the choices that Erdogan and top Turkish officials have made contributed to the vortex of violence and extremism that is Syria’s reality. Erdogan has never paid a price for these choices either at home, where he has hollowed out Turkish political institutions to ensure his grip on power, or abroad, where Turkey’s NATO allies are forced to pretend, by dint of circumstance and geography, that Ankara shares their goals.

It all starts with Turkey’s decade-old relationship with Assad. In the mid-2000s, Erdogan, who was then the prime minister, and the three foreign ministers who served him—Abdullah Gul, Ali Babacan and Ahmet Davutoglu—cultivated Assad. Their goals were both economic and strategic: to improve and expand relations with Syria and thereby provide a land bridge for Turkish trade to the Persian Gulf via Jordan, as well as to peel Damascus away from Tehran. The result was a flowering of relations that included increased trade and investment, security cooperation and joint cabinet meetings; Erdogan even invited the Assad family on vacation (though the trip never actually materialized).

But once the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, Erdogan and Davutoglu discovered they had been played. Assad lied to both men, twice reneging on promises to implement political reforms to stem the unrest in Syria, and instead turning to Iran for support. As the Syrian conflict intensified in 2011, refugees flooded across the long Turkish border and Syrian artillery shells fell on Turkish territory. Ankara looked powerless to respond. Not only was the conflict in Syria a security threat to Turkey—one that would grow over time—but Erdogan, who is not used to failing, seemed deeply livid that Assad had spurned his counsel.

By late summer 2011, Erdogan had given up on Assad, and Ankara had become the leading international advocate for the end of the Assad regime. Yet the Turks were soon caught off guard by their own diplomatic impotence and unwillingness to venture into the growing maelstrom on their own. In mid-2012, after the Syrians shot down a Turkish reconnaissance plane operating off Syria’s coast, Ankara repeatedly appealed to Washington to intervene in Syria and bring the Assad regime down. This was another miscalculation. Obama, having no intention of deploying forces to the Middle East, demurred. With their Syria policy in tatters and an unwilling ally in Washington, Ankara determined that the only way to respond to Assad was to turn a blind eye to the increasing number of radicalized young men who began using their territory to wage jihad against Assad.

American and European officials first raised concerns in 2012 that jihadists were using Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul to make their way to the Turkish city of Gaziantep before heading into Syrian territory to take up the fight. But the Turks dragged their feet on imposing border controls, and instead charged that Europe was not providing them timely intelligence about the Belgians, Germans and Frenchman coming Turkey’s way.

Over time, extremism became a veritable instrument of Turkish statecraft—and also, not surprisingly, a threat within Turkey’s borders. Turkey, along with another problematic American ally, Saudi Arabia, has provided support to Ahrar al-Sham, which in turn is alleged to have provided assistance to Jabhat al Nusra, both Syrian rebel groups that are linked to Al Qaeda. It’s true these two organizations have made gains against Assad, but that doesn’t make them any less extremist. And while Ankara might think it can control these groups, it clearly cannot: Within Turkey’s borders, extremists have built up their own infrastructure, including communications networks, safe houses, medical facilities and illicit commerce that exist to support the fight in Syria. It would be naive to think that this could not be used in a fight against Turkey.

What about the Islamic State? Turkish police may have arrested a Belgian connected to the Paris attacks to great fanfare last week. But critics have alleged that Erdogan’s government has been unwilling to shut down supply lines from Turkey to territory controlled by ISIL. As dangerous as the group is, it has also proved a useful enemy of two of Turkey’s most important adversaries, Assad and the Kurds. Certainly, questions about Turkey’s conduct toward the group remain unanswered. For instance, given all the violence that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s ISIL followers have visited on fellow Muslims, why were 46 Turks that ISIL took hostage in Mosul released unharmed? Turkish and Western observers speculated that the Turks provided cash or guns or both to secure the release of these diplomats and their families, but neither Erdogan nor any other Turkish official provided a clear explanation.

Meanwhile, from the time the Obama administration first put together its anti-ISIL strategy in the summer of 2014, the Turks have been noticeably ambivalent about it. Given their proximity to Syria and the extremists in their midst, Turkish officials worry that if they take on ISIL, the group will stage retaliatory attacks—like Paris or Beirut—in Istanbul or Ankara. From Turkey’s perspective, the weakening ISIL seemed to embolden Kurdish nationalism—a significant problem when 20 percent of the Turkish population is Kurdish, many of them alienated and angry. And finally, the American approach did not target the Assad regime directly, which Ankara insists is the cause of the ISIS problem. Yet even after ISIL killed 134 Turkish citizens in Suruc—near the Turkish-Syrian border—and Ankara, the Turks have not exactly taken the fight to ISIL’s headquarters in Raqqa.

In July, Turkey announced that it was giving anti-ISIL forces expanded access to its airbases to conduct combat operations, and that Ankara would join the fight. But this apparent turning point has not lived up to its billing. While American and allied air crews are now flying regular combat missions from Incirlik airbase in Southern Turkey, the Turks themselves, as so many expected, have spent considerably more time attacking the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a terrorist organization that has been waging a fight against Turkey since the mid-1980s. Turkey has every right to defend itself, of course, but it also happens that the PKK and its Syrian affiliate, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which has coordinated directly with the United States, have proven themselves to be effective ground forces in the fight against ISIL. The Turks, based on their own actions and statements, appear more concerned with snuffing out an independent Kurdish canton in Syria and battling the PKK than fighting ISIL militants. Erdogan has been clear that he will never allow the emergence of “Western Kurdistan” in northern Syria. Echoing that sentiment, last June the pro-government daily Sabah ran a headline calling the political affiliate of the YPG “more dangerous than ISIS.”

It is not as if Turkey has done nothing against the Islamic State, but the value it has added is actually quite limited beyond real estate. If not for those runways at Incirlik and elsewhere in Turkey so crucial to the anti-ISIL coalition, Erdogan would not credibly be able to say the things he said at the G-20 summit. Therein lies the reason Erdogan is the “Teflon Don” of Turkish politics. The existence of Incirlik—along with the fact that Turkey shares a 500-mile border with Syria, and is the NATO outpost closest to the conflict in Syria—is Erdogan’s get-out-of-jail card. Like the late mobster John Gotti, whom federal prosecutors pursued relentlessly in the 1980s, nothing sticks on Erdogan.

And it’s not just enabling jihadis or agreeing to fight the Islamic State without really fighting the Islamic State; at home, Erdogan has crushed the Turkish press, clamped down on social media, rerun an election earlier this year because the initial result wasn’t good enough and made sure his son-in-law was appointed energy minister. Yet Americans say nary a word about Erdogan’s thuggish approach to domestic and foreign policy. Germany’s Angela Merkel even showed up in Ankara in October with a bunch of goodies to help the Turkish leader’s party regain a parliamentary majority. It’s good to be Erdogan. In the interest of alliance unity and solidarity, he will get a further pass from his NATO allies now that the plane incident has raised tensions between Ankara and Moscow.

There are few within the Obama administration who genuinely seem to believe Turkey can be part of the solution in Syria. Washington appears happy just to have access to Turkish territory, which is apparently why the White House has been so publicly accommodating toward Erdogan. After a year of tough negotiations with the Turks over Incirlik, they don’t want to risk losing the access. The American policy toward Turkey must remind anyone with children of the first rule of day care: You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.

Given how Washington has defined the gravity of the ISIL threat and the importance of Turkey’s airbases in the fight against extremism, the benefits of this approach may very well outweigh its costs. But as long as Washington determines not to call out the Turkish government for its bad behavior, Ankara will continue to sow chaos.