The United States Has Supplicants, Not Allies

Salvatore Babones

Security, Americas

Alliances are a holdover from nineteenth-century European geopolitics, kept alive by political pundits' juvenile obsessions with strategy games.

A United States treaty ally is at war with a non-state actor based in the Middle East. But the Trump administration has disavowed America’s friends abroad, concerned only to make a quick exit before the 2020 election season starts in earnest. Congressional foreign-policy heavyweights on both sides of the aisle have lined up to condemn the president, while pundits scream “betrayal” and warn that America’s allies would no longer trust the United States.

The American ally, of course, is Turkey, and the non-state actor with which it is at war is the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria. The Kurdish forces throughout the region are a loose network of terrorists (the PKK in Turkey), irregular militia (the YPG in Syria), and two political party-based armies (the Peshmerga in Iraq). Since 2015, the PKK has killed at least 490 civilians and 1,215 security personnel inside Turkey, according to data compiled by the International Crisis Group.

Since October 9, YPG mortar attacks on targets inside Turkey have killed at least ten civilians and wounded dozens more, and now the YPG is cooperating with the Syrian armed forces.

That is not to say Turkey is right to invade Syria, or that its apparent support for murderous irregular allies of its own is excusable. It’s just to point out that things are more complicated than they seem. In theory, Turkey, which has been a member of NATO since 1951, could invoke Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and appeal for the assistance of all twenty-eight of its NATO allies. After all, Turkey’s recent losses to Kurdish terrorism rival America’s death toll from the 9/11 attacks.

The Alliance Myth