How Bush's Bad Idea that Turkey Could Join the EU Bombed

Matt Purple

Politics, Middle East

Bush 43 was a big-picture thinker, not a geopolitical strategist.

It was 2004, and the geopolitical chess pieces were positioned very differently from how they are today. Back then, Turkey wanted to join the European Union, Great Britain thought that that was a magnificent idea and France was skeptical. Oddest of all, the most vocal advocacy for Turkish accession and democratic reform came from an unlikely alliance of then-president George W. Bush and then-prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. An Associated Press photo from 2002 shows the two of them sitting together, grinning for the camera, with the former’s hair and the latter’s mustache having yet to gray.

Bush’s support for Turkey had precedent. American presidents have historically backed EU enlargements, viewing a stronger Europe as strategically preferable. Clinton-era diplomats had also been receptive to Ankara’s ambitions, helping Turkey secure status as a candidate for membership at the Helsinki Summit in 1999. But the forcefulness of Bush’s advocacy was surprising: “We join you side-by-side in your desire to become a member of the European Union,” he declared while sitting next to Erdogan in 2002.