BackOpinion | Shock and awe evoked the Donald Trump way
The US president’s letter to Turkish President Erdoğan asking him not to be a ‘fool’ may have stunned foreign policy observers, but maybe Trump has reason to be pleased with it
PremiumA large number of Americans are said to believe US President Donald Trump’s Twitter handle should be taken away before an urge to shoot from the hip, as it were, gets the better of him—and of America. If this delusion hasn’t already been dispelled, it should be by the warning letter he sent last week to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, copies of which have been handed out by Trump himself, reportedly. Dated 9 October, it bears the White House seal, stands out for its brevity, and has evoked varying degrees of shock and awe across the world. “Let’s work out a good deal!" it begins, and gets even more characteristic as it goes along, especially with the final advice offered: “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!"
The foolishness that Erdoğan was being cautioned against has a suitably vague mention in Trump’s letter, though it gets to the point right away with a line referring to the broad cause of friction between the two and what the US president would do in case Turkey’s leader were to reject the deal on offer: “You don’t want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy—and I will." This threat was apparently issued in the context of Trump’s withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria, an abrupt decision declared on 6 October that attracted global criticism for leaving pro-US Syrian Kurds at the mercy of forces hostile to them. Analysts feared that Turkey, a US ally which has long claimed that an insurgency among its own Kurds was aided by Kurdish militant groups in Syria, would take the US departure as an all-clear to launch cross-border strikes at those groups. On 9 October, to the horror of observers, that is exactly what happened. Turkish armed forces began bombing what Erdoğan called a “terror corridor" in northern Syria, with the offensive quickly turning into an invasion of Syrian territory. This was the slaughter that the White House letter had sought to deter. Or so Trump would have us believe. Going by other references in his crisp correspondence, the “deal" he wanted Erdoğan to consider involved an offer by the Kurdish military commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a US ally against Islamic State, to discuss a peace pact with Ankara. “You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past," as Trump’s letter conveyed it. Just in case the prospect of Turkey’s economic doom didn’t prove persuasive enough, the White House evidently took sufficient care to switch tack. In his letter’s closing lines, Trump made an effort to invoke the diabolical imprint that the Turkish president would risk leaving on the world’s memory of him: “History will look at you favourably if you get this done right and [in] a humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen."
As a foreign policy tactic, it did not work. Erdoğan’s response to the letter, according to Turkish sources who spoke to the BBC, was to “put it in the bin", and the region has been wracked by violence over the past week. As a political ploy to rouse an electoral base, however, the letter’s release may actually have served Trump’s purpose. Yes, he seems lost on West Asia. He simply wants out. But perhaps that explains some of his political appeal.
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