The potential mutual value of US-Turkish relations is not hard to grasp in geopolitical terms. A global superpower needs regional allies with potent capabilities and the ability to balance would-be regional hegemons. Preferably, those allies would not be interested in supplanting the superpower itself. Major regional powers need positive relations with the dominant extra-regional power in its neighborhood, and a friend to call on if nearer major powers or coalitions target them. This premise has provided the basis for effective transactional relations between the U.S. and Turkey since shortly after the Second World War. The mutual advantage of cooperation has overcome serious differences of political culture and conflicting interests over for roughly eight decades now - and will continue to do so if the distorting factor of two outsized personalities can be mitigated in the immediate future.
Who are those personalities? Let’s begin with who is not one of these personalities - Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Why not? He is an outsized personality who has exerted a major influence on bilateral relations. He is not a distorting factor, though, because he has reflected rather than created fault lines and tensions in the bilateral relationship (which predate him by far). Erdogan in this sense is a symptom rather than a cause of dysfunctional US-Turkish relations. He has also been the dominant factor in Turkish politics for a quarter century and seems set to remain so for the foreseeable future.
The two personalities who have exerted outsized influence and can be considered distortions or variables in the geopolitical logic of bilateral relations are Fethullah Gulen and Abdullah Ocalan. One is the recently-deceased leader of an Islamist movement with an ambitious economic, social, and political agenda. The other is the imprisoned symbolic leader of an international militant network recognized as a terror organization with a network of affiliated political movements and some international support. Both have been complex and - to the Turkish political world - deeply antagonistic actors who have benefited from U.S. action or inaction. As the world enters 2025, significant events involving each of them indicate a shifting set of policy considerations for Ankara and Washington. This may in time present opportunities to more closely align Turkish and American interests in the region, unburdened by troubles driven by these two for the past two decades.
Gulen
The Gulen movement - Hizmet (service) to its adherents, FETO (the Fethullah Terror Organization) to the Turkish state and many Turks, FGM (Fethullah Gulen Movement) in academic parlance - became politically prominent in Washington after the failed Turkish coup of July 2016. The FGM is broadly believed in Turkey to have instigated the coup, preceded by decades of covertly infiltrating police, judiciary, education, bureaucratic, and military institutions. What began as a surreptitious march through institutions became more overt after the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AKP) embraced the FGM in its efforts to shake off the dominance of secular, military-aligned elites.
Born in 1941 in eastern Turkey, Gulen became a licensed imam in 1958, moved to Izmir in western Turkey, and established a network of educational organizations, starting with student boarding houses, then schools, test preparation centers, schools, charities, civil society organizations, and ultimately businesses and media aligned with his movement. He was briefly jailed twice after military coups in Turkey (1971 and 1980) under suspicion of seeking to institute a theocratic regime. During the 1980s and 1990s the FGM sought to place adherents into positions of influence in the national police and military, drawing the renewed ire of authorities, and a judicial process serious enough to prompt his search for haven in the U.S. to prevent a potential third arrest.
Much of the FGM’s ambitious campaign to place “a golden generation” of followers in sensitive positions of the state was documented by Turkish journalists and investigators, many bitterly anti-AKP. These included Sedat Ergin, Hanafi Avci, Ahmet Sik and Nedim Sener, Necip Hablemitoglu, Ahmet Zeki Üçok, and others. These writers documented the rise of the organization from a small sectarian player to an instrument of state power, and ultimately to aspirant for control of the state itself. Without understanding this 40-year plus sojourn steeped in ambition, power politics, subterfuge, and Machiavellian intrigue, it is impossible to characterize the FGM accurately. The outward-facing identity of the group, especially in the U.S., generally does not account for this context and background.
Ultimately the FGM appetite for power led to a break with AKP, though, leading Western writers to investigate with a bit more alacrity. These included Gareth Jenkins, who examined FGM’s role in the manufactured cases against secularists and Dexter Filkins, who conducted extensive research on the hidden structure and operations of the group. Michael Reynolds from Princeton catalogued FGM’s metastasis within and efforts to seize control of the Turkish state, as well as the botched U.S. government response to the attempted coup of 2016. Harvard’s Dani Rodrik documented at length FGM involvement in the anti-secularist trials and the 2016 coup attempt, as well as the deleterious effects Gulen’s residence in the U.S. had on bilateral relations as those acts played out. There was no shortage of serious Western academic and journalistic research demonstrating FGM’s role in attempts to achieve power in Turkey - first gradually, then in a failed coup - which makes continued naivete over their status as a philanthropic network untenable, yet still relatively common in Washington.
The FGM crossed a Rubicon of sorts once it organized the arrest of the Chief of General Staff of the Turkish military, Ilker Basbug, in January 2012. Subsequently it appeared that there was no target off-limits for FGM-aligned prosecutors and police to target, including Erdogan’s intelligence chief Hakan Fidan in February 2012 Erdogan and AKP leadership realized they had misread Gulen’s intentions, and erred in supporting investigations and trials rooted in forged evidence and political maneuvering. In early 2013 the AKP declared the FGM a “parallel state” and began dismantling its domestic network of businesses, educational establishments, and bureaucratic cliques. FGM-aligned media - and some foreign press outlets - denied an FGM role in the military show trials and anti-AKP corruption investigations, as they would regarding the failed 2016 coup. Few in Turkey doubt that they were all tied together as part of efforts to seize control of the state for the movement. Observers point to Gulen’s own words for confirmation: he was recorded on audiotape directly exhorting his followers:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers…you must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey.
Many Turks underestimated the ambitions and misread the progress of the FGM project in Turkey and abroad and so apparently did the U.S. government. After Gulen fled his homeland in 1998, fearing prosecution by the secularist government, he came to the U.S. for medical treatment and never left. While there he organized the establishment of a network of charter schools, cultural organizations, and political ties that brought him into contact with hundreds of elected officials on favorable terms. The schools were praised for efficiency but also embroiled in controversy based on questionable financial practices and suspicions that they were being used to fund FGM activities outside the U.S. FGM affiliates reportedly funded hundreds of trips for members and staff of the U.S. Congress, as well. There is a theory that the CIA relied on the FGM for intelligence gathering in post-Soviet spaces in the 1990s, which (if true) could help explain why former CIA employees and a former U.S. Ambassador signed letters of support for Gulen to receive permanent residency in the U.S. after it had been initially denied.
To be clear, this does not mean that the U.S. government sponsored or directed the FGM as a matter of policy. Some U.S. officials noted with concern, in fact, the rising threat to the Turkish state posed by the organization. It is possible and perhaps likely that what began as low-level coordination between elements of the U.S. government and the FGM in the 1990s grew into a major policy challenge after the definitive break between the FGM and the Turkish government after 2009, and that no officials anticipated or countenanced that threat - that the scope of its reach and ambitions surprised Washington as much as it surprised Ankara. The legal basis for shutting down FGM affiliated schools or business in the U.S., for extraditing Gulen per Ankara’s requests, or for directly attributing the 2016 coup attempt to Gulen or the FGM has never been established to the standards of U.S. law.
In a sense this has put the U.S. government in an inextricable dilemma for two decades. Having (apparently) forged tactical cooperation with a group not seen as a major threat to its treaty ally Turkey in the 1990s, that enjoyed tacit acceptance from the Turkish government in the 2000s, and that became politically connected in the United States, Washington was not in a position to do a policy about-face abruptly as the FGM grew into a major threat against the AKP and the Turkish state. The FGM challenge to the Turkish state reached its zenith right as other factors - post-Gezi park crackdowns, the war in Syria, tensions between Turkey and Israel - were torpedoing trust and cooperation between the two allies.
This led to Gulen’s extended residence in the U.S. being seen as one of the major impediments to improved bilateral relations. It is understandable from the Turkish perspective to see willful blindness or malice involved, as Turks overwhelmingly consider the FGM a serious threat. It is equally understandable that there were serious obstacles to Washington treating it as such. Crucial to understand at this point is that portraying the FGM as an innocent civil society movement and interfaith dialogue group spuriously blamed by the AKP is an inadequate explanation of the factual record. The FGM was much, much more than that; it was an organization accumulating political power, in Turkey and in the US. That is not to say that all or most followers of the group knew of the designs, that all aligned with the coup were FGM adherents, or that the AKP was innocent of abetting their rise. Future historians may shed more light on those matters. It does mean that the U.S. has not acknowledged an obvious truth for the Turkish government and (most) citizens: the man and movement that challenged state authority and played a central role in the 2016 coup attempt lived out his days in relative quiet in Pennsylvania.
The FGM retains significant if reduced following and resources internationally, though it has been dismantled more or less completely inside Turkey over the past decade. The glue holding the movement together has been Gulen himself, who reportedly enjoyed a cult of personality that saw adherents fight for scraps of his food, seek personal mementoes such as castoff clothing, and speculate that he might in fact be the Messiah. A movement that has stressed education, service, solidarity, influence, and obfuscation for decades does not simply dissolve, but seems quite likely to devolve and degrade in the wake of his passing.
The significance of Gulen’s death in terms of bilateral relations is that it removes an extremely polarizing figure from the equation of rebuilding mutual trust. Historical memory infuses political discourse in Turkey far more than in the U.S., and Turks have a long list of perceived perfidies to remember: the Johnson Letter, the Cyprus embargo, failure to oppose the 1980 coup. Yet the Turkish government has shown remarkable pragmatism over time in resuming effective cooperation once a grievance recedes. Whether the FGM withers, splinters, or survives in attenuated form in the coming years, the immediacy of the threat and the grievance will inevitably decrease, leaving a little more room for confidence-building measures.
Ocalan
While Fethullah Gulen spent the 25 years from 1999-2024 in the relative comfort of rural Pennsylvania, the other bête noire of Turkish politics, Abdullah Ocalan, spent those years in an isolated prison on the island of İmralı, an Alcatraz of sorts across the Sea of Marmara from Istanbul. In a sense his political sin was graver and more enduring than Gulen’s: leading a radical campaign of terrorism and insurgency that has caused over 40,000 deaths (the majority ethnic Kurds, in whose name he sought revolution) for nearly half a century. Yet he provokes less of a visceral reaction in current Turkish politics, for he eventually abjured the search to conquer or divide the Turkish state, and retains potential to help soften or contribute to a solution to the long-running question of how to nest the rights of Kurdish communities in Turkey within the centralized political culture of the Turkish Republic.
The PKK’s campaign in Turkey has taken on a quixotic dimension as some goals that motivated them to resort to revolutionary violence in the 1970s and 1980s have empirically changed. The first is demography: the center of gravity for the Kurdish population in Turkey has migrated to the big cities of the west, especially to Istanbul, rendering geographic partition of Turkey unworkable. Economic and technological development have improved conditions in southeast Turkey, broadening the middle class in heavily Kurdish regions and decreasing incentives for radical change to political structures or economic flows. Turkish intelligence and counter-terrorism techniques have greatly improved over four decades, especially since the advent of Turkish armed drones in the last decade, making insurgent or terror activity much more difficult to carry out.
Ironically, another part of what has changed is that Erdogan’s AKP governments progressively broke taboos associated with talking about Kurdish issues, negotiating with PKK-aligned political parties, broadcasting or allowing education in Kurdish languages (predominantly Kermanji in Turkey, as opposed to the Behdini, Sorani, or Gorani languages spoken among Kurds in Iraq and Iran). AKP politicians from Kurdish backgrounds are well-represented among the party’s key leaders. Ankara under the AKP has developed a close strategic partnership with Kurdistan Region of Iraq, especially the portion dominated by the Erbil-based Kurdistan Democratic Party. The set of Kurdish issues and interests in Turkey and across its borders has dramatically changed over the past twenty years in ways that make armed struggle by the PKK against Turkey superfluous, and, in a real sense, self-defeating.
Nowhere is this more evident than in northeast Syria. With American help, the PKK’s Syrian affiliate, the PYD and its armed wing the YPG, has achieved a controlling position over significant territory. It has accrued military strength sufficient to suppress the remnants of the Islamic State and to deter a reconquista by Assad’s forces, though not enough to take on the Turkish military and security services. YPG leaders have disclaimed any desire to fight Turkey, but are shackled to the broader struggle of the PKK against Turkey by the dominance over movement decision-making by leaders in the mountainous Qandil region between Iraq and Iran. Qandil has also challenged the KDP for territorial control in Iraqi Kurdistan. For both the aspiring Kurdish movement of Syria and the existing Kurdish region in Iraq, the PKK is something of a millstone around the neck.
There is reason to doubt that the Syrian PKK - the YPG - can transform into a Syrian movement unbound by the broader PKK war against the Turkish state, protestations in this direction notwithstanding. Qandil has made clear that it is the arbiter of when and if concessions will be made on that front. One recent example occurred in October 2024, when AKP-aligned Turkish nationalists (the Milli Hareket Partisi or MHP) made gestures towards Kurdish members of the Turkish parliament and indicated a possible opening for renewed negotiations to end the PKK conflict. Within two weeks a terror attack targeting a Turkish aerospace facility in Ankara followed, quashing at least temporarily any momentum towards peace talks.
Ocalan is an enigmatic figure, though still one seen by most Turks as the cause of countless deaths among Kurds and Turks by his history of being more Mao or Guevara than Martin Luther King or Mandela. Under his leadership the Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan (Kurdish Workers’ Party or PKK) became an armed force that subverted state authority, murdered political opponents, enforced a radical leftist form of Kurdish nationalism against an ambivalent Kurdish society, and embraced terrorism for decades. He has been cast as a charismatic figure who focused on real suffering, though his remedies never resonated with the majority of the Kurds of Turkey - many of whom are deeply religious, tribally affiliated, or conservative, and therefore not fully winnable to the PKK’s leftist ideology.
Ocalan’s PKK war on Turkey has arguably been more Bonnie and Clyde than Robin Hood: instrumental violence without a sustainable governance program, and a financing model based on extortion (kampanya) and drug-running that became something of a self-sustaining business without measurably advancing the putative cause. After Ocalan’s capture in Kenya in 1999 (a result of reported cooperation between U.S. and Turkish intelligence), he demonstrated a more pragmatic side. Unlike Alberto Guzman, leader of a parallel Maoist organization in Peru (Sendero Luminoso or the Shining Path), who remained a zealot until the bitter end, Ocalan explored political combinations that would serve his ultimate political goal even as his paramilitary and terrorism strategy failed. During his capture and captivity, he stressed the intertwined nature of his own identity (“my mother is a Turk”) and the fact that the two Kurdish and Turkish peoples could not separate their political destinies, at least not within the territory of the Turkish state. This view has been reflected, theoretically, in subsequent official platforms of the PKK, which have abjured the drive to cleave off a section of Turkey’s territory for a PKK-ruled Kurdish state.
There appears to be a struggle to control the destiny of the PKK movement. On one side is Ocalan, aging and isolated on İmralı, who aspires to cement some political achievement from his long struggle while obtaining personal freedom by ending the armed campaign. Near to his position stands the DEM (People’s Equality and Democracy Party), rooted in and sympathetic to the PKK, which now centers its political case on a broader leftist vision stressing democracy and “the peaceful and honorable resolution of the Kurdish issue, the Alevi issue, and all ethnic, religious, and cultural identity issues in Turkey.” DEM, like Ocalan, at this point have more or less committed to pressing their causes via peaceful means within the existing borders of Turkey. We might add to this side of the equation the Syrian Kurds, who would prefer to pursue their experiment in territorial and political autonomy without being a front in Qandil’s war against the colossus to the north.
On the other side is Qandil. The aging kadros directing the struggle from the mountain stronghold of the so-called Medya Defense Zones in Iraq. They still dream of exercising political control over a linked confederation of Kurdish-majority areas linking “northern Kurdistan” (eastern Turkey or Bakur), “western Kurdistan” (northeast Syria or Rojava), southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq or Bashur), and “eastern Kurdistan” (northwest Iran or Rojhalat). And while they claim to wish to do that without changing nation-state boundaries, none of the nation states involved have ever indicated a willingness to cede political power. As long as Qandil maintains this aspirational multi-region program and pursues it through armed force, war will continue. Ocalan and the DEM may be willing to settle for less, but Qandil holds an effective veto over initiatives in that direction.
Washington’s Awkward Position(s)
The U.S. government has managed, through error more than design, to end up on the wrong side of both these outsized personalities in terms of impact on bilateral relations. Incremental shifts in policy and perception played out over several decades in a manner that convinced most Turks that both men have been agents of American influence. Coupled with the prevailing view in Turkey that both men have been extremely injurious to their state and nation, the dual association amounts to a brake on improved relations and a structural driver of distrust.
Understanding how Gulen and the FGM came to be a central element in U.S.-Turkish relations requires a high degree of nuance and contextual knowledge about a movement that has practiced dissimulation at a virtuoso level. Gulen’s own motives, and consequently those of his movement, began with anti-communism, shifted into anti-Kemalism (the strict secularism of Turkey’s traditional ruling elites), broadened into a sort of global/liberal Islamism, then metastasized into control over a nation state. While there is no publicly available evidence of policy decisions in Washington that would have supported or comported with these motives, it’s not hard to see how the first and the third would have held appeal for elements of U.S. statecraft during the 1980s and 1990s.
There is close to zero chance that any Presidential Directive, Executive Order, Summary of Conclusions, or formal guidance of any sort existed or will come to light directing aid or safe haven for the man or the movement. Yet the effective combination of ambiguity in organizational structure, sophisticated political engagement, and canny reading of U.S. legal protections provided a high degree of protection against extradition or serious legal action of the sort Ankara would have liked to see. By the time the FGM attempted by fatal overreach to directly challenge the Turkish government, it did so from a secure perch to direct its various lines of operation.
Where Turks frequently err is in imputing motive and design to the U.S. side with regards to dealing with the FGM. This seems, in retrospect, to have been a discrete relationship of convenience that took a very bad unintended turn after the option to terminate had passed in practical and political terms. The George W. Bush administration tried to withhold permanent residence status and failed, but this came at a time that Gulen himself was receiving visits from Turkish government officials. In Washington, as late as 2014 the FGM seemed to be on reasonable terms with the Turkish government. A country with fewer legal safeguards might have pursued legal action against the group, or extradition, after 2016, but the nature of the U.S. legal system - and political realities - made such a rapid U-turn impossible. There has been and remains still in Washington some residual sympathy for the FGM based on the perception that whatever happened from 2012-2016 in Turkey, the group’s members in the U.S. do not seem to have been part of it and have perhaps been victims of political persecution.
The U.S. position with the PKK has taken even more twists and turns. During the 1980s and early 1990s the PKK generally avoided targeting Western interests. As a result, it was not until 1997 during President Clinton’s second term that the group was formally listed as a terror organization. During the 2000s the U.S. provided some legal and intelligence support to Turkish counter-PKK operations, and as previously noted helped with the apprehension of Ocalan in 1999.
The U.S. war in Iraq led to decreased regional cooperation between the U.S. and Turkey, especially after the decision of the Turkish parliament to deny American forces transit into northern Iraq. The PKK benefited from the vacuum of central state authority in northern Iraq, and neither the U.S. military nor its Kurdish allies in Erbil and Sulaymaniyah had much interest in picking a fight with PKK militants in the remote areas of the Kurdistan region. After a series of escalating PKK attacks into Turkey orchestrated by Qandil, the Turks threatened a major punitive operation in 2007. The U.S. averted this by increasing intelligence support to Ankara, but this remained much more limited than the late-1990s vigorous and full-throated approach.
The war in Syria led to an even more dramatic turn in U.S. policy. Faced with a murderous and growing terror threat from a group that aggressively targeted Western interests, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (IS), President Obama agreed to start operational and logistical support to PKK-affiliated Syrian fighters. Despite the fact that these fighters - primarily the YPG - espoused Ocalan’s ideology, posted banners with his face in areas they controlled, and responded to tasking from Qandil - the Obama Administration initially denied that the group constituted part of the PKK. Eventually senior officials such as Secretary of Defense Ash Carter acknowledged the groups’ affiliation in testimony to the Senate. Ten years later, with the IS territorial “caliphate” dismembered and the group driven underground in various corners of Syria and Iraq, the U.S. continues to arm, equip, and train that force. While President Trump has expressed a preference to remove the remaining U.S. troops from that mission, there is a formidable group of policymakers and influencers in Washington that will want to ensure that the group is not simply cut loose and left to the tender mercies of the array of opposition forces or the Turkish military.
The expedient, perhaps cynical, nature of using the YPG as a proxy while denying clear ties of ideology, leadership, and personnel between the group and the PKK have been acknowledged on occasion by U.S. officials. Yet the urgent nature of the D-ISIS mission has been sufficient in Washington to justify the relationship, despite the lack of political legitimacy for the group’s control of northeast. Whereas the relationship with Gulen seems to have evolved without topline policy guidance, the relationship with the PKK, and thus indirectly with Ocalan, was done by explicit decision, albeit with some political sleight of hand involved.
The FGM and YPG constitute a sort of dual Rorschach test for the U.S. and Turkey, in which both sides see a different picture. Ankara and most Turks see both groups as lethal, serious threats to Turkish security, and see American failure to take steps against them as adversarial inaction. Officials in Washington tend to see them as marginal threats with an ambiguous moral and political backdrop. No policy solution for tensions driven by the leaders of the two groups has been possible because issue framing in the two capitals has been so dissonant. Yet as a new U.S. Presidential Administration assumes office in January 2025, two impactful events have occurred that may shift perceptions in both capitals in a manner that reduces frictions driven by the two men and their movements. Both took place in October 2024: the death of Fethullah Gulen and signaling by both Ocalan and the Turkish government of interest in a new peace process to end the PKK’s war against Turkey, ten years after the last peace process ended.
Policy Implications
The two men, Gulen and Ocalan, stamped indelible impressions on Turkey from 1980 through the present day. Over time, as a result of incremental policy decisions, they became prominent factors in bilateral relations and both countries’ geopolitical calculations. One has now passed, and the other is seeking a way to turn his final years into an exit that provides a meaningful conclusion to a bloody and bitter struggle, and ends his imprisonment.
Statecraft is the art of the possible, and each successive change in regional context creates new possibilities. These are significant changes in context. What new possibilities might arise from the death of Gulen and the shift in the Ocalan story arc?
With Gulen’s passing, the issue of extradition becomes moot. The declining viability of the FGM as a political force internationally or in Turkey, its decreasing potential challenge to the Turkish state, and its flat-lined potential utility to the U.S. make the ultimate trajectory clear. As Gulen’s personal influence, and the moment of his movement’s prominence in Washington politics decline and approach zero, there will be little left to argue over. It will be up to Ankara to decide when to stop pressing on the FGM as a bilateral grievance. The complicated pas de deux that Washington and Ankara danced over the movement will become a calcified bitter memory, but, like similar past grievances, become more of a talking point than a central concern in the transactional business of bilateral relations. It may be putting too fine a point to say that both sides should simply drop the matter, but that is the essence of it.
There is more to be done in the case of Ocalan. The growing effectiveness of Turkish counter-PKK operations has given Ankara a freedom of maneuver that it previously lacked, because it can be confident in its ability to compensate for any failed political opening with lethal response. The series of Turkish operations in Syria (Euphrates Shield 2016, Olive Branch 2018, Peace Spring 2019, and Spring Shield 2020) established defensible lines and prevented a YPG-controlled “terror corridor” along the Turco-Syrian border. Turkish military and intelligence advances since 2017 have effectively limited the ability of the YPG in Syria or its sister organization, the HPG (PKK’s armed wing in Iraq and Turkey) to conduct operations on Turkish soil.
The U.S. has also played a role in limiting YPG anti-Turkey actions, by tethering aid and assistance to the group to focus its efforts on “the enduring defeat” of the Islamic State. The YPG’s successful experience as an American proxy creates an incentive for the Syrian members of the group to distance themselves from the PKK’s malignant regional campaign and its non-Syrian kadros who long called the important shots in northeast Syria.
In 2025 several dynamics come to a potentially useful conjunction. First is the aforementioned Turkish interest in a renewed political opening to end PKK violence and renew progress issues of concern to Kurds in Turkey. The second is Ocalan’s apparent willingness to participate in and support a new process. The third is the growing likelihood of President Trump taking steps to reduce or end the U.S. military presence in Syria, which will increase pressure on the YPG to reach a modus vivendi with Ankara. We might imagine a situation in which Ocalan prevails upon Qandil to declare a permanent ceasefire. We might also imagine a situation in which Qandil refuses, but the YPG defies the authority of the aging militants on the mountain.
The U.S. has what it needs to square this policy circle regarding the YPG. A President with a strong mandate - which Trump has after winning the electoral college, popular vote, Senate, and House - can forge a creative solution. In this case, that would entail:
a) signaling a gradual decrease in U.S. military presence in northeast Syria and subsidy to the YPG;
b) leveraging decreasing support to the YPG as a reason for Ankara to adopt a more forward and flexible security approach to northern Syria;
c) encouraging the potential opening for a cessation of PKK’s campaign against Turkey, or at least for the YPG to demonstrably and definitively opt out of that campaign; and
d) tying these elements into a broader U.S. strategy that reconciles geopolitical and counter-terrorism goals.
These steps would draw on enhanced Washington-Ankara coordination to avoid a vacuum in northeast Syria that would be inimical to both states’ interests as well as regional stability.
It is a tall task, with multiple potential points of failure. Ankara may find the U.S. approach too incremental, hoping for a categorical U.S. abandonment of the YPG. Qandil may increase pressure on the YPG and terror attacks in Turkey to scuttle potential progress. The designs of Julani and other opposition groups on northeast Syria are as yet unclear but they may want to assert control. These are all real risks, but the existing status quo carries its own risks.
If nothing changes, the YPG/PKK or “Ocalan” issue will remain a poisonous element in the broader US-Turkish relationship. The current opening to end the PKK terror campaign through political means will be missed. U.S. deployments in Iraq and Syria are precarious. Whether a weakened Iran will allow for more stability and security in the region remains to be seen.
The two men, Gulen and Ocalan, will not define the next decade of U.S.-Turkish relations in the way they have for the past several decades. One still has the potential to be part of a positive turn in that relationship. Without preaching or insisting, the task for U.S. statecraft and the new Administration will be to find ways to incentivize and facilitate that turn.
COL (ret) Rich Outzen, PhD, is a geopolitical analyst with decades of experience in strategy, policy, and operational positions in the Middle East and in Washington.
