Turkey Worried As ISIS Approaches, Wants US to Do More, NATO to Be Ready

Earlier this week Vice President Joe Biden
apologized to Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, for
suggesting their support for Islamist extremists in Syria
contributed to the problem of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria
(ISIS). Biden, in fact, had said that the Turkish president, Recep
Erdogan, admitted to him his country let too many foreign fighters
cross over into Syria to aid in the toppling of the Syrian
president, Bashar Assad.

ISIS, formerly the Islamic State of Iraq or the al-Qaeda
affiliate in Iraq, grew in strength amid the Syrian rebels. The
United States insists its support for rebels in Syria did not go to
rebels affiliated with al-Qaeda or other Islamist extremists.

While ISIS consolidates power in the territory its occupied in
Iraq, it continues to fight in Syria as well, and
appears poised to overrun Kobane, a border town close to
Turkey. The Turkish government is worried, not enough to take any
military action of its own, but enough to want the U.S. and NATO to
do more.  

“Our government and our related institutions have emphasized to
US officials the necessity of immediately ramping up air
bombardment in a more active and efficient way,” Deputy Prime
Minister Yalcin Akdogan told a
local television station. Turkey’s defense minister, Ismet
Yildiz, said that NATO, at Turkey’s insistence, has drawn up plans
to defend the country if ISIS attacks. Turkey has not joined the
anti-ISIS coalition in Iraq or Syria, and insists the objective in
Syria should be the ouster of Assad.

NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, obligates
member-states, including the U.S., Canada, most of Western and
Central Europe, and Turkey, to aid in each other’s self-defense.
The alliance was formed after World War II to contain the Soviet
Union and its satellite states.

Since the end of the Cold War, its mission has been warped by
the U.S. and European countries. In the late 1990s NATO was
involved in the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, though
it involved no NATO member-state. Just a few years ago NATO led the
charge for intervention in Libya’s civil war, for which the country
is still paying in instability. The mission creep’s turned NATO
into an organ of U.S. and European interventionist policy, but it’s
largely stayed out of the ISIS fight even as its member states
haven’t. With ISIS just a few miles from the Turkish border, the
consequences of NATO member states’ interventions could trigger the
only obligation the alliance ever really had, the defense of its
members.

Related:
Whether post-WW2 institutions like NATO “are still relevant or
useful or necessary or proper in the 21^st century
is an open question.”