In response, many Turks posted videos of themselves heeding their dear leader’s call on Facebook (an American product itself). In the various videos, patriotic Turks burn $1 bills, smash iPhones with a sledgehammer, or even shoot their iPhones at point blank range. In the new Turkey where criticizing anything the government or its president does can land one in jail, virtue signaling one’s loyalty makes a certain amount of sense.
Turkey’s Kurdish critics reacted to these Turkish displays of loyalty with a certain amount of glee. Since the birth of the Turkish Republic, British and American support for Turkey went a long way towards preventing any recognition of, or support for, Kurds in the region. Long an implacable opponent of Kurdish gains anywhere and an important member of NATO since 1952, Turkey often prevented more robust Western support for Kurdish political movements.
As Turkey’s relationship with the West continues to sour under Erdogan’s rule, however, the equation seems to be changing. The latest row between Washington and Ankara has increased calls for NATO to shed itself of a member that does not share its values, its democratic systems of government or its interests. Turkey may have even become a liability for NATO, given its support of jihadists in Syria and its plans to purchase Russian S-400 air defense systems – which if integrated to Turkey’s NATO weapons systems would provide Russian advisors and engineers that come with the S-400 package a lot of very compromising information.
The satisfaction of many Kurdish observers watching the train wreck of Turkish-American relations thus seems easy to understand. Many of this columnist’s Kurdish friends would like to see even more patriotic virtue signaling from Turkey, in fact. Assuming that the $1 bills that Erdogan’s supporters are burning were bought with Turkish liras, setting fire to a lot more of them should quickly devalue Turkey’s currency another 40 percent.
Also, why stop with iPhones? True demonstrations of patriotism should include smashing Turkey’s F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters (the ones used to continually bomb Afrin, parts of Iraqi Kurdistan, and rebellious areas of southeastern Turkey).
In fact, if Turks truly wish to signal their loathing of the US, and their capacity to operate without it, they should immediately release Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan back to Kenya. It was the Americans, after all, who captured him there on behalf of Turkey in 1999. They can then try to hunt him down and capture him again on their own.
Erdogan might also consider releasing all the July 16, 2016 coup plotters (both the real ones and the other 80,000 he had arrested), since he averted the coup thanks to an American iPhone program called "Facetime" – which he used to rally people to the streets against the putschists.
The Cold War is also over and the communist bogeyman has been replaced by jihadists. Whereas the old secular Turkey might have looked useful for countering the threat of radical Islamists, today’s images of Turks smashing their iPhones as they chant “Allahu Akbar” and make Grey Wolf fascist hand gestures hardly holds the same appeal for Washington.
While Erdogan’s threats to “find other friends” such as Russia may worry some in Washington, that boat seems to have already sailed with the S-400 system purchase and various oil and gas deals with Moscow. Russia, no matter what alarmist noises come out of the media, is also nowhere near the threat to the United States the Soviet Union represented.
Decision makers in Ankara are not, however, quite ready to jump and replace their NATO membership with complete dependence on Russia, whose geographical proximity also threatens Turkey a great deal more than any iPhone or American conspiracy in the Middle East. The Turkish state’s enemies will rejoice if they ever make that jump.
Until they do, we all get to be entertained by symbolic, patriotic virtue signaling on Turkish Facebook accounts.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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