Biden's Two-Faced Agenda on Turkey
by Burak Bekdil • December 3, 2021 at 5:00 am
Since the summer, everything on the Washington-Ankara axis seems to have gone wrong.
Is Biden the champion of human rights and universal democratic values that he claims he is? Or is he an unpleasant cheat with a disappointing fake democratic agenda?
U.S. President Joe Biden's increasingly hypocritical policy on NATO's increasingly difficult ally, Turkey, is badly zig-zagging between the U.S. leader's self-declared advocacy for universal democratic values and Biden's secret agenda, which he prefers dishonestly to hide: appeasing Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan behind closed doors and condemning Turkey's democratic deficit in public. In less than two years Biden has swung from a pledge to oust Turkey's autocratic leader to appeasing him behind closed doors.
In a December 2019 interview, then-presidential candidate Biden said that Erdoğan should be ousted from power through a democratic process and that support for the opposition was crucial. Turkey's human rights record has gone downhill from there. The Council of Europe has said that if Turkish courts keep ignoring rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, it would start infringement proceedings against Turkey at the end of November.
