The Navy Risks Sailors with Port Calls in Turkey

A Turkish mob in Izmir on Monday attacked an American sailor attached to the amphibious assault ship USS Wasp while the ship was on a scheduled port call to give sailors and marines a few days of recreation. The crowd placed a sack over the man’s head, roughed him up, and shouted, “Yankee, go home!” while videoing the incident. The sailor is lucky the Turks did not lynch him.

The sailor himself is not to blame. He was the victim and acted professionally. The Pentagon and the House and Senate Armed Services committees should put the Navy leadership in the hot seat, though, as the incident was both predictable and avoidable.

There was no reason for the USS Wasp to be in Turkey. Port calls are a highlight of deployment, but the Navy has no shortage of options. Years ago, I rode the USS Theodore Roosevelt into Croatia. A decade ago, the USS George H.W. Bush chose Greece as the first port call of its second deployment. Less than a month ago, the USS Wasp conducted a port visit in Cyprus. Malta is a popular choice.

The Navy officers choosing Izmir as a destination knew that Turks either had a habit of targeting American sailors or were negligent. The genesis of the hooding attacks on American sailors was in July 2003 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraqi Kurdistan. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister at the time, had refused both to participate in the ouster of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein four months earlier and to allow American forces to transit Turkey on their way into Iraq. As a result, Ankara lost its ability to shape Iraq’s post-Saddam future.

Erdogan, however, wanted things both ways. He infiltrated a special forces assassination squad into Iraqi Kurdistan without first informing the Americans. The Kurds tipped the Americans off, and they detained the Turkish hit men, both flex-cuffing and hooding them after disarming them as per standard procedure. The entire episode might have been resolved quietly had Erdogan wanted such an outcome, but he instead leaked word to fan populist anti-American flames that persist.

Over subsequent years, there has been hardly a Navy port call in Turkey that has not led to an incident. In October 2011, Turks attacked an American sailor from the USS Ramage in the Turkish resort town of Bodrum. Nine months later, seven Turkish men ambushed American sailors in the resort town of Antalya after the USS Abraham Lincoln docked on a port call. Just after Veterans Day in 2014, Turks attacked three sailors from the USS Ross in Istanbul, again shouting, “Yankee, go home!” And the list continues.

In many countries, diplomats might dismiss such protests as the work of a leftward fringe, but Turkey is different. Youth organizations and militias affiliated with the ruling party or its coalition partners conduct the attack, likely with the encouragement if not full coordination of Erdogan himself. The Turkish president wants it both ways: He wants American weaponry and assistance but then also to be the model for anti-Americanism across the region.

Perhaps with frequent rotations and changes of command, the Navy can plead ignorance. This, however, is also no excuse. Ann E. Rondeau, president of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, rose to vice admiral as a bureaucrat with little sea duty. On the school’s website, she describes herself as a “visionary leader.” After a stint at the College of DuPage in Illinois where she championed online learning, she came to the Naval Postgraduate School and sought to impose a similar model.

One of the first actions she took was to end the Regional Security Education Program founded in the wake of the USS Cole disaster. RSEP would bring academics and analysts, of which I was one, with regional experience on ships for a few weeks at a time in order to provide history lectures and explain the context of ongoing problems. The risk of Turkish hooding incidents was well covered, as was the trajectory of Turkey’s ruling party toward anti-Americanism.

As Erdogan gives his base red meat, accidents happen. It is a matter of time until an Erdogan brownshirt expecting reward knives or shoots an American sailor. The Navy must stop rewarding Turkey with port calls worth millions and start putting American sailors first.