Opinion | Turkeys People Are Resisting Autocracy. They Deserve More Than Silence.
The United States has long been willing to befriend unsavory foreign governments, sometimes with good reason.In a dangerous world, democracies cannot afford to alienate every nondemocracy.
But any alliance with an autocratic regime requires at least a careful weighing of trade-offs.How valuable is the relationship to American interests? And how odious is the regime’s behavior?President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has personified this dilemma for much of his 22 years in power.
Turkey, at the crossroads of Europe, Asia and the Middle East, is an important American partner, with the second-largest military in NATO.Yet Turkey has been sliding toward autocracy over the past decade.
Mr.Erdogan has changed its Constitution to expand his power, brought the courts under his control, manipulated elections, purged professors, shut down media organizations and arrested journalists and protesters.Last month, Mr.
Erdogan took the assault on democracy to a new level.With dissatisfaction with his government growing, it detained his likely opponent in the next presidential election, Ekrem Imamoglu, the popular mayor of Istanbul, along with almost 100 of Mr.
Imamoglu’s associates on dubious charges.The arrests put Turkey on the path that Russia has traveled over the past two decades, in which a democratically elected leader uses the powers of his office to turn it into an autocracy.
“This is more than the slow erosion of democracy,” Mr.Imamoglu wrote from Silivri Prison in these pages.
“It is the deliberate dismantling of our republic’s institutional foundations.”The response from the rest of the world has been weak.A short time after Mr.
Imamoglu’s arrest, President Trump said of Mr.Erdogan, “I happen to like him, and he likes me.” Many European leaders stayed quiet.
The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said only that the arrest was “deeply concerning.” There are no easy answers, given Turkey’s strategic importance and...