The Turkish Kerfuffle - F35 and S-400 Missiles in Competition

It may be too dramatic to call the kerfuffle over S-400 missiles a fight for the soul of Turkey.  I am not a Turkey expert, but I think that Erdogan's victory over the military after the "coup" of 2016 took Turkey down a new security path that may be hard to come back from. Many articles have discussed the issue of the S-400 missile and the US decision to exclude Turkey from the F-35 project as a consequence.  A recent article in War on the Rocks helped me to think through my own position on this issue more clearly.

The author of the article, Ray Rounds, makes a number of interesting points about the ineffectiveness of arms as instruments of foreign policy - especially in terms of specific policies.  This ineffectiveness has been at the heart of the finds that Richard Johhnson and I found regarding human rights and arms transfers.  We published a piece in ISQ last year that tried to tie democratic states' stances on human rights to their policy actions in terms of arms transfers.  We found that the actions of these democratic states does not match their rhetoric in any meaningful way.  We have other work under review that tests this proposition using dependence on arms as the independent variable to test whether or not dependence on democratic suppliers can spur states to better human rights records.  The spoiler answer to that particular question is that it does not.

With that in mind, the argument that arms embargoes are more costly and harmful is thought-provoking.  It is especially useful for helping to develop clearer theories of arms transfers in international relations more broadly - my long-term project and personal white whale.

Arms exports are best used for maintaining or strengthening relationships while limiting adversary access to client states; a tool of nuanced influence, not outright coercion. In fact, threatening to withhold arms sales to coerce a state into changing its behavior often has the opposite effect, leading clients to diversify their arms sourcing instead of shifting course. 

This idea that arms create and strengthen relationships, and cannot simply be used instrumentally to get a particular policy or outcome at a desired time is interesting and nuanced.  It also tracks with my own theoretical leanings to think that arms sales are part of the fabric of international relations precisely because they are a currency of relationships.  They are a currency precisely because the transfer of arms represents the transfer of coercive capabilities that forms the basis of an anarchic world.  In terms of Wendt (1992) arms are a big piece of the anarchy that states are making.

Rounds lists a number of states that have moved to diversify their arms suppliers because of US restrictions, delays, and hesitance in supplying them with weapons over the course of a number of year:

Egypt is one example above; but others such as Venezuela and even tiny Kuwait — frustrated at years of U.S. approval delays — have significantly diversified their arms acquisitions. In other words, with the money and options available to Saudi Arabia, and few other producers showing a stomach for a full embargo, it is not unreasonable to believe that the Saudis might significantly diversify their arms acquisitions over time in response to a U.S. embargo.

In the case of US and Turkey, the refusal of the US to consider Turkey for Patriot Missiles (and some technology transfer and manufacturing offsets) was one of the main factors in influencing Turkey to move towards the Russians.  That move has now jeopardized further cooperation in defense and arms for the F-35, a project that may have kept Turkey in the US/Western orbit for 30-40 years or more. 

Politics, Relationships, and International Arms Transfers

Arms transfers and the politics and relationships that surround them are everywhere when you are tuned in to them.  I know that I suffer from an extreme case of selective attention in the case of arms transfers, but I find them fascinating to think about.  I am constantly surprised both by how much we think about arms transfers in terms of human rights and foreign policy, but how little we actually think about the strategic logic of transferring coercive capabilities between states.  It is an area that is deeply in need of theorizing, and that is what I've taken as my central research task.

This week I had a few stories pop up in my news feed that reinforce the social and political nature of arms transfers.  The first one is one that I find very fascinating - it is the case of Turkey ordering S-400 missiles from Russia.  The original sale is problematic from the point of view of NATO since the S-400 is designed to shoot down NATO aircraft.  The symbolic move of Turkey away from NATO suppliers to Russia also signaled some deeper trends in the fracturing relationship between Erdogan and the West as a whole. 

I wrote about that sale in more detail earlier this year on this blog (LINK) and focused on the aspect that this particular sale may be an interesting case of a leading indicator that can be used to predict a state's alliance and ideological affiliation in the future.  One aspect that I didn't think of was the current state of Russian-Western relations and the fact that Russia faces sanctions.  The US is telling Turkey along with Saudi Arabia and Qatar to back out of the purchase of these missiles from Russia or face the threat of sanctions themselves. LINK

In terms of the sanctions regime, it makes sense that explicitly military goods would be at the top of the list of sanctioned goods.  The fact that these arms are being considered by US allies is potentially troubling in and of itself in terms of what it may mean about the strength of trust between these states and the US in terms of security guarantees.

The second story that caught my eye was the potential for Ukraine to jointly produce armored vehicles with Thailand (LINK).  An article by Vucetic and Tago (2015) that I recently discovered (via Twitter) does a very good job of outlining the trade-off between autonomy and efficiency in the acquisition of arms.  It is most efficient to purchase arms off the shelf, but that leaves a state vulnerable to pressure from the selling state (which is the subject of the first part of this post).  It is costly and inefficient from an economic standpoint. 

What I found fascinating was the description of the meeting between the delegation from Thailand who came to Kyiv as part of bilateral talks between the nation.  The talks between the delegations are about strategic partnerships.  One way that is being considered to increase that partnership is to go into the business of arms together. One aspect of arms transfers that has been interesting to me since I started researching them 8 years ago is the high level of discussions that are involved in these purchases and how often heads of state or with cabinet/department level heads. 

The building of relationships through the transfer of weapons often seems to be part of an elaborate trust exercise.  I love the idea of Suchman and Eyre (1992) and their institutional logic of arms transfers, but I think that the social aspect of states bargaining and building relations based on arms tells an even deeper and surprising story.  It's a story that I'm happy to keep chipping away at.

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Suchman, Mark C., and Dana P. Eyre. (1992) Military Procurement as Rational Myth: Notes on the Social Construction of Weapons Proliferation. Sociological Forum 7: 137–161.

Vucetic, Srdjan, and Atsushi Tago. (2015) Why Buy American? The International Politics of Fighter Jet Transfers. Canadian Journal of Political Science 48: 101–124.