WASHINGTON — It’s hard to remember today that to President Obama, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey once embodied a new kind of Muslim leader. Mr. Obama regarded him as “a man of principle, and also a man of action,” Tom Donilon, the president’s former national security adviser, said in 2011.
But when Mr. Erdogan began tilting in the direction of authoritarianism, ascending from prime minister to president and setting out to transform Turkey from a parliamentary democracy into a one-man system built around him, their once-intense relationship deteriorated. His frequent phone calls with Mr. Obama ended, and Mr. Erdogan has observed that they rarely speak anymore.
On Tuesday morning, the phone calls resumed. Mr. Obama called Mr. Erdogan to deliver what a senior administration official described as a “shout-out” for his resilience in the face of a failed coup attempt, and to express relief that the Turkish president and his family were safe.
Mr. Obama’s supportive words, even in the face of a state of emergency that Mr. Erdogan declared on Wednesday and a crackdown that extended to banning every academic in the country from traveling abroad, testified to the stark reality the White House confronts with Turkey. Mr. Erdogan may now be a bitter disappointment to the president, but he is still better than any other option — and, like it or not, remains a linchpin in the campaign against the Islamic State and in a host of other critical issues.
For Mr. Obama, as for many of his predecessors, it is a familiar accommodation, struggling to square values and interests in the chaotic landscape of the Middle East. In Egypt, for example, the United States has tolerated a repressive military government in an effort to preserve another crucial alliance in the region.
“Whatever our concerns might be about the direction the Erdogan government is going — and there are legitimate concerns — nobody thinks that a military coup is a legitimate or sensible alternative,” said Philip H. Gordon, who coordinated Middle East policy on the National Security Council until 2015.
Had the coup succeeded, administration officials said, Turkey most likely would have plunged into a protracted period of instability, perhaps even civil war. That would have made it an even less reliable partner in the campaign against the Islamic State after the United States and its allies won the right last July to use Incirlik Air Base in Turkey to launch airstrikes against the group.
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Those operations were halted when the Turkish authorities cut off electricity to Incirlik, after it emerged that the base’s commander was linked to the coup plotters. American officials said the operations had resumed, though they acknowledged that Turkey, and especially its military, would be preoccupied for the foreseeable future by the fallout from the attempted coup. The government has charged nearly 100 generals and admirals, and detained thousands of other officers, as Mr. Erdogan’s purge widens.
On Tuesday, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., spoke with Turkey’s chief of defense, Gen. Hulusi Akar. A Pentagon spokesman, Capt. Gregory L. Hicks, said they had agreed to “continue a close U.S.-Turkey military-to-military partnership.”
During their phone call on the same day, administration officials said, Mr. Obama urged Mr. Erdogan to stay focused on the threat from the Islamic State. “I think we don’t need to remind Turkey of that,” Brett H. McGurk, the president’s special envoy to the coalition against the Islamic State, told reporters. “They just suffered terrible attacks at Istanbul airport only a couple weeks ago with a number of suicide bombers.”
Mr. Erdogan, however, is more likely to be consumed by threats from Kurdish separatists and from supporters of Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim cleric living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, whom Mr. Erdogan has accused of fomenting the coup. During their phone call, the Turkish president urged Mr. Obama to hand over Mr. Gulen, and his government has submitted the paperwork to begin a formal request for his extradition.
The White House has declined to comment on the merits of the arguments made by the Turkish government that he should be returned to Turkey. But extraditing the cleric, officials said, is a lengthy, complex process that involves an assessment by the Justice Department, followed by a ruling by a federal judge. Mr. Obama, they said, has nothing to do with it.
Mr. Obama and Mr. Erdogan have weathered previous disagreements. At a summit meeting in Toronto in 2010, the two had a fiery, two-hour exchange over Turkey’s decision to vote against imposing sanctions on Iran in the United Nations Security Council. Mr. Erdogan was still bruised by the White House’s spurning of a diplomatic effort by Turkey and Brazil to broker a deal with Iran over its nuclear program. Administration officials acknowledged that they were partly to blame for sending the Turks a poorly worded letter that could have been interpreted as endorsing the diplomatic initiative.
It was the first major jolt in a relationship that had begun on an auspicious note in 2009, when Mr. Obama chose Turkey as the first Muslim country he visited as president. “I’m trying to make a statement about the importance of Turkey,” he said at the time. Turkey and the United States could “build a model partnership,” he added.
Mr. Obama believed that Mr. Erdogan, who had risen in politics as a reformer, “was going to show that you could be democratic and Islamist at the same time,” Mr. Gordon said. “He had a lot of faith in Erdogan; he invested in the relationship.”
Mr. Erdogan, analysts said, had a similar faith in Mr. Obama. He viewed him as a different kind of American leader, one who would not prize relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia above all other countries in the region. Mr. Erdogan was also eager to flex Turkey’s muscles, and Mr. Obama seemed receptive. In 2011, the president spoke more frequently with Mr. Erdogan than with any other foreign leader except Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain.
During the early days of the Arab Spring upheavals, in Egypt and Libya, Mr. Obama and Mr. Erdogan were in sync. But the protests in Syria exposed fissures: Mr. Erdogan initially balked at putting pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and later worried more about what a fractured Syria would mean for Kurdish nationalism than about the threat of the Islamic State.
Although Mr. Obama has periodically warned Mr. Erdogan to curb his authoritarian tendencies — he called him in June 2013 after the police cracked down brutally on protests in a park near Taksim Square in Istanbul — the president has generally delivered his criticisms in private. He is likely to do the same this time, analysts said, unless Mr. Erdogan begins executing people. It is a further reflection, they said, of the paucity of options open to Mr. Obama.
“We don’t really have a Plan B,” said Steven A. Cook, an expert on Turkey at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is what we’ve got, and we’re going to live with it.”
It was the first major jolt in a relationship that had begun on an auspicious note in 2009, when Mr. Obama chose Turkey as the first Muslim country he visited as president. “I’m trying to make a statement about the importance of Turkey,” he said at the time. Turkey and the United States could “build a model partnership,” he added.
Mr. Obama believed that Mr. Erdogan, who had risen in politics as a reformer, “was going to show that you could be democratic and Islamist at the same time,” Mr. Gordon said. “He had a lot of faith in Erdogan; he invested in the relationship.”
Mr. Erdogan, analysts said, had a similar faith in Mr. Obama. He viewed him as a different kind of American leader, one who would not prize relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia above all other countries in the region. Mr. Erdogan was also eager to flex Turkey’s muscles, and Mr. Obama seemed receptive. In 2011, the president spoke more frequently with Mr. Erdogan than with any other foreign leader except Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain.
During the early days of the Arab Spring upheavals, in Egypt and Libya, Mr. Obama and Mr. Erdogan were in sync. But the protests in Syria exposed fissures: Mr. Erdogan initially balked at putting pressure on President Bashar al-Assad and later worried more about what a fractured Syria would mean for Kurdish nationalism than about the threat of the Islamic State.
Although Mr. Obama has periodically warned Mr. Erdogan to curb his authoritarian tendencies — he called him in June 2013 after the police cracked down brutally on protests in a park near Taksim Square in Istanbul — the president has generally delivered his criticisms in private. He is likely to do the same this time, analysts said, unless Mr. Erdogan begins executing people. It is a further reflection, they said, of the paucity of options open to Mr. Obama.
“We don’t really have a Plan B,” said Steven A. Cook, an expert on Turkey at the Council on Foreign Relations. “This is what we’ve got, and we’re going to live with it.”
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