 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Institute. I'd like to welcome our speaker this afternoon, Amanda Slott. She's Robert Bosch, Senior Fellow of the Centre on United States and Europe at the Brookings Institute in Washington, and her research focuses on Turkey and Southern Europe, UK politics, EU foreign policy, and transatlantic relations. So it's quite a wide selection, but she's going to focus today on the subject of entangled alliances, the United States, Turkey, and the Syrian cards. She's also a non-resident fellow at the Ash Centre at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. She has considerable government experience. She served in the US government for almost a decade, most recently as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Southern Europe and Eastern Mediterranean Affairs at the State Department, so she will be able to enlighten us at least on when policies seem to be made fairly conventionally. I would be interested in her opinion now that policy is made in other ways by the new administration. She's no stranger to this part of the world. She has a doctorate in politics at the University of Edinburgh and a BA in political theory from James Madison College at Michigan State University, but she also did a postdoc in Queens in Belfast and has lived in Belfast for three years, so she knows the place, at least she knows part of this island. Amanda, I'd like to welcome you. Basically, Amanda will speak to us for 20, 25 minutes if she chooses to speak that long. Then we will have an off-the-record Q&A session under Chatham House Rules, which I've forgotten the actual text to them, but basically you may refer to what you hear, but you may not attribute or quote it directly or the venue. The other kind of household comment, you know where the emergency exits are, and also please turn off your mobile phones. I'd better make sure I've done that myself. Amanda, thank you very much for coming and I'd like to ask you to speak to us, please. Great. I thank you very much for the invitation. It's a pleasure to be back. I was familiar with the Institute from years ago when I was doing a PhD. I'm looking at the setting up of the Scottish Parliament and its relationship with the European Union, so I'm actually over here to be doing some Brexit-related research, so we'll be off to London and then back up to Edinburgh and Belfast. So my first love really is British-Irish and European politics, but for my sins I was managing Turkey for several years in government, so I'm happy to be talking about US-Turkey relations now and also the future of where we seem to be heading in Syria. Turkey certainly sits in a very turbulent neighborhood and has been profoundly affected by both the Civil War and the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. These conflicts have flooded Turkey with over three and a half million refugees for which I think Turkey has not tended to get sufficient credit for dealing with them as well as they have. It's complicated relations with Russia and Iran, contributed to terrorist attacks on Turkish soil and has also inflamed the Kurdish issue. In terms of the way the US and Turkey have approached Syria, there's been different priorities which really has contributed to tensions within our bilateral relationship. Turkey initially focused on the removal of President Bashar al-Assad from power, so if you remember back over seven years ago when this conflict started it was initially a small uprising within Syria that started with some schoolboys painting graffiti on a wall and it was happening within the wider context of the Arab Spring which I think is what led to Obama's enthusiastic comments that Assad must go and so Erdogan's initial approach was to try and engage with Assad and see if he could persuade him to make some small democratic reforms that would sufficiently assuage the protesters so that things didn't become a larger conflict. Assad refused to do that and from Erdogan's perspective once you turn down Erdogan you are essentially dead to him and so Erdogan's perspective at that point also became Assad must go and so in furtherance of the objective of Assad leaving he was willing to turn a blind eye to some of the more nefarious characters that were crossing the Turkish border and going to join the opposition to Assad within Syria. The Obama administration was very reluctant to get involved in the civil war but became involved militarily once the Islamic State emerged and was seen to be threatening the national security both of the United States, Europe and our regional partners. Turkey initially felt much less threatened by the Islamic State and so it refrained from acting against the group and tended to turn another blind eye to some of the activity that was happening within its borders. That view changed after there was an attack by a suicide bomber that was alleged to have ISIS links in July 2015 and weeks after that Turkey opened its air base in Injulik in the southwest of the country to US and coalition forces. Turkey's own flying as part of that coalition was short lived as it soon shot down a Russian jet that had repeatedly violated its air space on its border. It's certainly arguable that Turkey's much more aggressive posture also increased its vulnerability to retaliation by the Islamic State. As Ankara was attacked in October 2015 and Istanbul twice in 2016. I would tangentially say I think we've also tended to have some double standards here with Turkey and that you will recall there has never been a jusui Istanbul moment the same way that we have had for Nice and for Paris and for other cities in Western Europe that have fallen prey to attacks by the Islamic State. The second major area of disagreement then between the United States and Turkey was how to respond to the Islamic State. There was negotiations for months between the US and Turkey about possible joint military action that I was involved in at the time which ultimately ended up faltering over a couple of points. First Erdogan was very keen to have a no fly zone along his southern border with Syria. He was quite interested in in what he called a back to Syria policy which meant everybody go back to Syria. The opposition go back the refugees go back and it was a way of trying to clean out some of these people that were flooding Turkey. He was also quite interested in trying to block the Kurds from from doing anything along the Turkish Syrian border which which I'll come back to. But there was also disagreement about the availability of local Syrian forces to partner with and also the affiliation of these forces because the United States and Turkey have had to have some differences of opinion over what actually constitute a terrorist organization. There were some American efforts that you may recall to try and train and equip Syrian forces with whom to partner that was not a highly successful effort in part because the US was only willing to train and equip those who were willing to fight against the Islamic State. Not surprisingly most of these opposition forces who had been fighting for several years who had lost family, brothers, relatives in the conflict were not interested in fighting the Islamic State. They wanted to continue their campaign against the regime. So therefore American Special Forces who were operating on the ground in Syria needed to find ground forces with whom to partner and this is when they happened upon the Syrian Kurds, the YPG. So starting with the airdrop in 2014 to the Kurdish town of Kobani which really became the starting point of the American fight against the Islamic State in Syria Kobani notable because it could be seen by CNN cameras I would argue from across the Turkish border. The US then started providing logistical and air support to the Kurds and continued to ramp up its partnership with them. Not surprisingly Turkey has consistently and quite vehemently objected to US partnership with the YPG because of the links between the YPG and the PKK. From the US government perspective the PKK is a designated terrorist organization by the US and the EU. Neither the US nor the EU has designated the YPG which is what made it legally possible for the United States to support the efforts of the YPG. I would argue this is essentially a distinction without a difference while it may have been true in legal terms it certainly didn't account for the practical cooperation between these two groups in terms of the membership and the the movement of individuals between both organizations. So at that point Turkey's top priority in Syria shifted from the overthrow of Assad to preventing the Syrian Kurds from connecting cantons in northern Syria into a single contiguous region. The Turks believe that this could either result in an independence bid by the Kurds in Syria which could then inflame the desire for a Kurdish movement or a Kurdish independence bid by their Kurdish population the majority of which are in the southeast of the country or that it could be used as a staging area for attacks by the YPG PKK on to Turkey and Turkish fears of violence by Kurdish extremists are not unfounded. In 2016 alone far more Turks were killed in attacks by the PKK and its affiliates then by ISIS and others. Syria related conflict also contributed to the breakdown of Turkey's two and a half year ceasefire with the the PKK so Erdogan had initiated a peace process with the PKK. There were some openings that was made to the the Kurdish side and the the PKK did have a ceasefire for a period of time. So despite all of this negative rhetoric Erdogan largely tolerated US support for the YPG. I think he was sufficiently pragmatic to understand that the US was working with the YPG for the objective of countering the Islamic State. However Erdogan did have two red lines with this cooperation. First he opposed any direct arming of the YPG so the US military largely addressed this by providing mission specific supplies to the YPG Syrian Arab partners in the Syrian Democratic Forces. So the US military worked with the YPG and other partners on the ground to create this umbrella organization the Syrian Democratic Forces the SDF. The majority of that was YPG fighters but then there was also a number of Syrian Arab fighters and the thinking was that there would be a snowballing effect that Syrian Arabs would see the success of the SDF more of them would want to join this coalition and so the size of the the SDF then would would grow. So there had been a practice of providing arms to the Syrian partners within this which again you could argue was a distinction without a difference but but that was the the way the operations were done. This policy ended up changing under Trump at the beginning of the administration and frankly I think it would have if Obama had been in in office for another 6 to 12 months with the battle for Raqqa. That was seen as a sufficiently large-scale and complicated effort that there was a desire to give heavier weaponry to the YPG in order to fight that battle in in Raqqa. The Obama administration did not take that decision because of the potential for negative repercussions with Turkey and given that the point at which that would have happened was at the very end of the Obama administration they decided to hand that over to the Trump administration to make a decision on that. The second was that Erdogan had said that YPG forces should not move west of the Euphrates. So if you think about the map of northern Syria you have the Euphrates essentially down the middle you have a number of cantons to the eastern side of that which is where US forces have been based around Kobani and and other cities and then on the west of the country is where Afrin is. The US was not working with the Kurds in Afrin they were being supported by by the Russians but the US was working with the Kurds that were on the eastern side of that and then Mambitch was right there on the Euphrates. So there was a process of negotiation with the Turks and saying to them again we need the YPG to lead the campaign into Mambitch to clear the city they will have to cross the Euphrates to do that once that operation is done then they will retreat back to the west and Syrian Arabs will will govern that that area. Turkey asked and said okay the SDF went in they cleared the city but the problem is that the YPG did not leave so I will come back to that but that is part of what is is frustrating Erdogan right now. So this then left a very Gordian knot given the YPG's presence in northern Syria and it's raised a lot of questions for the United States and the counter ISIS coalition going forward about what the security and governance arrangements are going to look like in a post Assad post ISIS northern Syria. There's been a lot of conflict within the administration and frankly a lot of these fault lines existed during the Obama administration but they've become much more heightened during the Trump administration and we're also seeing a lot of these disagreements spilling out publicly. The State Department has always maintained that cooperation with the YPG is temporary transactional and tactical that it was very limited it was focused on the counter ISIS operation and once ISIS was done then that cooperation was going to end. Trump has told Erdogan that the US is going to stop arming the YPG including in a phone call in November 2017 in an interesting commentary on the way US politics is working right now this caught the Defense Department off guard which quickly ended up issuing a statement clarifying that it was reviewing pending adjustments which essentially suggest no we're not going to stop doing that but we're not going to overly say that. In January in turn the Pentagon surprised the White House when the counter ISIS coalition based in Baghdad announced that it was going to be creating a 30,000 strong border security force with a significant YPG component that would be deployed along the Turkish border. Not surprisingly the Turks were very upset about this which then led Secretary Tillerson to come out and say that entire situation has been mis-portrayed mis- described some people misspoke we're not creating a border security force at all. He then about two days later delivered a major policy speech at Stanford setting out the administration's Syria policy calling for a long-term US military presence in northern Syria to help prevent a resurgence of terrorist violence, prevent the change of regime leadership, help reconstruct liberated areas. He also shifted policy to include countering Iran so if you're the the Turks this still sounds like a long-term American security presence. So a couple of days after that on January 20 Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch against YPG forces in Syria. So I think the the Turks had long been concerned I think they have been expressing their concerns to the United States and certainly launching a large-scale military invasion has been a very good way of getting the attention of the US government. So to come back to my earlier map of where things are in Syria Turkey has been focusing on the Western side in Afrin. What's interesting about that is those YPG forces have been cooperating with Russia they are not ones that have been cooperating with the US and second Russia controls the airspace in that area so Turkey has needed to get Russian acquiescence to launch a campaign against Russian-backed forces and Russia ended up pulling its advisors out that had been working with the the YPG there. After the Turks had shot down the Russian military plane in 2015 not surprisingly relations between Turkey and Russia were quite bad. Russia imposed a lot of economic sanctions on Turkey. Turkey took a significant hit in terms of tourism and and economics but then there was a rapprochement when Erdogan wanted to launch his prior military campaign Operation Euphrates Shield which again largely served the same purpose of clearing YPG forces off from its border and protecting them from connecting these cantons. The significance of protecting the cantons is if they did you would have a contiguous Kurdish controlled territory all across northern Syria and all across Turkey's border which would then block Turkey from having access anywhere into into Syria. So Turkey has now been successful in terms of capturing Afrin and pushing YPG forces out of there. The big question now is whether Turkey ends up moving east towards Mambitch towards the Euphrates which is about 100 kilometers away as it has threatened to do. The concern from the perspective of the United States is one Turkey would then be going after YPG forces that the U.S. itself is backed and second there's also about 2,000 special forces of the United States on the ground so you could potentially have a conflict between two NATO allies on the ground there. So I would be remiss in not mentioning that some of these domestic Kurdish issues that Erdogan is concerned about are not only related to understandable security concerns given links between the YPG and the PKK but there's also of course an element of domestic Kurdish politics for for Erdogan here to certainly the misstep by the Trump administration compelled Erdogan to address this threat by presenting himself as a strong leader that's capable of defending Turkish security. So following a coup, following perceptions of security threats it certainly puts Erdogan in a stronger position domestically to be able to look like he's a strong military leader and he's protecting the country from this this Kurdish threat and certainly public opinion polls in Turkey show that there is significant report or support for what Turkey has been been doing in in Syria. There's also at this time had been elections coming up these elections have now been called early they're going to be June 24th in Turkey. They're presidential and parliamentary elections and they also bring into force a lot of the constitutional changes that Turks have voted on in the constitutional referendum last spring. So maintaining rhetorical and political pressure on the Syrian Kurds helps to delegitimize the voice of the the Turkish Kurds. Long tangents related to that which I will not fully go into but there had been parliamentary elections in 2015 where you had a strong showing by the HDP which was the domestic Kurdish political party. It was the first time they had crossed the 10% threshold to be able to get seats in government and also cost the AKP Erdogan's party its governing majority. Erdogan was not happy with that so there was a long period of foot dragging during which time he ramped up his military campaign against the PKK. We ran elections in November of 2015 and got back the governing parliamentary majority and then went on to arrest the co-leaders of the HDP and so the co-leader and 10 members of parliament from the HDP are sitting in jail. So lots of complicated domestic politics going on there too. So where do we go from here? My final point will be that this is creating complications certainly for the United States because it's very unclear what the United States' policy on Syria is. It's unclear what the U.S. policy is on many things at the moment but particularly on Syria. In fairness I would argue that it was never clear that the Obama administration had a Syria policy. We had a very clear Iraq policy made easier by the fact that we had a democratically elected government that we could partner with. We have had a counter ISIS strategy which from a military perspective has been effective in terms of eliminating the Islamic State and we are in the final phases of that and so the Turkish military mission is causing a lot of frustration in the Pentagon because these YPG forces that the U.S. have been supporting in Mambit have moved over to Afrin to join their YPG brother in there who are trying to counter the Turkish assault. But it's not clear what Syria policy is and what U.S. posture is going to be in Syria following the Islamic State. As I said the U.S. was not interested in getting involved in the civil war in Syria and there tend to be lots of questions now about how we actually draw an end to the ongoing civil war in Syria and what makes it so difficult is it's essentially become a proxy fight between lots of multiple different international actors. You have Russia that has a very active presence. You have Iran that is on the ground. The U.S. is there and now you also have Turkey there. Oh and there's the question of what the Syrian people actually want including large numbers of Syrian Arabs that are now living in areas that the Syrian Kurds control. So the U.S. then launched military strikes. The week before President Trump was saying that he wanted the U.S. to leave. He initially said he wanted U.S. forces out within 48 hours. His commanders persuaded him that was simply logistically impossible and also not wise because there were still ongoing efforts to conclude the mission against the Islamic State. So it appears that Trump has at least agreed to allow these forces to be there for the next six months to conclude the counter ISIS operation. It is then an open question as to whether or not the U.S. forces leave. I think Trump is is not keen to have them there. I think he doesn't see that as being in the U.S. interest for them to be there and so is is looking to pull them out. There was then the use of chemical weapons. Trump I think caused some international confusion with his very aggressive tweets that were calling out both Assad and Putin by name. There is a school of thought that with all of these separate questions going on about Russian interference in the election, Russian collusion, which Trump has never said anything about that this has been a way for him to be tough on Russia and Putin in a separate sphere of action separate from the American domestic political sphere. So the U.S. did end up going in with British and French forces and did very, very limited retaliatory punitive strikes against the Syrian regime for the use of weapons. The U.S. had done similar strikes a year and a week before under President Trump that targeted an airfield and some aircraft. The strikes this time were very narrowly focused on chemical production and storage facilities that were a ways away from any potential conflict with Russian, Iranian and regime forces there because it was very clear by the administration that they only wanted to focus this on CW and not on the broader conflict. So lots of questions now about what U.S. policy is going to be going forward, whether the Geneva process is going to work and really how we ultimately end up solving the civil war in Syria separate from the ISIS fight, separate from the use of chemical weapons. So I will stop there.