Each year, millions of passengers fly into and out of Ankara Esenboğa Airport, just north of the Turkish capital, without event. On Thursday, however, the transit of twenty-six passengers made international headlines. American journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, along with former US Marine Paul Whelan and several Russian political dissidents, among others who had been held in Russia, were exchanged with Moscow for eight prisoners who had been convicted in the West.
Prisoner swaps between Russia and the West have an asymmetric quality: Arms dealers and assassins get traded for journalists and dissidents. Such is the moral calculus between autocratic regimes and those striving to uphold the ideals of democracy and republican governance. It is regrettable that such deals must be struck, but the cost might be quite a bit higher if truth-speakers in the dark spots of the world thought no one would bargain for their freedom in a pinch. So, the multinational deal on Thursday that returned journalists, political dissidents, and friends of the West in exchange for the release of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cadres can be welcomed and regretted at the same time.
Given the sharp divide between Western democracies and their authoritarian antagonists in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere, it is remarkable that deals remain possible at all. The reality of global polarization and great-power competition means that a very small number of countries maintain diplomatic contact and influence across dividing lines, and Turkey is one of the few. Thus, Turkey’s diplomatic efforts, as well as its geographic position, made it a linchpin of the recent prisoner swap. Ankara receives a fairly steady stream of Western criticism for hedging and balancing behaviors keeping the door open to Russia, but Thursday’s deal demonstrates the wisdom of having allies with an open line to rival camps—which is why the West has generally acquiesced to the Turkish balancing act.
The politics of prisoner exchanges have been unfortunately prominent in 2024, in light of the ongoing wars in Ukraine and in Gaza, where Hamas has sought to use Israeli hostages as tools to shape the outcome of the war that followed its October 7 attacks into Israel. There have been previous exchanges of prisoners between Russia and Ukraine, including several facilitated by the United Arab Emirates, some via joint Saudi-Turkish mediation, and roughly fifty other prisoner exchanges done bilaterally or through third parties. But this week’s deal represented a different level of difficulty—politically prominent prisoners and accused spies, a half dozen countries, complex negotiations, and US electoral politics in the mix. Before this week, Ankara had been the site and the facilitator for less high-profile swaps of Russians and Americans, but after the complex deal this week, the trade space may narrow.
The international system has left an era of aspirational globalization and entered an era of hard power-driven geopolitical competition. In this era, diplomatic agility will matter a great deal, especially when coupled with economic and military leverage over prospective negotiating parties. Mediating or facilitating countries must not only have a reputation for even-handedness in the dispute in question, but they also need a degree of trust with the parties and enough geopolitical sway to incentivize cooperation. Turkey meets two key criteria in this regard: It has an imperfect alignment with the West, with sufficient friction to foster understanding of and hedging positions with non-Western powers. It also has relative self-sufficiency in defense matters, which provides it a risk tolerance in diverging from strict adherence to Western policy lines.
Prisoner exchanges, peace talks, and creative diplomacy become more difficult as alignments, bloc behavior, and other aspects of great-power competition reemerge as norms in the international system. While deterrence requires intra-alliance solidarity and discipline, deal-making requires occasional line-crossing, albeit not nonalignment altogether. Ankara clearly favors this aspect of modern statecraft. It remains a robust NATO member, passing the 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense spending commitment this year and solidly supporting collective defense requirements, including significant military support to Ukraine in the current conflict. Yet it engages in line-crossing diplomatic gambits in pursuit of de-escalation with some frequency, including in the Caucasus, Libya, Israel-Palestine (less successfully), and the war in Ukraine.
The swap just completed is in part a fruit of such line-crossing. That Ankara can pull off the balancing act of providing lethal aid to Russia’s enemies, fully supporting Western military deterrence, yet trading and making deals with Moscow in a manner that helps US policy interests is both rare and valuable. So the next time an article in a Western publication claims that Turkey is an ally in name only or not an ally at all due to imperfect alignment, it might be worth remembering that bad allies are a good deal more useful than enemies or neutrals, especially when they have demonstrated military, economic, and diplomatic heft.
Rich Outzen is a geopolitical consultant and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in Turkey with thirty-two years of government service both in uniform and as a civilian. Follow him on Twitter @RichOutzen.
Further reading
Fri, Aug 2, 2024
As sixteen of Putin’s prisoners come home, don’t forget the millions of hostages who remain
New Atlanticist By Mikhail Zygar
Thousands of Russians are sitting in Putin’s prisons. And over the years, he has successfully turned the whole country into a gulag.
Thu, Aug 1, 2024
Experts react: What to know about the release of Evan Gershkovich and others held by Russia
New Atlanticist By
A prisoner swap has freed American journalists Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva, former US Marine Paul Whelan, and Russian political dissidents Vladimir Kara-Murza and llya Yashin, among others.
Wed, Jul 31, 2024
The role Turkey can play in NATO’s post-Washington summit aims
TURKEYSource By
As NATO is aiming to enhance the Alliance’s collective deterrence and defense, Turkey has an important role to play.
Image: A Russian government plane and private jets are seen from behind a fence on the tarmac at Esenboga Airport in Ankara, Turkey August 1, 2024. REUTERS/Tunahan Turhan