Trump set to cancel sanctions on Turkey, a NATO ally all his own
President Donald Trump with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after arriving for the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, Tuesday. Credit: AP/Alex Brandon
President Donald Trump’s gushing praise of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at NATO’s summit on Tuesday even as Trump chafes with other allied leaders should have surprised nobody.
“If it weren’t held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader — a very strong, uh, person — it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended,” Trump told reporters alongside Erdoğan in Ankara.
Trump added he will cancel sanctions on that nation, imposed under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. That law is meant to keep foreign nations from doing business with Russia, North Korea and, most importantly these days, Iran, which the U.S. and Israel have droned for the better part of five months. Trump on Tuesday also reimposed sanctions on Iran selling oil.
Letting Turkey off the hook on all Iran sanctions might be considered a gift to Erdoğan from Trump, who chides NATO for declining to support his war. Trump is also reportedly preparing to allow Turkey to buy F-35 jets, reversing a policy he himself imposed six years ago.
A related milestone in the decade-old Erdoğan-Trump bromance is due next week — not in Eurasia, but in New York. It involves the long-running criminal case against Iranian-born gold trader Reza Zarrab in Manhattan federal court.
In 2017, Zarrab, who had been arrested the previous year at Miami International Airport, admitted helping Iranians and their government evade sanctions. He has since cooperated with the Justice Department. He said he paid millions of dollars in bribes and provided key testimony against an executive of Halkbank, the state-owned lender in Turkey. Halkbank was a key player in handling and moving illicit Iranian oil revenue.
Sentencing for Zarrab, who’d once been viewed as an Erdoğan insider, is slated for July 14. Prosecutors in March said they had reached an agreement with Halkbank to drop all charges, if the bank bars transactions that benefit Iran. That announcement sent Halkbank’s stock shares soaring in Istanbul. Now federal prosecutors are pushing for Zarrab also to be cut a big break in his sentencing.
Clearly this is a gratifying result for Trump’s friend Erdoğan and his regime — which is widely viewed as authoritarian and repressive, particularly against his perceived political opponents.
The early public stages of the case, during “Trump Term 1,” were quite peculiar. Trump went outside the Justice Department hierarchy and deployed ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Attorney General and federal Judge Michael Mukasey as go-betweens to negotiate the matter with Erdoğan, who loudly condemned and lobbied in Washington against the Zarrab and Halkbank prosecutions.
In 2018, U.S. District Judge Richard Berman told the Courthouse News site: “I am still stunned by the fact that Rudy was hired to be — and he very actively pursued — being the ‘go between’ between President Trump and Turkey’s President Erdoğan in an unprecedented effort to terminate this federal criminal case in the middle of the case.”
Nowadays, a Trump-driven intervention in a pending case would be less than surprising. He’s already battered the independence of the Justice Department and established the idea that foreign relations are not so much detached business between representatives of different nations as transactions between leaders based on their interests.
“We’re going to be taking the sanctions off,” Trump told reporters Tuesday regarding Turkey. “It’s time to do that. Okay, you don’t want to sanction friends. It’s very simple.”
Only if you choose to see it that way.
Columnist Dan Janison’s opinions are his own.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
