A few snapshots from recent history reveal how Turkish opinion of the United States has profoundly changed over the years.

In April 1946, the battleship USS Missouri brought the funeral of the Turkish ambassador to the United States, Münir Ertegün, to Turkey. Although it was a great diplomatic gesture on the part of the Americans, the U.S. and Turkish governments were in fact using the episode to signal their resolve to resist the Soviet Union’s demands on the Turkish Straits and Eastern Turkey.

The appearance of an American warship in troubled times made an instant splash among Turkish people. Thousands greeted the Missouri in İstanbul. Public intellectuals were just as enthusiastic as the crowds. In the influential daily Akşam, the editor-in-chief Necmettin Sadak (who became foreign minister a year later) adorned his column with an exuberant title: “Aziz Dostlarımız, Hoşgeldiniz” (“Our Dear Friends, Welcome).[2]

When President Harry S. Truman declared his famous “doctrine” the following year, giving way to developments which ultimately brought Turkey into NATO and the Western camp in 1952, the popularity of the United States in Turkey peaked.

Much has changed since then.

Last year, the Pew Global Attitudes Project survey revealed that Turkish people had the least favorable opinion of the United States in the world (12 percent). Moreover, only three percent of the Turkish public has confidence in President George W. Bush’s international leadership. Pew surveys also reveal that the anti-Americanism in Turkey is replicated elsewhere in the Middle East and the Muslim world.[3]

The reasons for this outcome are obvious: the failed attempt to eradicate the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; the invasion of Iraq on flimsy evidence and then causing the situation to go from bad to catastrophic; not doing much about the PKK in Northern Iraq; and a general disregard for international public opinion.

That the Bush administration has demonstrated poor judgment in exercising leadership around the world has been continuously stressed for nearly seven years. The larger question is how to salvage U.S. prestige in the Middle East and particularly in Turkey; a NATO ally and the country that can conclusively demonstrate for the first time that a Muslim country can be genuinely democratic.

U.S. prestige in Turkey has rock-bottomed primarily because of the war in Iraq. The previously mentioned Pew survey reveals that those Turks who thought of the United States in a positive light were in a clear majority in 2000. Thus, if the United States could alter the course of events in the Middle East, things can be turned around.

Aside from the obvious need to put a stop to the violence in Iraq, the Bush administration and the succeeding administration must address the Israeli-Palestinian question. Washington should spearhead a just and equitable solution which offers territory and statehood to the Palestinians and security and recognition to the Israelis. To that end, the Bush administration has to support the Saudi-led Arab Initiative for the upcoming Middle East Peace Conference. The venue should be used to open new avenues for resolving the enmity between Israel, Lebanon, and Syria as well.[4] That move can remove much of Middle Eastern animosity against the United States.

While working on the political aspects of the myriad conflicts of the region, American decision-makers should also ponder the economic alternatives: fostering free trade, development of infrastructure, and construction of better schools and hospitals could help transform the Middle East a lot more quickly than the U.S. armed forces can ever dream of.

What is good for the United States can also be good for Middle Eastern countries. The challenge to the American government is to convince the people and governments of the region that engaging in free trade can actually ease the political situation. Instead of telling Middle Eastern countries how to behave themselves (which has not worked so far), the United States could facilitate an environment in which it could help those nations engage in various partnerships among each other and with other parts of the world. The Japanese government, for example, seems over-eager to invest both in Israel and Palestine.[5] Other wealthy nations can be brought in to put an end to the region’s destitute, which is the true cause of Middle East terror.

For an economic solution to the plight of the Middle East, Washington should set the general parameters for a new Marshall Plan. Similar to the European Recovery Plan after World War II, aid to countries willing to pull down tariffs for trade with other Middle Eastern countries will foster peace in the region and will cost much less to American taxpayers. A few hundred billion dollars within the next 15 years will certainly not affect the federal budget the way the Iraq war does (which is likely to reach and pass $1 trillion by the time U.S. troops pull out).[6]

When engaging in these enterprises, the Americans need to remember that the Middle East is not an essentially stagnant place. Things can be changed in a radically positive way. Middle Easterners do not hate Americans for who they are but for their governments’ actions. If those actions are corrected, hatred toward the United States will become a thing of the past.

The collapse of U.S. prestige in the Middle East is not a tide that cannot be reversed. In fact, the popularity of three U.S. presidents in Turkey stands as perfect witness to that assertion. When former Presidents Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson died within a month of each other in the early 1970s, reactions in Turkey were completely different in the two instances. Thousands of Turks poured into the U.S. embassy in Ankara to pay homage to President Truman, whom they admired. However, in the case of President Johnson, whom Turks disliked because of his role in stopping a Turkish operation into Cyprus that could have saved more Turkish Cypriots in 1964 (the “Johnson letter” incident), hardly anyone showed up.[7] Reactions to Johnson’s death were in fact reflective of the strains on U.S.-Turkish relations in the 1960s and 1970s.

By the end of the twentieth century, however, the situation had changed once again. In November 1999, President Bill Clinton visited Turkey for the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) summit in İstanbul. During his visit, Mr. Clinton made a quick stop at the housing projects for the victims of the catastrophic earthquake of summer 1999. Joyful with the crowd surrounding him, Mr. Clinton held a little baby for minutes and allowed the little one to play with his nose. The sight of the cutest creature on earth playing with the nose of the most powerful man on earth mesmerized quite a few people in Turkey. As can be expected, Mr. Clinton’s popularity skyrocketed in Turkey from then onward. (Although Mr. Clinton was accompanied to the scene by his Turkish counterpart and the Turkish prime minister, not many people took notice of them.)

These examples clearly demonstrate that America’s “popularity gap” in Turkey and in the Middle East is not something that one should take for granted. By investing time and energy in well-meant projects and following them to their successful conclusion, Washington can restore its prestige in the region.

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Barın Kayaoğlu is a Ph.D. student in history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and a regular contributor to the Journal of Turkish Weekly.

E-mail: kayaoglu@virginia.edu