It's time to ban Turkish Air from US airspace

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said that Turkey will no longer allow Israeli planes to fly over its airspace.

Fidan, one of Hamas’s key supporters in Turkey, said President Recep Tayyip Erdogan took the action as a show of solidarity with Gaza. The move has become a frequent tool of the regime: in the past, Turkey has banned both overflights of Armenian passenger planes heading from Europe to Yerevan and flights to Sulaymaniyah, the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in Iraq, in protest of its alliance with Syrian Kurds fighting the Islamic State and opposing the Islamist extremists Ankara supports.

In any case, Turkey's action amounts to economic warfare. Israeli aircraft must now make major detours on flights to many European destinations, as well as the United States, which can add hundreds of dollars to the already high cost of tickets and hours to each flight.

The issue is not only about solidarity with a democracy under siege, but also about overall security.

If President Donald Trump is serious about protecting Israel, confronting terrorist organizations like Hamas and their state sponsors, and promoting peace in the Middle East, he should act immediately to ban Turkish Airlines from using American airspace. At stake is not only solidarity with a democracy under siege, but also broader security.

More than a decade ago, leaked audio recordings revealed a conversation between Erdogan’s private office and Turkish Airlines about sending Turkish weapons to Islamist terrorists who were killing Christians and moderate Muslims in Nigeria. Last summer, officials in Ivory Coast, a country with a large and diverse Lebanese business community, told me that Turkish Airlines had been transporting smuggled gold destined for Hezbollah. Turkish Airlines is also a legitimate target, both as a face of Turkey and as a Turkish public-private venture, in which most of the private investors are Erdogan supporters and donors.

Trump has already put Erdogan in a difficult position before. When the Turkish president took American pastor Andrew Brunson hostage in a bid to exchange him for diplomatic gains, Trump refused to budge, instead imposing tariffs on Turkish steel and threatening to collapse the Turkish lira. When Erdogan saw that Trump was determined, he backed down almost immediately. If Turkish Airlines gets its own “dose of its medicine,” Turkey might react with humility, especially since its flights to the United States likely bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

A tough stance toward Turkey now could remind Erdogan that Trump does not view him as an equal.

Turkish Airlines has already proven its sensitivity to sanctions. After the deaths of many refugees from the cold on the Belarusian border with the European Union, Brussels tacitly warned Turkey that if it continued to transport Syrian, Afghan and Kurdish refugees to Belarus to pressure the EU on other issues, it would impose sanctions on Turkish Airlines. Turkey stopped refugee flights almost immediately. The fact that Turkish Airlines continues to serve occupied Cyprus, whose territory is occupied by the Turkish army, is a challenge for the entire European Union.

Trump has championed Freedom of Navigation. There is no equivalent freedom of airspace over foreign states, but generally only dictatorships like China, Russia, and North Korea routinely ban passenger aircraft from overflight. A tough stance on Turkey now could remind Erdogan that, even if Trump considers him a friend, he does not consider him an equal. It could also help keep American companies from falling victim to a growing web of discriminatory flight bans promoted by terror-sponsoring regimes and their cronies.

Michael Rubin – Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, specializing in Iran and Turkey. He has served as a Pentagon official.