U.S.-Turkish relations have plunged to a new nadir. In the past month, a senior Republican senator has suggested suspending Turkey’s membership in the NATO alliance, while the secretary of state implied a readiness to use military force against America’s wayward ally.

In these circumstances, U.S. nuclear weapons have no business in Turkey. It is time to bring them home.

The signs of a strained and deteriorating relationship are hard to miss. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s increasingly autocratic leader, has turned away from both Europe and the United States. He instead is actively cultivating a close relationship with fellow authoritarian Vladimir Putin, as evidenced by their eight meetings just this year.

Erdogan rejected buying U.S. Patriot air defense missiles in favor of Russian S-400s—missiles that are incompatible with NATO’s integrated air defense system. As a result, the United States excluded Turkey from taking part in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, leaving the question of Turkey’s next-generation fighter literally up in the air.

Following President Donald Trump’s rash decision to withdraw the small U.S. military contingent from eastern Syria, Erdogan launched the Turkish army on a major offensive. In doing so, he showed no regard for the Kurdish forces that did so much in collaboration with the U.S. military to destroy ISIS at great cost—some ten thousand Kurdish fighters killed. At one point, Turkish artillery bracketed a position still occupied by U.S. troops. Trump has threatened various sanctions and repeatedly expressed his readiness to “devastate” the Turkish economy.

One other worrying matter. Erdogan says he wants nuclear weapons. In September, he told his political party: “Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads. But the West insists ‘we can’t have them.’ This, I cannot accept.”

Turkey is not the place to host U.S. nuclear arms.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, the U.S. military maintains 150 B61 nuclear gravity bombs in Europe for use in conflict by the U.S. and certain allied air forces. Reportedly, fifty of those are located at an American facility at the Turkish airbase at Incirlik (bases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy host the other one hundred). The 39th Weapons Systems Security Group, numbering about five hundred U.S. Air Force personnel, secures and maintains the bombs at Incirlik.

The United States has deployed nuclear weapons in Europe going back to the 1950s, though the number today is drastically lower than the peak of more than seven thousand in the 1970s. The long-stated purpose of these deployments has been to help deter an attack against NATO member states in Europe while reassuring European allies of America’s commitment to their defense.

Ten years ago, many in Europe questioned the need for such forward-basing of U.S. nuclear arms. That talk has become muted as Moscow adopted a belligerent attitude toward the West, and the Russian military seized Crimea and provoked an armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Washington and NATO still see a need for American nuclear bombs in Europe. While any use of a nuclear weapon would have a military effect, the Alliance has come to regard these bombs as having primarily a political purpose: deterrence and, should deterrence fail and a conflict break out, to signal (by their use) that matters are about to escalate to potentially horrific levels and thus bring the conflict to an end.

The one hundred B61 bombs deployed at bases in NATO countries other than Turkey can fulfill those requirements. There is no requirement to have U.S. nuclear weapons on the territory of five NATO members in order to deter attack and provide assurance to the twenty-seven European members of the Alliance; that can readily be done with B61 bombs based in four countries.

Moreover, while the U.S., German, Dutch, Belgian and Italian air forces each have dual-capable aircraft certified to carry nuclear weapons and crews trained in nuclear delivery, questions arose some time ago as to whether that is so with the Turkish Air Force. In that case, the most likely scenario in which a Turkish-based nuclear bomb would be used would envisage a U.S. fighter flying into Incirlik, loading a B61 bomb, and then taking off to fly to and strike its target. It would seem much simpler to launch a nuclear-armed U.S. F-16 from its base at Aviano, Italy.

The rationale for maintaining nuclear weapons at Incirlik becomes more dubious by the day. It is time for the U.S. Air Force to bring them home.

Steven Pifer is a William Perry research fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer.

Originally for The National Interest at  https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/its-time-get-us-nuk…

Under the title “Political Contestation and New Social Forces in the Middle East and North Africa,” the Program on Arab Reform and Democracy convened its 2018 annual conference on April 27 and 28 at Stanford University. Bringing together a diverse group of scholars from across several disciplines, the conference examined how dynamics of governance and modes of political participation have evolved in recent years in light of the resurgence of authoritarian trends throughout the region.

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The conference’s second panel, tilted “Situating Gender in the Law and the Economy,” featured Texas Christian University Historian Hanan Hammad, who assessed the achievements of the movement to fight gender-based violence in Egypt. Focusing on Gulf Cooperation Council states, Alessandra Gonzales, a Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, analyzed the differences in female executive hiring practices across local and foreign firms. Stanford University Political Scientist and FSI Senior Fellow Lisa Blaydes presented findings from her research on women’s attitudes toward Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Egypt.

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The fourth panel of the conference, “The Economy, the State, and New Social Actors,” featured George Washington University Associate Professor of Geography Mona Atia, who presented on territorial restructuring and the politics governing poverty in Morocco. Amr Adly, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University in Cairo, analyzed the relationship between the state and big business in Egypt after the 2013 military coup. Rice University Professor of Economics Mahmoud El-Gamal shared findings from his research on the economic determinants of democratization and de-democratization trends in Egypt during the past decade.

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The conference included a special session featuring former fellows of the American Middle Eastern Network at Stanford (AMENDS), an organization dedicated to promoting understanding around the Middle East, and supporting young leaders working to ignite concrete social and economic development in the region. AMENDS affiliates from five different MENA countries shared with the Stanford community their experiences in working toward social change in their respective countries.

Islamism has imitated, or colluded with, the state autocracies it claims to oppose. It has failed to suggest its own answers to economic problems, social justice, education or corruption, writes Hicham Alaoui in Le Monde diplomatique. Click here to read the full article, which is based on research that Alaoui presented at UC Berkeley and CDDRL on October 10 and 11, respectively.

The Program on Arab Reform and Democracy (ARD) at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) is pleased to welcome Egyptian economist Samer Atallah as a visiting scholar for the 2015-16 academic year. Atallah has taught economics at the American University in Cairo (AUC) since 2011, and his work focuses on development economics and political economy of democratization. He is a leading contributor to debates on economic public policy in Egypt, and previously served as an advisor to the 2012 presidential campaign of Abdel-Moneim Abul-Fettouh. He holds a PhD in Economics from McGill University and a Masters Degree in Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. His research on the Arab world has received the support of the Arab Council for Social Sciences and the Economic Research Fund, and spans a wide range of areas, including; education, electoral behavior, public opinion, trade policies, and political institutions in resource dependent economies.

During his residency at CDDRL, Atallah will work on a series of publications examining salient questions in the political economy of the Arab World, including the impact of trade and capital flows on governance in Egypt and Tunisia, and the relationship between education and wealth inequality in Egypt. Atallah’s fellowship is generously funded by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation to support scholars from the Arab world. In the following interview, Atallah discusses his current research projects and their relevance to important public policy debates.

What are your research goals and priorities during your residency at CDDRL?

First of all, I would like to say that I am extremely delighted to be here and excited at this valuable opportunity to collaborate with distinguished scholars at CDDRL and Stanford University, which promises to be a nourishing environment for my research. 

My research agenda during my residency here at CDDRL includes working on two projects, both of which are related to broader questions of democratization and development. This first one is a comprehensive theoretical and empirical study investigating how political and economic institutions evolve as economies become integrated in the global economy. I am interested in understanding how trade and capital flows impact institutions - in the economic sense of the term - and the implications of that impact on political change. For instance, the experiences of economic liberalization in countries like Egypt and Tunisia had unquestionable consequences on the distribution of wealth within their respective societies. Economic liberalization policies had equally important effects on the performance and evolution of their legal, economic governance and political institutions. My own research seeks to investigate how these institutional changes have evolved and the impact of these processes on political change.  The second project is an empirical study examining the relationship between wealth inequality and educational inequality in Egypt.

In what ways do your projects speak to contemporary debates on the origins and trajectories of the Arab uprisings?

I would argue that the divergence in outcomes across the various uprisings in Arab region cannot be understood without seriously thinking about the different historical evolution of political and economic institutions in these countries. These institutions impact the functioning of the economy, its growth, and the social inclusiveness of that growth—factors that were very pertinent to the popular mobilization that advanced the post-2010 uprisings. Certainly these institutions are in part the product of how the economy is managed in a given country in the short-run. At the same time, they are the result of long-term external and internal factors that we need to investigate and understand.

A case in point is the bureaucratic apparatus in Egypt. That sizable bureaucracy is the outcome of a long-standing policy of guaranteed employment, which the government had adopted in the 1960s to secure political support. Whereas economic liberalization policies adopted by President Anwar al-Sadat in the 1970s shrunk the economic role of the state, the size of the bureaucracy, nevertheless, increased significantly. Thus, the question we confront as researchers is why have these institutions remained stagnant and shielded from change despite the fact the nature and priorities of the economy have shifted. This is a major concern in my own research.

What lessons, if any, does your work offer policy-makers involved in the areas of economic and human development?

My second project on inequality and education speaks to one of the central factors that have animated the post-2010 uprisings in the Arab world, namely economic inclusion. In the context of Egypt, educational inequality has contributed greatly to the huge disparities in income and wealth in the country. Exacerbating and reinforcing these disparities is an intergenerational dependency in educational attainment—that is, children of uneducated parents are highly likely to remain uneducated, and by implication, economically underprivileged. This is an area that leaves a lot of room for policy interventions.

But such interventions must be grounded in a better understanding of the causes of this dependency and why it persists. Toward that end, my research seeks to investigate how the type and range of assets in a given household affect schooling and education decisions. Other key determinants of these decisions include access to credit, spatial distribution of educational facilities, and volatility of household income. With a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the problem at hand, all of these factors present potential areas for policy interventions to alter the incentives for school enrolment and quality of education delivery. Such interventions could potentially lead to a better distribution of education and income in the long run.

What are the potentially important research questions that address Arab reform and democracy?

I believe the recent upheavals in the Arab world have pushed us to re-evaluate our understanding of the underlying reasons and implications of political and economic change. This has opened up a multitude of lines of inquiry related to the economic incentives and costs of political change. One such endeavor entails an ambitious effort to compare the evolution of social movements, economic policies, and political structures in the Arab world with other regions of the world. For instance, I think we could draw multiple parallels between the Arab experience and that of many Latin American countries, especially with respect to the role of military institutions, the impact of economic liberalization, social inequality, and civil society movements. Having said that, there is also a lot of work that needs be done in understanding and analyzing the divergent outcomes of the Arab uprisings.