Editors’ Note: Turkey’s failed coup may lead to the worsening of Europe’s migration crisis, writes Jessica Brandt. That’s because it could lead to the dissolution of a recent pact between Brussels and Ankara over the plight of refugees arriving on the European Union’s shores. This post originally appeared on Vox.

Turkey’s recent failed coup may lead to the worsening of Europe’s migration crisis. That’s because it could lead to the dissolution of a recent pact between Brussels and Ankara over the plight of refugees arriving on the European Union’s shores. Even before the events of last weekend, the fate of the agreement was uncertain amid quarrels between the parties. Now its future is even more in doubt.

Last year, more than a million migrants and refugees crossed into Europe, roiling politics across the continent. It’s a crisis EU chief Donald Tusk has described as an “existential challenge.”

Under the terms of the deal, Turkey agreed to accept the “rapid return of all migrants not in need of international protection crossing from Turkey into Greece and to take back all irregular migrants intercepted in Turkish waters.” In other words, almost all refugees who cross into Greece are slated to be returned to Turkish soil.

In return, the EU pledged to speed up the allocation of €3 billion in aid to Turkey to help it house and care for refugees, “reenergize” Turkey's bid for membership in the EU, and lift visa restrictions on Turkish tourists and businessmen.

But the European Commission has conditioned changes to the visa restrictions on better governance in Turkey. In particular, it requires a change in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s controversial anti-terror law, which he has used to crack down on journalists and critics. Erdoğan was already adamantly against narrowing the law to protect free speech. Having now overcome a determined coup attempt, he is even less likely to do so.

Instead, it appears probable that he will further clamp down on civil liberties, acting on his authoritarian instincts and retaliating against his detractors. On Sunday, he suggested that he might reintroduce the death penalty, a practice Turkey abolished in 2004 as part of its bid for EU membership. Doing so would widen the gap in political culture between Turkey and Europe and, as German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier asserted forcefully on Monday in Brussels, derail the already limited possibility of reigniting accession talks.

The pact has already been strongly opposed by the European left, and particularly by humanitarian and human rights groups. Rising authoritarianism in Turkey would only increase resistance to the deal, making implementation even harder, especially if those groups were to scale back their activities on the ground.

That would not be without precedent. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Doctors Without Borders, and the International Rescue Committee, among others, have suspended some of their activities in refugee centers because they do not want to be involved in implementing a deal that they describe as constituting the blanket expulsion of refugees from Turkey back to Greece.

[A] crackdown could also undermine the legal basis of the agreement.

Crucially, a crackdown could also undermine the legal basis of the agreement. One of the agreement’s key provisions is that individuals who cross from Turkey into Greece will be sent back across the Aegean to Turkey. That hinges on the notion that Turkey is a “safe third country” for migrants. A crackdown could prompt refugees to argue that it isn’t.

If that were the case, deporting them to Turkey could be seen as constituting “refoulement”—the forcible return of asylum seekers to a country where they are prone to be subjected to persecution—which is forbidden under both international and EU law.

That’s a problem, since some analysts believe worsening conditions in Turkey could lead even more people seeking refuge to journey onward to Europe. In the past, Erdoğan has threatened to “open the gates” and send refugees streaming into Europe when displeased with the level of financial assistance from Brussels earmarked for managing the crisis. Preoccupied by troubles at home, he may see stability as in his interest and resist taking aggressive steps that would cause an open breach.

For both parties, finding a stable, though imperfect, accommodation—as they were poised to do prior to the events of last weekend—is still the most promising path forward. Let’s hope the parties take it. Managing Europe’s migration crisis depends on it.

The news Monday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on the incidence of resistant infections is disturbing but not surprising. CDC estimates that over two million Americans every year are affected by drug-resistant infections and of those, 23,000 die annually. The report notes that these figures are conservative and are likely an underestimate of the burden of resistant infections. While these numbers reflect domestic rates, antibiotic resistance is a global issue as well.

To further compound the issue, today’s antibiotic pipeline is nearly dry and has been for some time, with only a handful of large pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotech firms still engaged in antibiotic development. The threat of a so-called ‘post-antibiotic era’ – a time when there are no longer any effective antibiotic treatments – could become a reality without a concerted and comprehensive effort to combat this global threat. The evolution of drug resistance is an inherent risk of antibiotic use. The CDC report cited the development of new antibiotics and diagnostic tools, as well as programs and policies to support appropriate use of antibiotics, as being among the core strategies to combat resistance.

Clinical effectiveness and the relatively low cost of antibiotics have had the unintended consequence of contributing to overuse, accelerating the development of antibiotic resistance to all major classes of antibiotics. While there are some diagnostic tools available to support targeted treatment, it is often more time- and cost-effective for a physician to prescribe a relatively inexpensive, broad-spectrum antibiotic than to conduct a diagnostic test (if one exists at all). Antibiotic overuse can also be driven by patients who see antibiotics as safe and often low-cost cure-alls. Recognizing that these past patterns of overuse are dangerous, the clinical community is working diligently to curb inappropriate use and promote public health through stewardship and education programs. However, given the weakness of the current antibiotic development environment, it may be too little-too late; rates of resistance continue to rise globally while the number of effective therapies to treat many pathogens is dwindling. According to the CDC, resistance can be ”slowed but not stopped” – there will always be a need for novel antibiotics that can combat the evolution of these pathogens.

The current system for manufacturer return on investment for antibiotics, which are typically reimbursed at very low levels, is oriented towards volume sales. As a result, stewardship and educational programs geared toward limiting use of novel antibiotics create an ‘antibiotic development paradox.’ How can we incentivize investment in developing new effective antibiotics and also have successful programs that limit the use of these antibiotics in an effort to prevent or delay the development of resistance? Unless this fundamental conflict in the current business model is addressed, pharmaceutical firms are unlikely to expand development efforts.

How do we turn the tide?

There are several proposals that address aspects of the antibiotic development paradox with the goal of reinvigorating the antibiotic drug development ecosystem in a way that maximizes our ability to stay ahead of resistance. While none of these proposals alone will solve this problem, each could support the long-term goal of reinvigorating antibiotic discovery, development, and treatment.

Creating incentives for drug development

Antibiotic drug development has been a losing prospect for drug developers and has driven many of them to exit the antibiotic innovation space in the last few decades in favor of other therapeutic areas that have much larger markets and are easier areas to study. In order to make antibiotic development more attractive, various mechanisms have been proposed to stimulate or better reward successful clinical development. Incentives that can lower the financial risks associated with development include grants, tax credits, public-private partnerships, and intellectual property protections. Post-approval, prizes, advanced market commitments, and value-based pricing could all potentially provide additional incentives to invest in this research. Some potential incentives were discussed at the Incentives for Change: Addressing the Challenges in Antibacterial Drug Development workshop convened by Brookings in February 2013.

Balancing benefit and risk for severely-ill patients

Other incentives are related to the drug approval process. Novel mechanisms for expedited development and approval can speed time to market while still meeting traditional evidentiary requirements for safety and efficacy. In the last several years, a number of proposals – including from the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology – have sought to reduce development time and cost and increase regulatory clarity through a more targeted clinical trial process directed at the highest-risk patients. A narrower study population would allow the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to make a more targeted assessment of the product’s safety, efficacy, and benefit-risk profile that could accelerate innovation for patients with serious drug-resistant infections. The need to steward these antibiotics, which was noted as a core action in the CDC report, would be especially important to both prevent the growth of resistance and to reduce the risk of adverse effects in less seriously-ill populations. Additional information on the proposed limited-use pathway and appropriate use is available on the Brookings website.

De-link reimbursement from return on investment

In order to attract investment for new antibiotic research, we must develop a business model that can support ongoing and expanding development without compromising the effectiveness of new therapies. Recognizing the need to “de-link” return on investment from the volume of antibiotics sold, efforts to move away from the volume-based reimbursement system could become an attractive path forward. Promising models, which were discussed at the Brookings workshop in February, included several guaranteed payment schemes supported by public funding. Taken to an extreme, such a system could even allow new antibiotics to be reserved indefinitely until needed, removing the developer’s incentive to sell any drugs in the years following approval. While such a program would likely be expensive (with sufficient returns estimated on the order of $1.75-2.5 billion over five years), government intervention is needed to fix this public health crisis and dangerous market failure. Its societal value in curtailing resistance and providing critical drugs would outweigh the cost to taxpayers.

The antibiotic development paradox will require a multi-pronged strategy that includes incentives to support front-end drug discovery and development, and new reimbursement policies that de-link unit volume sales from return on investment. However, this is by no means a quick fix. Even if this approach is successful, it will take decades for manufacturers to rebuild lost antibiotic development infrastructure and expertise, and to successfully develop and market new treatments. For the few drugs currently in development, even with expedited development and review pathways, they are still years from reaching the market.

Editors' Note: It has perhaps never been more important to question the prevailing wisdom on the 2011 United States-led intervention in Libya, writes Shadi Hamid. Even with the benefits of hindsight, he argues, many of the criticisms of the intervention fall short. This post originally appeared on Vox.

Libya and the 2011 NATO intervention there have become synonymous with failure, disaster, and the Middle East being a "shit show" (to use President Obama’s colorful descriptor). It has perhaps never been more important to question this prevailing wisdom, because how we interpret Libya affects how we interpret Syria and, importantly, how we assess Obama’s foreign policy legacy.

Of course, Libya, as anyone can see, is a mess, and Americans are reasonably asking if the intervention was a mistake. But just because it’s reasonable doesn’t make it right.

Most criticisms of the intervention, even with the benefit of hindsight, fall short. It is certainly true that the intervention didn’t produce something resembling a stable democracy. This, however, was never the goal. The goal was to protect civilians and prevent a massacre.

Critics erroneously compare Libya today to any number of false ideals, but this is not the correct way to evaluate the success or failure of the intervention. To do that, we should compare Libya today to what Libya would have looked like if we hadn’t intervened. By that standard, the Libya intervention was successful: The country is better off today than it would have been had the international community allowed dictator Muammar Qaddafi to continue his rampage across the country.

Critics further assert that the intervention caused, created, or somehow led to civil war. In fact, the civil war had already started before the intervention began. As for today’s chaos, violence, and general instability, these are more plausibly tied not to the original intervention but to the international community’s failures after intervention.

The very fact that the Libya intervention and its legacy have been either distorted or misunderstood is itself evidence of a warped foreign policy discourse in the U.S., where anything short of success—in this case, Libya quickly becoming a stable, relatively democratic country—is viewed as a failure.

NATO intervened to protect civilians, not to set up a democracy

As stated in the U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing force in Libya, the goal of intervention was "to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack." And this is what was achieved.

In February 2011, anti-Qaddafi demonstrations spread across the country. The regime responded to the nascent protest movement with lethal force, killing more than 100 people in the first few days, effectively sparking an armed rebellion. The rebels quickly lost momentum, however.

I still remember how I felt in those last days and hours as Qaddafi’s forces marched toward Benghazi. In a quite literal sense, every moment mattered, and the longer we waited, the greater the cost.

It was frightening to watch. I didn’t want to live in an America where we would stand by silently as a brutal dictator—using that distinct language of genocidaires—announced rather clearly his intentions to kill. In one speech, Qaddafi called protesters "cockroaches" and vowed to cleanse Libya "inch by inch, house by house, home by home, alleyway by alleyway."

Already, on the eve of intervention, the death toll was estimated at somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. (This was when the international community’s tolerance for Arab Spring–related mass killings was still fairly low.)

As Obama’s advisers saw it, there were two options for military action: a no-fly zone (which, on its own, wouldn’t do much to stop Qaddafi’s tanks) or a broader resolution that would allow the U.S. and its allies to take further measures, including establishing what amounted to a floating no-drive zone around rebel forces. The president went with the latter option.

The NATO operation lasted about seven months, with an estimated death toll of around 8,000, apparently most of them combatants on both sides (although there is some lack of clarity on this, since the Libyan government doesn’t clearly define "revolutionaries" or "rebel supporters"). A Human Rights Watch investigation found that at least 72 civilians were killed as a result of the NATO air campaign, definitively contradicting speculative claims of mass casualties from the Qaddafi regime.

Claims of "mission creep" have become commonplace, most forcefully articulated by the Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations. Zenko may be right, but he asserts rather than explains why mission creep is always a bad thing. It may be that in some circumstances, the scope of a mission should be defined more broadly, rather than narrowly.

If anything, it was the Obama administration’s insistence of minimizing the mission—including the absurd claim that it would take "days, not weeks"—that was the problem from the very start. Zenko and others never make clear how civilians could have been protected as long as Qaddafi was waging war on them.

What Libya would look like today if NATO hadn’t intervened

It’s helpful to engage in a bit of counterfactual history here. As Niall Ferguson notes in his book Virtual Alternatives, "To understand how it actually was, we therefore need to understand how it actually wasn’t."

Applied to the Libyan context, this means that we’re not comparing Libya, during or after the intervention, with some imagined ideal of stable, functioning democracy. Rather, we would compare it with what we judge, to the best of our ability, the most likely alternative outcome would have been had the U.S. not intervened.

Here’s what we know: By March 19, 2011, when the NATO operation began, the death toll in Libya had risen rapidly to more than 1,000 in a relatively short amount of time, confirming Qaddafi’s longstanding reputation as someone who was willing to kill his countrymen (as well as others) in large numbers if that’s what his survival required.

There was no end in sight. After early rebel gains, Qaddafi had seized the advantage. Still, he was not in a position to deal a decisive blow to the opposition. (Nowhere in the Arab Spring era has one side in a military conflict been able to claim a clear victory, even with massive advantages in manpower, equipment, and regional backing.)

Any Libyan who had opted to take up arms was liable to be captured, arrested, or killed if Qaddafi "won," so the incentives to accept defeat were nonexistent, to say nothing of the understandable desire to not live under the rule of a brutal and maniacal strongman.

The most likely outcome, then, was a Syria-like situation of indefinite, intensifying violence. Even President Obama, who today seems unsure about the decision to intervene, acknowledged in an August 2014 interview with Thomas Friedman that "had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria...And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction."

What caused the current Libyan civil war?

Critics charge that the NATO intervention was responsible for or somehow caused Libya’s current state of chaos and instability. For instance, after leaving the Obama administration, Philip Gordon, the most senior U.S. official on the Middle East in 2013-'15, wrote: "In Iraq, the U.S. intervened and occupied, and the result was a costly disaster. In Libya, the U.S. intervened and did not occupy, and the result was a costly disaster. In Syria, the U.S. neither intervened nor occupied, and the result is a costly disaster."

The problem here is that U.S. intervention did not, in fact, result in a costly disaster, unless we are using the word "result" to simply connote that one thing happened after a previous thing. The NATO operation ended in October 2011. The current civil war in Libya began in May 2014—a full two and a half years later. The intervention and today’s violence are of course related, but this does not necessarily mean there is a causal relationship.

To argue that the current conflict in Libya is a result of the intervention, one would basically need to assume that the outbreak of civil war was inevitable, irrespective of anything that happened in the intervening 30 months.

This makes it all the more important to distinguish between the intervention itself and the international community’s subsequent failure—a failure that nearly all the relevant actors acknowledge—to plan and act for the day after and help Libyans rebuild their shattered country.

Such measures include sending training missions to help the Libyan army restructure itself (only in late 2013 did NATO provide a small team of advisers) or even sending multinational peacekeeping forces; expanding the United Nations Support Mission in Libya’s (UNSMIL) limited advisory role; and pressuring the Libyan government to consider alternatives to a dangerous and destabilizing political isolation law.

While perhaps less sexy, the U.S. and its allies could have also weighed in on institutional design and pushed back against Libya’s adoption, backed by UNSMIL, of one of world’s most counterproductive electoral systems—single non-transferable vote—along with an institutional bias favoring independents. This combination exacerbated tribal and regional divisions while making power sharing even more difficult.

Finally, the U.S. could have restrained its allies, particularly the Gulf States and Egypt, from excessive meddling in the lead-up to and early days of the 2014 civil war.

Yet Libya quickly tumbled off the American agenda. That’s not surprising, given that the Obama administration has always been suspicious of not just military entanglements but any kind of prolonged involvement—diplomatic, financial, or otherwise—in Middle East trouble spots. Libya "was farmed out to the working level," according to Dennis Ross, who served as a special assistant to President Obama until November 2011.

There was also an assumption that the Europeans would do more. This was more than just a hope; it was an organizing principle of Obama administration engagement abroad. Analysts Nina Hachigian and David Shorr have called it the "Responsibility Doctrine": a strategy of "prodding other influential nations…to help shoulder the burdens of fostering a stable, peaceful world order."

This may be the way the world should operate, but as a set of driving assumptions, this part of the Obama doctrine has proven to be wrong at best, and rather dangerous at worst.

We may not like it—and Obama certainly doesn’t—but even when the U.S. itself is not particularly involved in a given conflict, at the very least it is expected to set the agenda, convene partners, and drive international attention toward an issue that would otherwise be neglected in the morass of Middle East conflicts. The U.S., when it came to Libya, did not meet this minimal standard.

Even President Obama himself would eventually acknowledge the failure to stay engaged. As he put it to Friedman: "I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this."

Yet it is worth emphasizing that even with a civil war, ISIS’s capture of territory, and as many as three competing "governments," the destruction in Libya still does not come close to the level of death and destruction witnessed in Syria in the absence of intervention.

In other words, even this "worst-case scenario" falls well short of actual worst-case scenarios. According to the Libya Body Count, around 4,500 people have so far been killed over the course of 22 months of civil war.

In Syria, the death toll is about 100 times that, with more than 400,000 killed, according to the Syrian Center for Policy Research.

We’re all consequentialists now

For the reasons outlined above, Libya’s descent into civil conflict—and the resulting power vacuum, which extremist groups like ISIS eagerly filled—wasn’t inevitable. But let’s hypothesize for a moment that it was. Would that undermine support for the original intervention?

The Iraq War, to cite the most obvious example, wasn’t wrong because it led to chaos, instability, and civil war in the country. It was wrong because the decision to intervene in the first place was not justified, being based as it was on faulty premises regarding weapons of mass destruction.

If Iraq had quickly turned out "well" and become a relatively stable, flawed, yet functioning democracy, would that have retroactively justified an unjustified war? Presumably not, even though we would all be happy that Iraq was on a promising path.

The near reverse holds true for Libya. The justness of military intervention in March 2011 cannot be undone or negated retroactively. This is not the way choice or morality operates (imagine applying this standard to your personal life). This may suggest a broader philosophical divergence: Obama, according to one of his aides, is a "consequentialist."

I suspect that this, perhaps more than narrower questions of military intervention, drives at least some of the revisionism over Libya’s legacy. If we were consequentialists, it would be nearly impossible to act anywhere without some sort of preordained guarantee that a conflict area—which likely hadn’t been "stable" for years or decades—could all of a sudden stabilize.

Was the rightness of stopping the Rwandan genocide dependent on whether Rwanda could realistically become a stable democracy after the genocide was stopped? And how could policymakers make that determination, when the stabilization of any post-conflict situation is dependent, in part, not just on factual assessments but on always uncertain questions of the international community’s political will—something that is up to politicians—in committing the necessary time, attention, and resources to helping shattered countries rebuild themselves?

The idea that Libya, because it had oil and a relatively small population, would have been a relatively easy case was an odd one. Qaddafi had made sure, well in advance, that a Libya without him would be woefully unprepared to reconstruct itself.

For more than four decades, he did everything in his power to preempt any civil society organizations or real, autonomous institutions from emerging. Paranoid about competing centers of influence, Qaddafi reduced the Libyan army to a personal fiefdom. Unlike other Arab autocracies, the state and the leader were inseparable.

To think that Libya wouldn’t have encountered at least some major instability over the course of transition from one-person rule to an uncertain "something else" is to have a view of political development completely detached from both history and reality.

A distorted foreign policy discourse

The way we remember Libya suggests that the way we talk about America’s role in the world has changed, and not for the better. Americans are probably more likely to consider the Libya intervention a failure because the U.S. was at the forefront of the NATO operation. So any subsequent descent into conflict, presumably, says something about our failure, which is something we’d rather not think about.

Outside of the foreign policy community, politicians are usually criticized for what they do abroad, rather than what they don’t do. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates put it, "[Qaddafi] was not a threat to us anywhere. He was a threat to his own people, and that was about it." If the U.S had decided against intervention, Libya would have likely reverted to some noxious combination of dictatorship and insurgency. But we could have shirked responsibility (a sort of inverse "pottery barn" principle—if you didn’t break it, you don’t have to fix it). We could have claimed to have "done no harm," even though harm, of course, would have been done.

There was a time when the United States seemed to have a perpetual bias toward action. The instinct of leaders, more often than not, was to act militarily even in relatively small conflicts that were remote from American national security interests. Our country’s tragic experience in Iraq changed that. Inaction came to be seen as a virtue. And, to be sure, inaction is sometimes virtuous. Libya, though, was not one of those times.

Editor's Note: With the latest coup attempt in Turkey, Turkish democracy survived a major test, and the country turned from the edge of a precipice. writes Kemal Kirisci. But Turkey’s democracy has also taken a severe blow. This article was originally published in The National Interest.

The history of Turkish politics is littered with coups and coup attempts that have occurred in roughly ten-year intervals. It is almost a genetic defect.

• The nascent Turkish democracy experienced its first coup in 1960 when it was barely into its tenth year—led by a group of left-wing “young officers,” who had also forced the General Staff into its ranks. Administrative authority was returned to civilians in October 1961, after having cost the lives of the then-Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fatin Rüştü Zorlu, and the Minister of Finance, Hasan Polatkan.
• The second military intervention took place in 1971 against the government of Süleyman Demirel—this time around, though, through a “coup by memorandum.” The military issued to the prime minister an ultimatum—to step aside and be replaced by a technocratic cabinet.
• Less than ten years later, in the midst of endemic violence between left- and right-wing radical groups, the military's top brass carried out another intervention. This was bloodier than the previous two interventions, costing hundreds of lives and leading to massive human-rights violations. After rubberstamping a suffocating constitution on the country, the military handed the government over to a semblance of a democratically-elected government in 1983.
• Surprisingly, Turkey broke this pattern of ten-yearly military interventions, and civilian authority continued until 1997, when there was what was termed a “post-modern coup.” The army rolled out a convoy of tanks into the streets of Ankara, and in a repeat of the coup of 1971, demanded the resignation of the coalition government led by Necmettin Erbakan.
• The next coup occurred a decade later (almost to the day) in April 2007, when the Chief of Staff staged an “e-coup” by posting a set of demands on its website. The coup was a reaction against a long list of democratic reforms that were introduced as a part of the leadership’s pro-EU agenda and were seen as a departure from the staunchly secularist, restrictive mode of governance. Bolstered by the public support for these reforms, however, the incumbent Justice and Development Party (AKP) led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, now the current president of Turkey, successfully withstood the “e-coup,” and for the first time, pushed the military back “into the barracks”.

The latest coup attempt—which took place on Friday, July 15—has widely been attributed to a large Gülenist faction within the military and the judiciary that circumvented the established chain of command and held the high command hostage. Gülenists are the followers of the Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, who leads a worldwide movement that claims to advocate a moderate form of Sunni Islam with an emphasis on tolerance and interfaith dialogue. Formerly allies with Erdoğan, the Gülenists were blamed for spearheading the corruption scandal in December 2013 that engulfed several government officials, ministers and people in Erdoğan’s intimate circle. Since then, Gülen and Erdoğan have been locked in a power struggle.

Back from the brink

Turkish democracy survived a major test, and Turkey turned from the edge of a precipice. The credit for the coup’s defeat goes to the Turkish people, who heeded Erdoğan’s call to resist this intervention “by any means possible and necessary" and filled the squares. TV reports were filled with eye-to-eye, tense, agitated confrontations between civilians and armed soldiers on the two bridges that connect the Asian and European sides of Istanbul. Public restraint and sobriety helped to prevent escalation of violence. There were nevertheless senseless causalities resulting from fire opened by the mutineers and especially attacks mounted on the parliament building as well as the Headquarters of the General Staff. It could have been a lot worse.

Erdoğan needs to rise above a majoritarian understanding of democracy and do justice to the aspirations of a public that heeded his call by pouring into the streets and squares to defeat the coup attempt.

Clearly, Turkey’s democracy has taken a severe blow—cushioned only by the unequivocal stance of the opposition leaders and the media against the coup. Once again, the nation managed to break this pattern of ten-year coups. This offers the country a matchless opportunity for reconciliation. Granted, Erdoğan has had an exceptionally rough weekend and his frustration with those responsible for or implicated in the coup is understandable. He is correct in calling “for their punishment under the full force of the law of the land.” It will, however, now be critical that he ensure that the rule of law is upheld and rises to the challenge of winning the hearts and minds across a deeply polarized nation. He has the tools for it in his repertoire and had successfully wielded them in the past—especially between 2003 and 2011, when he served as prime minister. In hindsight, this period is often referred to as AKP’s “golden age,” when the economy boomed, democracy excelled, and Turkey was touted as a model for those Muslim-majority countries aspiring to transform themselves into liberal democracies.

As he steers the country from the brink of civil war, Erdoğan needs to rise above a majoritarian understanding of democracy and do justice to the aspirations of a public that heeded his call by pouring into the streets and squares to defeat the coup attempt. This is the least that the Turkish public deserves. This would also be a move in the right direction for Turkey’s neighborhood, which desperately needs a respite from the turmoil resulting from the war in Syria, the instability in Iraq, Russia’s territorial ambitions and now Brexit. This is the moment when a stable, democratic, transparent, accountable and prosperous Turkey needs to come to the fore on the world-stage. The United States needs it too. As much as the White House declared its faith in the strength of Turkey’s democracy and its support for the elected leadership, there is a clear chance for forging closer cooperation between the two countries. The first step in cooperation should be in bringing to justice the perpetrators of this coup, followed by measures to enhance Turkey’s capacity to address and manage the many challenges facing Turkey and its neighborhood.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has responded to last week’s coup attempt with a hammer. Over the span of just a few days, more than 50,000 people have been fired from their jobs or detained on suspicions that they’re connected to the coup or to the Gülenist movement (which President Erdoğan blames for the coup attempt). Now emergency rule has been imposed, suggesting that more detentions may follow.

Turkish leaders are assuring everyone that the state of emergency is meant to control the situation and to preserve Turkish democracy. But many observers, including in the West, aren’t buying it: There are legitimate fears that these measures will actually further consolidate Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule. And the consequences of Turkey’s continued drift away from democracy isn’t only a human rights or governance problem—it could become a real geopolitical challenge for the West. 

The swinging pendulum

Turkey—literally the bridge between Europe and Asia—sometimes seems of two minds on governance issues. On the one hand, its leaders express a commitment to a Western form of governance based on the rule of law, liberal democracy, transparency, and accountability. On the other—and more in the vein of governance styles in Russia, Iran, and China—they sometimes reject what they see as outside interference, restrict civil liberties and government transparency, and promote a heavy state role in the economy. 

Although Turkey was welcomed into NATO and other transatlantic institutions after World War II—at a time when Soviet expansionism was a real fear—its commitment to democratic values has always been shaky. The military’s shadow loomed large over Turkish politics (last week’s coup attempt was far from the first) and the country’s human rights record was poor, particularly on minority rights. 

Many thought that all this would change when Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. They introduced political reforms that propelled Turkey toward EU membership. The Turkish economy excelled: Many people in Turkey once depended on remittances sent by Gastarbeiters (guest workers) in Germany and other West European countries, for instance, but the country quickly became host itself to immigrants from neighboring countries. Tourists, business people, students, athletes, and artists poured into the country in the millions. And Turkey enjoyed considerable soft power in the region and the world, often touted as a model in the wake of the Arab Spring of a country that properly paired mainstream Islamism and democratic governance. None of this would have been possible were it not for Turkey’s growing adherence to Western governance norms and its membership in the transatlantic community. 

But the picture has since become rather grim. The events of the past week have renewed concerns about the state of Turkish democracy, yes—but those concerns have in fact been growing for years. Turkey’s commitment to supporting freedom of expression, freedom of the media, anti-corruption efforts, and liberal markets has been in serious doubt for a while. Meanwhile, the economy has stalled, related in part to political developments and to a recent spate of terror attacks that have seriously damaged the overall security situation. It is no wonder that Turkish per capita income—which peaked at $10,800 in 2013—has now fallen to 2009 levels, at $9,950. (That’s an almost 10 percent drop in the span of just two years.) Turkey’s further slide away from Western governance norms would likely only make matters worse, making Erdoğan’s promise of putting Turkey among the largest 10 economies in the world a fantasy.

If you ask Erdoğan and his AKP colleagues why reforms sputtered out, they’re likely to answer with conspiracy theories: They’ll blame the West, the EU, the interest rate lobby, and others. But the AKP has failed to be self-critical, which could have helped it succeed. 

Turkey’s choice of orbit

So if Turkey seems to be moving away from Western norms, is it also moving away from the West? Possibly. In November 2013—after years of stop-and-go accession talks with the EU—Erdoğan sought Russian President Vladimir Putin’s support for accepting Turkey into Eurasian organizations like the Shanghai Five. That could be a big geostrategic gain for Russia, something not lost on the Russian press.

Western Europe and the United States would be the biggest losers if Turkey moved closer to Russia’s camp. Losing their partnership with Turkey would deliver a serious blow to the fight against ISIS in Syria and Iraq, for one thing. But it would also further dim prospects that Turkey might really embrace Western-style democracy any time soon. As Ted Piccone has written, Turkey has the potential to be a linchpin of the liberal international order—and a long-term downturn in the country could have wide detrimental effects in regional and global governance. 

The path ahead

Finally, is there a role for the United States in all this? In the short term, as Ömer Taşpınar has argued, the United States should offer real help to Ankara in investigating the role of Pennsylvania resident Fethullah Gülen and his movement in last week’s coup attempt. Extradition is a highly sensitive issue, and the United States must defend its legal standards. At the same time, that kind of cooperation could build trust in U.S.-Turkey relations, calm Ankara’s paranoia about a potential U.S. role in the coup attempt (and therefore possibly help minimize the damage to Turkish democracy that Ankara itself might cause in its heavy-handed response), and help the United States build credibility on the rule of law. A thorough investigation—including into the Gülenists—is important for determining who was behind the coup attempt. And it’s in U.S. interests to know: As Turkey is a NATO member, a threat against it should be considered a threat against all members. It is in no NATO member’s interest to allow a political earthquake like this to push Turkey from its fold or towards a rival mode of governance. 

This isn’t to downplay the burden now on Ankara; the Turkish government shouldn’t forget that its respect for civil liberties and the rule of law once helped earn it a lot of international respect and a place in the Western community. It’s disappointing that the AKP and Erdoğan supporters have failed to capitalize on their country’s potential. Among its peers in the Muslim world, Turkey had once made the most progress in terms of democratic values and economic growth. Many would still like to believe that that Turkey still exists, in spite of recent setbacks. But for Turkey to win back those gains, its leadership will have to proceed very cautiously and with reason. 

Professor Riek Machar, former vice president of South Sudan and now leader of the rebel group that is fighting the government of South Sudan for control of the apparatus of the government, has publicly threatened to capture and take control of both the capital city of Juba and the oil-producing regions of the country. Branding South Sudan’s president, Salva Kiir, a “dictator” and arguing that he does not recognize the need to share power, Professor Machar stated that the present conflict, which has lasted for more than five months and resulted in the killing of many people and the destruction of a significant amount of property, will not end until Kiir is chased out of power.

Violent mobilization by groups loyal to Machar against the government in Juba began in December 2013. It was only after bloody confrontations between the two parties that targeted civilians based on their ethnicity had resulted in the deaths of many people (creating a major humanitarian crisis) that a cease-fire agreement was signed in Addis Ababa on January 23, 2014, with the hope of bringing to an end the brutal fighting. The cease-fire, however, was seen only as the first step towards negotiations that were supposed to help the country exit the violent conflict and secure institutional arrangements capable of guaranteeing peaceful coexistence.

If Machar and his supporters have the wherewithal to carry out the threats and successfully do so, there is no guarantee that peace would be brought to the country. For one thing, any violent overthrow of the government would only engender more violence as supporters of Kiir and his benefactors are likely to regroup and attempt to recapture their lost political positions. What South Sudan badly needs is an institutionalization of democracy and not a government led by political opportunists. In fact, an effective strategy to exit from this incessant violence must be centered around the election of an inclusive interim government—minus both Kiir and Machar—that would engage all of the country’s relevant stakeholders in negotiations to create a governing process that adequately constrains the state, establishes mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of conflict, enhances peaceful coexistence, and provides an enabling environment for the rapid creation of the wealth needed to deal with poverty and deprivation.

On March 9, 2012, less than a year after South Sudan gained independence, then-Vice President Machar met with several Brookings scholars, including myself, in New York City. The meeting was part of the new country’s efforts to seek assistance from its international partners to address complex and longstanding development challenges, including critical issues such as the effective management of the country’s natural resource endowments, gender equity, the building of government capacity to maintain law and order, the provision of other critical public goods and services, and poverty alleviation. Among participants in this critical consultation were Mwangi S. Kimenyi, senior fellow and director of the Africa Growth Initiative (AGI) at the Brookings Institution; Witney Schneidman, AGI nonresident fellow and former deputy assistant secretary of state for African Affairs; and me. The vice president, who appeared extremely energetic and optimistic about prospects for sustainable development in the new country, requested an analysis of the commitments and achievements that the government of South Sudan had made since independence and suggestions for a way forward. The scholars, working in close collaboration with their colleagues at Brookings, produced a policy report requested by the vice president. The report entitled, South Sudan: One Year After Independence—Opportunities and Obstacles for Africa’s Newest Country, was presented at a well-attended public event on July 28, 2012. Panelists included Peter Ajak, director of the Center for Strategic Analyses and Research in Juba; Ambassador Princeton Lyman, U.S. special envoy for South Sudan and Sudan; Nada Mustafa Ali scholar at the New School for Social Research; Mwangi S. Kimenyi and me.

The report provided a comprehensive review of the policy issues requested by the vice president—the provision of basic services; future engagement between South Sudan and the Republic of Sudan; efficient and equitable management of natural resources; ethnic diversity and peaceful coexistence; federalism; eradication of corruption; and the benefits of regional integration. Most important is the fact that the report placed emphasis on the need for the government of South Sudan to totally reconstruct the state inherited from the Khartoum government through democratic constitution making and produce a governing process that (i) guarantees the protection of human and fundamental rights, including those of vulnerable groups (e.g., women, minority ethnic groups); (ii) adequately constrains the government (so that impunity, corruption and rent seeking are minimized); (iii) enhances entrepreneurial activities and provides the wherewithal for wealth creation and economic growth; and (iv) establishes mechanisms for the peaceful resolution of conflict and creates an environment within which all of the country’s diverse population groups can coexist peacefully.

Unfortunately, when the report was completed, members of the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement were already embroiled in a brutal power struggle that eventually led to President Kiir sacking his entire cabinet, including the vice president. The collapse of the government raised the prospects of violent and destructive mobilization by groups that felt the president’s actions were marginalizing them both economically and politically. The ensuing chaos created an environment that was hardly conducive to the implementation of policies such as those presented in the Brookings report.

The government of Sudan has failed to engage in the type of robust institutional reforms that would have effectively prevented President Kiir and his government from engaging in the various opportunistic policies that have been partly responsible for the violence that now pervades the country. South Sudan’s diverse ethnic groups put forth a united front in their war against Khartoum for self-determination. Following independence, the new government engaged in state formation processes that did not provide mechanisms for all individuals and groups to compete fairly for positions in the political and economic systems. Instead, the government’s approach to state formation politicized ethnic cleavages and made the ethnic group the basis and foundation for political, and to a certain extent, economic participation. This approach has created a "sure recipe for breeding ethnic antagonism," and has led to the crisis that currently consumes the country.

While the most important policy imperative in South Sudan today is the need to make certain that the cease-fire continues to hold, long-term prospects for peaceful coexistence and development call for comprehensive institutional reforms to provide the country with a governing process that guarantees the rule of law. Hence, both the opposition and the government—the two sides in the present conflict—should take advantage of the cease-fire and start putting together the framework that will eventually be used to put the state back together. A new interim government, without the participation of the two protagonists—Kiir and Machar—should be granted the power to bring together all of the country’s relevant stakeholders to reconstitute and reconstruct the state, including negotiating a permanent constitution.

During the 27th Heads of State Assembly of the African Union (AU) meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, from July 17-18, 2016, the heads of state were supposed to elect individuals to lead the AU for the next four years. One of the most important functions that the delegates were expected to perform was to elect the chairperson of the AU Commission to replace the present chairperson, South Africa’s Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma, who had indicated that she would not seek re-election.

Three candidates were standing for the position of chairperson of the AU Commission. These were Dr. Pelonomi Venson-Moitoi, foreign minister of Botswana, Dr. Specioza Waigaga Wandira Kazibwe, former vice president of Uganda, and Mr. Agapito Mba Mokuy, foreign minister of Equatorial Guinea. There was great expectation that the election of any one of these three candidates would significantly advance gender and regional balance, with respect to key leadership positions in continental institutions. Hence, the election of either one of the two female candidates would have been welcomed by supporters of gender balance. However, if the delegates had opted for Mr. Mokuy, such a choice would have been welcomed by the Spanish-speaking community, as well as the continent’s smaller and historically marginalized states. Given the fact that the outgoing chairperson of the AU Commission, Dr. Zuma, is a woman, the hope within the central African community was that Mr. Mokuy would emerge victorious and represent the region, as well as serve as a sign of hope for the heretofore marginalized regions.

Reports from Kigali are that the election for the chairperson has been postponed until January 2017. It is reported that the AU took that decision based on the fact that none of the three candidates had secured the two-thirds majority of votes needed to win. During the election’s first round, Dr. Venson-Moitoi received 16 votes, Mr. Mokuy received 12 votes, and Dr. Kazibwe received 11 votes. 

Those who abstained from voting claimed that the candidates were not qualified to lead the commission.

After receiving the least votes in the first round, Dr. Kazibwe withdrew from the competition. That left Dr. Venson-Moitoi and Mr. Mokuy to compete for the position. Although Dr. Venson-Moitoi garnered 23 votes in the next round, that number was less than the 36 votes to constitute the two-thirds majority needed to emerge victorious.

Part of the reason for this quagmire, as the news from Kigali is indicating, is that as many as 15 heads of state abstained from voting in the first round of the competition and that in the second round, 20 acted similarly. These many abstentions derailed the process and made certain that none of the remaining candidates would emerge victorious.

While these may be legitimate issues to raise, one wonders why these issues were not raised and fully resolved before the delegates actually assembled in Kigali.

Indeed, the AU assembly chair, President Idriss Déby of Chad, cited the boycott as a deciding factor in the failure of any of the three candidates to secure the necessary votes to win. He then announced that the elections had been postponed until January 2017 and that the heads of state had opened up the contest to more candidates—a decision that appears to be a slap in the face of the current candidates. Notably, this appears to support the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) bloc’s pre-election petition that the elections be postponed because, as they argued, none of the candidates was qualified to lead. That petition, however, had been previously denied.

President Déby argued, in his post-election proclamation, that the delay would provide candidates and their respective regions with the time to adequately prepare for the elections in January 2017. What appears to be implied by this declaration is that preparations for the failed July elections were inadequate and that with this extra time, the type of behavior exhibited by some representatives during the recently concluded elections would not occur in January. However, unless the AU puts in place rules to prevent such an eventuality, there is no guarantee that January 2017’s elections would not be marred by such last-minute maneuvering again. What is to prevent other blocs from engaging in similar strategic behavior (i.e., boycotting the election) in order to promote their own candidates for the various leadership positions in the commission?

Nevertheless, the AU is a continental organization, and no country or region should be allowed to dominate and monopolize leadership positions in its institutions.

Those who abstained from voting claimed that the candidates were not qualified to lead the commission. Dr. Kazibwe’s candidacy was questioned on the grounds that she was previously convicted of abusing state funds. Mr. Mokuy was taken to task for his country’s human rights record, while Dr. Venson-Moitoi’s candidacy was questioned because her home country, Botswana, has often taken positions that are contrary to those of many other AU members, notably on the issue of Africa’s relations with the International Criminal Court.

While these may be legitimate issues to raise, one wonders why these issues were not raised and fully resolved before the delegates actually assembled in Kigali. Certainly, the AU must have mechanisms to vet individuals who are nominated for leadership positions in its institutions to determine their fit for office. During such a vetting process, groups and individuals within the AU can make known their objections to candidates that they believe are not qualified to perform the jobs for which they are being nominated. Of course, such a vetting process must be governed by rules chosen in an earlier period such as those presented in The Statutes of the Commission of the African Union, which provide information on the minimum qualifications and experience of the commissioners. Hence, any challenge to the qualifications of an individual running to serve on the commission should begin with and be governed by such rules.

Once candidates have been fully vetted and determined to meet the minimum qualifications to stand for the positions for which they have been nominated, no head of state (i.e., elector) should boycott the voting. Of course, it is not surprising that electors would prefer to vote for candidates from either their own countries or region. Nevertheless, the AU is a continental organization, and no country or region should be allowed to dominate and monopolize leadership positions in its institutions. Hence, the AU Commission’s leadership must reflect the continent’s diversity, with specific emphasis on gender and geographic balance. Efforts by heads of state or blocs (e.g., ECOWAS) to engage in last minute strategic maneuvering (e.g., boycotting of elections) in order to secure certain political advantages should be discouraged. Such opportunistic behavior can seriously undermine the AU’s electoral system and place the organization in a very precarious position. In fact, one could argue that the outcome of the July 2016 commission elections in Kigali betray an organization that appears to be adrift and without proper leadership and one that is not willing to follow its own rules.  

In fact, one could argue that the outcome of the July 2016 commission elections in Kigali betray an organization that appears to be adrift and without proper leadership and one that is not willing to follow its own rules.

As the AU looks forward, it must make certain that no voting bloc within the organization is allowed to grant itself the power to derail the electoral process. Such opportunism and capriciousness on the part of any group within the AU can prevent the deepening and institutionalization of democratic principles within the organization and effectively hold hostage the interests of the continent to those of a smaller group or region.

Thus, the process through which the member states of the African Union choose individuals to serve in and manage their institutions must be competitive and based on democratic principles. The AU should learn a lesson from what happened in Kigali and put legal mechanisms in place to deal fully and effectively with any future efforts by groups, individuals, and factions to engage in any behavior that can frustrate the functioning of the organization and its institutions. Perhaps the failure of the AU to anticipate such behavior is due to its inexperience. Nevertheless, the organization must provide itself with the wherewithal to prevent this type of stalemate. For, come January, another region may, at the last minute, register its dissatisfaction with all candidates and seek to replace them.

If the AU is to teach member states the principles of good governance, it must first put its own house in order and lead by example.

As the AU looks forward to the January 2017 round of elections, Senegalese politician and diplomat, Abdoulaye Bathily, has already indicated his interest in competing for the position of chairperson of the AU Commission. To avoid the problems that were encountered by the electoral process in Kigali, he, his country, and his region should commence the formal nomination process in order to provide all interested parties with the opportunity to properly vet his candidacy and determine his fit for office. In fact, other candidates who are planning to stand for the elections in January 2017 should also have themselves formally nominated as soon as possible so that the vetting process can be completed and a final list of qualified candidates agreed before the delegates meet in January 2017.

If the AU is to teach member states the principles of good governance, it must first put its own house in order and lead by example. It must, for example, make its electoral decisions through a democratic and competitive process. It must be governed by the rule of law in order for it to stand as a beacon of light for the many countries in the continent that are trying to deepen and institutionalize democracy. Unless the AU puts into place mechanisms to deal with the types of behaviors that derailed the commission elections in Kigali in July 2016, it risks descending into a quagmire from which it might not get out uninjured.