Erdoğan’s New Turkey—and Old?
The “neo-Ottoman” dreams of American Turkey-watchers exceed reality.
For Americans steeped in a post-Cold War “unipolar” understanding of world affairs, the foreign policy of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan can be hard to fathom. Whether in buying Russian-produced S‑400 air defense systems over Washington’s loud objections in 2020, triangulating between Ukraine and Russia since the latter invaded the former in 2022, supporting Azerbaijan’s brutal offensive against Armenia in Nagorno-Karabakh (“Artsakh”) in 2023, or intervening in Syria against Bashar Assad’s regime, Turkey in the Erdoğan era appears to be acting as a proud and independent power, unconstrained by any loyalty to the U.S. or fidelity to the NATO alliance to which it still belongs—if not a revanchist regional bully.
After the toppling of Assad last December, headlines blared about Turkey’s intelligence chief praying at the famous Umayyad mosque in Damascus with cameras rolling. After the prayer, Turkish carpets were ostentatiously installed. It was hard to miss the note of alarm in a Hill headline on “Neo-Ottoman Turkey’s triumph over its regional rivals.” “Turkey,” Washington policy analyst Andrew Latham warned, “has carved out a new role for itself as successor to the Ottoman empire.”
To anyone familiar with history, however, Erdoğan’s increasingly assertive (and often U.S.-hostile or at least U.S.-indifferent) foreign policy should not be altogether surprising. If we take a longer view, the four decades during which Turkey was a loyal U.S. client state—between 1952 (when the nation joined NATO) and 1991 (when the USSR collapsed)—were a historical anomaly, arising from a combination of Turkey’s weakness, its hostility to the expansionist post-1945 Soviet Union, and its strategic location in the Cold War.
Despite the cultural modernization and westernization wrought by Atatürk’s reforms in the 1920s and 1930s, the rump Republican Turkey born of the violent collapse of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War—its population reduced to under 15 million even as many of its most productive skilled workers, artisans, and engineers were lost in the population exchange with Greece in 1923—was demographically and economically moribund for decades. Turkey did not truly come roaring back to life until the pro-market reforms under Turgut Özal in the 1980s launched an economic and baby boom. Turkey’s population, having inched past 40 million in 1980, has since more than doubled, and its gross annual economic output, a mere $68 billion in 1980 even adjusted to today’s dollars, had tripled by the time Özal died in 1993. By 2023, it stood at $1.1 trillion.
It was no accident that the first sign of Turkey going its own way in foreign policy came in 1991, when Özal, despite being a U.S.-educated engineer who was generally pro-American, kept his distance from the victorious U.S.-led coalition in the First Gulf War, allowing the use of airbases in Turkey but contributing no troops or support personnel. The emergence of a Kurdish-dominated zone in the oil-rich region of northern Iraq under U.S. protection after that war confirmed Ankara’s worst fears. It gave spur to Turkey’s longtime domestic nemesis, the once Soviet-supported Kurdistan Workers’ Party or PKK, which scaled up its periodic acts of terror in southeastern Turkey into a full-blown insurgency in the 1990s. Although the U.S. government designated the PKK a terrorist organization in 1997, persistent American support for Iraq’s Kurds, including a heavily armed Kurdish security force called the Peshmerga, was hard for Turkish leaders to ignore.
The Second Gulf War of March 2003, meanwhile, nearly sundered U.S.-Turkish relations entirely. The timing was tricky, as Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s new Justice and Development Party (AKP) had just swept to power in the November 2002 parliamentary election with a super-majority of 363 out of 550 seats—even though Erdoğan was in jail as the elections took place. He was behind bars for an explosive speech he had given back in 1997 citing an old poem, with certain lines (“minarets are our spears” and “mosques are our barracks”) seeming to violate Turkey’s strict constitutional restrictions on Islam in public life (laiklik or “laicism”), dating back to Mustafa Kemal’s postwar secular reforms. Owing to quiet U.S. diplomatic support during his years in prison, Erdoğan was believed to be more pro-American than the secularist politicians he had beaten—in fact many educated Turkish elites believed that Erdoğan, like the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen whose network of influential charter schools and media organizations helped elect him, was an American asset. (Gülen, if not Erdoğan, was undeniably U.S.-connected, at least since he had moved to the U.S. in 1999, setting up his international headquarters in the Pocono mountains of eastern Pennsylvania, almost halfway in between Washington and New York City; Gülen’s asylum papers were signed by Graham Fuller, a notorious CIA officer who had helped run the Afghan mujaheddin in the 1980s. Turkey’s secularist generals grumbled, not without reason, that Gülen was “America’s Frankenstein”).
On March 3, 2003 the Turkish parliament failed to approve U.S. use of Turkish bases or territory during “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” with 60 AKP deputies joining the opposition in an apparent political blow to Erdoğan (if his support for the U.S. and its allies in Iraq was indeed sincere, which in retrospect seems doubtful). The no vote plunged relations between Ankara and Washington into crisis mode, but few ordinary Turks seemed to mind. Once the Iraq war went sour, with a postwar insurgency bleeding American lives, treasure, and prestige, Turks all but reveled in Schadenfreude, best epitomized in the 2006 Turkish smash hit film Kurtlar Vadisi: Irak (“Valley of the Wolves: Iraq”), starring the mostly washed-up Hollywood Actor Gary Busey as a Jewish-American doctor who cuts out the organs of innocent Muslims at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and ships them to the West for profit. By 2009, it was reported that less than 10 percent of Turks had a “favorable” view of the U.S., and no wonder.
Still, we should not overrate the importance of Turkish anti-Americanism, either in Turkey’s politics or its foreign policy. Despite surveys showing regularly that Turks have the most negative views of Americans of any country in the world, bottoming out around 2007–2009 before a brief upturn in the early Obama years, any American who traveled to the country even at the height of tensions over the Iraq war can attest that ordinary Turks are friendly and gracious hosts. What the slow-motion blow-up over Iraq (which began all the way back in 1991) revealed, rather, was that Turkey’s governing establishment was no longer beholden to Cold War precedent and tradition.
A significant departure came with Erdoğan’s assertion of authority over the Turkish “deep state” (derin devlet), which had seen Turkey’s Kemalist military establishment intervene whenever popular Islamic politicians seemed to threaten Kemal’s laicist constitution. The military staged actual coups in 1960 (when the elected president, Adnan Menderes, was arrested and executed) and 1980, and more recently pulled off a “soft” or “postmodern” coup against Necmettin Erbakan (who agreed to resign and stay out of politics for five years) in 1997, the same year Erdoğan was arrested over his incendiary poetry reading. Erdoğan, after coming to power in early 2003, was more careful than his predecessors had been. But he also had the Gülen network at his disposal, which had begun to seed the Turkish police, army, and intelligence service with young men educated in Gülenist charter schools, who were much friendlier to Islam than the old Kemalists. The critical break occurred in April 2007, on the eve of new elections. Erdoğan refused to blink when the chief of the Turkish General Staff, Yaşar Büyükanıt, issued a memorandum warning of “the erosion of basic values, primarily secularism.” Steeled by Erdoğan’s defiance, the AKP swept to its first popular majority (the 2002 elections had returned a parliamentary majority with only 37 percent of the vote), and the military did nothing.
Over the next half-decade, Erdoğan used a series of show trials against suspiciously large “deep state” cabals allegedly plotting terrible acts against the Turkish people (the first was called Ergenekon and the second Balyoz, or “Sledgehammer”). While a few Western reporters did offer critical coverage of the crackdown, most Western governments looked the other way from Erdoğan’s purges of “disloyal” Kemalists, in part because (especially in Europe) Turkey’s secularist deep state had long been resented for its hostility to Kurdish minorities and its often blatant interference in democratic politics. It was seen as now receiving its just deserts. Strange as it is to remember today after a decade of ham-handed authoritarian maneuvers, Erdoğan’s political triumph over the general staff in 2007 was celebrated by the left in both Turkey and Europe: He was a hero of “democracy.”
Erdoğan’s reputation in the West did not really begin to suffer until his tactical partnership with Gülen burst into rivalry and then open political war in 2013. Gülen’s press network turned on Erdoğan and blasted him with (mostly accurate) stories about corruption and nepotism, and in 2016 the Gülen network inside Turkey (Hizmet or, in its alleged military wing, FETÖ, or “Fethullist terrorist organization”) tried, or was goaded into, overthrowing Erdoğan’s government in a military coup. Launched on the night of July 15, 2016, the coup was a bitter and close-run affair, and its failure was a political triumph for Erdoğan. The U.S. government refused to extradite Gülen, even after Erdoğan tried playing hardball by cutting off power to the American airbase in southeastern Turkey at İncirlik. Still, the Gülenist network inside Turkey was smashed utterly, with Erdoğan opportunistically rehabilitating some of the old “Sledgehammer” generals he had arrested and forging a political alliance with the hard nationalist right out of shared antipathy to Gülen (and the PKK). Once seen as softer on the Kurds and more “democratic” than the secularist Turkish deep state, Erdoğan fully embraced his inner Turkish nationalist-authoritarian. Together with the brutal, extra-judicial crackdown on the Gülen network, which ensnared hundreds of Turkish academics and entire universities, journalists, and even hospitals, this hard right turn gravely eroded Erdoğan’s public image in the West.
Even as Erdoğan’s reputation abroad was darkening, Turkey began pushing its weight around again in the Middle East, in everything from interventions in the Syrian Civil War and post-Qaddafi Libya to ever-louder backing of the Palestinian cause and overt support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other Sunni Islamist extremist groups like Hamas. Turkey has also made waves in the realm of soft power. Magnificent Century, a lurid soap opera nostalgia-fest for the Ottoman glory days of the 16th century set in the harem of Süleyman the Magnificent, became a smash hit across the greater Middle East and was later picked up by Netflix. In 2020, Erdoğan helped push through a court ruling turning the great Byzantine church the Hagia Sofia (Aya Sofya) into a mosque again, as it had been from the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453 until Mustafa Kemal designated it a non-denominational museum and heritage site in 1934. Although Christians and Turkish secularists cried foul, the Aya Sofya mosque is now a far greater attraction than Kemal’s secular “museum” ever was, drawing in more than 50,000 visitors every day, the vast majority of them Muslim worshippers. It is now an important global pilgrimage site for Sunni Islam.
As for hard power, Turkish victories in the Erdoğan era initially seemed harder to come by, in part owing to the friction between Erdoğan and the military between the Büyükanıt showdown of 2007 and the thwarted Gülenist coup of 2016, which raised doubts about the army’s loyalty and cohesion. But the last few years have seen a revival here too, with victories by Turkish-armed clients—however costly in human terms—in Nagorno-Karabakh and Syria, and the well-publicized role of Turkish Bayraktar TB‑2 drones in the Ukraine war. This March, Erdoğan announced a deal with the longtime PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has asked his followers to lay down their arms and dissolve the organization. If the deal holds, the PKK climbdown may be Erdoğan’s greatest geopolitical win yet, a blend of hard and soft power that signals a broader Turkish ascendancy across the contested Kurdish-inhabited areas of southeastern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and possibly Iran as well.
Is Erdoğan, then, a neo-Ottomanist trying to revive the old empire, as Washington’s Turkey-watchers have surmised? Certainly, nostalgia for the past helps to animate Turkish politics. But we must be careful not to exaggerate either Erdoğan’s ambitions or the means he has at his disposal to achieve them. Not unlike the Russia of Putin, his rival strongman whose alleged efforts to recreate the Soviet empire have been wildly overblown—Russian troops may have advanced steadily over the past year, but they are still in the far reaches of eastern Ukraine—the reach of Erdoğan’s Turkey is limited. He may now have genuine influence in Syria and over Hamas and other Sunni Muslim movements, and some diplomatic leverage in the Russia–Ukraine war. But the idea of today’s Turkey conquering Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and huge swathes of the Balkans, to recreate a simulacrum of the Ottoman empire circa 1900, is absurd on its face.
Of course, Ottoman diplomats were masters at overcoming apparent weakness and leveraging geography to survive, from goading Britain and France into attacking Russia on their behalf in the Crimean War of the 1850s, to getting Britain and Germany to force Russia to stand down in the war of 1877–78, when Russian troops reached San Stefano (Yesilköy) on the outskirts of today’s Istanbul, to the First World War, when the beleaguered and overmatched Ottomans nearly rode Germany’s coattails to an improbable victory. At the time of the Compiègne armistice of November 1918 on the western front, Turkish troops had taken Baku and were racing northwards up the Caspian Sea towards Black Earth Russia. In raw economic and demographic terms, Turkey is actually stronger today, vis-à-vis Europe, than the Ottoman empire was at any point after, say, the Treaty of Karlowitz of 1699, which began its long retreat from the Balkans. If Erdoğan’s own diplomats had the same savoir faire as their Ottoman predecessors, it would be easy to imagine Turkey dominating the greater Middle East today, even without direct sovereign control.
But in other ways the comparison is misleading. Europe today is hardly a hard power colossus. Even its wealthiest members, such as Germany, have none of the dynamism they did in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which made the Ottomans seem so moribund in comparison. Twenty years ago, Turkey was still straining, almost begging, to join the European Union, but today it might be better off staying out so as not to be weighed down by excessive regulation. Inflation may be far worse in Turkey than anywhere in Europe, but having an independent currency, however cheap and unstable, gives Erdoğan’s economic team more flexibility than Greece or other EU member states weighed down by the euro. Moreover, the weakness of the Turkish lira keeps the country relatively inexpensive for tourists, investors, and real estate buyers from the Arab world and Russian sphere, who appreciate the country’s beauty and temperate climate, which can be enjoyed for a bargain.
Turkey’s apparent resurgence in the Erdoğan era is relative, standing out due to the comparative decline of its neighbors, from the ever more sclerotic Eurozone to the wreckage in Syria, Iraq, and Iran. Despite recent growth, Turkey remains basically a middling regional power, its national economic output ranking a respectable 17th, though much lower in per capita terms (about 64th). Even Turkey’s recent geopolitical victories resulted from the accidental alignment of interests between Turkey, Israel, and the U.S. in Syria (at least in the Biden era, when the U.S. supported toppling Assad), and from Israel’s smashing, in the wake of Hamas’s October 2023 attacks, of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which gravely weakened Iran. A similar dynamic was on display in Israel’s support for the Turkish position in Azerbaijan against loosely Russia-aligned Armenia. By contrast, Erdoğan’s consistent advocacy for the return of Crimea to Ukraine is likely to go nowhere, as it not only runs up against firm Russian opposition, but likely exceeds what the U.S. is willing to stipulate.
Erdoğan’s recent successes, meanwhile, occurred at a time when the Turkish economy was still more or less intact before his latest ham-handed authoritarian maneuver: the shocking jailing and disqualification of the main opposition candidate, Istanbul’s Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, from standing in the next presidential election. This sparked yet another run on the lira, which cost Turkey’s central bank $25 billion in just the first few days, and induced a market meltdown in perhaps the most serious financial crisis of the Erdoğan era to date. Whatever political capital Erdoğan may have gained from the Öcalan deal dissolving the PKK has now evaporated.
Turkey still punches above its economic weight thanks to a strategic location and large army, second to the U.S. in NATO. For this reason, Turkish moves on the Middle Eastern chessboard are worth watching, as are Erdoğan’s ever-more brazen assaults on democratic liberties. But aside from the rightful concern U.S. policymakers should express about Erdoğan’s political and human rights abuses, there is little in Turkey’s foreign posturing that should alarm us. Turkey’s neighbors, including Israel, Iran, and Russia, may feel differently about Turkish moves and push back now that Erdoğan’s government is weakening. If they do, that is Erdoğan’s problem, not ours.
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