What Does Erdogan Want?

For over two decades the nation of turkey has been under the control of one man at home he's amassed a power greater than any of his modern predecessors taken hold of turkish society with an iron fist across the globe he's known as a savvy cunning geopolitical operator sometimes an ally sometimes a danger but never a true friend during his tenure he's

Transformed turkey from a mere strategic afterthought to an important regional player to a rising middle power on the world stage now he's ushering in what he says will be the century of turkey promising nothing short of a rebirth for the land that once sat at the heart of the ottoman empire but above all else turkey's president erdogan is an enigma a leader

Charting an entirely unique path forward for his nation elements of his playbook are familiar from his inclination towards strongman rule to his willingness to fuel a grand ethno-nationalist mythos with himself at the center yet his unconventional methods his fiercely independent approach to world affairs and even the tenuous nature of his own grip on power

All beg the ultimate question what does erdogan really want both for the nation of turkey and for himself erdogan at home like so many of the global strongmen who've become synonymous with the nation they lead president erdogan is very much a product of his time and a product of the situation in turkey before he ever took office erdogan first took charge of

The nation in 2003 as turkey's prime minister where it's for a bit over 10 years before becoming president a role that he holds till this day but before that erdogan spent years as the mayor of istanbul and then several months within the turkish prison system after reciting a poem that was found to be inflammatory and then as a member or leader in several

Political parties that were banned by turkish authorities at that time turkey was ostensibly a multi-party democracy but one where the national military had a persistent habit of putting its finger on the scales basically allowing civil governance to proceed as normal until and unless civil leaders did something the military didn't really like in general the

Military were mostly concerned about ensuring that turkey avoided any sign of islamism abided by their chosen view of turkish identity and remained oriented toward the global west while opposing any displays of islamic faith in day-to-day life at the same time the turkish economy had grown into a ticking time bomb and one that would finally blast itself

Apart in 2001 after decades of mismanagement by a corrupt fractious and utterly ineffective political elite so when erdogan first came into power the core of his appeal was quite simple he was everything that the ruling turkish elite wasn't he was focused on rebuilding civil institutions for ordinary people building up civilian and popular authority over

That of the military and advocating populist changes that would in essence make turkish life more livable for everyone he wasn't a religious zealot but he was proud and unashamed of his personal faith and he was a man who had both improved the lots of people in turkey's most important city and personally endured the humiliation and persecution of turkey's

Political elite you he was an outsider a populist and a leader firmly focused on results and once he got the prime minister's post and started to deliver his mandate was secure while the next two decades are a story that's very worth telling the broad strokes of these erdogan built a reputation as a pragmatic highly effective change maker within turkish

Society and earns the genuine trust of a majority of turkey's people then around the mid-2010s after a failed coup and a few other key changes across turkish society erdogan's master began to slip he began to consolidate power more forcefully he started to really crack down on political dissent and he leaned hard into the religious and ethno-nationalist

Themes that have fueled erdogan's modern-day popular support that's where we find him today working toward a grand vision that starts with a concept known as the century of turkey in the early 2020s erdogan unveiled the grand concept of the century of turkey a century set to begin in 2023 100 years after the founding of turkey's modern republic similar to

Visions put forward by vladimir putin xi jinping muhammad bin salman on irendra modi the century of turkey is a sweeping comprehensive position on what turkish society should be and what erdogan personally wants to turn it into hunter erdogan's view of modern turkey the fall of the ottoman empire long regarded as an embarrassment and a bygone era by modern

Turks was actually a grand tragedy and while the strictly secular pro-western military-centric era that came afterward was a justifiable decision it had gone too far in taking turkey away from its past in erdogan's telling turkey's future should be strong it should be autonomous and it should be unified around the grand vision of a single leader erdogan

Today and perhaps a worthy successor tomorrow under that grand vision erdogan advocates return to turkish nationalism the turkey is a nation built by turks for the absolute benefit of turks with no tolerance for separatism or dissent from other groups on turkish lands he advocates a nation in which sunni islam is embraced openly and used to inform a sense of

National morality a disciplined collective family-oriented and patriarchal view of the nation where secularism acceptance of minority group lifestyles and endorsement of western liberal values or cultural norms are all framed as threats to turkish civilization and to violate under one's vision whether in its nationalism its moral structure or its ethnic

Turkish centrism is to be unturkish and thus a threat to the state itself of course if all of this is starting to sound a bit authoritarian that ain't an accident in fact it appears to be entirely by design erdogan's cultural vision for turkey and the values that he's worked tirelessly to promote help to reinforce a much broader idea about turkey itself that

This is not a country engaged in ordinary politics but embroiled in a civilizational struggle to realize its grand potential erdogan in his own telling is the avatar of that struggle and the leader of the grand effort to build and realize turkish ambition and funny enough that approach makes it very easy to turn the gun on turkey's political opposition to

Say that if powerful members of Turkish society aren't working to advance Erdogan's vision of a greater Turkish civilization, then they're working to oppose it, undermine it, and sabotage its chance of success.

Authoritarianism, under Erdogan's sweeping logic, is neither a sin of governance nor an objective in its own right. It's a necessary instrument, a tool to move Turkey toward the only correct or acceptable historical trajectory.

Because Turkey must be great. And because Turkey's destiny is to realize Erdogan's vision, it becomes necessary to use the tools of the state to preserve and enforce loyalty, prevent discord and disunity, and ensure that all of Turkey's domestic power and energy can move in the same direction.

That ideological approach has helped to justify Erdogan's ongoing and sweeping consolidation of authority within his iron fist.

Over his tenure, and especially across the last decade, Erdogan has sought to bring one element of the Turkish state after another under his direct and absolute control.

He's accomplished that partly by relying on the emergency powers and the mandate to preserve stability that he was given by the attempted coup against him in 2016, and partly by rallying such a powerful popular movement across Turkey that he's often been impossible to oppose.

Erdogan has hamstrung Turkish courts and subordinated them to his personal authority.

He substantially weakens the national parliament so that it exists as little more than a rubber stamping body to approve decisions that Erdogan was going to make anyway.

He's substantially diminished the independence and freedom of Turkish media, and brought elite institutions, especially the nation's universities and high-profile schools, into alignment with state goals.

His most dangerous political opponents now come from the provincial or local levels, especially one Ekrem Imamoglu, who's grown into Erdogan's primary modern rival, and also comes with the implied insult of having also been Istanbul's mayor, the same post that Erdogan himself used in the 2000s, to argue that he was an avatar for the will of the people.

Whether against Imamoglu, other opposition, politicians, journalists, academics, protesters, or anybody else, Erdogan has sought to leverage the state against them as if they were threats to Turkish national security, because in Erdogan's grand view, defense of his movement against these subversives is the same thing as national self-defense.

As he and his movement have waned in popularity, those instruments of state authority have begun to replace Erdogan's populist appeal, ensuring that he remains in power because of a simple lack of alternatives.

Of course, Erdogan also places all the emphasis you might expect on economic matters with his century of Turkey, promising a full-scale overhaul of Turkish life.

While his proposals have, at times, been a good deal more vague than, say, Saudi Arabia's promise of shining linear cities in the desert, and to Erdogan's credit, that's probably a wise choice, they do tend to move in the same direction.

Erdogan and his allies have promised grand investment in mega infrastructure, massive growth in Turkey's export market, and a continual swelling. of hisводелен partisanship. its economy unfortunately for erdogan this is where things have been coming off the rails especially in the last several years turkey has suffered from chronic and devastating inflation

And its overall economy is hardly in the shape that erdogan had intended individual industries quite corrupt co-opted by value extracting oligarchs and reliance on complex patronage networks and turkey has struggled to hold on to many of its best educated citizens especially its youth who often long for the same secular westernized lifestyle that erdogan

Rails against that's not to say that turkey's entire economy is doing poorly as we'll discuss in a moment its defense industrial complex is among the most impressive around the world today but overall erdogan's economic promises may represent the greatest gap between what he wants and what he's gotten so far where economic performance has let some of erdogan

Supporters down his recent moves to consolidate turkey into the ethno-nationalist vision erdogan has promised seem to have made up for past disappointment over the last year turkey has practically finished its long-time conflict with kurdish separatists on its own soil announcing a complete disarmament and dissolution of the kurdistan workers party or pkk

And granting full amnesty to its former fighters and non-combatant members as of now growing efforts are underway to assimilate turkey's kurdish population more fully into society and integrate them into erdogan's political coalition directly after the fall of boshar al-assad in syria in late 2024 erdogan has invested heavily in a state-building push in

Post-assad syria with the express intent of facilitating the return of millions of syrian refugees who live on turkish soil today as a result turkey is on the path to grow more homogeneous than ever and with turkey's political opposition facing constant setbacks erdogan's grand domestic strategy seems to be working erdogan abroad just as important to erdogan

As turkey's evolving domestic politics are turkey's ambitions abroad for our purposes today we're going to be a bit more brief on this section overall more friends we've actually just published a deep dive into turkey's geopolitical power and erdogan's global strategy but we'll dig into the fundamentals of that global strategy here and get into elements of

Erdogan's ambition that we weren't able to cover beyond turkey's borders erdogan's highest priority is to secure threats to the turkish homeland and in erdogan's well-documented view on the northern middle east there's no greater threat to turkey than the kurds while turkey's domestic kurdish population has been granted broad amnesty the rest of the middle

East's transnational kurdish population hasn't been nearly so fortunate and with kurds in syria gathering into the particularly powerful syrian democratic forces or sdf one of erdogan's highest priorities has been to curtail or extinguish their influence in doing so erdogan has used broad military force against the sdf for years both directly and by backing

Pro-turkish paramilitaries and erdogan has stepped up those efforts in partnership with the friendly new syrian government for erdogan of course the drive deal with the Kurds is partially a matter of defense, but it's also another question of identity.

Today, after decades of work, the threat faced by Kurdish paramilitaries is an entirely external one, and one that Erdogan can rally the Turkish population against, including the Kurds who've benefited domestically by the transition away from armed resistance.

Then there's the concept of the Blue Homeland, a doctrine first laid out by a Turkish general back in the mid-2000s, but one that's become integral to Turkey's approach to geopolitics across the last decade.

In essence, the Blue Homeland Doctrine claims that Turkey should assert sovereignty over a vast stretch of sea, including in both the Southern Black Sea and the Eastern Mediterranean.

The doctrine is built around the centrality of the Bosporus Strait in regional affairs, a critical waterway under Turkey's direct control, through which immense volumes of goods are shipped in and out of the Black Sea.

Turkey's Blue Homeland openly infringes on the maritime territorial claims of other nations, particularly Greece and Cyprus, and its attempt to build upon the natural leverage at Turkey's disposal as the sole nation that can cut off access to the Black Sea at any given time.

Frankly, if Erdogan were to wake up one morning in a particularly sour mood, he could impose a blockade that would cut off a massive share of Russian oil exports, throttle the global grain markets, cause humanitarian catastrophe in developing nations across the globe, and cut off access to the Mediterranean for both a nuclear power in Russia and a NATO

Nation in Romania.

Erdogan has made it a core priority to reinforce Turkey's claim to its Blue Homeland, investing heavily in an expansion of the Turkish Navy for that very reason.

In fact, Turkey is working hard to expand the power and potency of its entire military, modernizing and expanding its land and air forces year over year in a grand plan to become a military powerhouse.

But arguably, even more important than that, Turkey is also working to build out a full, self-sustaining defense industrial complex, and that effort appears to be going very well so far. Turkey has become a world leader on emerging drone technologies.

It's about to become the first nation other than the US, Russia, and China to indigenously design and develop a fifth-generation fighter aircraft, and it's investing into its military development by learning to build all the other advanced, highly formidable kit that Turkey needs.

That defense industrial overhaul has been a key priority for Erdogan, and alongside South Korea and soon Ukraine, it's turned Turkey into one of the world's fastest-growing arms exporters. But it also affords Erdogan something that's far more meaningful in the long view, strategic autonomy.

On the global stage, it's autonomy that appears to be Erdogan's ultimate ambition, the power to ensure that Turkey can chart its own course, independent of the influence of any foreign power that would seek to assert its will.

Erdogan has tried to make that happen by building Turkey into a country that can handle itself militarily, supply itself, sustain the replenishment of any wartime. losses and otherwise break dependence on other countries that would deign to choose when turkey can or cannot make war he's pointedly pushed back against nato with a frequency that's frustrated

Alliance members while at the same time frequently challenging vladimir putin and demonstrating that turkey and russia exist on relatively equal footing he's orchestrated the start of a growing regional rivalry with israel turned turkey into a military industrial cornerstone in a new series of alliances across the islamic world and perhaps most important of

All he's made clear that turkey is willing to use its power when its ambitions or its interests are threatened on the global stage erdogan himself is 71 years old he's believed to be suffering from health problems and unless he can force constitutional reforms in a complicated and domestically challenging process he'll have to leave office before the end of

This decade erdogan is a shrewd operator he's coldly pragmatic in his assessments and he almost certainly understands that if turkey is ever going to become a true global power it'll happen decades from now and he's not going to be around to see it but saying that erdogan wants turkey to be a global superpower would be both to overstate and misunderstand his

True ambitions erdogan doesn't seek world domination in fact he only seeks regional domination to the extent that it's a means to an end erdogan appears to want a turkey that is at its core three things at once a turkey that is utterly self-sufficient a turkey that is homogenous and cohesive in the way he's imagined and a turkey that cannot and will not be

Challenged erdogan's reign has not been spotless and it certainly hasn't been bloodless but in the twilight years of his life it's hard to deny that and erdogan has gotten precisely what he's wanted for decades thank you for watching