Turkey’s Long Game

In a public meeting immediately after the Israeli attack on Iran, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tried to calm the nerves of the public. “The victorious army of the Ottoman Empire had a principle,” Erdoğan said. “If you want peace, you must always be ready for war.” It was not the first nor perhaps the last time a Turk adopted a Roman maxim. The Ottomans were noted for their love of all things Roman: Mehmed the Conqueror styled himself Kaiser-e-Rûm (Caesar of Rome) after his Hungarian-made guns tore through the ramparts of Constantinople, reprising the ambivalent relationship between historic Troy and continental Europe. (Erdoğan—just like any 26–32-year old man, as the meme goes—is an “empire enjoyer”.)

With the Turkish navy hounding the Franco-Greek flotillas in the Aegean in the summer of 2020, Erdoğan referred to the dumbest and possibly the most fateful of Western imperial policies—the carving up of Northern Iraq and Syria by the British and the French immediately after the First World War—and said, “those who left Turkey out of energy resources in its south 100 years ago won’t succeed in the Eastern Mediterranean today.” In 2018, the London Times reported that Erdoğan "said that modern Turkey is a ‘continuation’ of the Ottoman Empire—a direct contradiction of Ataturk’s ideology, which cast the Imperial era as backwards, stale and to be discarded and forgotten rather than celebrated.”

Of course, Erdoğan’s regional rival has its own talking points. “[Jews] sought refuge from economic hardship and antisemitic persecution . . . in the Ottoman Empire. An empire that I don't think will be renewed anytime soon, even though there are those who disagree with me.” Jews, Greek Orthodox, and Armenians thrived under the Ottoman millet system—but what’s a little history to get in the way of ideologues? But lost in the rhetoric is the reality that this dynamic of competing hegemonic aspirations are reshaping the Middle East as American power recedes. 

An American misperception is that Erdoğan is a Neo-Ottomanist or an Islamist. The reality is complicated. To claim that Erdoğan is qualitatively similar to the ISIS or Muslim Brotherhood is akin to saying that the Westboro Baptist Church is similar to the Vatican because they are both Christian churches. Erdoğanism, if that can be a theoretical framework, is in practice a repudiation of an earlier, and by certain measures more virulent, form of Turkish secular nationalism that started with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. But Erdoğanism is more a style than a theory. In a funny way it is a decolonization project, given that modern Turkey itself is a distinct creature of early-20th-century European liberalism.