Time For a New Policy Toward Erdogan

Turkey and Israel held talks last Wednesday aimed at avoiding a confrontation in Syria as Ankara continues to pursue greater influence in a post-Assad Syria, including through an increased military presence. With Turkey again throwing its military weight around the Middle East and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan asserting Ankara’s central role in European security, it is worth taking stock of Turkey’s actual military capabilities and foreign policy objectives.

This review demonstrates that it is long past time for Washington to demand much better from Ankara. Washington should, at a minimum, insist on the complete removal of the Russian S-400 system from Turkey, the end of Ankara’s financial and political support for Hamas, and an immediate halt to threatening actions against Greece, Cyprus, and Israel.

Turkey’s Military

Turkey is a member of the NATO alliance, even if it hasn’t acted like it during Erdogan’s tenure. The Turkish military is one of the largest in the alliance with an army second only in size to that of the United States among NATO members. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies 2025 Military Balance, the Turkish armed forces fields 355,000 active-duty personnel, split between 260,200 in the army, 45,000 in the navy, and 50,000 in the air force. The Turkish army is comprised of over 20 armored, mechanized, and light infantry brigade-sized formations.

To put that in perspective, several NATO countries would have trouble fielding a single fully equipped brigade. Likewise, Turkey’s air force is one of the largest combat aircraft fleets in NATO and retains a significant fleet of drones. The Turkish navy operates multiple attack submarines and dozens of surface combatants, as well as a number of transport and amphibious vessels and a developing fleet of maritime unmanned surface vessels (USVs).

While Turkey fields a large force on paper, the capabilities it can bring to bear vary in quality. The army, for example, fields several formidable systems, including modified Leopard and domestically produced Altay main battle tanks, but also retains stockpiles of older armored and artillery systems. Likewise, the air force fields a large F-16 fleet, but Ankara was removed from the F-35 program after buying the S-400 air defense system from Russia. Turkish drones have also shown mixed effectiveness in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Turkey operates multiple Western and domestically produced naval systems, including frigates and corvettes.

Despite the significant size and relative capability of some components of Turkey’s armed forces, large parts of Ankara’s forces remain untested, leading some to question whether the Turkish military is stronger on paper than in reality. Turkish forces have conducted operations against Kurdish militants in Syria and strikes in northern Iraq and Syria. But those operations pale in comparison, for example, with the combat experience of the Israel Defense Forces. While Turkish-backed Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) overthrew the Russian- and Iranian-backed Assad regime, Turkish forces largely played a supporting role while its HTS proxy carried the majority of the fighting burden.

Large, untested militaries with sophisticated weapons can be weaker than they appear. Issues that are difficult to judge on a balance sheet, ranging from corruption in high-level leadership to poor maintenance procedures, can be laid bare when making first contact with the enemy. The Russian military, for example, was not only large on the eve of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022 but also coming off years of a heralded military modernization effort. Still, as the world watched Russian tanks break down for lack of fuel or maintenance, Russian forces failed to achieve their initial strategic objectives and are now in their third year of attritional warfare against a country many feared the Kremlin would conquer in a quick campaign.

In addition to being a largely untested military, another concern surrounding Turkey’s military is politicization. In 2016, an unsuccessful coup orchestrated by elements of the military attempted to overthrow Erdogan and the civilian government. Erdogan used this opportunity to reorganize the military into a force that prioritized loyalty to him. Tens of thousands of officers were purged and replaced by vetted individuals. In many cases, the officers promoted to senior ranks lacked the required experience. In the case of the air force, the number of fighter pilots who were dismissed created a severe pilot shortage for the country’s F-16 fleet.

The Turkish War Academies, in existence since 1848, were shuttered in 2016 and replaced with a single ‘National Defense University,’ composed of five individual institutes. Prior to these actions, military education and doctrine were considered the realms of the military, largely uninfluenced by civilian authorities. This is no longer the case. Erdogan has consolidated his control over military education, training, and doctrinal development.

Since 2016, Turkey’s highest military officials openly espouse a strategic outlook aligned with Erdogan and antagonistic to Turkey’s historic pro-Atlanticist and NATO orientation. The clearest example of this can be seen in the advocacy and promotion of the “Blue Homeland” doctrine, a policy that does not recognize the territorial waters of Greece (a member of NATO and the European Union) and Cyprus (an EU member) and increasingly challenges the sovereignty of the Greek islands located in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.

Ankara’s actions such as these undermine American interests, regional security, and pose a threat to international law.

Erdogan has also prioritized the role of private military companies (PMCs) to further his objectives in sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East. In 2012, a group of Turkish military generals who were purged from the Turkish military for Islamist proclivities in 1997, led by Adnan Tanriverdi, founded Turkey’s first PMC, SADAT. Tanriverdi was a personal confidant of Erdogan. Since its inception, SADAT has provided military security and training to organizations aligned with Islamist ideologies in Libya, Azerbaijan, West Africa, Syria, and Iraq. Its stated mission includes the desire to form an alliance of Islamic countries that takes its place among the world’s superpowers.

Turkey’s Foreign Policy

Erdogan clearly seeks to use Turkey’s military and PMCs as part of a more aggressive and revanchist foreign policy. Ankara attempts to portray its efforts as aligned with transatlantic interests and supportive of American interests, but that is hardly the case. In reality, Ankara’s interests and objectives significantly diverge from those of the United States and its allies.

It is worth remembering that Erdogan purchased the S-400 air and missile defense system from Russia. That left Washington with no choice but to evict Turkey from the American-led F-35 program. An ally in good standing does not purchase an air and missile defense system from the leading threat to the alliance. The co-location of an S-400 and F-35s could potentially enable Moscow to gain valuable intelligence helpful for shooting down F-35s flown by Americans and their allies. And there should be little doubt that Moscow might share this information with Beijing, Tehran, and potentially Pyongyang.

Unfortunately, Turkey’s problematic actions are not relegated to defense procurement.

A Turkish unmanned aerial vehicle conducted airstrikes about a kilometer from American troops in a U.S.-restricted operating zone in Syria in 2023, putting our forces at risk. When the drone flew within a half kilometer of U.S. military personnel, they were compelled to shoot down the drone with an F-16 in what U.S. Central Command called an act of “self-defense.”

Ankara then supported Putin’s objectives by delaying the efforts of Finland and Sweden to join NATO after the Kremlin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine compelled Helsinki and Stockholm to set aside longstanding policies of neutrality and seek admission to the defensive alliance. Ankara delayed Sweden’s accession to the alliance by almost two years.

Also, Ankara, as our Foundation for Defense of Democracies colleague Jonathan Schanzer testified in March, has a long history of supporting terror groups such as Hamas. After it waged the horrific terror attack on Israel on October 7, one would have thought an American ally would have ended Ankara’s cozy relationship with the terror organization.

Instead, Erdogan embraced Hamas even more closely, continuing political and financial support for a terror organization that has murdered Americans and held them hostage and that is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

When October 7 put the choice clearly to Erdogan, he chose Hamas over the United States. Given his Islamist ideology, we should not expect things to get better as long as Erdogan remains in charge.

So, what’s to be done in the meantime?

Washington should condition additional security assistance for Turkey on clear, measurable, and non-negotiable demands. They should include, at a minimum, the complete removal of the Russian S-400 system from Turkey, the end of any financial and political support for Hamas and similar terrorist organizations, and an immediate halt to any threatening actions against Greece, Cyprus, and Israel.

A government that refuses to change such policies is hardly one we should want to have the F-35, America’s most advanced fighter jet. Indeed, if Erdogan is not willing to take these steps, he will confirm what many have long suspected: Erdogan is an ally in name only. 

Cameron McMillan is a research analyst at the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Sinan Ciddi is a non-resident senior fellow and Bradley Bowman is a senior director.