April 19, 2025 | The Atlantic
Erdoğan Sets His Sights on Israel
If Trump wants to prevent another regional conflict, calling Turkey’s president a “friend” won’t cut it.
April 19, 2025 | The Atlantic
Erdoğan Sets His Sights on Israel
If Trump wants to prevent another regional conflict, calling Turkey’s president a “friend” won’t cut it.
Excerpt
The Turkish Republic is on the brink. As Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, its would-be sultan, dismantles the country’s secular democracy, President Donald Trump has seemingly taken little notice. Soon, though, Trump will have no choice but to pay attention. While Erdoğan consolidates power at home and prepares to project it abroad, he has set the stage for a clash with Israel. Indeed, Turkey has quickly emerged as perhaps the greatest danger to the Jewish state in the Middle East, escalating the threat of a conflict he won’t be able to avoid.
Erdoğan and his Justice and Development Party have cowed their liberal opponents, co-opted most of the Turkish press, purged and restaffed the Turkish military—with special zeal after crushing a 2016 coup attempt—and revamped Turkey’s intelligence service. Last month, he arrested and falsely charged as a terrorist the most potent political rival he has faced since becoming prime minister in 2003: the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu. Erdoğan even revoked İmamoğlu’s university degree, making him, in theory, ineligible to run for president. The country has erupted in protest; in response, the regime has tightened its grip and arrested hundreds of demonstrators.
Erdoğan seems poised to use his growing power in service of imperialist aims. He has fused Turkish nationalism and Islamism with a renewed reverence for the Ottoman Empire, reversing the course that Kemal Atatürk, the republic’s founder, once set. Atatürk forged the modern Turkish state from the rump of the Ottoman Empire in part by focusing Turkish identity on nation rather than on faith. What drives Erdoğan is a kind of neo-Ottoman dream, starring himself in the role of sultan cum caliph, or, as he once put it, “a servant of the Sharia.” Despite domestic opposition to his rule, Erdoğan has a plausible path to that ambition. The truth is that many Turks, even secular ones, have a certain affection for their country’s imperial past, when Turks were feared invaders rather than migrants searching for industrial jobs.
Reuel Marc Gerecht, who served in Turkey with the CIA, is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.