Since January, many observers have warned that U.S. President Donald Trump is traveling down the same autocratic path pioneered by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Just last week, Trump threatened to replace the elected mayor of Washington, D.C., echoing a favorite tactic of the Erdogan government. The good, if still not very comforting, news for Americans is that while the speed of the breakdown is alarming, the United States still has a ways to go before reaching the point that Turkey is at today.
But while Erdogan maintains his lead in dismantling democratic institutions, he has fallen behind in geopolitical provocations. Just recently, Turkey stood out for its repeated assaults on international norms. Now, though, those norms have been shattered by a host of bigger and more aggressive actors, from Moscow to Washington, and Turkey looks almost calm in comparison.
Over the last decade, Turkey went from being a status-quo power to a revisionist one. In a series of conflicts, from Libya to Syria to the Caucasus, Ankara used its military might to tilt regional dynamics in its favor. Amid a great deal of hype, these interventions created facts on the ground, helping to secure the fall of the Assad regime in Syria and the Azerbaijani capture of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Alongside accelerating arms exports and the expansion of overseas military bases, Turkey also raised alarm among its neighbors through its embrace of nakedly irredentist cartography and rhetoric. In the early 2020s, Turkey put forward aggressive new maritime claims at Greece’s expense, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned that Greece was forfeiting its sovereignty over a string of islands off the Turkish coast. Erdogan’s political allies started flashing maps that showed parts of Greece as Turkish territory. And Erdogan himself warned Athens, “The islands you occupy do not bind us, we will do what is necessary when the time comes. As we say, we can come suddenly one night.”
But by today’s standards, this barely registers anymore. Russia set off the shift with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Then, after the Hamas attack of 2023, Israel has gone on the offensive, occupying parts of Lebanon and Syria, and launching attacks against Iran, Yemen, and Qatar. Closer to home, Israel is also working to ethnically cleanse Gaza and annex the West Bank.
The United States’ pivot has been more sudden and unexpected. Trump came into office promising the country “will once again consider itself a growing nation,” specifically one that “expands [its] territory.” He has repeatedly expressed interest in buying Greenland, seizing the control of Panama Canal, and making Canada the 51st state. He shared a number of irredentist maps and published a crass video of his plans for the Gaza Riviera. More concretely, he has also launched military strikes against Iran and Yemen, while deploying military assets to Mexico and edging closer to war with Venezuela.
Turkey, in turn, has quieted down, both in comparison with its neighbors and its previous policies. This doesn’t necessarily mean its ambitions are gone, but rather that it has a lot to deal with. For one thing, Turkey’s own aggressive actions generated considerable blowback. By the early 2020s, these provocations had helped create a deepening alignment between France, Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which sought to contain Turkey. Over the last few years, Ankara has worked assiduously to calm and defuse this coalition.
Now, having secured a geopolitical windfall with the collapse of the Assad regime, Turkey is working to consolidate its gains there. This has become even more challenging because of Israel’s own intervention, which has required Ankara to move carefully to avoid triggering a direct confrontation. Domestically, Erdogan is occupied with consolidating his final authoritarian power grab, as he seeks to crush and co-opt the country’s main opposition party.
Turkey may also be discovering that it’s harder to operate in an environment where everyone has gone rogue. Being the one revisionist power embedded in a functioning NATO alliance was a relatively secure position. Erdogan hoped that as American power waned, he would have more room to maneuver, both at home and abroad, while U.S. allies like Greece and Israel grew more pliant without their patron. Instead, the United States’ sudden shift under Trump risks simultaneously empowering both Russian and Israeli revisionism, leaving the region a far more dangerous place for Turkey.
But if the irredentist ambitions of great and neighboring powers have complicated Ankara’s calculus, they have also presented opportunities. Erdogan’s regime has repeatedly tried to restore frayed relations with erstwhile allies based on shared concerns about the irredentism of others. First, Ankara pitched Turkey to the Biden administration as a necessary partner in containing Russia. Now that Trump is more aligned with Moscow, however, Turkey is revising the appeal for Europe. Ankara’s new argument is that only with Turkey’s military support can the Europeans hope to contain Russia without Washington.
At the same time, Israel’s increasingly unchecked behavior has made Turkey look less threatening by comparison in the eyes of its Arab neighbors. Egypt and the Gulf appear more content coordinating with Turkey in Syria and around the region, to the extent that they believe Ankara can serve as a counterweight to Israel.
Erdogan’s former foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, was alternately lauded, criticized, and mocked for his ambitious “neo-Ottoman” vision of Turkish regional power. While Davutoglu’s geopolitical dreams may have been grandiose, what stands out in retrospect is that they were ultimately consistent with post-Cold War liberal assumptions.
At its most idealistic, his version of a Turkish sphere of influence sounded an awful lot like a European Union for the Balkans and the Middle East, with Turkey playing the economic and diplomatic role of Germany. Like the United States’ own articulation of the liberal international order, it was a model of Turkish power that promised to pay dividends for everyone involved.
As my colleague Selim Koru has written, there was always something implausible about the relentlessly positive win-win framing of these geopolitical visions. Certainly, people on the receiving end of them weren’t always convinced. But at best, they made it possible for other countries to buy into American—and for a brief period, Turkish—power as a mutually beneficial project. Now, some vestigial rhetoric aside, this win-win framing is gone. At best, countries can appeal to others as the lesser evil—a temporary partner in the face of a greater threat.
After enthusiastically embracing a new era of irredentism, Turkey suddenly finds itself in a crowded field. The world has entered a period of Risk geopolitics, beset by competing efforts to rewrite rules and redraw borders. If the past was never quite as win-win as the liberal internationalists among us liked to believe, it is entirely possible that this future will prove distinctly lose-lose.