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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.
“People mistakenly think of Erdoğan’s tenure as an Islamist project, but it is a bit of everything—Turkish nationalism, neo-Ottomanism, even a dose of Kemalism recently,” Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, fellow at Brookings Institution, confirmed. “Turkish grand strategy is to see the rebirth of the Turkish empire—a Turkey that has a zone of influence in its neighborhood and can emerge as a substantial global power. In recent years, [Erdoğan] has used foreign policy openings, including incursions in Libya and Syria, or things like his ‘The Century of Turkey’ framing to create a new sense of Turkey’s destiny.”
Forgotten in history is the paradox that newer republics are often more homogenous and racially violent than cosmopolitan empires. Kemalist Turkey, fresh out of the ashes of the first world war, was no exception. The followers of Ataturk considered the Ottomans regressive and barbaric. They hated Ottoman imperial cosmopolitanism: just as the Pan-Germans once hated the Austro-Hungarian empire, Hindu nationalists hate the Mughals and the British, or any other racial or religious majoritarians in recent history who form movements based on sub-elite resentments about being let down or left back.
The Kemalists didn’t want anything to do with Libya, the Caucasus, Albania or the Balkans—the imperial burden in formerly Ottoman lands. Erdoğanism is perhaps the exact opposite: a movement of contradictions that seeks to merge the 16th-century idea of Turkey as a regional bridging influence with multiculturalism and irredentism, secular nationalism with Western decolonization rhetoric, flirtations with financial and martial autarky with detached hegemonic leadership. Whatever it is, it is neither Kemalism nor ethno-Islamism. In fact, the Kemalist protests against Erdoğan last decade had “No to Shariah and No to US/EU” placards.
Ahmet Davutoğlu, the brains behind the early foreign policy of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), articulated the Turkish aspiration to be a bridging power with regional influence. That took some interesting turns along the way. Decolonization rhetoric was employed during the reconversion of Hagia Sophia from a bland secular museum to a place of worship. Simultaneously, a nationalist-era doctrine named “Blue Homeland” was incorporated into the AKP policy for the Eastern Mediterranean, similar to the Ottoman practice of incorporating successful policies of conquered regimes.
A traditionally detached but supportive relation with the United States started to fall apart with the Obama administration’s outreach to Iran. But more than that, the outreach to the Kurds was considered an act of betrayal by Ankara. In 2015, President Barack Obama armed Syrian Kurdish militias, aligned with the notionally Stalinist Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), a group traditionally opposed to Turkish central power, in order to create a buffer force to take on the Islamic State. The resultant entity, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), scuttled the then-nascent rapprochement efforts between the Kurds and Turkey. Turkey and the United States, the two largest armed forces within NATO, found themselves on the opposite sides of the fence. With ISIS defeated, direct conflict broke out between Turkey and the Kurds, followed by brutal urban warfare in southern Turkey.
All that seems to be in the distant past, now that Turkish power and active support resulted in an Armenian rout at the hands of Azerbaijan, resulting in the first territorial conquest in a war within the new era of multipolarity. Turkish drones helped South Sudan win on the battlefield, and at least in the early days, helped Ukraine balance a Russian march to Kiev, earning it a major reputational boost in European circles. Gone are the days of Franco-Greek alignment; France and Germany recently considered inviting Turkey to send peacekeeper troops in Ukraine after the war. The UK plans to sell Eurofighter jets to Turkey. Most importantly, however, Turkey militarily routed the Kurdish insurgency, while Ankara’s support tilted the balance in Syria and effected the collapse of Syrian Baathism.
With the victory of the rebels in Syria, the land is now carved in half, with the south of Syria under de facto Israeli control and regular bombardment. As the PKK laid down its arms, Erdoğan considered his regional rapprochement mission completed; he declared that Turkish power will bring about peace in the region as days of yore, “when galloping Kurdish, Arabian and Ottoman horses” brought about peace in a land traditionally savaged by ethnic rivalries. Whatever one might think of his ornate prose, ending the conflict with the Kurds is enough to cement the man’s legacy in history books. All things considered, Turkey’s regional power has reached a height not seen in nearly a century. Rarely in history does a former great power return to such a form.
But repressed Turkish grievances and a sense of betrayal remain, only heightened by the destabilizing Israeli hegemonic aspirations in the region. Israel is currently waging a conflict of total annihilation in Gaza and the West Bank, is in attritional periodic conflicts with Iran and the Houthis in Yemen, and has bombed a rump Syria and Lebanon with impunity. None of that has gone unnoticed in Ankara. With Shiite Iranian power on the wane, the region is gearing up for the big, bad finale: Turkey’s rise in the north inevitably clashing with the aspirations of a “Greater Israel.” Jerusalem recognizes the emergence of multipolarity and the trend of a decline of American long-term direct support, and aspires to create buffers and proxies all around it.
Explaining unbalanced multipolarity in the region in his last major essay, the international relations scholar Kenneth Waltz wrote, “Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly, which has proved remarkably durable for the past four decades, has long fueled instability in the Middle East. In no other region of the world does a lone, unchecked nuclear state exist.” Power, after all, begs to be balanced, per theories of realism: “But the very acts that have allowed Israel to maintain its nuclear edge in the short term have prolonged an imbalance that is unsustainable in the long term. Israel’s proven ability to strike potential nuclear rivals with impunity has inevitably made its enemies anxious to develop the means to prevent Israel from doing so again.”
That was in 2012. Unchecked Israeli warfare has resulted in it being nearly unchallenged, and with the collapse of Iranian influence, Turkish strategic calculation as well as public threat perceptions are turning exactly as expected. “Turkey seems very concerned about the rise of Israel as a regional hegemon—in part because that’s a role Ankara thinks is best fit for Turkey”, Aydıntaşbaş commented to The American Conservative. “No doubt Turkey will establish military bases in Syria—and Israel will try to prevent that. But in a counter-intuitive way, Israel’s targeting of the new regime in Syria is making Damascus more reliant on Turkey. The two countries are in very clear competition for influence over the Trump administration, over Syria—and to an extent in the eastern Mediterranean.”
In a recent survey conducted by Research Istanbul, in July 2025, a significant majority of Turks now support an independent nuclear deterrent for Turkey. The poll, which came immediately after the Israeli strikes on Iran, demonstrates a massive shift, with a whopping 71 percent of respondents now supporting a push for nuclear weapons. While Turkey is a major power in the region, has made enormous strides in defensive tech, and hosts American nuclear weapons, it is a party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is forbidden from developing independent nuclear weapons. But U.S. potential retrenchment from NATO and American political volatility are making Ankara rethink strategic equilibrium. The American inability to rein in Israeli actions just ahead of a potential diplomatic breakthrough with Iran didn’t help either.
Turkey, as a middle power, lacks the autonomy to fully chart its own long-term strategic course—it’s too entangled in external dependencies. That said, Ankara has actively pursued greater strategic autonomy through initiatives like developing its domestic defense industry and positioning itself as a regional energy hub. Both efforts, however, have been undermined by structural challenges and Erdoğan’s own policy missteps,” Gönül Tol, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, told TAC. “After the collapse of its ambitious, pro-Islamist foreign policy post-Arab Spring, Turkey pivoted toward regional normalization . . . but Israel increasingly threatens that vision. Nowhere is this more evident than in Syria, a linchpin in Erdoğan’s domestic and regional calculations. Israeli strikes there not only derail Turkey’s hopes for post-Assad influence, but also complicate its ties with Washington.”
Erdoğan, for now, has receptive ears in Washington, DC. “To me Izmir is the example of how you blend all of these communities, where you have Jews living side by side with Muslims living side by side with Christians,” U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack recently commented. He also appears to believe the Turkish version of history, as noted in a State Department Q&A session: “So what we’ve experienced every time the West has intervened in this part of the world, really since 1919, has not been great. So we started by Sykes-Picot and kind of dividing up [sic] the world and the nation states, and we’re living with the aftermath of that. God bless the British, but they gave away Palestine three times to three different people.”
His job as an ambassador is understandable, to synchronize American, Israeli, and Turkish objectives, and ease the tension. But the “can’t we all get along” act has a significant disadvantage: Jerusalem. The Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid called on the U.S. to block London and Berlin from selling weapons to Ankara, claiming that Turkey has the largest and most powerful naval fleet and army in the Middle East and “now aims to achieve parity with Israel in airspace.” To Israel, that is a dangerous and intolerable proposition, given Turkish defensive heft and manpower advantage. Elements in Israel are already eying Turkey as the next and potentially the final big war before achieving unchallenged supremacy in the region.
And while that would be a major gamble—Turkey is a member of NATO, hosts American nukes, and has armor brigades that can quite literally drive across Syria into Israel if provoked—chances of an open confrontation or at least a proxy war in Syria are increasing with every passing day. There is also another major risk. While the chances of a EU-sponsored color revolution are low because the EU needs Turkey to balance Russia, the chance of a coup in Turkey is ever present. Erdoğan, for all his political talents and legitimacy, isn’t sure if he has completely won over the Kemalist “deep state.” And his army, and their loyalties during an actual state-versus-state war, are still untested.
In speeches, Erdoğan has repeatedly cited the empire’s ninth sultan, Selim I, as one of his influences. That makes sense. Selim expanded the empire to be a global force, took over North Africa, and became powerful enough to influence most of Europe, dominating the world’s most important trade route between Asia and Europe. He expanded the Ottoman navy to challenge European powers. But if Erdoğan is truly interested in turning Turkey into a regional hegemon, he might want to look at an earlier emperor.
Reaching for the Bomb, the ultimate deterrent, is a radical idea. But the key to Ottoman power was not just random expansion and war, but a system of race-neutral protectorates that provided the bulk of the imperial power, from bureaucracy to brute force. As Sir Edward Creasy wrote in perhaps the greatest English translation of Ottoman history, Mehmed the Conqueror’s court and alliance systems enhanced one another’s power and kept the equilibrium within. Mehmed invited Hungarian and Italian engineers, teachers, and courtiers, who not only provided European technology and literature but also acted as a check on the local Turkish nobility. From Serbian princesses acting as diplomats, to military alliances with other local Christian protectorates, to foreign legions, Mehmed created an internal balance of power necessary for a long term survival, as well as an advanced multicultural polity within, and a foreign alliance system that was required to provide the bulk of the manpower for the final war against the Byzantines, when the time came. Hegemony is logically multicultural in character.
Turkey has begun normalizing relations with Armenia, secured its North African front, and prioritized mutually beneficial defense ties with the British, French, and Germans. But that isn’t all. Creating a strong foreign legion component, making mutual defense treaties with protectorates providing the fighting manpower in return for Turkish weaponry and protection, and inviting foreign brains and capital to invest in the Turkish defense tech industry would require a complete reversal from the ethno-nationalist-autarkic paradigm of the last hundred years. And most importantly, the Ottomans—and the Romans—knew, playing for regional equilibrium always helps, especially with an expansionist entity next door. After all, hegemony required centuries of patience.