Click here to read a transcript.

The nationwide Iranian protests throughout January were historic, with millions of people risking their lives—and 36,000 protesters losing them, according to exclusive Iran International reporting—to protest the odious Iranian regime. The protests also set in motion a major U.S.-Iran showdown. After dispatching a carrier strike group to the region, President Donald Trump threatened Iran with “violence, if necessary” on January 28, adding that “time is running out” for the regime to cut a deal.

JINSA hosted a webinar breaking down the extraordinary heroism on display in the protests, the potential for more demonstrations, and escalating U.S.-Iran tensions. The webinar featured Mehdi Parpanchi, executive editor of Iran International, and JINSA’s Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow John Hannah, former National Security Advisor to U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney.

JINSA Vice President for Policy Blaise Misztal moderated the discussion.

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Mehdi Parpanchi Mehdi Parpanchi is the executive editor of Iran International, a 24-hour broadcast network that sheds light on the Iranian regime’s brutality. He is the former Lead Presenter for BBC Persia and former Iran Service Director for Radio Farda. Click here to read full bio

John Hannah John Hannah is Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow at JINSA. John served in senior foreign policy positions for both Democratic and Republican administrations, including as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Security Advisor from 2005-2009 and as Vice President Cheney’s Deputy National Security Advisor for the Middle East from 2001-2005. Click here to read full bio

Blaise Misztal Blaise Misztal is the Vice President for Policy at JINSA. His research interests include Iran and its nuclear program, U.S.-Turkey relations, countering extremism, and strategic competition. Most recently, Blaise was a Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Click here to read full bio

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One of the most striking features of post-Assad Syria is the speed with which the interim government has been able to claim international legitimacy. Regional and Western governments that once saw no future for Damascus are now tentatively re-engaging, hopeful that the post-Assad moment can be shaped into something stable and constructive. Trump has focused on promoting normalization and economic integration as the foundations of long-term stability.

A critical step to achieving that vision and meeting Trump’s objectives is reaching an agreement between Syria’s interim government and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which defended large portions of northern and eastern Syria throughout the conflict and built one of the most effective governance structures of the post-2011 era: the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). On March 10, 2025 SDF General Mazloum Abdi and Syria’s interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa, agreed on a framework for talks which requires a detailed integration roadmap to be finalized by the end of December.

Among the main points the negotiations have to resolve centers on the future of the SDF. Roughly 100,000 fighters – men and women who have undergone years of US-backed training as part of the coalition’s campaign against the Islamic State – must somehow be integrated into a national army that itself is far from a coherent force. Equally contentious is the debate over Syria’s future political system. Negotiators from the AANES maintain that only a decentralized form of governance can reflect the country’s complex mosaic of ethnic and religious communities. By contrast, Damascus is insisting that this is a discussion that needs to be had further down the road, if at all.

For Syria’s interim president, incorporating the northeast through negotiation is a matter of survival. The institutions Al-Sharaa oversees remain brittle, and the forces under his command are a motley crew–an amalgam of militias whose record toward minority communities is deeply troubling. The state lacks the manpower, financial capacity, and political standing to capture and administer Kurdish-held areas through coercion. While a renewed civil war could theoretically dismantle the Autonomous Administration as a territorial entity, it would come at an enormous cost: investors would retreat; the government’s recently gained international credibility would evaporate; and external actors would find an opportunity to entrench themselves on Syrian soil. The result would be a level of fragmentation far worse than what any negotiated decentralized arrangement would produce.

That is why Ambassador Tom Barrack has positioned the United States as a facilitator between Damascus and the Autonomous Administration and urged the sides to engage in earnest. He is doing his best to convey no bias on the part of the Administration but mixed messages on decentralization in Syria have been confusing. Barrack is right not to seek to dictate the outcome of these negotiations but he should also not limit the scope and the vision of the peoples of Syria. Anything from a monarchy to federalism should be on the table–so long as the peoples of Syria reach their decision through peaceful and political dialogue.

Alas, the pace of the US-facilitated talks aimed at integrating the Kurdish-led administration in northeast Syria with the country’s transitional government has slowed. The last high-level meeting took place in Damascus on Oct. 7, bringing together Mazloum Abdi, Ahmed al-Sharaa, US Syria envoy Tom Barrack, and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. The prospects for meeting the end-of-year deadline set for the talks are dim.

The problem is not with the substance of the negotiations. Syria’s interim government is not outright rejecting the idea of integrating the SDF or establishing a decentralized political structure that reflects the realities of the new Syria – an idea that President Trump’s Syria Envoy Tom Barrack has also endorsed. On the contrary, there is strong appetite for a deal that ends territorial fragmentation and brings key armed and administrative actors under a unified national framework.

Instead, the obstacle comes from outside of Syria. The SDF has long warned that Turkey is imposing a veto on any deal that would integrate the northeast into a new Syrian political framework. Indeed, Turkish infiltration of Damascus has shaped decision-making across multiple ministries and agencies. Anyone attempting to steer Syria toward a more inclusive political future finds themselves navigating a labyrinth of Turkish influence.

Ankara’s policies since 2011 have played a decisive and often destructive role in shaping the Syrian conflict. What began as political support for opposition activists to topple Assad quickly morphed into the systematic backing of jihadist armed factions fighting to prevent the emergence of any sort of Kurdish governed area in Syria. These groups (many linked to al-Qaeda or sharing its ideological foundations) benefited from Turkey’s permissive border policy, logistical support networks, and, at times, direct military patronage. The current Interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa and virtually all government officials in Damascus come from one such group–Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, formerly the al-Qaeda affiliate in Syria.

With Assad’s downfall, one might have expected Ankara to support a new political arrangement that empowers the very Syrians who suffered under the old regime and fled the violence Turkey helped fuel. Instead, it is actively blocking the Syrian transitional government from reaching a deal with persecuted communities – particularly Kurds, Yazidis, Christians, and Arabs who live under the Autonomous Administration. Turkey appears unwilling to accept any new order in Damascus that does not adhere to its own narrow parameters, especially one that might embolden the Kurds of Turkey.

In Turkey, the Turkish government has taken a courageous step by engaging with the PKK and its leader Abdullah Öcalan as part of the peace process to resolve their own decades-old conflict, but it is yet to articulate how it intends to address its root cause: the Turkish republic’s constitutional eradication of Kurdish identity. Thus, three million Kurds enjoying broad constitutionally guaranteed rights in Syria just south of the Turkish border – at a time when 20 million Kurds in Turkey still cannot legally use the letter X (a letter absent from Turkish but present in the Kurdish alphabet) – is seen as a dangerous precedent before the anticipated drafting of a new constitution in Turkey.

As part of the process, the PKK announced a ceasefire in March, then dissolved in May, and later declared that it had initiated the withdrawal of its forces from within Turkey’s borders. Not satisfied with these historically significant steps, the Turkish government has moved the goalposts and is now slow-walking its own process with the PKK while preventing Damascus from moving forward with its negotiations with the SDF – essentially trying to turn the entire situation into a cross-border four-way trade. Ankara wants Öcalan to use his influence over the SDF to scale down their autonomy demands and disarm and disband along with the PKK. Ocalan is not relenting to this pressure, leading Ankara to essentially deadlock both processes in Turkey and Syria.

As of now, the front lines between the SDF and forces loyal to Syria’s interim government are still tense and have erupted multiple times over the last few months. The longer this deal takes, the more chances there are that the next flare up could result in Syria descending into civil war again. Recent Turkish military movements along the Turkey-Syria border and public threats made by government mouthpieces cannot be disregarded as mere bargaining tactics.

In my view, Turkey’s threats and obstructionism runs counter to the vision articulated by Trump for a more stable and secure Middle East. The United States should leave no doubt that renewed fighting in Syria is off the table. The bloody massacres in Suwayda and Latakia have already shown us how quickly armed groups loyal to the interim government in Damascus can revert to old habits. As Trump champions peace over new wars, the Turkish government should recognize that any move toward reopening the conflict would invite a strong White House response.

For the first time in years, Syria has a chance to rebuild. Turkey must not hold that hope hostage.

Giran Ozcan is Fellow for Kurdish Affairs at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA). He previously served as the Founding Director of the Kurdish Peace Institute.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

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Click here to read a transcript.

On January 18, after days of clashes, Ahmed al-Sharaa’s government and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) announced that they had reached a ceasefire deal. Just a day later, the agreement appeared to fall through, possibly auguring a return to fighting. The reported agreement’s terms were far less favorable to the SDF than what it had sought to achieve in negotiations. It would have brought SDF forces and SDF-controlled territory under Damascus’s control, seemingly ending the autonomy Syria’s Kurds had enjoyed for more than a decade. While U.S. Special Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack claimed the new developments would facilitate “our long-time Kurdish partners’ full onboarding into a united, inclusive Syria,” the trend appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

To evaluate the latest developments in Syria’s ongoing unrest, JINSA hosted a discussion with three leading experts on the issue: JINSA Distinguished Scholar and former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman, JINSA’s Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow John Hannah, and JINSA Fellow for Kurdish Affairs Giran Ozcan.

JINSA Vice President for Policy Blaise Misztal moderated the discussion.

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Amb. Eric Edelman Amb. Eric Edelman is a JINSA Distinguished Scholar and the Co-Chair of JINSA’s Iran Policy Project and JINSA’s Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project. Amb. Edelman is the former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and the former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, and held a range of other senior positions in government. Click here to read full bio

John Hannah John Hannah is JINSA’s Randi & Charles Wax Senior Fellow. He served as former Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Security Advisor from 2005-2009 and as Vice President Cheney’s Deputy National Security Advisor for the Middle East from 2001-2005. Click here to read full bio

Giran Ozcan Giran Ozcan is Fellow for Kurdish Affairs at JINSA. Prior to JINSA, Giran served as Executive Director of the Kurdish Peace Institute. He previously worked with the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in its overseas representative offices and served as the HDP Representative to the United States of America. Click here to read full bio

Blaise Misztal Blaise Misztal is the Vice President for Policy at JINSA. His research interests include Iran and its nuclear program, U.S.-Turkey relations, countering extremism, and strategic competition. Most recently, Blaise was a Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Click here to read full bio

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Click here to read a transcript.

Turkey announced on August 29 that it was severing all remaining economic and commercial ties with Israel, barring Israeli vessels from Turkish ports, prohibiting Turkish ships from calling at Israeli harbors, and closing its airspace to Israeli government planes and arms shipments. The move represents the latest escalation in President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasingly confrontational approach toward Israel, building on Ankara’s May 2024 suspension of $7 billion in annual bilateral trade.

This came just two weeks after Turkey and Syria signed a defense agreement and two days before Erdogan joined the leaders of Russia and China at a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization billed as “pooling the strength of the Global South.” At home, Erdogan’s government has continued its crackdown against the main opposition Republican People’s Party. Most recently, a court annulled the party’s selection of provincial leadership in Istanbul and is preparing to potentially do the same at the national level—effectively sidelining some of Erdogan’s most likely political challengers.

To discuss Turkey’s escalating clash with Israel, what it reveals about Ankara’s broader foreign policy ambitions, and how it relates to Turkey’s ever-eroding democracy at home, JINSA hosted a conversation featuring JINSA Distinguished Scholar and former Ambassador to Turkey Amb. Eric Edelman and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Member of JINSA’s Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project Alan Makovsky.

Amb. Eric Edelman Amb. Eric Edelman is a Distinguished Scholar at JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy and the Co-Chair of its Iran Policy Project and Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project. Amb. Edelman served in senior positions at the Departments of State and Defense as well as the White House where he led organizations providing analysis, strategy, policy development, security services, trade advocacy, public outreach, citizen services, and congressional relations. Click here to read full bio

Alan Makovsky Alan Makovsky is a senior fellow for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress. From 2001 to 2013, he served as a senior professional staff member on the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he covered the Middle East, Turkey, and other related issues. At the State Department, from 1983 to 1994, Makovsky variously covered southern European affairs and Middle Eastern affairs for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Click here to read full bio

Blaise Misztal Blaise Misztal is the Vice President for Policy at JINSA. His research interests include Iran and its nuclear program, U.S.-Turkey relations, countering extremism, and strategic competition. Misztal previously served as the Executive Director of the Task Force on Extremism in Fragile States, a congressionally mandated project convened by the U.S. Institute of Peace, and Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s National Security Program. Click here to read full bio

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Almost by definition all NATO Summits are deemed “successful” since there is a political premium on demonstrating alliance solidarity, overcoming differences through carefully negotiated communique language, and touting compromise agreements as steps forward in the alliance’s main missions of deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and management, and collective security.

There are rare exceptions, of course, and in today’s context, the exception that seems to prove the rule is the Bucharest Summit of 2008 which foundered on President George W. Bush’s desire to provide a Membership Action Plan (MAP, traditionally the penultimate step to NATO membership) for Georgia and Ukraine, colliding with French and German reticence. The resulting compromise, whereby NATO did not offer a MAP to Georgia and Ukraine but asserted that both would someday become members of NATO, created the worst of all possible worlds: a strategic gray zone which left the two countries at the mercy of Vladimir Putin who ultimately invaded both and, in the case of Ukraine, did it twice. This created today’s enormous crisis in European security occasioned by Russia’s “illegal, unjustifiable and unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine.”

The Vilnius NATO Summit held on July 11-12, 2023 offered an enormous opportunity for Joe Biden to make good on his pledges to renew US leadership of its premier multilateral military alliance. How does one assess his performance?

NATO faced three main challenges going into the Vilnius meeting: overcoming Turkey’s ongoing blockade of Swedish accession to NATO, concluding new regional defense plans to respond to the increased threat of Russian aggression, and working out Ukraine’s future relationship to NATO. The third challenge, which would prove to be the most difficult, involved eliminating the gray zone created by the Bucharest decision and creating a stable security equilibrium in Europe that precludes a third round of Russian aggression against Ukraine.

Biden and his team deserve high marks for managing the question of Swedish accession. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s authoritarian leader has perfected a form of transactional diplomacy with NATO and the European Union that rests on his ability to blackmail allies and partners into providing him with benefits that solidify his political standing at home. The Biden team understood from the beginning that although Sweden’s alleged coddling of Kurdish terrorists was the pretext for Erdogan’s ongoing blockage of Sweden’s candidacy, in reality he was also looking for psychic and material payoffs from the United States, notably a bilateral meeting at Vilnius with Biden and assurances that the Biden administration would proceed with plans to sell modern F-16 fighters to Turkey over strong congressional objections to the proposed sale. At the end of the day, despite (or perhaps because of) some last-minute theatrics by Erdoğan, the issue was resolved.

Erdoğan got a meeting with Biden, whose only other advertised bilateral engagement was with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskyy, and secured an announcement of the US intent to proceed with the F-16 sale with some side accommodations to manage congressional objections. He also obtained promises of Swedish and US support for an expanded Turkish-EU customs agreement. In return, Erdogan lifted his objections to allow for a happy ending – although the Turkish Grand National Assembly will not actually vote to ratify Sweden’s accession until October, which leaves plenty of time for more mischief-making by either Erdoğan or Hungary’s Viktor Orban who has used Turkish objections to try and extract his own concessions from Sweden and the EU.

On the second challenge, NATO had what seems to be a partial success. It agreed to new defense plans and promised to “regularly exercise the Alliance’s ability to rapidly reinforce any Ally that comes under threat.” But it is important to note that the plans are in many ways aspirational, will likely take years to implement, and in any event depend on NATO’s success in addressing the distressing state of the European defense industrial base. The Vilnius Communique implicitly recognized this reality by acknowledging that NATO needs “a robust and resilient defense industry able to sustainably meet the need of significantly strengthened collective defense.” But whether the European allies will be capable of meeting this demand remains, at best, an open question.

The war in Ukraine, and particularly the steady demand for munitions and other weapons systems to support Kyiv’s efforts to resist Russian aggression, has thrown into sharp relief the parlous state of the defense industrial base in both the US and Europe.

In 2018, the congressionally-mandated National Defense Strategy Commission (full disclosure: I co-chaired the Commission) drew attention to the fact that during the counter-ISIL campaign in 2015 the US Air Force almost ran out of precision-guided munitions, that the US defense industrial base faced difficulty in making up such short falls and that the supply chains for the defense industrial base were anything but resilient. Today, the Department of Defense and the Congress are taking steps to shore it up (although much more needs to be done).

Europe is, if anything, in even worse shape. As Michael Schoellhorn, the CEO of Airbus Defense and Space, noted in the days after the Vilnius Summit, “the US has definitely kick-started their industrial base as part of their defense system,” but in Europe “by and large it has taken too long, it’s not decisive enough and there’s too much fragmentation.”

There is irony in all this. Despite Biden’s pledge to lead the Alliance, it has largely been the Europeans who have forced the pace when it comes to providing Ukraine with military assistance – including on key items like tanks, long-range strike systems and provision of F-16 fighter aircraft.

The US administration, crippled by an overwhelming fear of escalation dynamics (despite repeated indications that Russia’s so-called “red lines” have repeatedly disappeared in the face of NATO members provision of material support to Ukraine’s armed forces) has repeatedly been in the position of playing catch-up on its qualitative support for Kyiv even as it provides the lion’s share of the military assistance to Ukraine. The recent decision to provide Ukraine with the Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munition, a cluster munition that will provide Ukraine with an important, if hugely controversial capability, may be an indication that Washington is ready to move a bit more aggressively to ensure that Ukraine wins the war. And Biden’s statements that he is considering supplying Ukraine with ATACMS ballistic missiles (enabling it to strike Russian logistics and supply lines that have moved out of range of the earlier supplied HIMARS systems) are a hopeful sign that some of Biden’s reticence is yielding to reality. But the fear of provoking “World War III” remains deeply ingrained in the psyche of Biden’s team.

The third challenge – Ukraine’s future relationship with NATO – provoked most of the drama at Vilnius and it is here that Biden and his team performed most poorly. Ukraine’s military performance has earned it enormous respect in European capitals. Considering Ukraine’s growing reliance on Western systems and training, as well as its successes on the battlefield, it is clear that the country is developing an advanced military that will be increasingly capable of meeting any criterion for interoperability. Its reforms at home (despite continuing problems with corruption and rule of law) compare favorably with some of the states recently welcomed into NATO – Montenegro comes to mind.

Nonetheless, amidst growing sentiment in Europe that a clear path to NATO membership was the only way to guarantee the security and stability of the continent in the long run, Washington (and Berlin) remained stubbornly resistant. Biden’s statements ahead of the Vilnius Summit that Ukraine wasn’t ready for NATO membership and that he wasn’t going to make it easy for them were nothing less than insulting. Moreover, as the communique deliberations in Vilnius proceeded, the insular or even solipsistic quality of the Biden team was sadly on display.

The Americans were reportedly stunned that the support for Ukraine’s path to membership was broader than they had assessed. When draft language leaked which suggested that Ukraine could only become a member when Allies agreed that unspecified conditions had been met, Zelenskyy understandably reacted harshly, tweeting that the reasoning was absurd.

The American response to Zelenskyy was to suggest that all the Ukraine language in the communique should be deleted. It was an unserious response that reflected a curious lack of strategic empathy. Although the Biden team spends much of its time worrying about what might provoke Vladimir Putin, it seems to have much less understanding or time for a heroic national leader who is fighting valiantly for the survival of his country against a rapacious enemy. This is an enemy who has committed countless war crimes and whose leaders routinely indulge in eliminationist, genocidal rhetoric and totally irresponsible and dangerous, if empty, nuclear threats throughout the course of this terrible war. Combined with Biden’s conspicuous failure to attend the summit’s final dinner for heads of state, it was not a good look.

Biden’s speech in Vilnius after the meetings had concluded and his subsequent stop in Helsinki allowed him to take a victory lap and proclaim the summit’s success and NATO’s solidarity. In truth, the language in the communique on Ukraine’s future association with NATO was not as strong as it should have been but, in combination with some of the undertakings to provide long-term bilateral assistance to Ukraine that Washington spearheaded, it was not as bad as Ukrainians might have feared.

There will be future opportunities for NATO foreign and defense ministers to provide additional assistance and clear the path to eventual NATO membership for Ukraine, perhaps leading to a formal offer at next year’s 75^th anniversary summit in Washington. But Biden’s performance, despite some real achievements, was much less than his promised return of America to the head of the table. Sadly there was much more followership than leadership on display in Vilnius.

Amb. Eric Edelman serves as Counselor to JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy and Co-Chair of its Iran Policy Project and Eastern Mediterranean Policy Project. He served as U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2005 to 2009. 

Originally published in Jerusalem Strategic Tribune.

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• The undying loyalty of Turkey’s sizable religious community, to whom he has brought equal rights, prestige, and a significant measure of prosperity.
• A nationalist-populist appeal that sought to link his moderate left opponent, Kilicdaroglu, to both Kurdish terrorism and the despised West as well as, almost unfathomably, the LGBTQ+ community.
• A more positive nationalist appeal based on Turkey’s enhanced diplomatic profile and expansion of its domestic military-industrial sector.
• Largesse from the state treasury, including multiple increases in the minimum wage and reduction of the retirement age, among other government-bestowed benefits. To mark the extraction of natural gas from a 2020 find in the Black Sea, Erdogan promised every household limitless use of natural gas for one month; the bills indicating “nothing due” arrived just before the election.

Of course, as widely reported, the election took place in the context of a campaign in which the opposition was effectively blocked from significant access to electronic and print media and in which many Erdogan opponents – including hundreds, if not thousands, of leaders and activists from a pro-Kurdish party (the Green Left Party, or YSP, formerly the People’s Democracy Party, or HDP) that backed Kilicdaroglu – were behind bars for nonviolent advocacy.

Polarization Persists

This was Erdogan’s sixth consecutive election to the leadership of the country – three times as prime minister under the previous, parliamentary regime and now three times as president, the last two under a “strengthened presidency” system formalized in 2018. And, in all three presidential contests, he won by virtually the same 52% total. In 2014 and 2018, he won against multiple candidates in the first round by 51.7% and 52.6%, respectively; in 2023, he was held to 49.5% against multiple candidates (although mainly Kilicdaroglu) in the first round but scored 52.1% going mano a mano with Kilicdaroglu on May 28.

Arguably, all three of Erdogan’s presidential elections were widely seen in Turkey as referendums on Erdogan. He has not been able to expand his appeal (though merely holding onto his support in the face of rampant inflation largely of his own making is remarkable); nor have his opponents been able to expand the anti-Erdogan “party.” This time almost the entire opposition united around Kilicdaroglu; in the end, however, the final result looked similar to those in the past.

Cleavages in Turkey remain stubbornly real – economic, social, ideological, ethnic, and religious. Erdogan deepens those cleavages by playing on them, fostering an “us against them” mentality, mainly directed at secular, Western-oriented Turks – the products of “the Ataturk revolution” – whose values previously ruled Turkey. Erdogan extols religious, working-class, Sunni Turks and praises the Ottoman heroes they venerate.

This produces what is often described as “identity politics.” However it is labeled, there clearly is little love lost between the camp that supports Erdogan and that which opposes him – and not much movement of voters between the two camps.

In his victory speech, Erdogan was anything but magnanimous. He gave lip service to wanting to serve “all 85 million Turks”; however, he also spoke scornfully of Kilicdaroglu, chiding him about his defeat and dismissing his backers as “LGBTQ supporters” who spurn Turkey’s mainstream values.

For his part, Kilicdaroglu also shunned the role of gracious loser. He neither congratulated Erdogan nor explicitly conceded defeat, although he did not contest the final results. He called the election “the most unfair in recent years” and promised to continue to lead the fight against “this oppressive system.” His junior coalition partner Meral Aksener, head of the IYI, or Good, Party, did congratulate Erdogan but only while also expressing hope that his greed would “not blind his vision once again.”

Kilicdaroglu’s Failure

Kilicdaroglu lost a desperate, “deal with the devil” gamble to make up a 4.5-percentage-point first-round gap with Erdogan. Following the first round, Kilicdaroglu received the backing of an ultra-nationalist ethnic Turkish party, the Victory Party (VP), which had won slightly more than 2% of the parliamentary vote. In exchange, he agreed to toughen his policies on removing Syrian refugees from Turkey and on removing from office elected Kurdish mayors convicted of association with terrorism related to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. Using particularly the refugee issue, Kilicdaroglu also vastly toughened his campaign tone, projecting an anger that stood in sharp contrast to the positive, inclusive tone of the first round, with its optimism and finger-formed hearts as central motifs.

Kilicdaroglu’s bet was that he would pick up more votes from a Turkish public fed up with the presence of 4 million Syrian refugees than he would lose from Kurdish voters alienated by his new alignment with the VP. His gap with Erdogan did shrink slightly compared with the first round, from 2.5 million to 2.2 million. However, in an election in which overall voter participation declined (compared with the first round), Kurdish participation appears to have diminished significantly more than the national average.

CHP’s Difficult Choices

Kilicdaroglu’s CHP faces a number of difficult decisions. First, will the Nation Alliance – led by the center-left CHP in partnership with the nationalist IYI Party and four smaller parties – endure in the wake of defeat? An IYI Party congress in late June may go a long way toward determining that. IYI leader Aksener was vocal, but late, in her opposition to Kilicdaroglu’s candidacy in early March and never seemed truly at ease in her support of his campaign.

Second, who will lead the party? Those who expected the 74-year-old Kilicdaroglu to resign after the election instead heard someone who sounds like he expects to continue to lead both the party and, more generally, the opposition to Erdogan.

Third, crucially, what will be the future relationship of the CHP – and, if it endures, the Nation Alliance – with the Kurdish movement and YSP? In 2019 countrywide local elections, unofficial cooperation with the YSP (then the HDP) helped produce CHP victories in several large cities, including Istanbul and Ankara, and Kurdish voters were seen as kingmakers. During that campaign, cooperation between the CHP and HDP was widely assumed but never publicly acknowledged by either party.

This year’s presidential election, however, was different. The YSP, rather than run its own presidential candidate, openly endorsed Kilicdaroglu – an unprecedented decision by a pro-Kurdish party on behalf of a mainstream Turkish party candidate. That created a new dynamic. Many, if not most, Turks see the YSP as something like the civilian face of the PKK – Sinn Fein to the PKK’s Irish Republican Army. The fact that the YSP – and, for that matter, some PKK officials – publicly endorsed Kilicdaroglu gave Erdogan the opening he needed for demagoguery, spurring him repeatedly to denounce Kilicdaroglu as one who supports terrorists, takes his orders from terrorists, etc. This became one of his primary campaign themes.

CHP leaders now must ponder the impact the relationship with the YSP had on the 2023 election and the impact it is likely to have in the future. Some in the CHP, which has its own ethnic Turkish nationalist faction, may conclude that cooperation with the Kurds was a mistake altogether: Kilicdaroglu took a rhetorical beating from Erdogan for his YSP support, yet many Kurds did not even show up at the polls, they may argue. Many in the YSP, too, may question the value of an alliance with a CHP that barely spoke of the Kurdish issue during the campaign, other than to say that it should be “solved in Parliament.”

Foreign Policy: A Look Ahead

Erdogan’s 2023 campaign was his most anti-Western and anti-United States ever. Erdogan is unpredictable, but, if the campaign is any guide, it seems likely that Turkey will continue to tighten its ties with Russia and prove disruptive in the Western alliance.

In a recent CNN International interview, Erdogan praised his “special relationship” with Putin. At another point in the campaign, he rebuked Kilicdaroglu for criticizing Russia, reminding him that “relations with Russia are no less important than those with the United States.”

Meanwhile, regarding the bilateral issue currently of greatest importance to the U.S. administration, it is unclear whether Turkey will ratify Sweden’s NATO bid before the July 11-12 NATO summit in Vilnius. President Joseph R. Biden Jr. made a congratulatory phone call to Erdogan on May 29. Afterward, he said he raised the Sweden/NATO issue with Erdogan and that the Turkish president, in turn, reiterated Turkey’s desire to purchase F-16s from the United States. Some people see a potential trade-off in the making. Ankara has previously insisted the two issues are not linked, but, with a new context – Turkish elections in the rearview mirror – perhaps a deal will become possible. The issue remains complicated because of congressional considerations, Erdogan’s previous extreme demands of Sweden, and possibly the views of Erdogan’s junior alliance partner, the hard-nationalist Nationalist Action Party, or MHP.

Foreign Policy Autonomy?

Erdogan boasts of having made Turkey a more independent power, but Turkey’s financial situation suggests that it is far from independent. With its foreign exchange coffers virtually empty, Erdogan has acknowledged that unnamed Gulf states have provided emergency backing in the recent past. It is presumed that Qatar is one of those states, and some weeks ago Saudi Arabia announced a $5 billion transfer to Turkey. Russia deferred natural gas payments and reportedly provided significant additional aid as well. On the other hand, the European Union and United States absorb the majority of Turkish exports and provide the majority of its foreign direct investment, although the Gulf has become more active in the latter regard.

The Turkish economy will likely travel a rocky road in the months ahead. The Turkish lira has lost 90% of its value against the dollar over the past decade. On May 29, the day after the election, it fell to its lowest level ever, 20.1 to the dollar. It is unlikely that the Gulf and Russia would or even can keep it afloat indefinitely. Turkey still needs its commerce with the West, and that may impose a certain pragmatism on Erdogan’s foreign policy in the months ahead, whatever his anti-Western resentments.

For the most part, Erdogan probably will not seek to create new regional storms in the near term. Calm is what seems to be desired by the Turkish people, Turkey’s potential investors, and Turkey’s Gulf friends and benefactors.

Politics Ahead

In a country where politics almost never stops, the next campaign is already almost upon Turkey: Countrywide local elections are scheduled for March 2024. Erdogan will want to recover the mayoralties he lost to the CHP in Istanbul and Ankara and perhaps flip a couple of other major cities that the CHP took from his Justice and Development Party, or AKP, in 2019; should he succeed in all that, the opposition would have almost no prominent perch left in Turkish politics from which to address the country. Meanwhile, the likelihood is that Erdogan and the Parliament, in which his alliance holds a clear majority, will stay in office a full five-year term. Under Turkey’s presidential regime, it takes a 60% vote of Parliament or a simple presidential decision to declare new elections; neither seems likely.

The elephant in the room will remain inflation and Turkey’s overall economic turmoil. Erdogan has proved he can win a national election without a successful economy. But he may not be able to win back Istanbul and Ankara without it. And he knows he will not be able to begin to realize his vision of Turkish greatness – a “Turkish century,” as his campaign slogan had it – without achieving economic greatness as well.

Originally published in Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.

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In the wake of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, moving swiftly to incorporate Finland and Sweden into NATO is imperative for the geopolitical and military benefits it brings to European security. It is almost certain that a reluctant President Joe Biden will have to get involved, and it is equally likely that, at the end of the day, Erdoğan’s objections will be assuaged and the NATO enlargement process will move forward. But the damage that Erdoğan has done to Turkey’s standing in Europe and its long-term geopolitical interests (as opposed to his short-term domestic political interests) will be profound.

The damage is thrown into sharp relief by a recent domestic political crisis in Sweden and an extraordinary interview granted by Finland’s President Sauli Niinistö, one of Europe’s few statesmen of any vision or stature. The combination of the two demonstrate both the bad faith of Erdoğan, the unintended consequences of his recent hostage-taking diplomacy, and the potentially long-lasting aftereffects of the Turkish strongman’s strong arm diplomatic tactics.

Sweden’s path to NATO candidacy was not as direct as Finland’s, where the debate on NATO membership had been much more advanced for years. Moreover, the political situation in Sweden was more fraught since the Social Democratic government had a very narrow margin in the parliament, the country is facing elections in the fall, and the broad political consensus that existed in Finland was not in place—in fact the governing Social Democratic Party was divided over NATO membership. The Finns coordinated very carefully with the Swedes after the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, mindful that while public opinion had rapidly and radically transformed in Finland, the change in Sweden, also profound, was not on the same order of magnitude.

The recent Swedish government crisis had almost nothing to do with Turkey’s demands on NATO accession, but rather originated in efforts by opposition parties to force a vote of no-confidence on the minister of justice and interior because of rising gang violence in Sweden. The no-confidence motion fell one vote short and that vote was Left Party member Amineh Kakabaveh, a Swede of Kurdish origin, whose support keeps the Social Democratic government in office. The price she has extracted for her vote in this instance, however, was a commitment that the Swedish government would not cave in to Erdoğan’s demands that Stockholm turn over various Kurds that Turkey has accused of terrorism. Some observers are already suggesting that this episode comes close to “derailing” Finland and Sweden’s applications for the moment. Although that judgment seems premature, the entire episode demonstrates that Erdoğan’s extortionate diplomacy could lead him to miscalculate in ways that lead to a train wreck at the NATO summit.

Which brings us to President Niinistö’s interview in Ilta-Sanomat. Niinistö walks through in detail the extensive consultations undertaken by the always careful and thorough Finns as well as the more tentative Swedes before announcing their application for NATO membership. He specifies that the contacts went beyond the April 4 phone call between Niinistö and Erdoğan that had previously been reported and included exchanges between the foreign ministers and at lower levels of the ministries as well. The assurances of Turkish support for a Nordic round of enlargement were repeated in Brussels to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. Niinistö made clear that although Finland is willing to address Turkish concerns about terrorism (and indeed pointed to the fact that Finnish anti-terrorism legislation is consistent with European standards) and even the arms embargo (although not as a “condition” for membership), extradition of individuals will have to be dealt with through normal legal channels (the same position that the U.S. has taken with regard to Turkish demands for the extradition of cleric Fetullah Gulen for allegedly plotting the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey). Despite his typically laconic manner of expression, Niinistö’s anger at Turkish duplicity drips through the interview noting that had the Turks indicated they would raise an objection, Finland and Sweden wouldn’t have applied since being in a security limbo is the worst possible position for them.

The irony in all of this is that Finland and Sweden have been for the past 25 years among Turkey’s strongest advocates and supporters in Europe. In the late 1990s President William Jefferson Clinton nominated me to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Finland. When I arrived in the summer of 1998 I found my Finnish diplomatic colleagues at the Foreign Ministry and in the office of the president and prime minister (who both have responsibilities for the conduct of Finland’s foreign relations) hard at work preparing to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union which they had only recently joined in 1995 The extremely thorough, hardworking, and talented Finnish diplomatic leaders had concluded from their studies of past EU presidencies that an unexpected issue would always crop up during the presidency and dominate it. Although they recognized that it was impossible to predict just what that issue might be, they decided that the possibility of renewed crisis or negotiations over Cyprus might be such an issue and set to work preparing themselves to handle it if it emerged as an issue during their presidency. This entailed lots of diplomatic contact with Greece and Turkey, needless to say.

As the Finns settled into their first EU presidency, however, what greeted them was not geopolitical tremors but real, no-shit earthquakes of significant magnitude in first Turkey and then Greece in the late summer of 1999. The geological phenomena led in short order to massive efforts at humanitarian relief in the Eastern Mediterranean that brought, in its wake, a rapid and unexpected improvement in the Greek-Turkish relationship. The Finns’ hard work and anticipatory diplomacy put them in an excellent position to capitalize on this. Although there was no Cyprus crisis for them to resolve, they suddenly found themselves in a position to put the question of Turkish accession to the European Union on the agenda at the December 1999 Helsinki EU Summit.

EU membership had been a longstanding goal of Turkish statecraft dating back to the initial application by Turkey in 1959 for associate membership in what was then called the European Economic Community. Anchoring Turkey in the economic structures of Europe to complement its important role as a NATO ally had also been a key bipartisan objective of U.S. European policy through the administrations of nine different U.S. presidents, from Eisenhower to Clinton. Hence, I was actively involved, as U.S. ambassador, on the margins of the EU Summit that December in helping the Finns work out a formula acceptable to the Turks. Despite intensive efforts with my then colleagues in Ankara, Ambassador Mark Parris and his deputy, Jim Jeffrey, it ultimately took a phone call from Air Force One by President Clinton to the then-Turkish Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit to get the Turks to take yes for an answer to something that they had been seeking for 40 years—the prospect of opening accession talks to join Europe. Finland’s early preparation and assiduous efforts paid off and Turkey’s potential candidacy was now clearly on the EU agenda.

Five years later I found myself in Ankara as George W. Bush’s ambassador to the Republic of Turkey when the EU faced the decision of whether to actually open accession talks with Turkey on all of the chapters of the Acquis Communitaire—the steps that Turkey would need to take to adapt its economic, social and political institutions to enable it to actually undertake the responsibilities of membership in the EU.

The Finns had remained strong supporters of Turkish candidacy. Former Finnish President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Marti Ahtisaari became chairman of an independent commission on Turkey (supported by funding from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation) that lobbied for Turkey’s candidacy before the December 2004 Brussels EU Summit. Sweden also had emerged as a key supporter. My Swedish counterpart in Ankara, Ann Dismorr, was a particularly active advocate and sympathetically described Turkey’s reform efforts in her 2005 book Turkey Decoded. Working with her, British Ambassador Peter Westmacott (later Her Majesty’s Ambassador to France and the U.S.) as well as other American colleagues, we pushed for the EU to open the process to Turkey. At the end the invitation was offered—albeit with some caveats that were hard for Turkey to swallow. Once again Western leaders—in this case, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac—had to cajole Erdoğan for hours into taking yes for an answer. It should have been a moment of triumph for Turkey, but Erdoğan’s reaction betrayed at best ambivalent feelings about the prospect of firmly grounding Turkey in European institutions.

In short order, European leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel emerged who were much less sympathetic to Turkey, and Turks have long since written off the EU accession process as Erdoğan’s increasing authoritarianism has taken Turkey farther and farther away from European standards of democracy and rule of law. But even without an active EU accession process, alienating traditional supporters in Europe is foolish and short-sighted by any standard. The anger and hostility this has engendered in Northern Europe (and not just in Sweden and Finland) is palpable and will not be forgotten for a long time. Moreover, Erdogan’s insistence on using the Nordic candidacies for bargaining purposes will reinforce every existing bad stereotype that regards Turks not as Europeans but as Middle Easterners more interested in haggling in the souk than in policy outcomes. It is a high bill to pay for the autocrat’s several minutes in the sun at Madrid and his pathetic efforts to demonstrate his relevance and importance to Turkish voters in the run-up to elections in 2023 at the expense of Europe’s larger security needs as it faces the biggest war on the continent since 1945.

Eric S. Edelman is a former U.S. ambassador to both Finland (1998-2001) and Turkey (2003-2005) and was undersecretary of defense for policy (2005-2009).

Originally published in The Dispatch.

This op-ed was made possible by the generous support of the Gettler Family Foundation and a portion of the research was conducted on the Benjamin Gettler International Policy Trip.

The post What Erdoğan Has Wrought? appeared first on JINSA.

Erdoğan’s view seems to represent a change of heart from earlier Turkish support for Finnish membership, conveyed to Niinisto in an April 4 phone call and in bilateral diplomatic contacts, not to mention Turkey’s traditional support for NATO’s enlargement since the end of the Cold War. The Turkish volte face reportedly has left diplomats at NATO headquarters in Brussels furious with the Turks, despite the public statements that all is well and the clear expectation that the alliance ultimately will move forward with Finnish and Swedish membership.

In this regard, the Turkish authoritarian and kleptocrat seems to resemble no one more than former Illinois governor and convicted felon Rod Blagojevich who, when he found out he could appoint Barack Obama’s successor to the U.S. Senate, famously said, “I’ve got this thing and it’s f—ing golden. I’m not just giving it up for f—ing nothing.” Erdoğan sees the Finnish and Swedish application for membership as an opportunity to accomplish multiple objectives—burnishing his domestic position by highlighting the important international role he plays and gaining leverage with both the West and his difficult and complicated Russian neighbor.

In the first instance, we should recall that Erdoğan and the Turks have done this before in the NATO context. First in 2009, when then-Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen was on the verge of being appointed NATO secretary general and then again in 2019 when Turkish diplomats blocked NATO defense plans for the Baltic states and Poland. The pretext for threatening to veto Rasmussen was the “scandal” over the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten four years earlier. President Barack Obama’s first NATO summit ended up almost entirely consumed by negotiations with Erdoğan over measures to placate the Turkish leader’s alleged rage over Rasmussen’s insult to Muslims worldwide because of his defense of free expression. It turned out that Erdoğan’s concerns were perhaps more prosaic than principled: He later told Turkish television that he had relented after President Obama had promised that Rasmussen would have a Turkish deputy and that Turkish general officers would be better represented at NATO headquarters.

In the second instance, NATO had drawn up defense plans for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland at the latter’s request in the wake of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and destabilization of eastern Ukraine in 2014. The alliance approved the plans at the December 2018 NATO London Summit, but Turkey blocked implementation, demanding that NATO recognize the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria as a terrorist group. After six months of intransigence Turkey finally lifted its objection under pressure from the rest of the allies.

Erdoğan’s “strongman” need for constant attention and his failure, so far, to secure a bilateral meeting with Biden or to establish the kind of access he enjoyed to the U.S. president under both Obama and Trump undoubtedly explain the Turkish leader’s initial reaction. Just as it took Obama’s persuasive efforts in 2009 to talk Erdoğan off the ledge regarding Rasmussen, I suspect President Biden will have to spend a disproportionate amount of time sweet-talking and jaw-boning Erdoğan to drop his opposition to Finland and Sweden. The opportunity cost will be high since the NATO summit in June should be focused on responding to Russian aggression and NATO’s new strategic concept in the light of rapidly changing security conditions in Europe.

Recognition by foreign leaders of Erdoğan’s international role serves more than to stroke his ego: It also serves an important domestic political need. As Turkey approaches elections in 2023, Erdoğan’s poll numbers have been sagging. He is undoubtedly calculating that the NATO spotlight will not just reinforce his international importance to the Turkish public the but tying the issue to Sweden’s support for Kurdish nationalists will predictably whip up Turkish nationalism. That can handily also serve as a distraction from the economic management disaster that Erdoğan has created in Turkey by his insistence on keeping interest rates low. The result has been a 70 percent inflation rate and enormous hardship for the Turkish public and businesses.

Erdoğan, however, is also looking for international leverage with both the U.S. and Russia and not just personal recognition. As is well known, Turkey’s purchase of the Russian S-400 air and missile defense system created a crisis in Turkey’s bilateral relationship with the U.S. and NATO. It led to Turkey’s expulsion from the F-35 program and the imposition of sanctions under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). In the wake of the F-35 cancellation, Turkey has recently approached the Biden administration seeking both upgrades to its existing F-16s and a request to purchase new, more advanced F-16s and associated weapons packages. A preliminary sale of upgrade kits and missiles worth about $300 million was recently informally notified to the Congress. Erdoğan may think that holding Finland and Sweden hostage will provide the Biden team with arguments on the Hill to proceed with these arms sales packages (both the preliminary package and the larger F-16 package that the Turks have requested). Erdoğan needs to proceed with caution, however, because as Mitch McConnell indicated in Helsinki on May 16, there is broad support for Finland and Sweden in Congress, and many members would like nothing better than to trade Turkey as a member for the two Nordic states. (There is no mechanism for kicking member states out of NATO, but this sentiment reflects Turkey’s loss of any real backing on Capitol Hill—which represents the toll that Erdoğan’s creeping authoritarianism and reflexive anti-Americanism has taken on Turkey’s much more robust support in the past).

Finally, Erdoğan may also calculate that creating a ruckus in NATO serves the purpose of endearing him to Putin and may redirect Russia’s attention away from the ongoing supply of TB2 Bayraktar drones to Ukraine (one of the most effective weapons in Kyiv’s arsenal in destroying Russia’s invasion force), thus helping Erdoğan manage the complicated minuet he has been dancing with Putin—his closest “competimate”—for several years now.

It is almost certainly the case that Erdoğan and Turkey eventually will yield in the face of both blandishments and pressures from the other 29 allies in NATO and allow Finland and Sweden to take their place as capable and responsible allies, but not before he has reminded the rest of the alliance—once again—that an authoritarian Turkey remains an unpredictable and unreliable ally in a crucial geo-strategic location in the midst of Europe’s most serious crisis since the end of the Cold War.

Eric S. Edelman is a former U.S. ambassador to both Finland (1998-2001) and Turkey (2003-2005) and was undersecretary of defense for policy (2005-2009).

Originally published in The Dispatch.

This op-ed was made possible by the generous support of the Gettler Family Foundation and a portion of the research was conducted on the Benjamin Gettler International Policy Trip.

The post The Strongman Cometh appeared first on JINSA.