Angry Planet - Erdogan’s Path to Pure Authoritarianism

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.comTurkey’s president has grabbed a bit more power for himself with the recent arrest of the mayor of Istanbul. The mayor was thought to be one of the few politicians who could challenge Erdogan.Steven Cook will take us through it.Talking about authoritarians is one of the things we do here, so strap in for another tale of turmoil on an angry planet.Shilling for kagi.com“Competitive authoritarianism”Negotiating with the Kurdistan Workers’ PartyHow to court the Kurdish vote while killing KurdsA stable of failsons“The Turkish Marc Andreessen”Why Erdogan hates PennsylvaniaDisproving McDonald’s Diplomacy, once againLeveling a park to build a mallHow Erdogan processed the Arab Spring“Fools, knaves, and rubes”—Oh my!Turkey Can’t Live With, or Without, ErdoganUkraine Has Written a Folk Song About Its DroneTurkey and Israel are becoming deadly rivals in SyriaSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. I assume that Zoom has gotten progressively smarter from the first time I used it in like March 2020. It has, but like with any of these kind of automated systems, smart for whom? Like, what's your use case? And, okay, good point.

It's like I finally abandoned, like last week actually finally abandoned Google search. Like I won't use it anymore. I've got a search engine that I pay for, which stings, but it works. And it works the first time. K-A-G-I. And it's like you can get like 300 searches just to test it out. But it was this thing where I was like looking for one of our old podcasts so I could link to it, Jason. It was the one where we had talked to the woman from the.

New York Times about the Russians that go to the front and then go home and like, yeah. Oh, like do the same thing. Yeah, and rape people and all the horrible things.

Yeah. And like no matter what I typed into Google, I could not get it to link me directly to the like the episode. Even now that Gemini is sort of embedded in it and stuff like that. Yes. I refute, but I refuse to use that stuff. And then I once tried using Duck Duck,

go. Duck, But a lot of it's basically... It was okay, but it was not. Yeah. Try Kagi is what it's called K-A-G-I. But yeah, so like I couldn't find it with Google. And then I was like, I've been putting off using signing up for Kagi.

And I finally did. And there was the first result. And how much is it? Five bucks for 500 or 12 bucks a month for unlimited. That's pretty good. Yeah. And it's... I mean, when I think about all the other shit that I spend money on.

at least it's useful help with my productivity yeah and it's yeah it's night and day difference it's like what google was you know 15 years ago when it was not an advertising company when it was actually a search company exactly and that i mean i have a buddy who i have a buddy who works for google uh in government relations he spent 15 years in china and was u s t r c u s t r rep in Beijing for a while and i was like what is it that you guys do I've no idea. I went and hung out with him in the San Francisco office. Well, this is cool.

I mean, I like sitting in this amazing office. But like, what do all of these people do all day? He's like, oh, we have a range of products. I'm like, no. I don't believe this. Well, unfortunately, more and more people are asking that question of more and more people. What exactly is it you do every day, sir? I know.

And actually, being a think tanker, want to hide from that. I mean, I have a good answer for it. But whenever I'm sitting on a ski lift and someone gets friendly and that like asked me what I do, I would say, I do something that you can only do in Washington, D.C. And they're like, what do you do? I was like, I'm a professor without teaching classes or going to faculty. And he's like, okay, we kind of get that. But like, that sounds nice, actually. It's nice. It's very nice. I will hold on to it forever unless they kick me out and then God knows what will happen. become of me.

Well, you've got a good home depot. I mean, there's always Portugal, right? Exactly. Well, speaking of authoritarian's and the results of their rule, we are here today with Stephen Cook, who has been

on the show more than once, and is probably one, two, or three of among our favorite guests, but we refuse to rank the top three. Well, thank you. I'll take any one of those rankings. We refuse to rank on, on air. On air, but yeah. Off the air. We've got to us afterwards. We've got a spreadsheet. Okay. Okay, cool. So, but today we're going to start off by talking about Erdogan, the, well, we guess we technically can't say dictator. Can we say strong man of Turkey?

Strong man's good. Strong man's good. And I'm comfortable saying, I'm comfortable saying dictator. Well, actually, maybe we should talk about that distinction. Uh, so Stephen, Stephen, Could you just sort of introduce yourself again? Because a lot of people who listen to the show will know who you are. Thanks. I am the Enrico Matez Senior Fellow from Middle East and Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, where I've been since early 2004. And my areas of specialty are politics in the Middle East and Turkish politics. And I guess that's why I'm here to talk about everyone.

Yep. So is he a dictator? a dictator, I guess. And whatever one is, is he one. Yeah, you know, books like these social scientists, political scientists, we like to have all of these categories for people. And for anybody who's been following what's happened in Turkey beginning a couple of weeks ago when the mayor of Istanbul, the primary opponent of Erdogan was detained and then subsequently arrested, people talked about, oh, now Turkey is moving away from competitive authoritarianism to full-blown authoritarianism. And I guess you could say full-blown authoritarianism is like a dictatorship.

But, you know, I would have, first, I quibble with this idea of competitive authoritarianism. And the idea behind competitive authoritarianism is that there are elections and elections have meaning. and they can produce different outcomes. But it's within the overall contours of an authoritarian political system. Another way of putting it is illiberal democracy. But, you know, my colleagues and I can debate forever, the fine gradations between calling something in a liberal democracy and a competitive authoritarian system.

What I've said about Turkey for a long time is that I felt that the idea of competitive authoritarianism sort of missed the nuances and complexities of the Turkish system. So while it's true that the mayor who had been arrested won his position three times, fair and square, the ruling party subsequently went about stripping him of his power. So the outcome was the same regardless. It was the deepening of Turkey's authoritarian system. I think what protesters in the streets in Turkey

and the main opposition political party have been warning about is that if the detention and arrest of the mayor of Istanbul, this guy, Ekramma, Mamolo, who is by polls the most popular politician in Turkey and who is a potent threat to Erdogan's rule, if he remains in prison and is out of politics forever, it is a short way from where Turkey is now. with people in the streets to an out-and-out real dictatorship that, you know, looks more like, you know, Belarus than it did Turkey in even, you know, 2004 when the same President Erdogan, although he was prime minister at the time, was overseeing packages of constitutional reforms to bring Turkey more in line with the European Union. It's been a really fascinating 20 years in which there's been a de-democratization in Turkey and where people are literally talking about. is this a dictatorship or not? I don't think it's quite a dictatorship, but certainly we're talking about an authoritarian political order. It's kind of funny because you're talking about stripping the mayor's

power, and that's exactly what happened in North Carolina after the last election, where the assembly, when they had a supermajority, voted to make sure that the next governor, who just happens to be a Democrat, would have no say over anything. Yeah, and this is why in the kind of of global rankings of democracies over the course of the last decade, the United States has slipped because of this kind of raw power politics. And I think the United States is really far away from becoming Turkey. But I would, I would also say, and I would, you know, to be perfectly honest, there are times when I'm reading the news, I get a news alert, and I mummelled myself, I think I'm living in Turkey. And so there are,

these questions about the quality of American democracy at this point if a legislature can strip a duly elected governor or mayor of their power. And it's a very similar dynamic to what has happened to Ekrami Mamalu in Istanbul or to any number of opposition mayors in Turkey Southeast who come from the predominantly Kurdish Ghem party in which, mayors have been removed and the municipality has been taken over by a receiver that's been appointed by the ruling party. What's the justification for stripping him of power and arresting him? Well, so they said, I mean, this is, I mean, the irony of this is amazing.

So there were two charges. He was detained for two reasons. One corruption and the other one is terrorism. And they arrested him on the corruption charge. And, you know, the stunning irony of the AKP and Erdogan, like, overseeing the arrest of the mayor of Istanbul on corruption is sort of extraordinary. It's true that when Erdogan was the mayor of Istanbul in the mid-90s, he kind of cleaned up City Hall.

But over the long period of, you know, what is it now, almost 23 years that he's been in power, there are credible allegations of massive corruption at the most senior levels of the Turkish government within the party and even touching the president's family himself. And so then they're getting Imammolu on corruption when I think the evidence is quite flimsy. The terrorism thing is also absurd. And even in Turkey's deeply compromised judicial system, I don't think that they could make the terrorism charges stick so they stuck. with corruption, but that doesn't mean that they're not going to try with terrorism. What's the nature of the terrorism charge?

It's always related to Kurdish separatism and Kurdish nationalism. And what Imamolo has done is actually someone took a page from Erdogan's playbook, which was to say, and this is Erdogan 1.0's playbook, or maybe Erdogan 2.0, once he became the prime minister in 2003, which is to say, hey, you know what? The commonalities are, our commonalities are greater than our differences. So can't we all just be, you know, happy Turks, happy Muslims within Anatolia? And he has reached out to predominantly Kurdish Dem party, which the ruling party from time to time has wanted to accuse of having links to this group called the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, which has been waging a war against the Turkish state since the mid-1980s.

So it's, you know, it's a number of times removed. And I think it's much harder to make the case on terrorism with, you know, not being absolutely totally ridiculous rather than just ridiculous. If you're living in Turkey, how much are you going to have to pay out, let's say, to get a building permit or what is it that level of corruption or? Is it more just people stealing from the treasury? I mean, Erdogan has amassed a tremendous amount of wealth. So there is definitely the kind of skimming that people are talking about. And there's definitely the sort of buying off of legislators and ministers and so on and so forth.

You know, all these guys have beautiful watches and things like that. Remember the earthquake in February, was it 2023 or 20, I think it was 2023? and all of those buildings collapsed. I mean, just pancake down. And that's because connected builders got passes from building inspectors because money was changing hands here. So it's everything from petty corruption like that all the way up to, you know, kind of the most senior levels.

And if you take listeners back to late 2013 and 2014, there was a spectacular revelation of corruption at the highest levels in which there were, there was audio of any number of ministers talking about openly about the grafting corruption that they're engaged in. There's audio of Erdogan instructing his son to hide money. Of course, because this was a competitive authoritarian system, the parliament made, did a quote-unquote investigation and said, in fact, the police and the people involved in recording this stuff were attempting a coup and that Erdogan was, and the ministers were not engaged in corruption. This was all kind of manufactured, a Turkish version of fake news.

But these were obviously credible allegations of corruption that the ruling party essentially, you know, swept under the rug for the. big man as Erdogan is sometimes referred. Can we talk about, um, obviously, we talk about anything you want. Uh, let's, let's talk about the Kurds more than, um, because the beginning of the month and these, this is all based on like half remembered stories. So, and I know the things.

And so much has happened. So much has happened. Both in Turkey as well as the United States. Uh, there were, right, didn't the Kurd slap tariffs on, no, I'm kidding. Your stories can get out and get confused, right? Yeah, good Lord. Yeah, something like that. So there was talk.

I remember reading news stories about talk coming out of Turkey that possibly the PKK leader was going to be released from prison in exchange for a pledge for like nonviolence. And that may change after years and years and years may change the nature of the relationship between Turkey's ruling party and the PKK. Like, where does that stand now? Yeah. So, um, what happened is that a guy named Abdullah Ojalon, who is the leader of the PKK, who was apprehended by Turkey with the help of the United States and Israel leaving the Greek embassy in Kenya in 1999. Ojelan was, you know, Turkey's most wanted man.

and he had been in Syria, he got kicked out of Syria, he ended up somehow in Kenya and found safe haven in the Greek embassy in the Kenyan capital. And thanks to Israeli and American intelligence, they tipped off the Turks who then arrested Ojalon coming out of the Greek embassy. He's been in an island prison in the Sea of Marmara ever since. and but he remains the leader of the PKK and the sort of, you know, conscience of the PKK. And from time to time there have been negotiations between him and the government over an end to the conflict, what they call a Kurdish opening. And this most recent one, Ogelon, again, he's been in prison since 1999.

So he's been in prison since for 26 years. he wants to get out. And so there's been some outreach between him and the government, first with parliamentarians, then even the Turkish nationalists and the government. And he finally called on his organization whose fighters are hold up in the mountains of Iraq in which they conduct operations against Turkey from Iraq and in that kind of very rough border area between Turkey, Iraq and Iran. and called on them to lay down their arms and bring this conflict that began in 1984 finally to an end and kind of normalized the relationship between Kurds and Turks,

which is something Erdogan had sought to do early on, although he shifted to the nationalist right as his political interest dictated over, you know, for the last 10 or 12 years or so. And this held out hope for peace. I mean, you know, Turks, most of the PKK's recent operations have been against Turkish military, but, you know, they have attacked Turkish civilian targets. They have attacked Turkish Airlines offices in Europe and things like that. And it brought in, would bring an end to this, to this violence that has taken an estimated 40,000 people. How many Kurds, how many Turks, very, very, how many security personnel, very, very unclear. But lots of people have died over these last 40 years.

And the military leadership that remains, you know, in the Iraqi mountains who said, okay, you know, we take this very, very seriously, but we're only going to lay down our arms if the Turkish government actually upholds its end of the bargain. And so that's where we are. I mean, how do you uphold your end of the bargain unless you start down this road of an agreement and everybody tests each other? So we're not really quite there yet. And I think it speaks to the fact that the leadership outside of prison didn't immediately

lay down in terms of suggest that the PKK, although it venerates Ogelene, may have moved on a bit, even though like I said, they continue to call him the leader and so on and so forth. The other thing that this might have done is change the nature of Turkey's relationship with the Kurds of Syria. Now, the PKK at the time of the Syrian uprising went to its Syrian cousins and said, look, no good for you is going to come from this. And you guys need to not just be, you know, Marxists and, you know, pronounce how you do, but you also need to protect yourself. So they help them set up something called the people's protection units, which became the core of the Syrian Democratic forces, which will be able to be. became the American partner in fighting ISIS in Syria. When the Turkish government said, no, we're not interested in fighting ISIS, we're actually more interested in fighting Kurdish nationalism. Turkish government

was fighting the SDF and the YPG, which is an offshoot of the PKK. Get it? It's a little bit complicated. In any event, the Turks regard the YPG as essentially the PKK, the Turkish government as the what. And so if the PKK laid down its arms, there was this potential where the YPG would follow suit. But that doesn't seem to be happening because the YPG maintains it's separate. And it has a lot of concerns in Syria, even though there was supposed to be a deal between the Syrian Kurds and the central government to absorb the YPG slash SDF into the security services. That was like one day. And then there was a constitutional principle. announcement in Damascus that didn't even mention the Kurds, that didn't even talk about any of this.

And the Kurds have said, hey, we're, we're looking forward to settling our differences here, but we're not. So everything is kind of at a standstill right now. As Syria spirals and external actors are involved in Syria. So all of these issues sort of play on each other and create tensions within Turkish society and Syrian society. and within Kurdish society. It's extremely, extremely complicated. Well, I wouldn't lay down my weapons, would you if you were the YPG? No. I mean, Syria is hardly a stable place.

And even, and I'm not, let me just say, before, you know, any Turks listen to this, I'm not, I'm not advocating for the PKK or the YPG here, but it doesn't make sense for them to just say, okay, we're laying down our arms because Ogeland said so. Ogeland's been in jail for 26 years. He doesn't understand. what's going on here. And previous openings between the Turkish government and the Kurds have come to not.

And the most recent one in 2015 ended up in a renewal of kind of broad-scale violence in which Turkish security services leveled Kurdish villages in the southeast and part of Turkey. I mean, you know, people talk about Gaza. Well, yeah, it looked kind of like Gaza in those places. I just want to add a throw further complication in there. enormous Kurdish population in Turkey. 20% of the population. And they do vote.

They do. So the Kurds are, what's, you know, 20% of 81, 82 million people. That's a very significant number of people. Something like 14, 15 million. 14 or 15 million. The second largest Kurdish city in the world is Istanbul. And the Kurds tend to vote for either

a series of Kurdish-based parties that it's all the same party but with different names, but they keep getting closed, and then they return. The leaders get jailed. They remain leaders, but other, so they vote for this predominantly Kurdish-based party and, or they vote for the ruling justice

and development party. One of my most fascist Turkish friends used to refer to the Justin Development Party's Turkish acronym is AKP, and he used to refer to the AKP as the Arab and Kurd Party. Because there are conservative, religiously conservative Kurds who feel more comfortable with the AKP's more religiously oriented, values-based worldview. The succession of Kurdish parties are kind of democratic socialist,

more secular in outlook, and so and so forth, and they're less, obviously less religious. So those are the kind of weights of where Turkish politics are. But what the Justice and Development Party has sought to do, has sought to prevent these series of Kurdish parties from garnering enough votes so that they can be kingmakers in the parliament. You still need a coalition. In early days of the AKP, it ruled,

had a majority in the parliament and it ruled alone. But in the last two rounds, it has needed a partner. But way and get a partner is by reducing the vote totals for other parties. And the Kurds have been an obvious target for the Kurds. And one of the vagaries of the Turkish electoral system, if a party doesn't make it into the parliament, if it doesn't meet the threshold of votes to get into the parliament, all those votes accrue to the party that gets the most votes. So if you push down on the Kurdish parties, which are sometimes, you know, at that threshold, although they have more plenty of seats now, you get more votes. Question about the Kurds. So are they the same branch of Islam as the, as most Turks, I mean, as Sunni, I think? They're predominantly Sunni. So that's not a fault line.

It's not, it's an ethnic difference. There was also, Kurdish Jews, small Christian minority, but it's an ethnic difference and a linguistic difference. Kurds speak a language that is closer to Farsi than Turkish, and they're ethnically different from Turks. And so what I think one of the important things to remember about Erdogan in his earlier incarnation was an effort on the part of Erdogan and the AKP to sort of. mitigate or soften the importance of Turkish nationalism. And if you did that and you emphasized everybody as being Muslim and Muslim brothers and sisters,

you could mitigate that ethnic difference between Kurds and Turks that had really created, you know, all kinds of political tension throughout the history of the Turkish Republic. seemed like a pretty good idea, except for the fact that Erdogan felt after, I believe it was the 2014, 2013 and 2014, I think it was 2014 municipal elections in which the Justice Navellum Party didn't lose any mayoralties, but they seated votes to the hardcore nationalists who are deeply hostile to the Kurds that he tacked to the nationalist right in order to protect that flank and took a much, much harder line on on the Kurds ever since what are the term limits for Erdogan debt on paper what are the term limits for Erdogan two two to five year is it two five year

they keep changing the constitution so it's hard to it's either two four or two five but what has happened so he was first elected president in 2014. So if he was turned out, really, he would have left office by now. But what they keep doing is they keep amending the Constitution, which is why I can't remember whether it's four or five. And they say, oh, we just amended the Constitution. That means that the term that he's serving doesn't really count because the new amended Constitution doesn't go into force until it appears in the official Gazette on such and such a day. So we can start him a moment. over again and he gets another two terms. And so they're talking about, again, almost as soon as

the last presidential election, everyone said, oh, we need a new constitution or we need to at least amend the one we have. And there's a real, there's, you know, he's, he's only 70 or 71, but he looks a lot older. And I think, and he's been sick. And so I think they, he genuinely wants to write a new constitution to protect the changes that he's made in Turkey over the course of the last couple decades from being undone once he passes from the scene. So certainly if they're writing a new constitution, he'll get at least another two terms out of it. But he has said he'll be there until he goes to the grave. In offhanded remarks, I mean, he'd get up and say, I will be there to the grave.

I think that's too much for even, you know, the deep. deeply compromised Turkish political system to bear. But I would expect that it's a possibility, but it's a lower possibility than other outcomes. For Erdogan, the low possibility for him to go off into retirement and, you know, live out his days in some castle somewhere, you know, on the Black Sea or something like that. I just don't see it. Does he have a child who he's grooming to take over? Or, I mean, what kind of, because that's my. my least favorite kind of authoritarianism. He's got three kids.

He's got three kids. Bilal, his son, and two daughters, Sumaya and Esra. Bilal is like a clown. Well, so is Don Jr. would people talk about him? Well, right. But I don't think people even take the idea seriously that Bilal could be a leader in Turkey. All three kids went to Indiana University.

They're all three of Hoosiers. Um, Bilal started his PhD at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where I got an MA. Um, it's unclear whether he actually ever finished. But from what I hear, he wasn't, uh, the brightest of students. Um, he kind of looks like Turkish Mark Andresen, so I'm looking at pictures of him. Sorry. And then they're the two daughters, Sumaya and Esra. Sumaya, who I've met is like Erdogan. She's got like ice in her veins. She's got like ice in her veins. and she is a tough, tough cookie. But she's a woman and she's not going to be the next leader of Turkey.

And then her sister, Esther, is married to a guy named Barat Al-Bairk, who was like sort of the Jared Kushner of Turkey for a while. But he screwed some stuff up. He was stepping out on her. His stock seems to have fallen. So maybe Sumaya's husband, who's atop the defense industry, remember at the beginning of the Ukraine war, there was a lot of talk about Turkish drones.

This is the guy who sits atop the company that produces those Turkish drones. The bierre, right? What's that? The biroctars, that is that my second? Yeah, the bryctars. The TB2s. Right. So it's very unclear what's going to happen.

And which may give you a clue as to why Erdogan's real term limit is death. This is someone who is a micromanager and believes that he's surrounded by a bunch fools, rubs, and knaves, and only he can do it. And so it's a problem identifying a successor to him. Outside of the family, you know, people talk about Hakan Fidon, the now foreign minister, who was the intelligence chief. I had thought that if Erdogan were to drop dead, there would be a battle among these kind of big personalities between them. But there is no obvious. successor to Erdog. And I think that justice and development party leaders say, well, you know, we're a democratic system. A leader will emerge. There'll be a presidential election. I mean,

that's not really the way it's going to happen. You brought up the intelligence chief or former intelligence chiefs. I'm just wondering how much of a police state Turkey is at this point. If you're living there, you know, what can you say? What can't you say? Yeah. That kind of. kind of thing. It's pretty significant. You know, first of all, there have been just waves of purges in Turkey for a decade. They've targeted the followers of Fetula Gulan, this cleric who passed away in the last year who was set up in Pennsylvania, which is why in the past Erdogan's speeches, you'd hear him railing about Pennsylvania.

Like to the, you know, if someone who was watching it in translation, they're like, what's his problem with Pennsylvania? You had to know that Gulen lived in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. So as well as other opponents. And, you know, any kind of hint that you might be a supporter of Gulen could get you arrested, your property expropriated, your business taking away from you. there are Turks who will not, you know, like talk to me on the phone or Zoom with me on the phone or me. I'm not even, you know, my colleague Henri Barkey, who is, was kind of the dean of the Turkey Watchers in Washington, who was born in Turkey, and was identified in the Turkish press after the failed coup of 2016 as being one of the master. minds of the coup. And so crazy, crazy things like this. And so Turks have been very, very careful. Some of the people who've been

swept up in purges can't get lawyers because anybody defending any of these people themselves can be then arrested. So it's pretty, it's pretty grim. And newspapers are shut down regularly from what I've read, if they can even open, I guess. Right. I mean, I think the newspapers that had been opponents, newspapers and media properties that had been controlled by the Gulenists were expropriated and taken over. But even before that, newspapers that were critical of Erdogan were often the family or company

that owned them were, Erdogan would use the state, the Turkish state, to be. go after him, levy huge tax fines, forcing them to give up these media properties to Erdogan cronies, would change the editorial line of, so most of the media is in the hands of pro-Erduan voices without necessarily being in the hands of the government. Although, you know, Turkish radio and television service, Anadolu agency, which is the Turkish state news agency, these were, you know, the Turkish press was never great, but there was, you know, there was a certain amount of independence among some of it. they've turned those two things, the TRT and Anadolu, into basically mouthpieces of the AKP and, you know, wild supporters of Erdogan.

It does seem like a very similar playbook to what's happened in Russia as well, how the various media properties were taken away, given to loyalists, even the amending of the Constitution so that Putin could have yet another two terms. I know that there's that Putin and Erdogan are sort of friends. I mean, insofar as, I mean, it's a political thing. Friend of me. Okay. So, but is Erdogan actually looking toward Russia for an example? It just seems so similar. Yeah.

I actually think that Erdogan was the leading edge of this kind of de-democratization. Okay. People often talk about Orban. They talk about Putin. But Erdogan's been in power longer than these guys. Well, not necessarily, well, when did Putin come to power? 1999, 2000. 1999.

Okay. But still, Erdogan came to power in 2003. But these kinds of things of expropriating properties or getting cronies to buy up media properties. These are things that were sort of in full swing when Putin was just starting to do that. They were in full swing in Turkey when Putin was just starting to do it. I always say Turkey is the kind of the leading edge of deliberalization or D.J. democratization. Something that, you know, when I was in grad school, we didn't really think of because there was this idea that once a country reached a GDP per capita of a certain level,

that they wouldn't slide back. And Turkey has proven that to be completely wrong. And we've seen a number of countries slide back that are way above that per capita GDP. So Erdogan doesn't get enough credit in this area. He's the model for Orban and Putin. If only McDonald's were more delicious. This was actually a perfect setup for my question, Jason, which was looking back at like the last 20 years, I think obviously the failed coup in 2016 is a big like milestone in this in this in this. de-liberalization. Can we talk about 2011?

Can we talk about the Arab Spring? How do you think that a guy like Erdogan processed that as it was happening? And how did that factor in to where we are now? Yeah, I think there are two really important dates in that era. The entire year 2011 and then June, the spring of 2013, And then July 3rd, 2013. Those are three critical dates. I think when it came to the Arab uprisings, Erdogan positioned Turkey as a leader of the new orders in these countries.

I mean, his then prime minister who had been foreign minister, Ahmed Davutolu, said that, you know, Turkey was going to lead the region without using the word model. And in Washington at the time, everybody was talking about. about the Turkish model, the Turkish model. In fact, NPR just once did a mashup of all the people like me talking about the Turkish model. Of course, I never really thought that was a Turkish model. And the stunning irony of the Turkish model, talking about the Turkish model at that time, was really twofold. One, it was at a time when Erdogan was really engaging in a variety of policies that would lead to this deliberalization of Turkey. Just as everybody was talking about, oh, the democracy is breaking out in the Arab world, and Turkey can be a model for it.

And then the original term Turkish model was sort of coined in the early 1980s after the Turkish military overthrew the Turkish government. And they said, and the idea was that, you know, this radically secular organization would apply enough, enough repression to keep everything in line in Turkey. And that's sort of what we liked about it, is that it would keep the communists and the Islam. at bay by dosing society with enough coercion and repressions. Oh, like, okay, now there's this new Turkish model, the accumulation of Islamist political power without undermining democracy, except for the fact that Erdogan was in the process of undermining democracy, just as Washington became, you know, completely enthrall of the idea of the Turkish model.

Okay. Then you get to 2013 in the spring of 2013. Turkey has its own uprising. And the trigger for it was there's a park in central Istanbul off of what's called Toxim Square. It's called Gezi Park. And it's a green space. It's not wonderful, whatever, but they were going to level it and build a mall. A mall.

And the mall was going to look like some Ottoman era barracks that stood there. And you have to understand, you know, there's been an explosion of mall building in Turkey. I mean, one of the ways to get the patronage money flowing in Turkey is through construction contracts and so and so forth. And so governments have, you know, Mnespas have given AKP affiliated contractors lots of room to destroy the landscape and put up monstrosities here and there because the patronage money flows as a result. And so people came out and they said, no, we don't want you to do this. And it became this protest that went on and on and on. And like Hosni Mubarak, who Erdogan was one of the first leaders to call

must go. And like others who Erdogan said must go, the Turkish riot police kicked the asses of a lot of these Turkish protesters. I was, I happened to be there on a research trip, and I witnessed that once the worst, worst state violence perpetrated against, against protesters. I was tear gassed. Turus water cannon is particularly nasty because they mix it with pepper spray. So when it touches your skin, it burns like hell. And so there was a lot of, a lot of repression. And you would think that this, and this did undermine the allure of Turkey among Arabs, Arab liberals and Arab Islamists who did see Turkey as a model.

And we're intrigued by the accumulation of Islamist political power without necessarily compromising or so people thought the democratic qualities of the political system. And suddenly Erdogan was using the same tactics of recently deposed Arab leaders. So that was happening in the spring and early summer of 2003. Everyone, I'm the leader of the region. We will help with the transition. Look to us, et cetera, et cetera. And then he's using this violence.

Then on July 3rd, 2003, the Egyptian military under Major General Abduf Tassisi overthrows Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood Apparachic, who became the president of Egypt, after Mubarak fell and after a transition period. You mean 2013, right? You said 2013, right? You said 2003. I just want to make sure you mean 2013? 2013, July 2013. He, Morsi became the president in June of 2012. He was overthrown almost exactly a year later by CC and the Egyptian military. This set off all kinds of alarm bells for Erdog. Oh, by the way, he was overthrown with,

the full support of the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the tacit support of the United States. I mean, basically, Obama administration was like, there's nothing we can do to stop it. We're not calling it a coup. If we call it a coup, we'll have to cut off aid. That would not be good. So we're just going to accommodate ourselves to this outcome, even though we don't think, like, coups are the greatest thing in the whole wide world. In any event. But Erdogan was completely flipped out about that.

All the major states of the region supported it. It was a coup. Turkey has a history of coups. 1960, 1971, 1981, 1980, 1997. Erdogan is fully believed, and he showed that the military was plotting against him. Morsi was an Islamist. Erdogan's an Islamist. They come from different traditions of Islamism, but as the purported, self-declared kind of leader of the region after the Arab uprisings, Erdogan had sort of put his arm around the Muslim Brotherhood.

especially the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Morsi had come to Istanbul and had been welcomed as a conquering hero to the AKP, you know, annual party, annual party meetings. Erdogan went to Cairo in September 2011. Heroes welcome and so on and so forth. And all of a sudden this order was gone, was gone. And Erdogan's like, we don't want to give any impression. and that that's the kind of thing that, you know,

the message he was getting from the major states was, we're good with coups. And no, you want to send that message to the Turkish military with its history of coups. So this led to a sharp deterioration of Turkey's relations with the major states of the Middle East and a collapse of its strategic position in the region.

And what Turkey became sort of an opposition, an oppositional country. country in the region. It's the only real ally with the Qatari's and Hamas and its frequent dalliances with the Iranians. And what this speaks to was something that was already happening in Turkish foreign policy. And I realize I'm going on and on here, but it's really fun for me to talk about that. That's what we're paying you for. Was there a check at the end of this? Yeah. Oh, excellent. No, I'm kidding. We're not sustainable. I'm just, I, I, you guys, I'm, I'm, I, you guys, I'm, this. This is one of my favorite podcasts to do.

In any event, something that was already happening in Turkish foreign policy and something that was a central part of the AKP's kind of worldview, which is that Turkey should pursue its interests as it sees fit. It should not be just part of, you know, an asset of the West. It was neither east nor West. It was Turkey with its own resources, its own great history, its own legacies in the region, and so on and so forth. So what it wanted to do was carve out a more autonomous foreign policy from the United States

and its traditional allies in Europe, a 360-degree foreign policy in which the Turks pursued their interests regardless of what the United States wanted. And this was one of those things that sort of contributed. It was already happening, but contributed to what we see in Turkish foreign policy now, which is an kind of ambiguous stance on Russia. a willingness to undercut the United States in the Middle East, throwing its weight around in the Mediterranean. Being a real asshole in NATO. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

So a question about what might have been. Because instead of going its own way, at one point, it seemed like Turkey really wanted to be part of the EU. And the EU, I mean, you know, if we're going to talk about schmucks, I mean, it seems like they really put up hurdles for Turkey that they didn't necessarily put up to other countries. And there was Islamophobia that was at least partly blamed for it and some fun stuff like that. Do you think that all of this would have been different if the EU had actually been welcoming to Turkey? it's a it's an argument that i've had over and over and over and over again with friends in the turkey watching world like we you know what what what what could have happened because you know the under erdogan under first abdul airdwan erdogan was banned from politics until march 20 2003

but first under prime minister abdulah ghoul and then erdogan the akp after it first came to power undertook pretty significant constitutional reform to align Turkish politics, which is what's called the Copenhagen criteria. The Copenhagen criteria, once you meet the Copenhagen criteria, you can move on to actual formal negotiations to become a full member of the European Union. They went a long way towards fulfilling the Copenhagen criteria, but they didn't completely fulfill it. But still, the European Commission said, let's give them an invitation.

to begin membership negotiations as an incentive for them to complete the Copenhagen criteria. This is like 2005. And they actually began formal negotiations, but almost as soon as it began it shut down over the objections of the Cypriots and the French and the Austrian and others. And it was almost immediately frozen. And so there's an argument that some have made that had the European Union been more forthcoming, the Turks would have eventually fulfilled the Copenhagen criteria and negotiations might have proceeded. Now, of course, a number of things happened in Turkey a couple of years later that led Erdogan to move from this sort of reformist position that he began in to a divide and conquer

and let him down this road of authoritarianism. And I'm a view. And there are some people who say, you know, that was their intention all along, was authoritarianism. And they used opposition to them to divide and conquer. It was convenient, but they never were. It was, and to me, that's too conspiratorial. History, to my mind, is more contingent than that. And so had the EU been more forthcoming and had these conspiracies against the Justice and Development Party that were hatched by the Camelist elite and the military not happen, perhaps that reformist path might have continued, but it didn't. And Turkey is further away from EU membership than it was even before it went down the road of constitutional reforms to try to align with Europe through the

Copenhagen criteria. So what could have been, yeah. But what's happened is that Turkey is where we began this conversation. Is it competitive authoritarianism? Is it authoritarianism? Is it a dictatorship? What are the differences? What are the differences here? And I think that's a more fruitful conversation than any discussion of the European Union. I will say this, though, and I think you're spot on. And I used to say this to my Turkish friends at the time that they were undertaking these reforms. I said, you know, I'm fairly confident that Turkey has the capacity to change, but does Europe? And Europe seem opposed, at least important parts of Europe were opposed to Turkey becoming a full-fledged member of the European Union. And so

it was always going to be difficult for for the Turks to get in. You know, prior to all this, Turkey had been, you know, had an association agreement with the European Union and had a customs union agreement. The fallback really should have been an enhanced customs union agreement, which I call it friends with benefits, rather than actually being a member. And that seemed to me that probably the place where they should have ended up, but now it's much more difficult. I assume it's a great time to jail an opposition leader if you're Erdogan. Yes. Right? Can we talk about the timing of this?

Yeah. I mean, Erdogan is a shrewd cat. I mean, he's thinly educated, but a shrewd cat. And that's why he's been in power for as long as he has. He's always a couple of steps ahead of everybody. And I mean, you know, when he says he's surrounded by fools, nays, and rubs, he's not entirely wrong. But I think he understood two things. One, he wasn't going to pay a price in Washington for arresting him on Lolo.

He certainly was going to pay a press in the Trump White House for arresting in Mammalo. Trump and Erdogan have a good personal relationship. Second, given the Trump administration's approach to Europe and NATO, the Europeans themselves were saying Turkey is more important to European security than ever before. Because quite honestly, outside of France, you look around members of the European Union, the only people who actually have an army on the European continent are the Turks. They're not members of the European Union. It's only a small sliver of Turkish territory. But still, second largest military in NATO, does that mean it's incredibly capable? I think some parts of it are quite capable.

Some parts of it may not be. But still, in terms of mass and whatever. So Europeans are like, Turkey is more important. Turkey is more important. And I'll tell you, this is not a Turkish word, but bear with me. The Khutzpah of Erdogan of having Imammolu detained on the same day he's going to the Council of Europe. It was just like this master stroke of balls and trolling to do that. And he didn't pay a price.

What he didn't believe, and this is where he's miscalculated, he's not an evil genius. The Turkish people came out of the streets and were like, you can't do that. After all of this, the de-democratization, the deliberalization, the buttsing around with the outcome of referenda and so on and so forth, Turks still believe. in the importance of democratic practices and value their votes. And they voted for Ekram and Mamuolo three times to be the mayor of greater Istanbul. And people came out in the streets, not just in Istanbul, but all over the places that, you can't do that. And now Erdogan has a problem on his hand because he has rolling demonstrations across the country.

And that are a real challenge to him. And he's made a martyr of Ekram and Mamlolo. So it was a good time for him with regard to Washington and Brussels, not a good time for the folks in Istanbul and other major population centers of Turkey. But as you've said, Turkey is very good, Turkey is very good at suppressing these kinds of protests, right? It's been a tremendous amount of violence, tremendous amount of tear gas and water cannon and beatings and arrests of people. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I'm not going to say, I wrote a piece about this. I wrote a piece about Erdogan's hubris, however you pronounce that.

And when I said is, I'm going to reserve judgment about how Erdogan leaves the scene. Because I think, I think, but I do think that it's more likely that the state prevails because everybody in the security services owes their position to Erdogan. Everybody. And so they have a lot to lose by this thing coming undone. That's interesting because, of course, as you said earlier, it was the military before that had all the power. And so now the military is a creature of Erdogan. Yeah.

I mean, Erdogan finally established, you know, the Turkish military for decades was outside of civilian control, power unto itself in the system. The locus of power in the system that, you know, endowed itself the right to change governments and didn't. like. And then through these EU reforms, the government did establish civilian control over the military more easily than anybody thought, including myself. But it wasn't a healthy civilian control. It was what a great theorist of civil military relations and Harvard professor Samuel Huntington called subjective control, which is that Erdogan has created loyalty issues within the Turkish armed forces. And so that factionalized and then

with subsequent purges, everybody has become an Erdogan loyalist. So I don't, I would never say the era of Coos is over in Turkey. But at the same time, the military has been captured by Erdogan

and his loyalists. He is really good at his job. He's really good at his job. I will tell you this, I have seen him. I've been in a room with, you know, of, you know, 12 people in a room with him. I've been in a room with him with 200 people. I've been in a room with him with 75 people.

I have been in an outdoor venue with like 450,000 people. He is the best politician I've ever seen this side of Bill Clinton. He just has that charisma, that ability to connect with people. I've seen him bring people who don't speak a word of Turkish to their feet in the standing ovation. I mean, he's really, really good at his job. And he now, really, really good at his job, really able to connect with people. But there's now generation of younger Turks who know nothing but Erdogan. And they're not necessarily digging on him.

He's like the hectoring old uncle who's a pain in the ass. And you can see from these demonstrations, which are, you know, the main opposition party has sort of appropriated it, but this is all coming out of the universities. Yeah, let's hope he doesn't take a page out of our playbook then. It's only $8 billion for Harvard. Actually, I'm not sure Harvard would notice, but that's... I think they've got a...

I think if when we get to the other side of this thing, I think one of the things that people should consider if you are at Harvard and you're sitting on an enormous endowment is how much you want the federal government to be able to pull Well, 100%. 100%. I got a piece. My next column at Foreign Policy Magazine is, you know, it's foreign policy. We're at the Council on Foundation, but I had to say something about the universities.

So I start out the piece showing the global rankings of Egyptian, Turkish, Syrian universities. Now, I don't think Colombia is going to become Ainschamps University, which is a line out of the piece. But what all of the, the highest rank of any of these universities I looked at was like 285th in the world. And there's lots of reasons for this. But one thing that all of these universities that I looked at had in common was government

control slash government interference. So Colombia is not going to become Ansham's, but this is, you don't make, you don't You don't make America great again by hamstringing universities. You don't make America great again by threatening the funding for universities. No one is saying that, you know, the ed departments are hotbeds of radicalism, anti-Semitism, have a weird yen for jihadists as long as they're framed in terms of the anti-colonial narrative. No one's saying that these aren't problems. but docking a university $400 million hurts cancer patients,

hurts our ability to understand and exploit AI for our benefits, hurts quantum computing, hurts our understanding of what de-democratization is, hurts our understanding of ancient civilizations that help inform our own existence. These are things that are really important. And so I would leave it to universities along, students and others to figure out how to fix those problems, part of the university

of their problem and not the federal government. I understand there's a need for oversight when it's federal dollars. And there's no one I know outside of university who thinks like the excesses and overindulgences of the faculty are appropriate. But at the same time, we do not want to destroy these engines of discovery. that we have created because of our free system and academic freedom and tenure and so and so forth that all contributed to. It would be such an own goal and probably a longer lasting own goal than a tariff war. It's the era of own goals.

It is. That's where America is right now. It's the era of own goals. Believe. Well. Jason, unless you got something else. No, I think that was appropriately depressing. I think we can stop there.

Sorry. Sorry. You guys, thank you very much for the time. It was really fun to chat. It's always a pleasure. It's all afternoon. Yeah, and so you've got a new piece coming out. Did it just come out?

Our policy, my regular column, I'm there twice a month. And this one, I don't know, I haven't heard from my editor yet. I sent it to him yesterday. But look out for it in the next week or so. I mean, I think there's a lot going on in the world, and this is sort of evergreen. but it's just, I felt the need to meditate on this. It's not anything like, you know, the last one was all about Erdogan and what he's doing. This one was just an itch I needed to scratch because I am a product of these schools,

and I absolutely abhor the crazy radicalism of some of the departments, but you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's got to be another solution than basically establishing political control over universities in the United States. These are crown jewels. Crown jewels. They're damaged goods, but they can be fixed. That's all for this week.

Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Gulp, Jason Fields, and Kevin Nodell. Go to Angry Planetpod.com to sign up for the commercial free, early version of the show. We will be back next week with another conversation about conflict on an Angry Planet. Stay safe until then.