The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Doors Open for Turkey as the Kurds Disarm || PETER ZEIHAN

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Imprisoned Kurdish PKK leader, Abdullah Öcalan, has once again called for the PKK to disarm and transition into a political party, but this time it might actually happen.Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/doors-open-for-turkey-as-the-kurds-disarm

Hey all, Peter Zine here, coming to you from a frosty Colorado morning. Today we're going to talk about what's going on in Turkey, specifically a guy by the name of Abdullah, let's see if you get this right, Ojulong, Ojolong, Ojolong, is a Kurdish leader of a group called the PKK, which is a militant group, has called upon as compatriots to lay down their arms and dissolve their military arm completely becoming a political party. In his words, the days when the Turks were oppressing the Kurds are gone, and the Kurds now have rights, and it's time to move on.

on. This isn't the first time he said this. This guy's been in prison since 1999, so you can understand that he kind of wants to get out of prison and maybe into something a little more cushy like house arrest before he dies. But this time, it's probably going to work. So let's dial the clock back and explain how we got to where we are and then look forward. The Kurds predominate in the part of the Middle East that is in southwest Turkey, which is where most of them live. And then there are others in northwestern Iran, northeastern Syria, and northern Iraq. Starting in the early 80s, a group formed called the PKK that started a civil war against the Turkish government for independence for Turkish Kurdistan. And Ojalon was part of that process. And again, then he was arrested in 1989.

In the early parts of the war, over 30,000 people died. We're up to about 40,000 in total now 25 years later. And it's wrapped up in issues of identity for the Turks. You see, in the days before World War I, when it wasn't Turkey, when it was the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Empire was a plurality government. You had the Turks who were large in charge, but they weren't a majority in their own empire. And so they knew that they needed other ethnicities, other peoples to do everything from keeping the trains running on time, even before they were trains, to man in the army. And so there was a relatively robust respect for the ethnic and religious autonomy of every group.

And in this system, the Kurds, just like the Greeks, just like the Serbs, just like the Romanians, just like the Arabs, all enjoyed probably the most robust rights of any minorities in any system in human history, with a possible exception in the early United States itself. And because of this, this multi-ethnic entity persevered for centuries. It allowed the Turks at the head of this multi-ethnic coalition to be a world power, to be the world power for centuries. But after century and century and century of military defeats at the hands of the Europeans primarily, as the Europeans industrialized and the Turks did not, the Turks found themselves stripped of a lot of these outer territories that were home to most of these other ethnicities that had joined more or less willingly with the Turkish cause. And by the time you get to World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there wasn't a lot left except for what we know today is contemporary Turkey.

And so the Turks change their governing strategy. Because in what is today contemporary Turkey, the Turks were over 75% of the overall population. They changed from having a multi-ethnic strategy to a nationalist one. And Turkey was the land of the Turks for the Turks ruled by the Turks. And if you happen to be another minority in contemporary Turkey, well, you were just shit out a lot. So we had a couple of uprooting where Armenians were removed from eastern Turkey in a genocide and ran to what is today contemporary Armenia. And in the West, you had a willing population exchange between the Greeks and the Turks in the province of Thrace, where they basically just swapped populations. And that took care of most of the ethnic complications, with the exception of the Kurds of which there were too many to move and there was nowhere to move them to.

So the Kurds became persecuted in what they saw as their own homeland because it was also the Turkish homeland and the definitions had changed. Now, you go from 1917 until roughly 2010, 2015, and you had this duology in Turkish identity was, are we modern? Are we European? Are we Turkish? Are we Islamic? And those different ideas of identity agreed on one thing. We weren't Kurdish. So no matter where you were on the Turkish political spectrum, the Kurds were always the odd man out, and that was reflected in their electoral system as well. The Kurds had an independence-minded party in the parliament, but no one would work with it.

And it was never enough of a vote to really sway the balance of power. But the ebb and flow of Turkish politics continued, and you basically had it consolidate into two major camps. First, you had the Kamalas or the Europeanists who saw Turkey as a modern nation state, maybe not quite in the Western model, but pretty close. Big on industrialization, big on militarization, and big on making sure that everybody's noses were faced in the right direction, and so the Kurds were a problem there. On the other side, you had the Islamists who wanted to go back to the old Ottoman roots, with identity being more rooted in culture and the interior, shifted away from Europe, more

religiosity. As a rule in free elections, the Islamists tended to win because they had more people, and then you would usually have a military coup as the military would decide that they would get strained away from the ideals of the Turkish Republic. This continued into about 2000, with the rise of a guy by the name of Erdogan, who was still the leader of the country, has been for 25 years now, yeah. Anyway, Ederwan definitely hailed from the Islamist side of things, but over his first 15 years of rule, He largely succeeded in merging the two identities into one. So Turkey is modern and Islamic, is of the countryside and of the city, is of Europe, and is of the Middle East.

And in doing so, he brought both the more militant aspects of Islamism to heal and made it more of a political force. At the same time, he tamed the military and included the secularists in the ruling coalition. Now, this is a very non-Western country. and we don't want to overplay this. It is not a democracy in the way we think of it. Erdogan is a strong man, but he's created a degree of economic and cultural unity in Turkey that is really quite impressive, especially considering the history of the country. The one thing that this all has in common is the Kurds were on the odd man out of all of it. And once we get to about 2015 towards 2020,

the fact that the military has been tamed and put under civilian control, and that civil control includes both secular and Islamic elements, the military, instead of having to pull, police, the political's field, has become far more professional at doing what militaries do. And so the uprising that the Kurds have had led by the PKK, of which Adjelan is part of, became tamped down because the military was able to do it. It was able to focus on what it does well. So you fast forward to 2025. All of a sudden, Turkey is in a new world.

Its domestic politics are the calmest and most unified they have been since at least the Ottoman period. You've got a leader who is large and in charge, but is getting on an age. He's right up there with Biden and Trump. It's probably not going to be with us much longer, and so it's time to turn a page for any number of reasons. The PKK is on the outs, and if you look across the border from Turkish Kurdistan

to the rest of the Kurdish territories, the situation has changed as well. Going south into Iraq, it used to be that the Americans preferred working with the Iraqi Kurds to first counter Saddam and then to an injected degree of stability into the Middle East. But the Americans are largely gone. The total number of American forces in all of Iraqi Kurdistan are probably well under 1,000, mostly for intel operations against Iran. If you go straight south into Syria, you just had the first phase of the Syrian civil war

wrap up. And at the moment, all of the various factions are attempting to get along and they're attempting to form a national government. I have my doubts as to whether this work, but I know I applaud the effort. But what all of the factions, whether they are al-a-white or Sunni or Arab or Druze, they all agree upon, is that the Syrian Kurds have no role in that. And so the Syrian Kurds are finding themselves squeezed politically. And just like in Iraq, the Americans considered the Syrian Kurds to be their primary partners, but the Americans are leaving Syria as well. So all of a sudden, that diplomatic squeeze and political squeeze is also becoming a strategic squeeze, and the Turks have a very strong opinion about what the role.

of the Kurds in Syria should be in the role they believe should be zero. And then you've got Iran. The Iranians have their own Kurds, but because the Iranians have lost all of their proxies across the Middle East, they're not in a position to stir up trouble. It used to be that you'd have Turkey and Syria and Iraq and Iran basically stirring everybody else's Kurds up while pressing their own. Well, that's not the math today. So there's this interesting opportunity for the Turks to actually put this situation to bed for forever. And forever is a long time. There are complications, of course. You still have what is, in essence, the largest ethnicity without a state in the world, but it's split within four

countries. Their prospects are very weak right now. And there's an old saying in the Middle East is that every Kurd will fight to the last Kurd to determine who's in charge. And there was a moment during the American occupation Iraq where it looked like it might have gone a different direction, but with the Americans largely gone, that period's now over. And the Kurds in each individual region are basically at each other's throats. So the Turkish goal here is pretty straightforward. If you can get the PKK to disarm, if you can fold them into the political process, if you can do this with the blessing of folks like Adelon, who can oversee it and provide the diplomatic gravitas to make it stick, then as the militant

Syrian Kurds find themselves squeezed out. Some of them will try to cross the border into Turkey, but there won't be anywhere for them to base. And so they'll be faced with the choice of going the way of the PKK and folding into the political priceless, or facing a unified Turkey that all of a sudden has far fewer strategic problems to wrestle with, and they will lose and they will lose badly. And if you're Turkey, wow, how much has changed in the last couple of years? Syria is gone. And the role of Turkey and Syria is basically whatever it wants. It will probably be able to occupy portions of the border region, including the Syrian Kurdish territories, if wants to. Something similar is shaping up

Iraq where the Kurds is Iraq are no longer a threat. Iran is going to take in the best case scenario a few years to regenerate its efforts, and that means for the first time since at least World War 1, the entire Turkish, southern and southeastern periphery is clear. Turkey is an interesting power. It's by far the most politically unified, economically powerful, industrially powerful, militarily powerful country in its region. But it's never really had the power that's necessary to deal with all of its borders all at the same time. But all of a sudden, three of those borders are pretty much nipped and tucked. There's still issues to deal with. There's always Europe and NATO to wrestle with for better or for worse to the northwest. The Ukraine war continues to rage. The Russians are always there. The

caucuses are always a mess, but having half of your borders largely taken care of, that's great. So it's just a question of what the Turks decide to focus on next. And whichever direction they go, that's going to get really interesting, really fast, because all of a sudden, their back is clear.