The Turkish leader is meeting frustrating setbacks both at home and abroad DAVID GARDNER Add to myFT President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s confident display of hard power in Libya masks potential weaknesses © Adem Altan/AFP Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Save David Gardner JUNE 11 2020 102 Print this page Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s pugnacious president, would appear to be on a roll, at least abroad. The country’s military intervention in Libya has just turned the tide of the civil war, forcing the retreat of Khalifa Haftar, the warlord backed by Russia, Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and France. Mr Erdogan will particularly savour the setback to the Arab trio, with whom he has been in escalating conflict since the Arab spring rebellions of 2011 because of Ankara’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood, and from 2017 because of Turkey’s backing for Qatar after they blockaded the maverick Gulf emirate.
Turkey’s relationship with Russia, an alliance of convenience over the past few years based on managing their respective interests in Syria, has now deteriorated. In February, their forces and proxies clashed spectacularly in north-west Syria but drew back from the brink. Russian president Vladimir Putin seems to have underestimated Mr Erdogan’s resolve to keep up pressure on Syrian Kurdish separatists across Turkey’s border and prevent a new wave of Syrian refugees fleeing Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime, backed by Russia’s air force. “We were absolutely convinced Erdogan was bluffing”, a Russian minister told a senior European diplomat shortly afterwards. The Turkish strongman, in power now for almost 18 years, was not bluffing — in Syria or in Libya. But is this really a position of Turkish strength? Moscow and Ankara are always on the lookout for mutually advantageous diplomatic solutions or, at least, veneers for their use of force. Over the past decade they have emerged as regional powers in the Middle East, outshining traditional western power-brokers:
the US, France and the UK. But their economies are weak. Turkey, in particular, may be vulnerable. First, Mr Erdogan depends on Russia’s acquiescence in Turkey’s retention of two enclaves it seized in north-west Syria in 2016 and 2018, as well as for the buffer zone it is trying to create across north-eastern Syria following the US withdrawal in 2019. It is Moscow, moreover, that is brokering the detente between Damascus and the Kurdish militias that had been allied with the US, enabling the Assad regime to re-enter vast stretches of north-east Syria they currently control. Second, Mr Erdogan’s intervention in Libya aims to stake Turkey’s claim to offshore rights in the oil and gas riches of the Eastern Mediterranean through a maritime borders deal he has signed with the UN-recognised Libyan government in Tripoli. But that brings him up against another alliance of antagonists (Greece, Cyprus and Israel) that want to pump that gas into Europe via a pipeline to Italy. Third, as result of this — and Turkey drilling offshore from Cyprus — the EU has stirred itself to at least threaten sanctions.
Turkey’s EU accession hopes have evaporated but the bloc, with which it has a customs union both sides wish to enhance, is still by far its most important market. Fourth, Mr Erdogan cannot rely on support from the US. It faces sanctions for buying Russian arms systems as a member of Nato, as well as breaking the embargo on Iran. Yet he did speak to US president Donald Trump this week and claimed they agreed an agenda on Libya. True or not, after the two conferred by phone last October, the US withdrew from north Syria and Turkey invaded. Fifth, while Turkey is diversifying its energy dependence it still gets roughly half its gas imports from Russia. Sixth, Turkey’s currency is sliding precipitously again, threatening a repeat of the 2018 currency crisis, when the US turned the screws. The Erdogan growth formula, based on construction, cheap credit and consumption, was beginning to fail before the economy was hit by the Covid-19 emergency.
Lastly, many of the signals Mr Erdogan is emitting at home do not suggest strength, despite his confident display of hard power abroad. A new wave of arrests of opposition MPs and mayors will not win back big cities such as Istanbul and Ankara that his ruling party lost last year. His plan to transform an antique nightwatchmen system from aged caretakers into cadres of loyalist vigilantes will not endear him to estranged urban voters. Now he is hinting heavily that he will turn Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia back into a mosque. The great Byzantine cathedral was converted into an imperial mosque by the Ottomans before Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the modern republic, made it into a more neutral museum. Reversing Ataturk’s decision will be raw meat to the Islamist base of Mr Erdogan’s national-populist government and, by design, a loud distraction from other problems. But ultimately, it is no more than a neo-Ottoman gesture — a bit like his interventions in Syria and Libya.
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