Why Erdoğan is having the best week of his life 

You might be having a great week, but nobody’s having a better time than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. No he didn’t just fall in love, climb a mountain, or watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. At least, not as far as we know?

Rather, in just a few days, Erdoğan has:

• Helped eject rival autocrats from a neighbour (Syria)
• Restored Turkey’s influence over what was long part of its Ottoman empire, and
• Reasserted Turkey’s role as a major player by brokering peace in Africa.

Let’s get into it. 

1. Syria 

We’ve written briefly about Erdoğan’s role in Assad’s fall next door, but it’s a cracker.

Ties were never easy, but like almost everyone else in the region appalled by Assad gassing and barrel-bombing his own people during the civil war, Erdoğan cut ties.

His spooks already knew many opposition players operating just over his 900km (560mi) border with Syria, so Erdoğan built on those ties as emerging groups seized Syria’s border crossings. One ended up being the Islamist Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which led last week’s march on Damascus.

While Turkey denies any direct role in Assad’s ousting (and still lists HTS as terrorists), it wouldn’t and couldn’t have happened without Erdoğan’s nod. In fact, he eventually stopped pretending and just openly egged it on, sending his spy chief on a personal tour around Damascus with none other than the HTS leader himself (Golani).

So Erdoğan now has direct access and influence in Damascus. The question is what he’ll do with it. Sure, he’ll want help repatriating the three million Syrian refugees in Turkey, but he’ll also want HTS to turn a blind eye while he keeps hitting Kurdish groups, some with ties to the PKK (listed as a terrorist group in Turkey, the US, and elsewhere) — he wants a buffer along his border.

But that puts Erdoğan at odds with his NATO ally the US, which still has 900 troops in Syria helping those same Kurdish groups contain ISIS (including tens of thousands of detained ISIS members). Erdoğan doesn’t want an ISIS resurgence either. So what’s next?

That’ll partly depend on Trump, who’s tweeted his preference to stay out of it (an instinct Erdoğan will encourage). But there are influential voices in DC who back an autonomous Kurdish region, or at least oppose the notion of the US (again) abandoning its Kurdish allies.

2. Somalia and Ethiopia  

While all this was playing out, Erdoğan somehow also stepped out on stage before international media in Ankara yesterday (Thursday), hand in hand with Somali leader Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and his Ethiopian counterpart Abiy Ahmed. Why? To announce he’d just brokered a truce between the two feuding neighbours in the Horn of Africa. 

Part of the issue flared up in January when Ethiopia (the world’s most populous landlocked nation) inked a deal with neighbouring Somaliland, a self-ruling coastal strip Somalia claims as its own — the deal would’ve granted Ethiopia a base on the Gulf of Aden in return for potentially recognising Somaliland as a country. But of course, that irked Somalia. There are no major new details in this truce, but all three leaders now say they’re figuring out a way for Ethiopia to get sea access without undermining Somalia.

The broader message here is that where traditional Western powers can’t or won’t impose a solution, Turkey will.

Why are we telling you all this? 

We often bang on about this emerging new multipolar world of ours, but it’s not often you get decades of evidence jammed into a single week of wins by one of the most intriguing resurgent players, Turkey.

INTRIGUE’S TAKE

The missing nuance in the public narrative is that Erdoğan’s luck can still change on a dime: he’s accumulating resentment with each new fake-out, and just stiffed two major players (Iran and Russia) by helping boot them out of Syria, despite years of talks.

But he’s well placed to handle whatever comes next. Why? Here are just two reasons:

• First, he’s now got the world’s third-largest diplomatic network after years of quiet but rapid growth. That eventually pays a dividend, whether you want to topple a dictator or broker a truce.
• But second, it’s about the mission you set those diplomats and the political cover you give them. Erdoğan has a clear and assertive vision of Turkey’s place on the world stage, and his diplomats push it hard wherever they are. In contrast, many Western diplomats often seem scared of getting in trouble with their home governments, which are still debating what vision to even pursue.

The reality is, Erdoğan knows from bitter experience that if you don’t shape the world in your own image, others will shape it in theirs.

Also worth noting:

• Turkey’s largest overseas military base is in Somalia, established in 2017 after several years of Turkish humanitarian presence.
• Erdoğan reportedly just made the world’s first diplomatic appointment to post-Assad Syria. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has nominated his long-time backer and real estate investment mogul Tom Barrack as his ambassador to Turkey.