Foreign Affairs - Erdogan’s Imperial Delusions - Turkish Power Does Not Match the President’s Ambitions - Asli Aydintasbas - December 25, 2025

 

Foreign  Affairs 

Erdogan’s Imperial Delusions

Turkish Power Does Not Match the President’s Ambitions

Asli Aydintasbas

December 25, 2025

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Johannesburg, South Africa, November 2025

Alet Pretorius / Reuters

ASLI AYDINTASBAS is a Fellow and Director of the Turkey Project at the Brookings Institution.

When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked into the White House in late September, he needed to come out of the visit with a win. Erdogan had presented the Turkish public a grand vision of Turkey’s leadership in the Middle East, but that vision was increasingly clouded by doubts. Domestic dissent and economic woes required Erdogan’s constant attention and risked tarnishing his legacy after 23 years in power. The success of Turkish-backed opposition forces in toppling Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria last December appeared to offer a golden opportunity to expand Turkey’s influence, but it became clear that the monumental task of rebuilding Syria would be beyond Turkey’s ability to do alone.

It seemed that engaging U.S. President Donald Trump could provide the boost Erdogan needed. Although Ankara and Washington have had their disagreements recently, including over Turkey’s purchase of Russian missile systems and repeated incursions into Syria, Trump saw in Erdogan a partner to help stabilize the Middle East. Turkey had leverage over Hamas, which could come in handy during the U.S.-led cease-fire negotiations with Israel, and Turkey could support peacekeeping and reconstruction efforts in Gaza and Ukraine. Trump, unlike his predecessors, seemed to admire Erdogan’s brand of illiberalism and his skillful geopolitical balancing, repeatedly calling him “a friend” and “a very strong leader.” Turkish officials, for their part, hoped that a rebooted partnership with the transactional Trump could help Turkey elevate its profile in the Middle East.

At first, they appeared to get their wish. Within days of Erdogan’s visit to Washington, Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin joined talks in Egypt over a cease-fire in Gaza—Turkey has long supported the Palestinian cause, but this was the first time Ankara had formally entered Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. When the cease-fire deal was signed, on October 13, Erdogan stood beside Trump and the leaders of Egypt and Qatar. To the Turkish president’s supporters, his participation was highly symbolic. More than 100 years earlier, General Edmund Allenby had led the British army into Jerusalem, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule. But now Turkey was back. In recent years, Turkish troops have been active in Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Striding center stage into the politics of the Holy Land was the final reclamation of Turkey’s historic role in the Middle East.

Or so Erdogan would want the Turks to believe. In truth, Turkey’s power so far does not match Erdogan’s aspirations to establish a Turkish-led regional order. Trump’s embrace has been good for optics, but the American president’s impulsive, unstructured foreign policy is highly unlikely to boost Turkey’s influence in the region—or to persuade the rest of the Middle East to accept it. On its own, Turkey faces too many internal problems, including a strained economy and a hollowed-out state, and too much external opposition, particularly from a confident and aggressive Israel, to build a regional order on Ankara’s terms. And if Erdogan cannot make good on his promise to usher in a new age of Turkish power, the domestic pressures he faces could mount as Turkey continues its strategic drift in an increasingly unsafe world.

GRAND STRATEGY

Erdogan’s geopolitical project rests on a simple idea: more than a mere middle power, Turkey is destined to lead the broader Middle East. A week after Assad’s fall, Erdogan declared that “Turkey is bigger than Turkey,” that “as a nation, we cannot limit our vision to 782,000 square kilometers.” Turkey “cannot escape its destiny,” he continued. “Those who say, ‘What does Turkey have to do in Libya or Somalia?’ do not comprehend this.”

There is some truth in Erdogan’s vision but a heavy dose of mythmaking, too. Within the country, the government’s formidable propaganda machine has pushed the “Century of Turkey” campaign and popularized the idea that Turkey is bound for greatness. The Ottoman Empire, once derided by modern Turkey’s political elite as a relic of decline, has been rehabilitated as a model of order and pluralism. In television series, quasi-academic conferences, and even restaurant menus that list items such as “sultan’s delight,” the Ottoman era appears as a “golden age,” one that was ultimately ended by foreign intrigue and internal betrayal.

Turkey’s security establishment, centralized under the presidency since constitutional changes came into effect in 2018, also embraces the idea of a Turkish-led regional order. The military, once a bastion of restraint, now champions Turkey’s forward defense postures in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the eastern Mediterranean. Recent Turkish National Security Council communiqués highlight Turkey’s stabilizing role and responsibilities in these places, too, as well as its readiness to help with security in Gaza. In private discussions, Turkish officials describe Turkey as the guarantor of stability from the Caucasus to the Levant, emphasizing the country’s alignment with friendly regimes.

Trump’s embrace is highly unlikely to boost Turkey’s influence.

Under Erdogan, Turkey has indeed expanded its regional presence. Its military footprint extends across the Caucasus, the Levant, and parts of Africa while projecting naval power in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Over the past decade, Ankara has signed defense and security partnerships with Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Ethiopia, Libya, Niger, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Syria, and Tunisia. In Libya, Turkey is making economic deals and providing security support, including training for law enforcement and the military. In 2020, Turkey backed Azerbaijan’s military incursion to reconquer territory from Armenia, and afterward Turkish companies played a leading role in reconstruction and infrastructure development in the newly captured areas. Turkey now wants to normalize relations with Armenia, too, and create a regional economic compact that would reduce the influence of Iran and Russia in the Caucasus and expand Turkey’s direct market access. The growing Turkish defense industry has also given Ankara leverage with its European allies and an entry point into markets in Africa and Asia. In addition to drones, the crown jewel of Turkish defense exports, private and state-owned manufacturers have been churning out ammunition, warships, missiles, tanks, and armored vehicles, and they will soon add the country’s first combat aircraft to the list.

As it seeks influence, Turkey is not particularly concerned about its neighbors’ domestic governance, focusing primarily on arrangements that advance its economic and security interests. In this sense, Erdogan’s vision today is narrower than agendas put forward earlier by his government, such as former Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbors” doctrine. That idea, which shaped Ankara’s regional outreach in the early years of Erdogan’s reign, was to balance Turkey’s traditional Western alliances with an eastward expansion, enhancing the country’s influence in the Middle East and Africa by positioning it as a regional model for democratic reform. Davutoglu’s policy fell apart during the Arab Spring, in part because the political transformation Turkey tried to push for in Egypt, Syria, and Yemen did not materialize. Now, no longer a democracy itself, Turkey is less interested in changing its neighbors’ political systems than it is in using hard power and transactional deals to promote solidarity among illiberal Sunni regimes.

TESTING GROUND

Recently, Syria has been the laboratory for Turkey’s regional ambitions. Turkey controls large swaths of northern Syria and has built schools, hospitals, and courts in regions that during the Assad regime were governed by Turkish-backed opposition forces. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the group that toppled Assad, has long enjoyed Turkish support. Since HTS and its leader, Ahmed al-Shara, took control in Damascus, Turkey has assisted the new regime with security training and equipment, border management, humanitarian aid, agricultural equipment and seeds, and urgent repair work on Syria’s energy grid. Turkish firms are starting to bid for construction, energy, and road projects inside Syria. Even more consequentially for Damascus, Ankara has successfully lobbied Washington, Riyadh, and European capitals to lift Assad-era sanctions.

The emergence of a friendly regime in Syria has also paved the way for Ankara to resuscitate a dormant peace process with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a separatist group that fought a decades-long insurgency against the Turkish state. Erdogan’s government opened talks with the imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in late 2024, no doubt angling to attract Kurdish voters in domestic elections. Assad’s ouster in Damascus made a settlement seem more feasible. As long as the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Syrian Kurdish militia groups with ties to the PKK, operated independently in northeastern Syria and commanded a sizable army, Ankara feared a potential security threat. That threat dissipated once Assad was gone and the SDF entered exploratory talks with both Damascus and Ankara—a process in which U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Tom Barrack often acts as an intermediary—to determine the role of the Kurds in the governance of post-Assad Syria. Disputes persist over control of water resources and oil revenues, the extent of the Kurdish-controlled region’s political autonomy, and the conditions for the SDF’s integration into the Syrian army, but the cost of the talks failing is too high for anyone to give up on negotiating.

The revived peace process with the Kurds serves a larger strategic purpose for Erdogan: it gives him a reason to loosen the rigid nationalism that has defined his rule for the past decade and to reimagine Turkey as a suitable regional leader. Both Erdogan and his ultranationalist ally Devlet Bahceli—who was the first to publicly call for resuming talks with the PKK, back in October 2024—now describe a Turkish-Kurdish-Arab alliance as the foundation of regional stability. That emphasis also allows them to invoke the memory of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire. “History,” Erdogan recently posted on X, “is filled with countless examples of the successes we achieved both at home and abroad when Turks, Kurds, and Arabs were one and together.”

Erdogan now hopes to demonstrate a multiethnic—albeit illiberal—model of governance that accommodates communal diversity under strong Sunni leadership. This, Turkey’s Islamists believe, was the key to the success and longevity of the Ottoman Empire—and a shortcoming of the secular Turkish republic. A settlement in Syria would therefore not only give Turkey a secure southern frontier and curb Kurdish aspirations for independence but also provide proof of concept for a Turkish-led regional order.

If talks with the Kurds stall in Turkey or in Syria, however, the entire structure begins to wobble. Renewed Kurdish unrest would push Turkey to deploy its security forces, sapping the resources needed for broader regional diplomacy. Instability in northern Syria, furthermore, would undercut Ankara’s claim that Turkey can deliver order where others have failed.

A HOLLOW STATE

Yet even if both Ankara and Damascus can reach an arrangement with the Kurds, Erdogan’s dream of ushering in a new Turkish century rests on fragile foundations. For ordinary Turks who are struggling to make ends meet, imperial grandeur feels distant from daily hardship. Years of unorthodox monetary policy have left Turkey with soaring inflation and a battered currency. The return to office in 2023 of Mehmet Simsek, a former finance minister parachuted in to help stabilize the economy, restored some confidence, but inflation remains stubbornly high and investor trust low. As a result, Turkey simply lacks the economic capacity to underwrite Syria’s reconstruction—or any other major regional project, for that matter. Already, Turkey’s fiscal constraints have forced the new Syrian government to turn to Qatar and Saudi Arabia to cover immediate budgetary needs, such as salaries and pensions—a shift that enhances the Gulf’s influence in Damascus at Turkey’s expense.

After two decades, Erdogan’s hypercentralized governance system has also begun to suffer from its own success. “The state rests on the shoulders of roughly ten good men,” one senior official told me. Below this small circle of competent technocrats, government agencies have atrophied as purges and loyalty-based appointments erase institutional know-how. Decision-making is concentrated in the presidential palace, leaving Turkey’s bureaucracy unable to develop its own policies or the capacity to execute them. A real strategy of regional influence would require Turkey to have a state apparatus capable of sustained economic engagement, diplomatic coordination, and the patient management of political transitions—in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere—not just episodic shows of military strength. At present, Ankara simply lacks the institutional machinery to match its ambition.

Politically, Erdogan’s base has narrowed even as his control has tightened. The opposition swept the 2024 municipal elections, with Erdogan’s party garnering only 35 percent of the vote, its worst performance since coming to power in 2003. The March 2025 arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu on corruption charges and the subsequent arrests of more than a dozen other mayors belonging to the main opposition party were widely viewed as politically motivated. They also revealed the government’s insecurity: no longer confident that he can win an election, Erdogan has turned the legal system into a cudgel to clobber his opponents.

The erosion of support for Erdogan’s party ultimately constrains his regional aspirations. Genuine leadership in the Middle East would require continuity. Turkey’s promises of economic assistance must be credible and its diplomatic commitments sustained. The country’s business elites, still largely pro-Western and liberal-leaning, must also buy in, which they are unlikely to do while Turkey’s geopolitical alignment remains uncertain and its domestic course illiberal. Ankara cannot offer guarantees of any kind with questions looming about who might succeed Erdogan and whether Ankara’s honeymoon with the Trump administration will last.

ISRAEL AS SPOILER

The most immediate external challenge to Erdogan’s vision is Turkey’s deepening rivalry with Israel. Over the past year, Israel has emerged as a regional hegemon after its war with Iran and military campaigns inside Lebanon, Qatar, and Syria. Simply put, Israel’s unambiguous military dominance and expanding network of security partnerships make it difficult for Turkey to credibly articulate a Turkish-led order in the Levant and beyond. Many in Turkey are not happy to see Israel gain influence in the region, with genuine public anger over Israel’s war in Gaza running high and extending far beyond Erdogan’s base. This public sentiment encourages Ankara to take positions opposing Israel, even when doing so complicates Turkey’s regional diplomacy and relationship with Washington. Israel, for its part, does not want to see Turkey shaping regional politics, especially given Ankara’s support for Hamas and its criticism of Israeli military operations. Some Israelis worry, too, that a Turkish-led Sunni axis could undermine Israel’s efforts to keep its neighbors in check.

But the main contest is over Syria. With Assad gone, Israel is determined to prevent any outside power—especially the hostile Turkey—from consolidating control over Syria and helping the new government build a military and political apparatus capable of threatening Israel’s northern border. Deeply suspicious of the Shara government, Israel has sought military control over a more than 100-square-mile buffer zone inside Syria. Erdogan, meanwhile, sees a Damascus aligned with Turkey as the linchpin of his regional vision. The two approaches are irreconcilable. Turkey wants a strong and centralized Syrian government that can secure its entire territory, bring stability, suppress any anti-Turkish militancy in the north, and anchor Syria firmly within Ankara’s orbit; Israel prefers that Syria remain decentralized, with autonomy for its Druze and Kurdish minorities, to keep it from becoming powerful enough to challenge Israel.

For ordinary Turks, imperial grandeur feels distant from daily hardship.

Those competing projects have put Turkey’s and Israel’s forces and proxies on a collision course. As each country tries to shape the post-Assad order to its advantage, their military footprints and intelligence activities increasingly overlap, heightening the risk of confrontation. Tensions have already spilled over: in April, Israel bombed a site earmarked for a Turkish base in the Syrian city of Palmyra. Turkey and Israel have finally established a crisis hotline to avoid direct clashes between their militaries, but this is a thin safeguard when both sides are testing the limits of each other’s influence, and broader diplomatic and political ties remain frozen.

The rivalry has extended beyond Syria, too. Ankara’s vocal criticism of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, its support for the Palestinian cause and for the international legal cases to hold Israeli officials accountable for war crimes, and Israel’s expanding intelligence partnerships with Greece and Cyprus have created a wider rift. As long as both Turkey and Israel fear each other’s regional ambitions, they are likely to remain locked in a security dilemma—each interpreting the other’s moves as threatening, responding with exaggerated rhetoric and outsize countermeasures, including with proxy activity in Syria, and thereby deepening the very insecurity they seek to avoid.

For Erdogan, the rivalry imposes a ceiling. A Turkey that is preoccupied with Israeli activities in Syria cannot fully pursue its broader agenda in the region. It would be forced to divert military, diplomatic, and financial resources toward containing Israel rather than building the alliances and institutions that are essential for advancing a coherent economic and political vision.

TRUMP THE ENABLER?

Trump has helped Erdogan sell his Middle East vision by giving the Turkish president what he craves: visibility in regional diplomacy and an elevated status as the United States’ security partner. In an extraordinary nod to Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman aspirations, Barrack has even mused about the Ottoman millet system, in which diverse ethnic and religious communities were granted autonomy when it came to internal governance but were ultimately loyal to the emperor, as a model for modern-day regional order.

Whereas past U.S. administrations have seen Turkey’s quest for a zone of influence in Iraq, Syria, and the eastern Mediterranean as a threat to regional stability and U.S. interests, the Trump administration has let Turkey extend its sway in Syria and welcomed Turkey into regional diplomacy. It largely agrees with Ankara about supporting the central authority in Damascus, keeping Iran’s military networks out of Syria, and preventing Kurdish federalism inside the country. And it appears content to let Turkey pursue those goals, freeing Washington to turn its diplomatic and military energies elsewhere while improving long-strained ties with a major NATO ally.

Yet approval from the changeable Trump does not provide Turkey much assurance of continued American backing, nor does it alter basic realities. Israel still holds military dominance in Syria. Trump, moreover, has been notably deferential to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who vehemently opposes a greater Turkish role in Syria or Gaza. The Gulf monarchies, too, remain wary of Turkish ambitions, and they can complicate Ankara’s project by withholding financial support to Syria, channeling reconstruction funds in ways that sideline Turkish companies, or reducing their promised investments inside Turkey. And Turkey’s economy—fragile, indebted, and exhausted—cannot underwrite reconstruction in Syria and Gaza or sustain the economic assistance, diplomatic investments, and military presence required to secure lasting regional influence.

Erdogan’s desire for a Turkish-led order—a Pax Turkica—endures, but the foundations of that order remain brittle. If he cannot deliver on this grand vision, Erdogan risks a self-reinforcing cycle of domestic decline, with public disillusionment and dwindling legitimacy further straining an already weak economy. A regional project meant to showcase Turkish resurgence could instead become a reminder of the gap between ambition and ability. Erdogan might be able to escape this cycle by broadening his domestic political tent, rebuilding Turkey’s institutions, and appealing to the country’s professional elites and business community. But all that would risk exposing his rule to criticism and weakening his strong hold on power. Erdogan may harbor the dreams of an Ottoman sultan, but modern Turkey remains hobbled in its own backyard and mired in domestic problems. Although Ankara will remain a major player in the regional order, and a dominant one in Syria, it will not be able to turn back the clock to the time when it was the single dominant force in the Middle East.