Erdogan: When staring into the Abyss, the Abyss stares back into you

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s arrival to power in May 2003 signalled the beginning of the deconstruction of the lifetime work accomplished by the father of modern Turkey, the revered Mustafa Kemal Paşa, who managed to revive the Turkish nation out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, founding a modern and secular republic from which a viable democracy was successfully developed.

Quite on the contrary, Erdogan looked at himself in the mirror of Sultan Suleiman, driving his international policy to restore of the Ottoman imperial dream by instrumentalizing Islamism across the region. This dream became an overnight nightmare in the battlefields of Syria and Libya, with such serious implications that led us to anticipate a comprehensive collapse of Turkish foreign policy, which only keeps a handful of international allies without any strategic weight, such as Qatar, Pakistan and Azerbaijan.

Nor is Erdogan’s presumable intention to consolidate its internal power on military adventurism yielding any fruits whatsoever. Thus, a recent survey carried out by the Turkish polling organization KONDA, shows that support for Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is the lowest in 17th years, with a clear tendency to keep going downhill. Given the conditions, it is rather implausible to expect opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, of the Republican People's Party, to miss the opportunity to take advantage of the situation. Thus, the prospect of a national unity government to respond to this very dark hour seems unlikely.

At any rate, it is pretty surprising that the prompt Turkish response to Idlib's self-inflicted crisis was threatening European NATO member countries with overflowing the EU by letting go a sizeable portion of the 4 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey - in the midst of a pandemic psychosis- while appealing to NATO's solidarity by invoking Article IV of the Treaty, which obliges its signatories to carry out consultations when one of its members claims threats against its territorial integrity and national security. Not only because Turkey has flirted with Russia at the expense of NATO's strategic interests, but also because even an entity as timorous as the European Commission may end up concluding that the best way to get rid of Erdogan's blackmailing is to facilitate an irrefutable victory for Bachar Hafez al-Asad in Syria, even if this entails a degree of collusion with Putin,  to unsettle the Sunni gamble favoured by Erdogan  -represented by the Muslim Brothers- to benefit the kind of Shiism personified by Al-Asad, an Alawite. 

Hence, it does not seem that inciting a clash between the USA and Russia as sought by Erdogan via NATO has any legs, even if the situation in Syria leads to an open confrontation between Russia and Turkey, as unlikely as this seems as of today, despite all the rhetoric used by Erdogan following talks with Putin on the 29th February, demanding Russia’s withdrawal from the conflict, so that Turkey can freely fight Syrian government forces.

There is little doubt that Vladimir Putin will ignore Erdogan’s request, since from a Kremlin's standpoint, Ankara failed to fulfil his commitment to just eliminate the “wrong terrorists” in Idlib, that is to say, those opposed to a ceasefire followed by a political peace process. According to this view, Putin is helping al-Assad to carry on with the work that Erdogan didn’t finished. Therefore, for Russia, backing al-Assad is a legitimate endeavour since because its military presence was requested by the legal government of Syria, in order to support a peace process which counted with the consent of the UN Security Council.

On the other hand, Erdogan's rhetoric is hopelessly outdated, as it bears no correlation with Turkey's actual ability to engage in a large-scale conflict with Russia, either in political, economic or military terms. Turkey depends critically on Russia to get shielded from the geopolitical dynamics revolving around the Iran-Israel axis; Russia has probed, after Turkey’s shoot down a Russian aircraft in 2015, that it has the means and the resolve to derail the Turkish economy. At the same time, the state of the Turkish armed forces, following the purge of senior secular elements on the aftermath of the failed coup of 2016, does not allow it to face such a formidable enemy as Russia, especially after having antagonized its NATO allies. A sample of the Turkish army vulnerability came to light when Russia rejected the request from Ankara to open Idlib airspace to Turkish medical helicopters to recover Turkish casualties, forcing instead a torturous evacuation of 70km by road to a hospital in Reyhanli, a bold Russian decision that denotes little concern to reduce animosity with Ankara, which may suggest that producing a large number of casualties was a risk that was part of Russian’s calculations, as much as it was unthinkable for Erdogan.

Therefore, the options at hand for the Turkish president have been reduced to two scenarios: one bad, the other even worse. The lesser of evils would see the US destroying all anti-aircraft weapon systems in the hands of Damascus; that NATO agrees to deter Russia from threatening Turkey; and that Putin is content imposing severe economic sanctions against Ankara, while increasing support for the Kurds in Syria and Haftar in Libya, and seeking complicities with the Emirates and the Saudis to further deter Erdogan’s ambitions. 

The worst case scenario for Erdogan would mean receiving no more than meagre military intelligence support from the US; that Putin and Assad displace Turkish’s military force in Syria; and a “Gaza Strip” of sorts is set along the border with Syria, resulting in such a surge in the flow of refugees that would end postponing indefinitely any realistic possibility of a re-approach between Ankara and Brussels.

In any case, the chance for Erdogan to achieve his main objectives in Syria is gone for good; both overthrowing the Assad regime, nor establishing Turkey as a key agent to oversee the future of the country -as agreed in Sochi back in September 2018-  are already goals beyond the reach of Turkey; the real issue at stake right now being the timing, plus the shape and form that retracting the failed neo-Ottoman expansionism will take; before or after Syria and Libya become a direct threat to Turkey's national security and stability. We lack so far any evidence that Turkish public opinion has the slightest appetite for entering a war phase that would lead to a large conscription and sacrifices.

On this basis, we suggest a high probability of a resolution in terms of internal politics. In the current composition of the Turkish Parliament, Erdogan's party holds 290 of its 600 parliament seats, hence lacking an overall majority, and dependant on the support of the Nationalist Action Party of Devlet Bahçeli, whose 49 seats empower him to trigger early elections, a reasonable exit from a war spiral that has few supporters among a population -40 % of which are under 45- that increasingly perceives Erdogan's escapist despotism with a great deal of apprehension. As is the case with so many politicians who make of authoritarian personalism their hallmark, public unrest tends to hit back at them when things go badly wrong, and it is therefore plausible to envisage a solution in the polls.