Hey, all. Peter Zeihan here coming from a foggy, snowy Colorado morning. Today we’re going to talk about protests in Turkey. The issue is we’ve got a power struggle at the top. You’ve got the sitting president, a guy by the name of Erdogan who has been in charge of all things in Turkey for almost a quarter of a century now. 

Started out as prime minister when that was an important position. Eventually became president. And change the constitutions of the presidents is more powerful. Anyway, the challenger is a guy by the name of. Let’s see if I get this right. Akram Imamoglu, apologies to Turkish speakers out there. Anyway, he is the mayor of Istanbul. And who is going to run for president? 

Had a decent chance of winning. And anyway, Erdogan has arrested the guy and then arrested his lawyer, to make sure that, nothing can happen, that Erdogan doesn’t want to happen. The issue here is that Turkey is no longer a democracy. Everyone is destroyed that system over the last 25 years. It’s definitely an autocracy. It’s not that there aren’t elections and it’s not. 

Those elections don’t matter. They just really don’t matter at the top. Everyone is kind of absorbed all the political space. And while there might be some space, down below in offices that would never threaten him when it comes to national leadership, he just doesn’t tolerate any sort of dissent that’s meaningful. So we’ve got protests in Istanbul over the weekend with hundreds of thousands of people protesting. 

And it’s probably not going to lead to much, because Erdogan controls the entire military, the security services. There’s really two things to keep in mind here. Number one is that Turkey is politically unified. Now in a way that it just hasn’t been since the time of the Ottoman Empire, when we were going through the 30s, 40, 50, 60, 70. 

Well, sorry. Let’s start with the 50s. In the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, a guy by the name of Ataturk, took over and basically ran the place as a benign dictatorship. And then as he was dying, he basically declared that Turkey would now be a democracy. He left the military as the stewards and allowed elections. 

And then he passed on, and we had a real, true democratic elections. But if they ever resulted in anything that the military thought broke with the out of Turkey and tradition, we had a coup, with the most recent one being in the late 80s, early 90s. A little fuzzy now. Anyway, other one emerged out of that mess in the 2000 and then started to unify the Islamist side of the country with the democratic leaning side of the country, with the military side of the country, and eventually brought all three factions under the same political roof. 

And he’s basically ruled without opposition for the last 10 to 15 years. Imamoglu would be basically looking to take one of those three traditions, the Democratic contrition and, relaunch it as an independent poll. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to be successful. So it’s kind of one. Number two is how the Europeans and the Americans think about this, under Trump. 

Democracy is not a priority. And so there’s really no pressure as long as we get a few basic things from Turkey. Unclear what those are going to be because the United States is now out of the Middle East for the most part. With the Iraq War finally wound down and the war on terror finally won down. There’s just a few holdovers and places like Syria where the Americans are probably going to be leaving in the not too distant future, something that Donald Trump has been looking forward to and something that Erdogan has been looking forward to. 

The second group, of course, are the Europeans who are integrated with Turkey much in the way that the United States is integrated with Mexican manufacturing. Much more robust relationship there, a lot more going on, whether it’s with migration or drugs or crime, or today, military alliances. Because with the United States going in a screaming retreat from confronting the Russians as part of the NATO alliance and probably leaving the NATO alliance fairly soon, the Turks all of a sudden become critical. 

They have the largest military in NATO outside of the United States, certainly the largest army. And because they sit on the Turkish Straits, they control the access for about 40% of Russian exports, that are waterborne. They go through the Black Sea, through basically downtown Istanbul, through the Turkish Straits and up to the Mediterranean in the wider world. 

The Turks have kind of kept one foot in NATO and one foot in neutrality when it comes to the Ukraine war. They haven’t supported the sanctions regimes that the Europeans have put on, but they’ve also acted to block the Russians from expanding in other directions and continue to sell a lot of very useful weaponry, most notably, more advanced drones, to the Ukrainians constantly throughout the entire conflict. 

And if Ukraine were to fall, Turkey knows that its own national interests would be severely impinged. So we’re looking at the Europeans and the Turks starting to agree on more things at a time when the Americans are pulling back. And the price of that agreement from the European point of view, will mean basically not throwing up a fuss about the degradation of democracy in what is arguably their second most important neighbor. 

So Erdogan is likely to get a pass here. The protests are almost certainly going to fail, and if there is going to be democracy in Turkey, it will have to be something that is forged by a different generation.

Hey, all Peter Zeihan 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 forget this region or Geelong or Geelong or Dillon. Is a Kurdish leader of a group called the PKK, which is a militant group has called upon his 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 Kurds now have rights, and it’s time to move on. This isn’t the first time he said this. This guy has been in prison since 1999. And you can understand 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, 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, Odilon 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 one, 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 there were trains to manning the army. And so there was a relatively robust respect for the ethnic and religious autonomy of every group. And the 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 the 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 industrialize 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 One and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, there wasn’t a lot left, except for what we know today as contemporary Turkey. And so the Turks changed 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 to shit out of luck. So we had a couple of, up routines, 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 have changed. Now you go from 1917 until roughly 2010, 2015, and you had this duology and 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 Kamala’s or the European US who saw Turkey as a modern nation state, maybe not quite in the Western model, but pretty close. Begun 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 give strain 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 it’s been 25 years now. 

Yeah. Anyway, Erdogan, 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 heel, made him 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 I 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 island, 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 civilian control includes both secular and Islamic elements, the military, instead of having to police the political 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, everyone 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 edge. 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 the 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 inject a degree of stability into the Middle East. But the Americans are largely gone. The total number of American forces in all of Iraqi Kurdistan is probably well under a thousand, 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, you know, I applaud the effort. But what all of the factions, whether they are Alawite 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 them self squeezed politically. And just like in Iraq, the Americans considered the Syrian Kurds to be the 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 straight, 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 forever. And, you know, forever’s 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 is, a period is now over, and the Kurds in each individual region are basically at each other’s throats. 

So the 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 Ocalan, 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 process, 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 has gone, and the role of Turkey in Syria is basically whatever it wants. It will probably be able to occupy portions of the border region, including the Syrian Kurdish territories it wants to do. Something similar is shaping up in Iraq, where the Kurds, if 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 one, 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 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, and 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. But all of a sudden they’re back is clear.